Libertarianism, mapped.

Alia Wong looks at the history of Sesame Street, and what we did and didn’t learn from it.

As someone for whom DSL is the only broadband option available, reports of the demise of DSL are disturbing.

Women are less likely to be exonerated of their crimes. Why? Sometimes, there was no crime.

The Yakuza has an age problem.

Wolf-Coyote Hybrids are migrating to cities.

School districts are scrambling to hire teachers.

“About fifty-four per cent of [liberal arts] graduate students report feeling so depressed they have “a hard time functioning, as opposed to ten per cent of the general population.”

Evidently, your cell phone battery can be used to track you.

Aww, Canada, we 2/3 like you, too! Philippines! And Germany, you break my heart.

An… enterprising individual figured out how to use 23andme’s website to allow webmasters to block people from websites on the basis of their ancestry.

Vox has some interesting energy maps.

Unleash the power of your brain using brain drumps.

Good news! Colonizing the moon may be easier than expected!

Could 2016 finally be the year of the brokered convention?! Mike Hunt Ray Rice thinks it might be, but Hanley is skeptical:

That scenario assumes the candidate isn’t determined prior to the convention. While the sheer number of candidates increases that probability, let’s remember that 1) it hasn’t happened in the modern primary era, and 2) we’re still a year away from the convention, and 5-6 months away from the first primaries (god willing and the states don’t go crazy). Candidates are going to start disappearing from any real consideration before that first convention, and then money will stop flowing to those who show poorly early on and redirect to the candidate the money likes, most likely producing a winner before the last primaries (unless all the states suddenly compress them so tightly there’s no time for that process to take place).

While recognizing the mathematical possibility of a brokered convention, I’d wager against it.

So would I. But I’d wager against it just a little bit less than usual, if Trump sticks around. Which I would also bet against, but things are not going According To Plan. And Trump has the potential – albeit a very unlikely one – to keep all of the oxygen out of the room until Iowa. He can keep the frontrunner seat warm, with little danger of other candidates being intimidated.

The most important thing is that Trump will not get the air of inevitability a leader would, if he is on top. That will encourage more candidates to try to stick around because the writing won’t be as clearly on the wall. Fundraising will push some candidates out almost immediately, but it’s easy to imagine an unusual number saying “Hold on until Super Tuesday, then I’ll show them!” and nobody will know what to do because of the Trump factor. So even if we wins Iowa and New Hampshire, you’re probably looking at at least three other candidates and maybe more. (There were four enduring candidates in 2012, including Ron Paul.)

The second most important thing is that the natural nominee is somebody that almost nobody has confidence in. There was definitely a dearth of confidence in Mitt Romney, but (a) not this much and (b) there were no other viable candidates. If Bush can’t convince people that he is Their Guy – which I think is possible – there is no other logical successor.

This is especially true given the oddity of the schedule. Won’t everyone coalesce around the most popular not-Trump? That assumes any sort of consistency, and the early schedule has one state that plays to the strengths of other candidates. Scott Walker is in a good position to be the top NTC in Iowa, Jeb or Kasich in New Hampshire, Cruz in South Carolina, and Rubio in Nevada. After that all hell breaks loose on Super Tuesday with a lot of delegates proportionally assigned. This is also where Trump is likely to struggle if his campaign has been going well up to this point.

Now, most likely Super Tuesday will declare the top NTC. In 2012, it sort of set up Santorum as the primary anti-Romney, but Gingrich still hung in there. Things could drag on. Especially if it’s one of those things where Jeb kinda does well enough to hang around but not well enough to inspire confidence, leaving hope for Kasich, Walker, or Rubio boosters. And since Trump does have the air of invincibility, he can be leading and have it still be considered a wide open race. (If somebody else is leading, it’s over.) If there’s much more dithering after that, and Trump does not have a majority…

All of this is very unlikely, of course. But short of the death of a frontrunner, this is the closest to a plausible scenario I have ever been able to really imagine. The combination of Trump and Jeb with potentially low ceilings make everything more complicated. So, too, may the proliferation of candidates, but I don’t expect that to last.

And even more glorious than anything? We could go into a brokered convention having no idea at all knowing who is going to win.

My money would be on Mitt Romney.

Some of you may recall a couple of years ago when some big city politicians announced that they would block Chik-Fil-E from opening up a store in their cities:

The uproar continues, and quite properly so (earlier here and here), over the threats of Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and Chicago alderman Proco (“Joe”) Moreno to exclude the Chick-Fil-A fast-food chain because they disagree (as do I) with some of the views of its owner. Among the latest commentary, the impeccably liberal Boston Globe has sided with the company in an editorial (“which part of the First Amendment does Menino not understand?…A city in which business owners must pass a political litmus test is the antithesis of what the Freedom Trail represents”), as has my libertarian colleague Tom Palmer at Cato (“Mayor Menino is no friend of human rights.”)

The spectacle of a national business being threatened with denial of local licenses because of its views on a national controversy is bad enough. But “don’t offend well-organized groups” is only Rule #2 for a business that regularly needs licenses, approvals and permissions. Rule #1 is “don’t criticize the officials in charge of granting the permissions.” Can you imagine if Mr. Dan Cathy had been quoted in an interview as saying “Boston has a mediocre if not incompetent Mayor, and the Chicago Board of Aldermen is an ethics scandal in continuous session.” How long do you think it would take for his construction permits to get approved then?

Given the amount of pushback they got, I had somewhat naively thought that we might not be going there again. As it turns out, though, that is not to be. The newest target is one Donald J Trump. In New York City:

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday that his city may not be able to break its business contracts with Donald Trump but will avoid future deals with the 2016 GOP contender.

“My impression is that unless there has been some breaking of a contract or something that gives us a legal opportunity to act, I’m not sure we have a specific course of action,” the Democratic mayor told reporters Monday, according to CNN and Capital New York.

“But we’re certainly not looking to do any business with him going forward,” de Blasio added.

And Washington DC:

A pair of Democratic lawmakers are petitioning the Obama administration to block GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump from showcasing his name on the businessman’s new hotel in Washington, D.C.

In a letter to the Department of Interior and General Services Administration (GSA), Reps. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Tony Cárdenas (D-Calif.) requested that Trump be prevented from having his name “prominently displayed” on the newly refurbished Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue, blocks from the White House.

“Trump’s recent and repeated remarks disparaging women, Mexican-Americans, and other Latinos are hateful, divisive and completely inaccurate,” the pair wrote to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and recently confirmed GSA Administrator Denise Turner Roth in a letter dated Aug. 13.

And, once again, in Boston:

Donald Trump, a reality TV star currently yelling crazy shit on his way through a Republican presidential primary while sporting a sad trombone haircut, is not welcome in Boston.

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh told the Boston Herald Monday that Trump would have to apologize to immigrants for his inflammatory comments.

“I think his comments are inappropriate. And if he wanted to build a hotel here, he’d have to make some apologies to people in this country,” said Walsh, the son of immigrants from Galway.

Each of these cases differ slightly from the others. But as much as I am not a fan of Donald Trump*, city contracts and business arrangements really should not depend on such things. I mean, really shouldn’t. We should at least be able to agree on that.

Given the givens, I have little issue with NBC using its pocketbook to cancel The Apprentice, or Macy’s to sever there relationship. But it does get different once we’re starting to talk about governments – even local ones – using their purse strings and regulatory levers to favor some people over others in such a fashion. Are there some circumstances in which I could imagine being okay with it? I don’t know… maybe? But not really. If their views are repugnant enough, there ought to be something behavioral that you can hang your hat upon.

Which doesn’t really work for Trump, of course, because as much as he hates illegal immigrants, one thing he doesn’t do is refuse to hire them.

This is pretty unlikely to be much of a slippery slope. First, because it’s unclear that they can even do what they’re talking about doing. It mostly looks like chest-thumping. But slope or so, this is the sort of thing that should be discouraged and opposed right out of the gate. Even if the “victim” is Donald Trump.

* – Hey Mike Rice, still waiting to hear an answer to the question of whether or not you are on Team Trump with Lion and Dave Hackensack.

PBS ran an article on dissenters on the Dr Seuss Question:

Amid the adoration is a small but vocal group of parents who take issue with the author’s use of nonsensical language.

There’s Jennifer Graham, who once took to The National Review as a frustrated mom.

“I always thought the point of reading to children was to teach them about language,” she writes. “How does Dr. Seuss help? Heck, he knew so few words that he had to make most of his up.”

She writes about losing it while reading Seuss to a group of children: “‘I DON’T KNOW WHAT A TRUFFULA TREE IS!’ I shriek. ‘I don’t know what any of this stuff is!’”

There’s Amy Mascott, a state-certified reading specialist in Maryland, who wrote a blog post two years ago that began with a confession: “I don’t love Dr. Seuss. I don’t, and I haven’t, and I won’t. So there. I said it.”

And there’s this commenter from a online Goodreads discussion. “Is Dr. Seuss good for kids? He makes up words. Then when my kids start making up words I have to be the bad guy and shoot them down.”

Our child development specialist frowned down on Dr Seuss. Less so for the fantastical language and more for the lack of literal illustration. The cows do not look like cows, and Sneeches don’t look like anything. It was her perspective that time spent learning what a Gox is would be better learning what an ox is, with a picture of an ox. She wasn’t 100% against Seuss, though that might have been more of a practical concession (“These people won’t listen to me if I am too adamant”) than an ideological one.

I’ve found myself undisturbed, which for those who know me isn’t surprising. I am actually quite impressed with my daughter’s ability to pick up on abstract imagery, to see a cartoon cow that doesn’t look like a cow, but successfully associate it with an actual cow. She is genuinely better at identifying the Play-Do outlines. She calls something a pig and I look at it and hey yeah that actually is a pig I had thought it was a dog.

Alan Jacobs takes issue with parents complaining about how bad children’s books are, wondering if our parents ever complained about the books they had to read to us.

Well, they didn’t complain to me or anything. And I wouldn’t dream of complaining to Lain. It is indeed one of those parental tasks to be taken with a smile. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we can’t vent on the Internet. At least a little bit. And that’s probably one of the differences. Used to be you just vented to other parents.

I enjoy reading to Lain within limits. Lain, however, does not always recognize limits. She is particularly aggressive with Clancy, who is more indulging. Since she isn’t around all day, she doesn’t quite need to set the boundaries that I do.

Lain’s library was mostly procured over eBay. You can get large sets of books for really reasonable prices. Some of them are not in the best condition, but that’s okay because if the book falls apart, you can make an informed decision about whether or not to pay full price for it. Sometimes you’re kind of glad it’s gone. Other times, though, you know it’s worth paying $10-20 for because you know that both parent and child will enjoy it. That’s worth a lot.

Some of the books are really bad, and Lain’s tastes are a bit spotty. The worst books are the educational ones. Intended for somewhat older kids. There’s one called You Will Go To the Moon, which is vaguely technical (explaining how a space station would simulate gravity) and boring. Also, given that she will not in fact go to the moon, a cruel lie. There’s another one about whale migration that I am not a big fan of, though it taught her the word “whale.”

I find myself wondering if Dr Seuss just ruined the industry. He was so prolific, and so good, and his works mostly so timeless, that I wonder if he rendered obsolete any book written since. More likely, it’s related to the fact that writers probably like to consider themselves above writing children’s books. It’s probably considered less impressive to say at a dinner party that you write children’s books than loftier stuff aimed at mature audiences. (I also think this is why comic books have “matured” over the years, or at least a contributing component.

It seems to be a pretty tight market, in the overall. The free ebook options, which for some reason I expected to be many, are actually quite rare (though Gecko on the Wall is great, and Danielle Bruckert‘s other books tend to be fun). And Kindle is so hit-and-miss with independent authors, and children’s books themselves especially so, that I haven’t really dived in as much as I otherwise might.

This is really, really important. Evidently, there is a rip in our time-space continuum that has been identified by the Berenst#in Bears.

Here’s the thing. These books play such a huge role in the collective memories of so many people, all of whom clearly and distinctly remember “BerenstEin”, that I am not the first to propose the notion that somehow, at some time in the last 10 years or so, reality has been tampered with and history has been retroactively changed. The bears really were called the “BerenstEin Bears” when we were growing up, but now reality has been altered such that the name of the bears has been changed post hoc.

In 1992 they were “stEin” in 1992, but in 2012 they were “stAin” in 1992.

Some explanations have been proposed. One person suggested a change due to time travel, similar to “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury. It’s an interesting theory, and I admire it for its simplicity, but it is flawed. Time travel doesn’t actually work that way, and if someone had “stepped on a butterfly”, it would not impact the future because they had already stepped on the butterfly before they left for the past; history has to be consistent.

I would like to make a modest proposal: We are all living in our own parallel universe.

When my wife pronounced them Berenstain Bears, I thought it was analogous to how she pronounces the president’s name “Oh’bamm’ah” rather than “Oh’bomb’ah”). So imagine my surprise when I notice the spelling.

Which is doubly problematic. That means that not only am I from a timeline alternate to the current one, but my wife is from this timeline. It’s almost enough to make me question our basic compatibility.

Kristin Wilcox looks at ways liberal arts colleges need to try to sell themselves. (Not sure if I got this from Hanley or I need to forward this to him.)

Uncle Steve applies Moynihan’s Law to a recent David Leonhardt and Bradford Wilcox pieces on marital success and family in red and blue states.

Dan Kahan writes about the problem he sees with consensus messaging in the climate change debate.

Tyler Cowen looks at the economic states in Kansas and Louisiana. Scott Sumner tackles Louisiana.

Italy promised pain if the EU didn’t agree to distribute the superstate’s refugees, but France and Germany are not so sure about the solution.

Rivals Apple and Samsung are teaming up to replace SIM cards.

Police officers are taking advantage of superpowered comrades to fight crime. No masks and capes, alas.

Dick Tracy wasn’t a particularly good movie, but it was visually marvelous.

Rent-controlled apartments in Sweden are less segregated by income, but more segregated by ethnicity.

Canadian oil fields are looking at self-driving trucks.

Will Germany’s demographic crunch knock it off its perch at the top of the EU?

There are some stories with happy endings of people who use technology to locate their lost or stolen smartphone or laptop. This is not one of those stories.

If oil extraction is causing earthquakes in Oklahoma, it may not be an issue of fracking as much as salt water disposal.

The LDS Church is showing off the stone that Joseph Smith allegedly used to translate the Book of Mormon.

Ross Douthat argues that there is no pro-life case for Planned Parenthood. The results of the Colorado experiment have been oversold, but it’s still something I’d like to see pursued.

Did Hiroshima and Nagasaki save Hokkaido from Soviet rule?

A World War II vet and Walmart employee celebrates his 103rd birthday.

Vox explains Sesame Street’s move to HBO. Boy, mixed feelings about that. But more episodes is good. I had no idea that they produced so few a year.

The joke writes itself: The daughter of the Governor of Oklahoma had to disconnect her trailer from the Governor’s Mansion.

A paper that boosted Golden Rice has been retracted over concerns of subject consent. (There is, it should be added, no evidence of falsification or fabrication.)

To quote Jesse Walker: “No!”

A judge in Texas ordered a 20 year old man to marry his 19 year old girlfriend within 18 days.

By ending up on the sex offender registry, Zach Anderson (the 19 year old who slept with the 14 year old who represented herself as being 17) was prohibited by an animal shelter from getting a dog.

A bounty hunter in Arizona raided the wrong house. No, I mean he really raided the wrong house.

Some pictures on a cell phone in a town dump lead to the arrest of a sailor.

I’m trying to imagine how this guy explains the gap in his resume. “I cared about the success of my clients a little too much, it turns out.”

Come on, Jared, all you had to do was keep your weight off and not be a creep, and you were pretty much set for life.

Here’s something interesting from Hanley about printing a bridge from those 3D printers… in mid-air.

A deep undercover agent in London went a little too deep, and a woman won a $685,737 judgment.

The courts in the UK have ruled that making private copies of your music is illegal.

The New York Times reports that manufacturing is making a comeback in the South, but Adam Ozimek says “Not so.”

Despite some bad news recently, Ben Thompson argues that ESPN is going to be okay.

Well, this sounds like a pleasant working environment.

As it turns out, giving people health insurance doesn’t save money. (“But long term, preventive care saves money!” Not exactly.)

Moody Analytic’s model suggest the slightest of slight victories for Hillary Clinton a Democrat next year. 270.

Yeah, this is pretty much what almost every middle school kid wants to hear. Truthfully, at my middle school, most of the worst flamed out by high school. I don’t think that’s especially typical, though.

UberX could be responsible for saving lives.

Will there be a restaurant at which we can watch? Or will we have to make due with charts?

New eye drops may be able to combat cataracts without the need for surgery.

There is an island off India – that is technically a part of India – where the inhabitants will apparently try to kill anybody who enters.

Some research indicates the driverless cars could produce enormous emission reductions.

Hadn’t thought about it, but it makes sense: Gay marriage is still illegal in Navajo Nation.

I find it hard to disagree with this: The Samsung whistle really is horrible and it’s the first thing I change when personalizing a Samsung device.

There is a class divide when it comes to choosing one’s major. It corresponds with my experience this it tends to be wealthier kids studying English, to the point that you can almost see a class divide at extended family gatherings.

The Columbia Journalism Review looks at the cult of Vice.

I am going to start a weekly update feature, posted most weeks on Friday or Saturday, that will include general topics of stuff that is going on. This week will mostly be talking about television, though they may not be as unified in the future.

New television arrives today! I’m pretty jazzed, though feeling sad and a little bit guilty that about the functional television in the basement. I mean, that TV is… fine. But I do a lot of my television interaction through a computer, and that’s increasingly difficult with that old machine attached to it, and on a CRT display.

We’re going to be getting DirecTV soon, and so it’s one of those “do it now or make things really complicated down the line” things.

So I’m getting a new TV for the living room and moving the one there downstairs. The Vizio I currently have was a great value, but has certain blind spots. One of which is that it has bad SD display from cable/satellite. Which, if we’re getting cable/satellite, kind of matters.

A frustrating thing is that new TVs don’t have VGA inputs, and VGA is what I use to attach the computer. The media PC does have a DisplayPort, which can convert into HDMI. So I got the applicable cable and was, alas, disappointed by the results. The video looks okay, but the Windows interface looks less than stellar. I am hoping that this is a Vizio problem, and that the new Samsung will look better. The Vizio has the VGA outlet, and so I can continue to use them for that TV.

Another alternative is that I got a bad cable. Cables matter a lot for such things. While I didn’t skimp, I also apparently did not get a 4K HDMI. Now, the TV and computer are 1080, but it’s possible that you might want to overshoot on something like this?

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Speaking of which, I discovered PBSKids.org, which is pretty great with kids’ videos. It also has some Lain favorites, like a Curious George cartoon and Cat in the Hat cartoon. I have mixed feelings about the latter as it has Cat and Fish as friends (or sort) and Cat and kids (and fish) going on adventures together just doesn’t seem right to me.

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I’m presently working my way through Arrow and Flash, though that’s been stalled somewhat. Enjoying it greatly, though the melodrama of Arrow is sometimes grating.

I’m audioreading Isaac Asimov, which I’m enjoying. Though Matt Yglesias recently kickstarted a conversation about the French Reign of Terror, which turned me on to a bunch of podcasts I want to listen to. I wish that had happened before I jumped back in to Asimov.

Last week I listened to the TV show Revenge, to its conclusion. It was a worthy enough conclusion on a silly show. SPOILER: I’m struck that I cannot remember a case where a protagonist that I didn’t entirely expect to get a happy ending got a happy ending that by any objective assessment she completely did not deserve.

According to a report from the FRB-NY, federal student loans and grants don’t increase enrollment, but do increase price tags.

Reihan Salam argues that Mexican immigrants have more to fear from the US than vice-versa. Or as Orin Judd likes to say, we’re importing the superior culture. (An old college professor had a similar line, that immigrants are wonderfully used until we drag them down to our level.)

Some Russian Nationalists want to fly the flag of the Tsarist imperial standard. I can’t speak to the history, but it’s certainly a cooler flag than their present one. (For that matter, the so was the Soviet flag.

Here’s an interesting idea: An Oklahoma school system seeks to deal with a budget crunch and a teacher shortage by condensing the school schedule.

This is the #1 reason – and indicator – that it will be a very, very long time before we see a United States of Europe.

War or no war, the Slave Economy was in for a lot of hurt.

Tom Selleck and the White Tattoo Guy have been vindicated!

David Whitlock makes the case against foul ball nets in baseball. I think #2 and #4 are especially strong points, and that #2 helps push along #1 and #3.

Idaho is down to one full-time federal judge.

A woman in the UK had to legally change her name to be able to log in to Facebook.

The TPP could have some bad consequences for generic drug availability.

Desperate migrants are trying and dying to swim across the English Channel from France to England. I asked Matt Feeney, who gave supplied the link, why immigrants consider the UK so much better than France, and he sent me this.

Some people seem rather upset that Charlie Hebdo has announced that it won’t be doing anymore Mohammed cartoons. I am glad that they didn’t back down at the time, but the attacks did not impose a requirement that they produce these comics indefinitely.

It’s really quite remarkable to me that they’re going forward with the movie valorizing the Bush-TANG debacle. What has me a bit concerned is that it might work.

Color me a bit surprised: In the UK, seven in ten homes that had the decision to filter out pornographic content chose to do so.

If you’re looking for a post that has a strong and cohesive thesis with supporting paragraphs and all that, this isn’t that post. (You may well be at the wrong blog, for that matter.)

Late lest week, the law office of one Collier & Radcliff was bombed in Mocum, Deseret. This was relevant to me because Edmund Collier was the chief legal counsel at Falstaff, where I worked when Hit Coffee was started. Edmund is one of three lawyers at Falstaff I remember and he is the only one I remember particularly warmly. Eldon Cooper (no relation) was okay, I guess, but I remember him more as being my boss’s boss by the time I left. Eric Forrester, The Coffee Shop Cowboy, was rather snooty.

Forester was also gay. And he was fired for it, when it came to light. This was just after Collier and almost all of the rest of the legal staff (except Cooper) was let go, leaving a real shortage of legal talent in a business that was very law-oriented.

Whatever role Collier may have played in that firing, though, I still remember him warmly. He was a pretty big deal, and really nice to everybody including me when I had just been hired.

What’s interesting to think about is if it had been the law offices of Forester that had been bombed, I’d be wondering if it was some anti-gay hate crime or something. In fact, there’s a decent chance that would be the assumption. It might even be in the national news. Except, of course, that it wasn’t because Forester wasn’t the target.

It’s something that comes to mind with the coverage of black church fires. There was the immediate assumption that it was related to Dylann Roof and the Confederate Flag. That was my assumption until some scrutiny was applied. I’m old enough to remember the alleged rash of black church fires back in the 90’s that also turned out to be less than meets the eye. Something grabs the attention of the media, and then each one gets coverage. It was actually during that spell that my own church (largely white) was burned to the ground. Little news coverage of that. Which isn’t a complaint (absent a larger trend, why would it get coverage) but probably feeding in to the perception that it was specifically black churches being burned down.

The number of racially-motivated burnings in both cases were, as I understand it, non-zero. And any time that happens – whether racially-motivated or not but especially when it is – it’s a tragedy. Though relatively a minor thing, it’s kind of frustrating that it gets hard to view except in a dichotomy where a segment of the population believes that none of it is racial and another side is irate that race is not applied to every instance until demonstrated otherwise.

Anyway, hopefully they will find whoever it is that bombed Edmund’s office. If they find them and report why, I’ll relay that information to you. Maybe it’s like a similar bombing in Winnipeg where it was an ugly divorce case. And two is a trend…