links and such

• Tom Scocca is simply indispensable. He picks his topics judiciously, pulls off the tricky balance of power-through-restraint, and unlike so many so many other writers of a left-wing bent, is able to express his views without a hint of self-hatred or embarrassment.
• Sometimes people I like ask me why I'm so hard on The Atlantic. Here's the perfect example of why I can't and won't take the magazine seriously. If you want to not be treated as a peddler of vulgar, factually inaccurate propaganda, don't peddle vulgar, factually inaccurate propaganda.  Incidentally, if you'd like to see some facts about the remarkably free and fair elections in Venezuela, you can find evidence and links here.
• On the other side of the ledger of Gawker media, here's more in Gizmodo's bizarre, constant pro-American hegemony propaganda, by a deeply uninformed techie named Andrew Tarantola. Neither Mossad nor the CIA believe that Iran is pursuing a nuclear bomb.
• This Margaret Thatcher obit in Jacobin is a good palate cleanser for the previous one that I liked so little.
• This piece is quite long, but it's a really entertaining account of academic and historical detective work.
• I subscribed to The Slurve, and if you like baseball (or sports media not owned by Disney), you should too. (That said, it wouldn't surprise me at all if MBD started next season as an employee of ESPN, himself.)
• I've gotten a few more gifts from readers in the last couple of days. It means more than I can say.