I’m happy to concede that American cuisine doesn’t have the world’s greatest reputation, but is it really the case that British people think our food is bad:

Ask people in the UK what they think of American food and all too often their faces settle into the amused expression Mahatma Gandhi is said to have assumed when asked what he thought of Western civilisation. “It would,” he replied, “be a very good idea.” The same, many think, would be true of American food.

For most people in Europe, I suspect, it seems not so much food at all as fuel. The burgers and fries shovelled down while the car is idling at the drive-thru, or gobbled by marooned air travellers waiting for the “delayed” sign to flip so they can finally make their connection to Detroit.

To be fair, the point of this article is that there’s more to US eating than that. But still, this is a BBC piece! By a British historian! Directed at a British audience! I can’t think of a country whose food has a worse reputation.

At first glance, the relative indifference of the government of China to climate change makes sense—environmental protection is a “superior good,” something countries worry about when they get rich and don’t need to worry about people living in horrible shacks eating low-protein diets. On the other hand, everything I’ve ever seen about the economic impact of climate change suggests it will be much more devastating to poor countries than to rich ones. Kate Mackenzie reports for the FT that this way of looking at it seems to be picking up speed in China:

However, a recent article by Xie Zhenhua, China’s lead negotiator at Copenhagen and a vice-chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission which oversees China’s economic policymaking, indicates that fears around climate change as a threat to the country’s development are rising:

“The scale of economic destruction would be equivalent to that of the two world wars and the Great Depression combined” if global temperatures rise by 3 degrees (5.4 Fahrenheit) to 4 degrees Celsius, Xie said. “Human beings and the Earth cannot afford such disasters.”

This argument moves the debate on from “climate change is bad, but development is our first priority” towards “development is our first priority, and climate change may threaten that”. That in turn suggests that the concerns of Mr Xie at least are starting to focus on risks that are longer-term than the next quarterly GDP report.

What’s more, it seems to me that in many ways it should be much easier for China or India to adapt to a low-emissions economy than for the United States. After all we already have a ton of sunk investment in an economy based around the presumption of unpriced carbon. The money we spent on urban freeways is just gone. They were hugely expensive, but we can’t sell them and use the proceeds to build streetcars. China needs to build an enormous amount of new infrastructure anyway and can just build it differently from the start.

Ever since the eruption, I know I can’t be the only person who’s been wondering how to say “Eyjafjallajökull.” In principle, the Internet and its multimedia cornucopia ought to shed a lot of light on this issue. In practice, no matter how many times I click over here and hear it pronounced, I can’t come any closer to saying it myself.

Pictured above you can find the extinct volcano I visited when I went to Iceland. It’s a beautiful country, and its geological activity creates a ton of cool sights when it’s not destroying European air travel.

Jonah Goldberg is really a remarkably stupid person:

Noah Millman has a long post in response to Sanchez as well. He has many interesting insights and hypotheses in it about why the American right is close-minded today compared to the left. But as near as I can tell, Noah simply asserts that this is so. Where is the data to back this up? Maybe my experience is far, far more of an exception to the rule than I can imagine, but it still seems to me that liberalism is far more shot through with political correctness and intellectual taboos than the right. I’m really trying to let David Frum’s self-serving version of events fade away, but even if his biggest defenders are right, is he really the only data point so many smart people need to support the closed-conservative-mind thesis? I mean because of this anecdote we have to hear about the right’s “epistemic closure”? Does the Frumian defenestration (and it wasn’t a defenestration — he jumped) really outweigh the Larry Summer’s fiasco at Harvard? Or the absurdity of the Skip Gates nonsense, also at Harvard? Or the riot of hatred aimed at Joe Lieberman?

Say what you will about Larry Summers’ tumultuous turn as President of Harvard but it seems to me that the last time I saw the guy on television he was serving as Assistant to the President and Director of the National Economic Council. Joe Lieberman is a member in good standing of the Democratic caucus of the United States Senate. These anecdotes illustrate the reverse of what Goldberg thinks. You can get drummed out of your prominent job in part because of left-wing opposition, and wind up in a new, more important, more political job in a Democratic administration. You can lose a Democratic Senate primary and endorse the GOP presidential candidate and stay in the caucus.

Conversely on the right a guy like Jonah Goldberg with no discernable mental functioning whatsoever, whose signature work is privately regarded with contempt by many of his ideological fellow travelers, can have a long and successful career based purely on rigid adherence to ideological orthodoxy.

There’s no denying that the financial services industry in general and employees of Goldman Sachs in general gave a lot of money to Barack Obama’s campaign in 2007-2008. And these days the financial services industry in unpopular and Goldman stands accused of fraud. So you can see why John Boehner is trying to spin this into a story that reflects poorly on Obama:

Republicans sought to tie President Barack Obama to Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs after it was hit with civil fraud charges.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) released a statement after the Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges against the Wall Street titan, calling the firm a “key supporter” of the president’s bid to reform the nation’s financial regulatory system.

“These are very serious charges against a key supporter of President Obama’s bill to create a permanent Wall Street bailout fund,” Boehner said Friday in the statement. “Despite President Obama’s rhetoric, his permanent bailout bill gives Goldman Sachs and other big Wall Street banks a permanent, taxpayer-funded safety net by designating them ‘too big to fail.’ Just whose side is President Obama on?”

The problems with this, however, start with the fact that it’s the Obama administration that initiated the lawsuit against Goldman Sachs in the first place. Also consider the fact that Goldman isn’t a leading support of the president’s regulatory reforms at all, it’s a leading opponent as this April 14 Bloomberg article makes clear:

Top White House officials last week pressed the chief executive officers of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to stop lobbying against a financial-regulatory bill advancing in Congress, according to people who attended the meeting. [...] The executives told the White House aides that while they support a regulatory overhaul, they have concerns about the bill sponsored by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, which includes new rules for consumer protection and derivatives trading.

The Goldman Sachs position is, as best I can tell, identical to the positions of Boehner and Senator Mitch McConnell and all the rest. They recognize the need for reform, but oppose the reform bill in the House and oppose the reform bill in the Senate and don’t have any alternative reform bill they do support and don’t have any concrete changes they want to see made to the bills. In other words, they don’t want to do anything.

Meanwhile, I don’t know how stupid Boehner and McConnell think people are, but obviously bailouts just happened under the status quo so the idea that passing the bill will somehow make bailouts possible or that standing by the status quo will make it impossible is 100 percent nonsense. Not everyone believes that Chris Dodd’s system is totally airtight, but how on earth does just doing nothing improve on that?