I am sincerely grateful, therefore, to Daniel Larison in The American Conservative for still being very angry. I am glad he won’t let it rest.

Of course the new administration will try to make the best of it, claim progress and take credit for anything it can. That is in the political self-interest of this administration. Having inherited a mess that the political class has convinced itself was improving, it would not be advantageous to be the one overseeing the unraveling. The rest of us are not burdened by such considerations.

I don’t think it is particular noble to destroy another people’s country on the basis of unfounded, paranoid fears that its small, economically weak, militarily inferior government posed grave threats to the global superpower. There are many words that come to mind to describe this, but noble is not one of them. It is not especially noble to do this with no meaningful plan for restoring order and governance in the wake of the invasion. There is no nobility to be found in the afterthought of poorly constructing a democratic regime whose elections served as the trigger for massive bloodshed. Likewise, there was not much nobility when our government belatedly recognized its incompetence and failure long after it could do the civilian casualties any good and proposed a plan that would temporarily reduce violence long enough for the previous administration to get out the door.

My anger is still there but is deep below the surface but I am glad that Larison is still able to rouse it back up and remind me. I don’t want to forget.

This is the first video of thirteen. Everyone one of them is a masterpiece. Listen to it with your children.

Elizabeth recounts the Greek idea that genius is not something we are, it’s something we have; it’s something that acts through us. She suggests that genius is something like Doby the house elf who lives in the wall and leaps out every now and then to infuse our work with brilliance…or not.

Watch the video or scroll down for the spoiler. Your choice.

Spoiler alert:

If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine, cock-eyed genius assigned to your case, decides to let some kind of wonderment be glimpsed for just one moment through your efforts…then…¡Olé!

And if not… do your dance anyhow…then ¡Olé! to you nonetheless.

Ah heck. Go watch the video. It was good. she earned her ¡Olé!

Yet every major country spends very significantly less of its national output on health than we do. As Table 1 shows, we spend five percent of GDP more than the country with the second-highest level of health spending as a share of GDP. Five percent of GDP is about $700 billion that Americans could be spending on new homes, cars and clothing, nice restaurants, paying off bills or anything else they can imagine. Instead, that money went to doctors, hospitals, pharmacists and insurance companies. If we only spent as much as Japan—a country known for having an excellent health system and a healthy population—we would have eight percent of GDP, about $1 trillion, to spend on anything we like.

But did you know that government spending on health care is also higher most other countries too?

what I am trying to show is that for no more than we are already spending on health through the government we could have a single-payer system no worse that those that exist in almost every other major country. My point is that this is an option that the administration should have at least floated and on which we should have had a national debate. I don’t think Americans would have embraced such an option, but as I said at the beginning it would have clarified the debate by focusing on the overall cost of our health care system—which I believe is far too great for what we get in return—and made reforms such as those that the Democrats have put forward seem modest by comparison.

Data from the OECD. Commentary from Bruce Bartlett’s excellent blog.

Marvellous visualization of where friends tend to cluster in Facebook. Apparently everyone in Dixie knows someone in Atlanta and all the Mormons are friends with each other.

My latest visualization shows the information by location, with connections drawn between places that share friends. For example, a lot of people in LA have friends in San Francisco, so there’s a line between them.

Looking at the network of US cities, it’s been remarkable to see how groups of them form clusters, with strong connections locally but few contacts outside the cluster. For example Columbus, OH and Charleston WV are nearby as the crow flies, but share few connections, with Columbus clearly part of the North, and Charleston tied to the South:

Take a look at his country-level visualization too.

By including a greatest hits album, they are basically saying - well, this guy didn’t really have any good albums but we like him…so…here are his greatest hits anyway.

Get rid of all the greatest hits, about half of The Beatles’ albums and all the oddball ones (I am looking at you Captain Beefheart) that they threw in to see if we were paying attention and you’d have a good list of about 40 albums that you really should go back and listen to someday. Maybe tomorrow.

Only four hundred to go.

UPDATE

I pruned the list down for you. I nuked all the greatest hits and oddballs and got rid of some Beatles. 40 fantastic albums remain and here they are. I left them in the original order that Rolling Stone had them.

1. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles
4. Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan
6. What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye
9. Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan
10. The Beatles (”The White Album”), The Beatles
11. The Sun Sessions, Elvis Presley
12. Kind of Blue, Miles Davis
15. Are You Experienced?, The Jimi Hendrix Experience
17. Nevermind, Nirvana
18. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen
22. Plastic Ono Band, John Lennon
23. Innervisions, Stevie Wonder
25. Rumours, Fleetwood Mac
26. The Joshua Tree, U2
28. Who’s Next, The Who
29. Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin
32. Let It Bleed, The Rolling Stones
37. Hotel California, The Eagles
41. Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, The Sex Pistols
42. The Doors, The Doors
43. The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd
51. Bridge Over Troubled Water, Simon and Garfunkel
57. Beggars Banquet, The Rolling Stones
65. Moondance, Van Morrison
66. Led Zeppelin IV, Led Zeppelin
68. Off the Wall, Michael Jackson
71. After the Gold Rush, Neil Young
72. Purple Rain, Prince
73. Back in Black, AC/DC
74. Otis Blue, Otis Redding
79. Star Time, James Brown
83. I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, Aretha Franklin
87. The Wall, Pink Floyd
88. At Folsom Prison, Johnny Cash
91. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Elton John
93. Sign ‘o’ the Times, Prince
97. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan
98. This Year’s Model, Elvis Costello
99. There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Sly and the Family Stone
100. In the Wee Small Hours, Frank Sinatra

It still needs some work but it’s a pretty good first try even if I say so myself.

The stuff I am most proud of is the stuff that I am not very good at. Stuff I am genuinely good at I keep to myself but when I have to work really hard to learn something I get a lot of pleasure from it and I want to shout it from the rooftops.

Is that just me?