Category Archives: Newsroom
This is an interesting map, but it’s weird to say “People at the bottom range of income cannot afford the middle range in housing” and present that as an interesting finding.
The pollster who calls you may know better than you who you’re going to vote for.
Wild energy ascendant! Of all renewables, I like wind energy the most because windfarms look cool (only oil refineries look cooler).
David Roberts looks at the persistent gender gap of nuclear power support. Turns out, it’s all about science science white male hierachical buzz buzz privilege male effect. Science!
I don’t really have an objection to this. Sometimes collisions aren’t actually accidents. Sometimes, they aren’t even negligent. A while back Jonathan McLeod pointed to a case where they used the A-word in a case that the article itself said, in the previous paragraph, was believed by police to be intentional.
Following up on the Thiel/Gawker story, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry gives a French perspective, and Marc Randazza falls squarely on Thiel’s side.
Here’s a look at the fiscal solvency of our states.
Uhhh, I guess vapers will take support wherever we can find it?
Yes, this would be entirely welcome. At least we’ve got Mitt.
Good news! Venezuela is getting more organized! Wait, not good news at all…
Grady Smith argues that the tension between country music’s party-boy style and religion is doing both a disservice. I checked out of the contemporary country scene some time ago, but if the depiction is accurate it’s a shame. Many of the best religious songs I ever heard were country, and some of the best country songs religious.
I’ve seen the first 45 minutes of Frost/Nixon five times (movie day substitute teaching), though I’ve not yet seen the second half. I wondered why @dick_nixon objected to it so since I thought the characterization of Nixon was on the whole kind of affectionate. Turns out, I needed to see the second half.
A story of conversion to and from the LDS Church.
Paulette Perhach explains the F*** Off Fund.
Among early skeptics of the Hiroshima bombing was Dwight Eisenhower. In fact, it was conservatives who were critical of the Hiroshima bombing.
Going to create a new Twitter series: "Who's to Blame for the rise of Donald Trump?" …
— Justin Tiehen (@jttiehen) December 12, 2015
1. Angela Merkel? https://t.co/VScxaY6Yc5
— Justin Tiehen (@jttiehen) December 12, 2015
2. The PC Left? https://t.co/5Shy4bcCqY
— Justin Tiehen (@jttiehen) December 12, 2015
The origin of the Animaniacs! When people are expressing weariness on Twitter, I sometimes send them a link to an Animaniacs sketch. It’s hard to watch Animaniacs and stay glum. At least it is for me.
It’s not just for liberals! Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry peeked at how the veil of ignorance justifies conservative position.
As we stare down the possibility of a Trump Presidency, maybe – just maybe – we shouldn’t have made the presidency as powerful as we have.
I am not at all surprised by this. Girls be mean.
Noah Berlatsky argues that superheroes are less modern myths and more melodramas. I think this is true in the case of classic comics, though the medium has transformed into something else (or, more accurately, many things).
I kind of shrugged off the latest Captain America twist (I mean, obviously, it’s going to be some sort of hypnosis where Steve was really being Steve up until now), but Jessica Plummer argues pretty convincingly that even accounting for the fact it’s going to be a gimmick, it matters.
This is no surprise: There’s a peer effect when it comes to teenage pregnancy. Of course, that’s a double-edged sword. Lower teenage pregnancies is a good thing, but too much stigma and abortion (for wronger-than-usual reasons, even) starts to look really attractive.
Calaveras High School (CA) are the Redskins no more! Now they are… well… nothing. That’s dumb. Otters would work for a California school!
Peak Sonny Bunch: He makes the case for the White Walkers.
This guy reminds me a bit of how much I miss the Natural Law Party right now. At least transcendental meditation as the solution to all of our ills is a mostly-harmless delusion.
A Katie Couric documentary rather deceptively edited an interview with gun control opponents, a conservative website “claims” (and also, actually, demonstrates).
Perhaps more evidence that people answering polls are not actually answering the question asked, partisan fact gaps diminish when money is on the line.
Zombie beavers may be the stuff of movies, but zombie cockroaches controlled by wasps are apparently real.
Priceonomics has an article on what words and inflections correlate with good and bad first dates.
Fast Company looks at skyscrapers and how they might influence our perspective of space.
I don’t care very much for the framing of this article, but I genuinely do worry what happens if, as whites become minorities, they vote in minority patterns. We already see it in cities where they are outnumbered.
I am inclined towards agreeing with this. It was important to put it out there, but once out there, all retweeting does is amplify it. Relatedly, this sort of explains some of the people who have shown up on my Twitter feed.
Maybe Lindsay Graham isn’t a sellout after all? To be honest, that’s the biggest one that has thrown me so far.
Nick Cohen takes radical tourists to task, with regard to their props to Venezuela.
I knew that Brazil’s interim president was controversial, but a Satanist?
Meanwhile, a king lies in wait… with the support of his would-be people!
There is a lesson here.
I’ll bet you’ve always wanted to know which cities were best equipped for the Zombie Apocalypse. Does New York City have to win at everything? Sigh…
Brad Wilcox and Nicholas Wolfinger look at The Latino Marriage Paradox: Given that Latino’s are in general poorer than whites, why are their family formation statistics similar?
With this is a cheery thought, from Elijah Wood.
The stereotypes seem to have changed from the ones in this article, from Republicans as Rich to Republicans as backwards losers. Interesting stuff all the same. Both parties, it turns out, contain multitudes.
The New York Times editorial board is recognizing that we’re pumping out too many college graduates for the jobs available, and then has a series of largely unrelated and counterproductive proposals on how to address it.
I give this article mega-points for its title, and it’s interesting to boot!
Chris Beck writes of the “law school prices [for] blue collar skills” in culinary schools.
Arthur Books wants to get America moving again! To places where there are jobs and opportunity available.
I have responded to the bulk of Aaron’s well-written piece on the Trump insurgency elsewhere, so I will not be rehashing most of it here. Rather, I wanted to focus on one of the arguments within:
Conservatives believe, rightly or wrongly it doesn’t matter, that the media is biased against them. This shows up in such ways as: how any opposition to the ACA is painted as racist; accusations that even when the job they have is legislating, they aren’t governing; or, claims that if the branches of government that the Republicans have just taken back use the checks and balances that the constitution provides them, it must be because they aren’t serious senators. Couple this with accusations that every Republican running for President is akin to Hitler, and that opposition to amnesty for illegal immigrants being solely motivated by racism. (A claim supported by the one of the party elite no less!)
Some of what I have to say was articulated by Trizzlor in the comments:
The problem is when a party collectively says “Oh you don’t like me because I’m [BLANK], well let me show you how [BLANK] I can be” they are collectively doomed. And that holds when BLANK is racism or when BLANK is SJW privilege checking. There’s a reason civil rights activists put on their Sunday best and went to church before staging a sit in: an insurgency is effective when it highlights the commonalities, not the differences.
I would, however, take it a step further. What this reasoning suggests to me is that at the end of the day, blank is what the speaker wants to be. And that, to a degree, the only reason not to be blank is the degree of social condemnation that comes with it. This is, controlling for blank, quite reasonable. If I want to blank, but blank makes people dislike me, then I might blank anyway if people are going to accuse me of blanking no matter what I do. Why not?
When blank is being racist, though, that ought to cause incur a pause. If your response to being called a racist no matter what you do is to become racist, that says something about you. It demonstrates to me that either (a) you really want to be a racist but are merely held back by social convention, or (b) you are cool being racist if it pisses the right people off. Neither of these is a flattering look, perceptively or morally. If we assume, at any rate, that racism is bad.
Now, if you’re not a liberal, and maybe if you are, being called a racist is something you’re likely to be confronted with. Regardless of what you say or do. It’s something that’s out there. Often, it’s because many on the left lack any sense of perspective or nuance. They find a racial dimension to whatever your view is, and they pounce on it. It’s just how they view the world. Not without reason, of course, but taken to excess. For others it is more blatantly a vehicle for self-righteousness, or a way to win an argument. A lot of people on the left have an awful lot invested in the notion of their enlightened superiority on such matters.
How we respond to this matters. One way of doing so, of course, would be simply never to dissent from their perspective on any issue which could be construed as a racial one (which is virtually any issue). If you’re conservative – and even if you’re not – that’s not a tenable position. It’s also not an intellectually honest one, for the most part. But the question that we ought to ask ourselves is not whether or not we will be accused of racism, but whether (a) the charge will stick, and (b) the charge is actually justified. We want to avoid situations where (a) occurs as a practical and political matter. But really, though, the most aggressive accusers end up doing most of the work for you in this regard. When everything is racist, then virtually nothing is, except to the most devoted. We want to avoid (b) as a moral matter, if we agree that racism is undesirable.
Now, defining racism is hard. I’m honestly not sure how to do it myself. In my view, it can be defined extremely broadly to the point where we are all guilty and even very defensible policy qualifies, or we can define it narrowly and with a great moral weight. I don’t know which one is correct, though I tend to approach accusations of racism according to defensibility. Sometimes something can, in my view, be called racist with accuracy, and yet still be the right course of action. (This comes up a lot with immigration.) I am rarely called racist myself, though things I believe are called racist with varying degrees of frequency. The good and proper response to this is to determine whether it’s not racist, whether it may be racist but is defensible anyway, or whether it is racist and I need to re-evaluate the whole thing. The good and proper response is not, and cannot be, “You want racist? I will show you racist!”
If you’re supporting the guy who calls Mexicans rapists, that’s on you. Not them. And except insofar as you are being “true to yourself” by doing so, you’re more or less playing the role that many of your adversaries want you to play anyway. Especially those in the last aforementioned category: The ones that have a strong investment in their enlightened superiority on racial matters. Most cynically, many of them really do want you to take the most extreme position possible. I thought myself cynical, but even I’ve been surprised by how many people on the left seem to relish the things that Trump says and does because he proves them right. He takes what they see and puts it out there for everybody else to see. Then they further accuse anti-Trump people on the right of only being anti-Trump on that basis. For the least earnest, most divisive sort, this is catnip.
To go in the other direction, let’s talk about anti-Trump protesters. Specifically, let’s talk about the anti-Trump protesters in New Mexico who were throwing rocks and waving the Mexican flag. Now, waving the Mexican flag is not really comparable to hurling either rocks or racist insults, but it is in the eyes of many divisive. It also plays into stereotypes about immigrants, Mexican-Americans, and anti-Trump people of being unpatriotic. It’s somewhat detrimental to the cause. This was noticed, as it happens, by Mexican-Americans:
Observers said that during the anti-Proposition 187 rallies of 1994, the flying of the Mexican flag may have increased support for the initiative, which would have denied public services to immigrants here illegally. It was passed by voters but overturned by the courts.
Protesters carrying Mexican flags during the 2006 protests also sparked debate, though as those protests continued, there were fewer Mexican flags and more American flags. That happened in part because Spanish-language DJs who promoted the demonstration during their radio shows urged participants to carry American flags to show their patriotism.
“If we want to live here, we want to demonstrate that we love this country and we love the American flag,” DJ Eddie “El Piolin” Sotelo said at the time.
More recently, during the Comprehensive Immigration Reform and DREAM debates, the advocates made the switch and it seemed to correspond with a change in public perceptions on the debate. There was a good article about this in Slate, but unfortunately I can’t find it. Whether they should have had to do this or not, it was nonetheless good for their movement that they didn’t decide “Haters gonna hate.”
Some will, of course, just as some liberals will believe that anyone that disagrees with them on a broad buffet of issues are racist. But haters aren’t the target audience. First and foremost, they like you good and hateworthy.
This surprises me not even a little bit: Things are different when you’re beautiful. (The linked episode of 30 Rock was really, really good.)
Why? Because freedom and you’re not the boss of me dad.
Some are becoming concerned that residency hour caps have gone too far.
This strikes me as about right. The clients of Electronic Medical Records aren’t the doctors who use them, really, but the government.
Within ten years, Chicago could be overtaken by Houston.
Whatever we say about San Francisco, at least it’s not Stockholm. (Yet.)
Lyman Stone says it’s time to let Atlantic City die.
The Washington Post made a splash with its new poll suggesting 90% of Native Americans don’t oppose the Redskins name. But “>here’s the pushback, and it’s not entirely unconvincing. A lot of this is going to come down to defining Native American, and possibly the extent to which some Native American opinions might matter more than others.
Bre Payton explains how a gay-friendly gun club helped secure our Second Amendment.
It’s interesting to me how in Nature vs Nurture it tends to be the right that endorses the former and the left the latter, when I actually think the policy implications kind of run the other way.
This piece, by an interest group on the cost of regulation in homebuilding, has me wondering what empirical data there might be on the actual long-term effects of such regulation. Especially safety regulations, which are the most justified.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown reports that academic freedom isn’t what it used to be.
Though growth has slowed down, the oil and gas apocalypse that was supposed to consume Texas still hasn’t happened.
Shane Parrish looks at Albert Einstein, the non-essential, and the essential.
It’s apparently long been known that if you put a joey in a kangaroo’s pouch, the kangaroo might adopt it. Apparently, they adopt on their own volition, too.
And because this post title is Guanajuato, I have to include this Robert Earl Keen song, which is pretty awesome:
Here’s another cool profile of Estonia’s president. I still, uhhh, disagree with him about the pseudonym thing.
Reportedly, Iron Man would have had a female villain but for concerns over toy sales.
As someone I know put it, why are people so good at doing nothing when they should do something and doing something when they should do nothing? I understand the park’s position on the matter, but any chance we could set up an adoption agency? We might need one for baby seals, too.
The Trump presidency is going to be great, y’all. Just hard on the UK.”>great.
It makes sense that The New Republic would want to destroy the only grassroots political movement in Westeros.
Stop trying to get me to like Hillary Clinton it’s not going to work.
The origin of the small statue penises. NSFW
Google is working with developers to improve chatbots. Excellent! I mean, it would be better if they cited Hitler elegantly, right?
Sweden is looking at legalizing male abortions, wherein men can sign away their rights and responsibilities early in the pregnancy. I’m pretty reflexively against it, though the dynamics do probably change when you’re dealing with a cradle-to-grave welfare state. How much, though?
This Lyman Stone post on suburbia, exurbia, and affordability is pretty long, but I love everything about it. {More} {Even More}
I’ve been waiting for this for quite some time. This, more than anything, is what is likely to make regular paperbacks obselete. {via Abel}
Wait, isn’t this how the Book of Mormon came to be?!
Jeffrey Tucker says that writing a book is easy, and publishing it is easier. These things aren’t false, though writing a publishable book (as in one you would want others to read) is more difficult.
Clancy loves coffee, and loves naps, so this is right up her alley and she reported that it actually kind of works.
Clarrissa Sebag-Montefiore explains how China gives short people the short shrift.
Decriminalization of marijuana has been good for white tokers, but not so good for minority ones or drivers.
Though it sounds like he were other things going on, the diaper conviction is pretty unsettling and I’m glad it was reversed.
Adam Ozimek links for four studies that he says should have higher minimum wage advocates nervous.
Gotta give these youngsters credit for ingenuity. The commercial at the bottom is kind of goofy, though. (And aren’t such jammers supposed to be illegal?)
The LDS Church and BYU is working to address the tech gender gap.
In an “advice for the privileged” sort of way, this actually seems to largely be good advice.
In Slovenia, they expressly want to prevent smokers from switching to ecigarettes, while over here the Democrats are doing a good job reminding me why I’m not beating down their door right now.
Alyssa Rosenberg’s piece about free speech and smoking in movies is quite good. I do agree that it would be better if we could show less smoking, like I think it would be better if there were other things we showed less of, but the lawsuit needs to be strangled in its crib. {Yes, I’m aware the lawsuit is about movie ratings and not content per se. Even so.}
There may be a whole lot of nudity at the RNC this time around.
An anonymous congressman dishes the dirt, possibly stripping us of whatever earnestness we have on the state of congress. Yes, I will be buying this book. I hope that he uses fictitious states to preserve his anonymity!
I used to take pride in being a psychopath, apparently. On the other hand, if a particular friend hadn’t stayed friends with a particular ex, I never would have met my wife.
Idaho’s decision to drop down from FBS to FCS football was not surprising. The report that lead them to that conclusion is fascinating. I especially find interesting that a variation of my idea for the WAC was sort of taken seriously (sans NDSU/SDSU, plus NAU).
Maybe it’s just me, but I sort of imagine these Russians commenting with a smirk. Also, Trump and Putin sittin’ in a tree…
Benjamin Morris looks at the internationalization of Sumo Wrestling. Uncle Steve comments.
Hey, look, the Phillippines may be electing someone worse than Trump. I vaguely wonder if there is any cultural relationship between this and the Northern Mariana Islands going so hard for Trump in the primary.
Some Pacific Islands are sinking! But maybe not due to climate change.
Halo has been pretty laid back about the coming FDA regs, but now that they’re out, they’re going to court.
This map looks like I would expect it to, with the Northeast ahead of the curve because it’s the northeast and they’ll regulate anything, and Appalachia because they have some of the most pressing problems.
At Unz Review, Anatoly Karlin breaks down Soviet scientists by ethnicity.
A lot of folks on the left talk about Wingnut Welfare, which is the phenomenon where rich right-wingers fund all sorts of think tanks and media. Turns out, BSDI, and lefty outfits team up with the government.
The EPA temporarily debunked claims that weedkillers were causing cancer, before it was quickly retracted.
Some of my rightier friends are getting a kick out of the article on the plight of the college Hillary supporter. Truth be told, I didn’t have it as bad as some did. The left was divided between Gore types and Nader types, the PC of the 80’s/90’s had mostly passed, and the current thing wasn’t a thing yet.
An alternative look at filters and bubbles.
So this is the stuff of a pretty silly sitcom plot: Ten years ago, a taxi driver drove to a TV network for an IT job and ended up on the air as someone else entirely.
It was Amanda Byrnes that really broke me on the subject of celebrity rubbernecking. I really wish Johnny Manziel had stayed in College Station an extra year. It would have been another year of fun.
This… sigh. I do wish that we had a fair and egalitarian way of handling the name thing. My own preference remains for hyphenated household names, he keeps his last name and she keeps hers and names are passed down by gender (by default, but open to mutual agreement).
Is it okay to end a friendship over Trump support? An awful lot depends on the particulars, I think.
Exactly how much does it actually cost Apple to run iTunes? Maybe it’s a lot and maybe Wang is right that they’ll get out of the downloading business, but conflating iTunes with “music downloads” is a bit of a stretch.
I got into a Twitter conversation with Tom Van Dyke about the holdouts on Donald Trump. He took issue with Michael Medved, who said that being anti-Trump is a courageous stance. Tom does not personally care much for Trump, but he supports him as a nominee that is superior to Hillary Clinton. He is, in fact, the only person I know who has waved the #NeverTrump banner and turned. A number of Trump critics have turned, giving those who have said “They will all fall into line” reason to smugly declare themselves prescient. But there is also a historically unprecedented reluctance to endorse the nominee. Enough so that some people, including TVD, are getting frustrated with it.
I am not sure I ever waved the #NeverTrump banner on an official basis. Anyone who has read my writing here or Over There knows, however, that I’m on board with the concept. You never say never, but I cannot imagine any circumstances under which I would vote for the man. My views on the matter are really quite extreme. It’s not that I know he would be a tyrant, but I consider it a non-trivial possibility that he will simply ignore all of the institutional controls we have because because he doesn’t respect them. That sounds like rhetorical excess, but I see no reason to believe he would not simply ignore unfovarable Supreme Court rulings, and almost always involving his ability to act independently of congress. A number of Democrats look at Cruz, and Republicans look at Hillary, and say “Actually, they’d be worse because…” and I reject those arguments.
I recognize, however, that my views on this are not normal. And I could be wrong. While I see a tyrant, other people see other things. A number of people on the left have done the thing where they say “If you really believe this about Trump, you would take it to its most logical conclusion” (with the logical conclusion being some combination of never supporting another Republican ever again, and/or disavowing any views on race and politics that liberals find unacceptable, and/or declaring yourself a moral cretin who has been wrong about everything he’s ever said in his entire life). There is some truth to some that, but only if I’m 100% sure I’m right and I’m not 100% sure about much of anything.
Which means that there is, in fact, wiggle room. This cycle, I am not going to be voting for anyone that has directly aided and abetted Trump, or that endorses him. Including those who endorse “the nominee” without naming him. But they’re not blacklisted for life in my mind. My Trumper friends are not going to be disowned. Politicians that make mistakes this cycle will be forgiven with time. This is life in a pluralistic society.
And when it comes to politicians in particular, they have a different vantage point than I do. I am a firm believer that we see in life what our circumstances allow us to see, and many of them are looking down the barrels of the rest of their careers and lives. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
And beyond that, talk is cheap. I may believe that Trump is dangerous, but it’s also easy for me to believe it. It’s also easy for me to believe, as I do, that the politics line up with my personal preferences and that doing anything but distancing themselves from Trump as much as they can will hurt them in direct proportion to how much they fail to so. If I get a false positive, or if I am wrong, I face very little harm. They have reason to ask themselves “Are you sure?” over and over again. I don’t. I want to scream “It’s not that hard, people!”… but it apparently is. If it was as easy, and obvious, as it looks to me, more of them would be doing it.
That brings me to TVD, Medved, and the bravery (or lack thereof) of #NeverTrump. It also helps explain why I grade people on a sliding scale. The more that seeing Donald Trump as I do affects your ability to succeed, the less I expect you to see it.
If you’re an independent commentator, like I am, then #NeverTrump is usually not terribly difficult position to take. Especially for someone like me. It is not a threat to my social circles. It doesn’t threaten my wife’s job. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to be on the outs with my family. There are a number of commentators whose audience is unlikely to punish them for it. The National Review can afford to be anti-Trump. There are other cases, however, where it may indeed be hurting them. There are indications that the Washington Free Beacon, for example, has paid a pretty steep price in terms of readership.
Politicians are a different matter, and not just because I expect less of them generally. Rather, that’s where the consequences become serious. Depending on who you are and who your constituency is, refusing to support your presidential nominee really is a big deal. It is not something that can be done lightly. It’s something almost never done, except by someone with one foot already out the door. Any politician who does that has my respect in spades. It’s the sort of thing I’m not going to forget, even as I have to forgive and forget most of those who do go over the dark side.
The easiest position for a politician to take is to support “the nominee.” If you’re pro-unity, you can look at what Rick Perry is doing and be kind of impressed that he’s eating his own words so vigorously. If someone says that takes guts, I… can’t actually disagree with that. Likewise, I couldn’t be more impressed with Paul Ryan right now. While I appreciate Romney and the Bush family and others, their skin in the game is pretty limited. However much Ryan, Flake, Sasse, and the rest of The Hamilton List can manage to hold out (and I fear they may not, indefinitely), I will appreciate. Too few are. It does take bravery, and that’s in somewhat short supply.