"Just as the financial system has to be changed to serve the needs of the people before the needs of the bankers, the drug trial system has to be changed to lower the incentives for cheating (and massive death tolls) just for a quick buck. As I mentioned before, it’s still not clear that they would have made less money, even including the penalties, if they had come clean in 2000. They made a bet that the fines they’d need to eventually pay would be smaller than the profits they’d make in the meantime. That sounds familiar to anyone who has been following the fallout from the credit crisis.
"One thing that should be changed immediately: the clinical trials for drugs should not be run or reported on by the drug companies themselves. There has to be a third party which is in charge of testing the drugs and has the power to take the drugs off the market immediately if adverse effects (like CVT events) are found. Hopefully they will be given more power than risk firms are currently given in finance (which is none)- in other words, it needs to be more than reporting, it needs to be an active regulatory power, with smart people who understand statistics and do their own state-of-the-art analyses – although as we’ve seen above even just Stats 101 would sometimes do the trick."

F. A. von Hayek as a "useful idiot".

"The 'H' obviously stands for 'Hussein'."

"Narayana Kocherlakota (who the bankers of Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, northwestern Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan have selected to exercise important public functions) certainly knows more about economics than me. So when he says “[m]ost of the existing unemployment represents mismatch that is not readily amenable to monetary policy” I’m prepared to defer to him or to leave the job of explaining why he’s wrong (if he is wrong) to other people. But ... as a reason to avoid monetary stimulus this makes no sense, and is just a piece of misleading rhetoric that distracts people from the real issue. ... Say that of that 5.1 percentage point increase [in unemployment], 2 ... are due to inadequate demand and 3.1 ... are due to structural factors... monetary expansion could reduce the unemployment rate by 2 percentage point ... [which would be] a big deal. ... we’d alleviate a substantial quantity of human suffering up to and including suicide."

"So I stand corrected. Credit reporting agencies don't pass along your credit scores to prospective employers. They do pass along your entire credit history and specifically promote it as a way of weeding out problem candidates, but there's no credit score. Just your entire credit history."

"There have been lies; yes, but they were told in a good cause. We have been treacherous; but that was only in order that real good might come out of apparent evil. True, we have crushed a deceived and confiding people; we have turned against the weak and the friendless who trusted us; we have stamped out a just and intelligent and well-ordered republic; we have stabbed an ally in the back and slapped the face of a guest; we have bought a Shadow from an enemy that hadn't it to sell; we have robbed a trusting friend of his land and his liberty; we have invited our clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do bandit's work under a flag which bandits have been accustomed to fear, not to follow; we have debauched America's honor and blackened her face before the world; but each detail was for the best."

"My gut reaction on reading Marc Thiessen's new book ... was: "Why is a speechwriter who's never served in the military or intelligence community acting as an expert on interrogation and national security?" Certainly, everyone is entitled to a voice in the debate over the lawfulness and efficacy of President Bush's abusive interrogation program, regardless of qualifications. But if you're not an expert on a subject, shouldn't you interview experts before expressing an opinion? Instead, Thiessen relies solely on the opinions of the CIA interrogators who used torture and abuse and are thus most vulnerable to prosecution for war crimes. That makes his book less a serious discussion of interrogation policy than a literary defense of war criminals. Nowhere in this book will you find the opinions of experienced military interrogators who successfully interrogated Islamic extremists.... Courting Disaster is nothing more than the defense's opening statement in a war crimes trial."

"I totally get that Tom Coburn is a man of principle. He thinks that minimizing federal spending is very important and preventing the rape, kidnap, and massacre of children is much less important. Those aren’t my priorities, but politics is all about the fact that priorities differ. To me, with interest rates so low, borrowing some money to minimize the rape, kidnap, and massacre of children is an investment worth making, but Coburn sees it another way. Which is exactly why you need to settle these things through votes. If Coburn doesn’t like the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, the appropriate way for him to express that is by voting “no” on the legislation. Plenty of other people aren’t as nutty as Coburn and are happy to vote for it. But this business of holds is simply unacceptable." (A very Yglesian paragraph.)

"Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the "machine zone," in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible--even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schüll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and "ambience management," player tracking and cash access systems--all designed to meet the market's desire for maximum "time on device.""

17th century Netherlands edition.

This is just evil.

"Kaplan is merely highlighting the fundamental difference between neoconservative thinking and thinking undertaken by people with a moral compass. As Alex Massie says, present-day Europe’s state of peace, prosperity, and physical security is a good thing. Neoconservatives, however, see war and death as good things. Irving Kristol told Corey Robin that market-oriented conservatism is too “boring” (”The notion of devoting your life to it is horrifying if only because it’s so repetitious. It’s like sex.”) so you need to inject some death and destruction into the mix to keep things interesting.

The world would be a better place if people looking for cheap thrills would stick to the black metal scene or maybe take up extreme sports rather than foreign policy punditry. But the point is that it’s extremely dangerous to take advice from people with this mindset—they’re not even trying to enhance the country’s security, they’re trying to embroil the country in wars."

"If you had asked me in 1998 what I thought the consequences would be if the United States government was revealed in public to have officially sanctioned torture ... I would have said that this revelation would be an enormous scandal with catastrophic po

Wow, I actually read something recent by Pinker (in The New Republic, no less!) and agree with it. Wonders never cease.