Number One for 13 July 2011

There's only millions that lose their jobs and homes and sometimes accents / There's only millions that die in their bloody wars, it's all right

• I like reading Roger Ebert anyhow, even though I normally disagree with him, but this was a blast from the past--both the references to Royko, the titan of columnists in the Midwest, and to James Hoge, who was also once my boss. [Roger Ebert]
  
• The CIA's using vaccination drives as a front for finding bin Laden has led me to revisit my rejection of the Marglins' view of vaccinations as a tool of imperialism, both epidemological and epistemological. [Kevin Drum]
  
• If Michele Bachmann, then this is the attitude that her Secretary of Education will bring to the post. [Penny Arcade]
  
• The world needs Bayesians to interpret frequentist correlations: "the distribution of systematic errors has much longer tails than the distribution of random errors, so the larger the estimated effect, the more likely it is to be a mistake" [Gelman blog]
  
• Regular readers of Perspectives on Politics are wildly overrepresented on this blog, but if you aren't among those four or five hundred people, you should definitely read how Americans don't believe government programs help them even though government programs essentially protect, nurture, and shelter them from cradle to grave. [Thought News]
  

"Ping Pong," Stereolab