Emily Yoffe has announced that her days of Prudence are at an end.

Bloggingheads is ten years old. Founders Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus reunite to talk about it.

When local newscasters try just a little too hard.

Alanis Morissette updates Ironic.

The Force is strong with this one. I used the Imperial Death March, along with the themes to Mario Bros and Zelda, to distract Lain when she was tiny.

A pilot says that Allegiant Air fired him for putting passenger safety first.

Noah Smith says minimum wages are great, except when they’re not.

Parliamentary Problems.

Catalonia takes steps towards independence.

It’s not just a retailers’ payday. Black Friday is a big moneymaker for plumbers.

Developing countries are told they will need to make some sacrifices to avert Climate Change. Samir Saran says India should decline.

The Montana Standard is unmasking its commenters. {More}

Refusing change is indeed not the way to Keep Austin Weird. Unsurprisingly, I oppose anti-group housing laws.

An international group of architects seek to build a new Colossus of Rhodes.

Tim Marshall writes of Russia’s unfortunate geography, and why it’s so concerned with its eastern neighbors.

Fortune looks at the prospects of knowledge workers being replaced by thinking machines.

A new study suggests that there may be many Earths to come.

@Louise_McSorley There are 424 male jockeys in Australia. https://t.co/rzQWwcBLg3

— AU Bureau of Stats (@ABSStats) November 4, 2015

At Unz.com, Chanda Chisala looks at intelligence and two different African-American populations.

Lauren Gurley writes about the urban bias of sociology and the left’s disinterest in rural American poverty.

Recently I linkied a liberal case against Birthright Citizenship. This week, the conservative case for Birthright Citizenship.

Under a new definition of planethood, the moon is a planet.

The Swedish central bank has a negative interest rate on deposits, leading people to stash their money at home.

Gabriel Rossman has some smart words about excessive statistical controls, where if you don’t like the effects of X, you simply control for X.

Adam Ozimek lays down his predictions for 2045.

Dr Farah Khan explains how she deals with racist patients and the frustration of being denied as an Indian and an American.

Reviewing a book, Jesse Singal looks at the black activists who helped launch the drug war. In the comment section of a related article, Freddie chimes in.

It appears attempts to hook ruralia up with broadband was evidently a spectacular failure.

Kris Hartley writes of the potential of rural industrialization in China.

Drone Assassin: A Feminist Success Story

I have historically thought their virtues were overrated, but I’m coming around on the idea of nonpartisan elections (at least at the state and local levels).

The hardship of being obscenely rich.

Brian Boyd writes of the Nietzchean nature of Gotham.

The National Front in France is allegedly gaining support among gays.

David Harsanyi wants you to know that you’re not actually a hero.

Matthew Walther is not a big fan of Paul Ryan’s anti-smoking sentiment, brought to light on account of his need to detoxify the Speaker’s office. I am somewhat sympathetic to Ryan’s plight – especially since he doesn’t have a DC residence, though it does actually kind of make me glad he didn’t run for president…

… because Obama’s seemingly reasonable regulatory regime for ecigarettes is looking worse and worse with each passing month. It’s far enough in the future that the next president will have a lot of influence over what’s going to happen. The decision looks more like a punt.

Is institutional racism (against minorities, to be clear) responsible for substance abuse deaths among whites?

The biology of morning sickness. (This is not a hint that Clancy is pregnant. Elizabeth Stroker Bruenig is, though!)

Horrifying.

I’m not laughing at all about The Jeb Scenario. He’s still #3 on my poll position, and I think I might be too bearish. {More}

Also, the whole bit about Jeb helping a National Review reporter with tips on how to clean her room is kinda cool.

Some black voters may disagree, but Kareem Abdul-Jabbar believes that Ben Carson is perpetuating black stereotypes by denying science. Not sure about that, but he does carry some black comic book character stereotypes (wherein black characters tend to fall into one of three categories, one of which is being incredibly successful and smart).

Orac looks Ben Carson and why intelligent people aren’t always skeptics. Somewhat related, from 2013, Tea Partiers know science.

Though I think there was a window of opportunity for him to run, Romney would not be wise to enter the fray now. He could possibly do his party a lot of good by endorsing Rubio, however.

Say what one will about the Tea Party, but no faction of the GOP has done more to recruit minority candidates.

I recently linkied about the extreme measures taken against students deemed troubled. On the other side of the ledger, take them out of regular classes may be good for everyone else, especially the smart kids.

Boom. Students who go to liberal arts colleges earn less.

Doran Larson makes the case for open prisons.

One of the debates I’ve gotten into people over the last few years is whether it’s “bigotry” to propose discriminating against people who do not have a legal claim to live in a particular country. I would say “the United States” but one of my biggest sparring partners is Jonathan McLeod, who is talking about Canada. It’s also something I’ve gone around with (I think?) James Hanley.

My view comes down to this: Maybe it is bigotry, but if it’s bigotry it is so universal and ingrained so that it can’t really be rooted out in a meaningful way. It’s true, that at various points in the past you could say that about slavery and straight-up racism. The former has been rooted out in most of the world (to the point that we like to call things slavery that aren’t slavery for effect). The latter hasn’t, but is generally acknowledged as something we should wipe out. With citizenship discrimination, though, we don’t have anything approaching that consensus. Nor is there a roadmap to how to get to a glorious unbigoted state. Even if you let everyone in, you don’t let them vote immediately. Or if you do let anybody move anywhere and immediately vote… good luck with that. Short of that, we’re talking about separate treatment and therefore discrimination

And as such, I find myself uninterested in its bigotry. Or if, by believing in something other than open borders, I should be considered a bigot. The path to being otherwise is simply more than my lowercase-c soul can really bear.

So I’m not really even saying that the Bigotry Card is unfair, or inaccurate, really. I am saying that I consider it to be somewhat beside the point. Uninteresting, except perhaps as an academic discussion.

The City of Houston got some really bad press earlier in the month when their residents overwhelmingly rejected an ordinance – HERO, Houston Equal Rights Ordinance – that would have expanded anti-discrimination law to include, among other groups, gays and transgendered individuals. Though the law was wide-ranging, most of the debate focused on bathrooms. Specifically, the right of transgender women to use men’s restroom and vice-versa.

If I lived in Houston, I would have voted for it. Maybe as much despite the restroom issue as because of it, and despite other imperfections, but mostly because given a binary choice I would consider its presence better than its absence. Houston, however, went the other way. Did I mention it did so overwhelmingly?

There has been the tendency in some of the press to say “Yes. Well. Texas.” and portray Houston as some sort of backwards cow town. What would you expect from Texans? Except that the voters of Houston have already expressed an open-mindedness on the question of homosexuality. They are the largest major city – and one of only two large ones – to have a gay or lesbian mayor. That doesn’t absolve them of having anti-LBGTQ sentiment, but it does suggest that there is something more than a knee-jerk reaction.

Saying “Houston may be okay with gays, but they’re still anti-trans bigots” is, at this juncture, probably more accurate. It may not be total and they may not care out of restrooms, but if you define bigotry in such a way as to include anyone that believes that people with penises need to use the restroom over here and those with vaginas need to use the restroom over there, then it fits. And the anti-HERO forces succeeded largely on this basis.

Supporters of HERO argued, simultaneously, that the notion of women with penises wouldn’t actually get to use the women’s restrooms and that they would be able to and should and thinking otherwise puts you with racists. The latter gets points for being transparent. When the administration is advocating that transgender kids be allowed to use their preferred restroom even when there are unisex options available, it seems unlikely that the law is as modest as Vox proposes. Add to that some of the ancillary consequences of gay marriages and the rapid defense of the notion that simply allowing them to be married isn’t enough, suspicion is somewhat justified.

I think the concerns over bathrooms are overblown, but I am also a male and have less to worry about in terms of harassment. That the right and ability of the transgendered has been acknowledged in large parts of the country and the fears simply haven’t come to fruition. So on this, I remain on the sides of the angelic unbigotted. That is of a small comfort because I am relatively certain that as the debate progresses, I will at some point or another end up on the side of the bigots. The results of gender reassignment surgery seem to be pretty bleak, and while I wouldn’t ban it I am exceptionally critical of minors undergoing it. I’m also uncertain about taking hormones during puberty. These are concerns that can be addressed, maybe, but not with a bigotry tag. And while my views are presently tentative, Just as I have gone from being on the spearhead of gay rights to a defender of bigotry, I am almost certain to be on the wrong side of one of them somewhere along the way, and thus at least a defender of bigotry.

So, if I were concerned about restrooms, I don’t think the bigotry tag would bother me all that much. Even if I think it could be accurate, I would consider it beside the point. Wearing the tag at some point seems an inevitability.

This is just wrong. If you buy a four-pack of hedgehog, you need to use all four.

Related: The struggles of dating as a witch.

One of the questions I asked myself while I was watching things unfold in the aftermath of Paris was why they didn’t go into the stadium. Question answered.

While we were watching Paris, a hero did this in Beirut.

You know what else saved lives (well, a life)? A Samsung smartphone. And not for the first time.

Michael Weiss interviews Abu Khaled, Daeshian spy.

One of the terrorists of the Paris attack got in to Paris using a fake Syrian passport, which are apparently pretty easy to get. That he wasn’t actually a Syrian is less comforting than that he apparently snuck in through the refugee system is discomforting.

Before the attacks, Tanvi Misra made the case that Syrian refugees are likely to help the cities they settle in. Maybe, but when you’ve lost Rick Snyder…

Brendan O’Neill makes the case against cultural appeasement after Paris.

How Taiwan sees Japan. {More}

Should “having defended your safety while on the job” be a protected class?

David Roberts explains the right-sizing ability of self-driving electric cars.

BusinessInsider looks at the best and worst states to make a living.

Bring back the flop houses. The price is outrageous, but hey it’s San Francisco… I’m just kind of flag a bunk bed for $1200 a month is an option. Kriston Capps is fascinated.

Once upon a time, bungalows were the spawling, gaudy, high-consumption housing Right-Thinking people complained about.

This Freddie piece on withdrawing into yourself hit pretty close to home.

The statistical correlations with cohabitation tend to be negative, but among African-Americans it may make them more positive about marriage.

What can the rest of the country learn from the educational success of Texas and Florida? Uncle Steve isn’t buying it.

Isolation rooms: Schools like prisons.

RAND writes about the Department of Education taking another look at Zero Tolerance.

Scott Shackford seeks to set the record straight on Germany’s free college.

Ole Miss is now (likely) the only state university that will no longer fly its state flag on campus. Here’s hoping that the state changes the flag into something the university will fly proudly.

What happens when the world’s driest desert gets some rain? This happens. Wow.

Puerto Rico’s solution to its debt problem may be to just stop paying.

This is a pretty heartwarming story.

GNC is accused of spiking their dietary supplements with Russian drugs.

Seduced by a teacher’s aide, a British school boy says he was scarred for life.

Waze is a great app, but it does ask you to navigate some pretty difficult maneuvers. Fortunately, this may be coming to an end.

David Kirby believes that SeaWorld needs to be held into account for their role in depleting the orca population. Trumwill-favorite Jonathan Last, who is not exactly an animal rights activist, found himself critical of SeaWorld in 2012 (and 2010).

More money is made from vinyl record sales than ad-supported streaming.

When our moral instincts fail, should we turn to pills and brain zaps?

This article on Texas Instruments’ “staggering monopoly” in high school mathematics is interesting, but I can’t see through the nostalgia. I never had a TI-8x because my parents got me a Casio, which I am still bitter about to this day. (All of the good games were on the TI.)

Conor Friedersdorf’s Atlantic essay focuses on the Christakises and how they and eventually their would-be defenders have been treated, and also briefly takes into account the assertion linked by Nevermoor below that “it’s not about Halloween costumes.”

The common demand that the accused individual recite a statement confessing to crimes against the just society, including the crime of being born to the wrong class and race, before or in the process of accepting punishment, repeats this demotion of the individual to mere symbol. What’s important is not what the person might freely come to think, or for that matter what happens to him or her, but that he or she publicly submit to the new power.–CK MacLeod

I’m going to go out on a limb right now and predict that everyone is just going to line up without waiting to hear what that history is, pick a side that fits a narrative they already have going in their head about college kids today or PC or SJW or The Man or whatever, and run with it. I mean, just run the s**t out of it. –Tod Kelly

—-

Over There, I did a linkchain post about the situation in Missouri:

Black players on the University of Missouri football team say they will boycott practices, meetings and games until the university dismisses its president or he quits, contending he has not responded adequately to concerns about racism on campus.

The move comes as a hunger strike staged by a graduate student to protest racism enters a second week. A majority of the 35,000 students at the university in Columbia, about 125 miles (200 km) west of St. Louis, are white.

“The athletes of color on the University of Missouri football team truly believe ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’” the university’s Legion of Black Collegians said in a statement on Twitter.

“We will no longer participate in any football-related activities until President Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized students’ experience,” it said. More than 30 players were in a photograph linked to the statement posted on Saturday night.

In a statement released on Sunday afternoon, Wolfe indicated no intention to resign but said solutions to the students’ concerns were being discussed.

Wolfe did, in fact resign. The system chancellor also announced his departure, though unlike Wolfe, his will not be immediate.

The lesson? Don’t mess with football! Actually, that’s both correct and incorrect. While some are saying this shows the awesome power of football, it’s not clear whether it was the decisive factor when it came to the outcome. Wolfe had lost the confidence of just about everybody. What the football program did do was deprive Wolfe of his only change of staying. Absent what the football players did, it seems likely Wolfe would have tried to wait it out. His success would have been improbably, but possible. However, if the football team isn’t practicing and paying, you go from having nothing to lose by holding off a few weeks (on the unlikely chance that his fortunes could reverse) to the enmity of the entire state.

But besides putting Wolfe on a clock, the main thing that football program did was make the situation very distinct from what’s going on at Yale University. For those of you that are not familiar with the situation at Yale, the convergence of a few events (a fraternity allegedly saying “white girls only” and an email from a house administrator regarding Halloween costumes) has lead to a series of protests and rallies about how the university and its students treat its minority (and particularly black) students.

Relatively few seem especially impressed by the Yale students. Most of the debate is whether it is indicative of the downfall of civilization, or just kids being kids. I consider it something close to the latter myself. Which may sound generous, but is actually a bit condescending. But I have taken the strategy of not freaking out about kids in college lacking the sense of perspective and overreacting to crap.

Also, protesting and holding rallies can be really gratifying. Writing long-winded pieces about justice and righteousness is fun and interesting. I’m not a protester or rally sort, but I am a “write long-winded piece” sort of person. When it comes to these activities, they often exist in search of a cause to latch on to. And when you’re young, everything can be a grand battle. There is also the high of being a part of a movement, perhaps the largest distinction with that and a mob being the clear-eyed justice of the cause.

So people who who want to gather and spontaneously rally and write op-eds can pretty easily get wound up on things in a volume out of proportion with that clear-eyed view.

But while protesting, writing op-eds, and yelling at authority figures can be fun, one thing that isn’t fun is sitting out a sporting event if you’re an athlete. That was, to me, why the Missouri football team really got my attention. These kids have been working most of their lives to play football at the college level. Their refusal to do so isn’t just latching on to a cause aligned with something they are predisposed to do anyway. If they’re doing this in saying that the president has got to go, I’m inclined to think that the environment is bad enough that the president does, in fact, got to go.

That’s not the only distinction between the two. At the risk of being a classist, this plays a role. Not so much (though partly) in the privilege of Yale youth (even those with darker skin), but because of how… realistic, for lack of a better term… accusations of a hostile environment sound to me. This is superficial and obviously not scientific, but while a part of me would actually really like to believe that Yale is essentially no different than the University of Mississippi or the University of Missouri*… I have difficulty. Maybe that’s not right and it’s not fair (either to Missouri or to minority students at Yale), it is nonetheless an impression I have. Not that the people of Yale are enlightened, exactly, but that even the renegade fraternities have more sense than to loudly proclaim “White girls only” at a party.

None of this is to excuse some of the excesses of the Missouri protesters and their faculty allies. There are some doubts being raised about the incident that kicked all of this off may be a hoax**, possibly fanned on by an opportunistic faculty or just an activist in search of a cause. And… it may be. It certainly wouldn’t be the first. These are questions to be asked. But on the question of whether I think Missouri has issues that I am less sure Yale does, I definitely find myself more open to hearing of a hostile environment necessitating a response.

Which, of course, could leave me in the position of “Dude, never believe college students ever.” Or perhaps more generously, “any valiant cause is likely to be infiltrated by bad actors.”

—-

It’s not clear how much the specifics of the original charge matter, if Wolfe’s termination was a product more of the response to the original incidents. On the other hand, it is also entirely possible that the leadership did look them, determine that there was no real “there” there, but that engaging the kids by calling them liars or opening themselves up to further misinterpretation was the bad bet for the university (not just its leadership) overall. That turned out to be a bad bet, but making a bad bet is different from being indifferent to Hate on Campus.

Subsequent events have almost uniformly undermined the Mizzou movement. There was the communications professor who wanted to get muscle to kick out photographers. While Yale had the student with the op-ed about not wanting debate, Missouri has the student vice president questioning the First Amendment. A professor who declined to cancel exams was harassed to the point of resignation (which was rejected by the university). All of these can be explained or isolated to be condemned. The actions of a communications professor are not the actions of a movement. The words of a student council vice president might be more indicative of sentiment, but that takes us back to Dreznerianism that there’s only so much account we can hold to young people stretching their intellectual legs. And with regard to the resigning professor, I heard a couple rumors that one of his tormentors was a high school kid in Houston. Which is maybe not the case, but it would stand to reason that there were a lot of outsiders piling on.

And nothing we have seen tells us that there are no racial problems on Mizzou, or problems so bad to warrant such a response. It doesn’t follow from the above that the students don’t have a reason to be anxious and aren’t victims of everyday racism and harassment. It doesn’t follow that actual events haven’t occurred on the micro and macro level, even if they’re harder to isolate or identify. The increased attention and scrutiny makes it hard to determine in the midst of the fever pitch. While not as bad as being fired, stripping the communications professor of her honorary title in the heat of current tensions seems like a bad idea. Professors resigning seems like a bad idea. The best idea, to me, is to calm down. Which is not only off the menu, but a suggestion itself that is offensive to some.

Meanwhile, things seem to have calmed down at Yale. That may be because Yale happened first. More disturbingly, it may be because at Yale the protesters never drew blood while, at Missouri, having done so, they are only more energized. While I don’t object to the resolutions in New Haven of Columbia specifically, the lessons drawn from this may not be what the students want. Next time it may put my theory about the football team not necessarily being necessary to the test, except with added incentive for everyone to rally around the administration.

* – Admittedly, this is partially because of regionalism. But also because “Large state school versus Ivy League private school.” I’d probably approach UMass (northern state school) and SMU (southern private one) with more of a Missouri perspective.

** – There evidently was a police report where the poop swastika was observed. That part seems settled. Whether that swastika was intended hate speech or a hoax intended to raise awareness of hate speech, though, is unclear.

Kate Iselin is sick of the predators and approval-seekers calling themselves feminist to get her attention.

Arrested johns are being sent to class to ask how they would feel if their loved ones were prostitutes. Relatedly, Noah Smith tweetbombs an explanation for why he opposes the legalization of prostitution.

Lyman Stone points out that interstate migration is mostly going not to super-deep red states, but to purple states. The definition of purpose is sufficiently broad so as to include Texas, but interesting all of the same.

One county in Alabama has abducted as many children as all of the strangers in the country combined. Relatedly, The Nation’s Michelle Goldberg takes a skeptical look at the CPS.

Watch some drones build a bridge.

If Firefox is worried about staying relevant in a mobile world, they ought to think less about having their own OS and more on making an Android browser that’s awesome. There are some good Android browsers out there, but no great ones. Make it happen, Firefox. (Or don’t worry about it, and make your desktop browser better.)

Filed under “Regulation for the sake of regulation being a thing”, Robert Reich and Matt Rosoff square off on whether or not the tech industry needs more regulation.

Hamilton Nolan reports that fidgeters don’t need standing desks.

Tom Rogan looks at the Tory political implications of the British class system.
The designer of the labradoodle would like to apologize. Meanwhile, in Japan…

The tears of a suicide bomber.

Democrats and Republicans tweet differently.

Don’t just start school later… also start work later.

Daniel Hertz writes about zoning and the education gap.

The commenters at Greater Greater Washington argue that of course the less fortunate need housing, just elsewhere.

Megan McArdle’s review of ‘Truth’ makes me wish they had made it in the style of The Informant, an underrated movie.

I hope that Anonymous might consider leaving UK than the medical profession. Montana and Idaho need you!

Peter Beinart argues that Jeb Bush’s tumble is proof that democracy is winning. I think the most underreported story this cycle is that campaign finance reform has worked so impressively this cycle.

My smartphone’s battery life has plummeted. I don’t have an iPhone, but is maybe Facebook responsible?

CVS is (at least temporarily) is scaling back its experiment with self-checkout. Virginia Postrel outlines why self-checkout is going to be an uphill climb.

I’m not gonna lie, a McDonald’s burger with a grey bun sounds intriguing to me.

In an interview with Russian astronauts, of course you ask how they will cope without men and makeup because that’s the important thing.

Former Alabama Democrat turn Virginia Republican turn Alabama Independent Artur Davis is not eligible to become an Alabama Democrat again right away.

Will electoral reform come to Canada? Trudeau favors it, but its time may have passed.

Hillary Clinton is fun.

Rugby… a game that makes soldiers, can honor indigenous culture, and has limited prospects in the US.

All he could say is that his life was pretty lame. I’m not sure any song captured the moment better than that one.

Raising Baby Hitler.

It looks like we will have Phil Collins to kick around again soon.

Woohoo! This is what the economy has long needed.

When I was growing up, it was pretty much conventional wisdom that you had to worry about people giving out (chemically of physically) spiked candy on Halloween. It wasn’t thought to be common or anything, but parents started doing the whole “No accepting trick or treat candy from strangers” thing as I was going through.

These are the things you only find out much later are almost entirely mythical. Or absolutely, entirely so.

But everything persists as if this isn’t the case. As if this is something that we genuinely need to be worried about. It speaks to something more than mere gullibility. It speaks to what I can only see as an investment in the notion that the world is a sick place. The need for affirmation that all of our fears are justified. That those who are afraid are not so much afraid as aware and those saying otherwise are at best naive, and at worst indifferent to evil.

And so it happened again this year. A razorblade in Auburn, Massachusetts, that turned out to be a criminal prank. Then some needles in Pennsylvania. I briefly got taken in by the second one, in large part because there were (allegedly) multiple reports. My thinking was not so much that some sicko was trying to hurt children, but that some parent might actually put needs in candy as a warning to people to be way of candy. Because that’s the sort of investment I’m talking about. A sick place about being a sick place, or something. You know, like cops stealing stuff from people’s cars to teach them a lesson about securing their cars.

Turns out, I was partially right:

Then, after detectives spoke with Ledrew, “They discovered upon questioning the male that he indeed made up the story.”

Minossse says Ledrew actually put the needles in himself, and the reason he gives them is that he was trying to teach his kids a lesson to be careful with their candy.

Ledrew was arrested and charged with making a false police report, Minosse says his lesson continues in court at a future date.

Meanwhile, at least four have died from automobile accidents while trick-or-treating.

But keep your eyes on that candy, parents. There are a lot of sickos out there.