Quick hits (part I)
August 12, 2023 6 Comments
1) I’m not sure the way these questions are asked isn’t designed to play into the thesis, but still interesting and worth grappling with from Ruy Teixeira, “The Democratic Party Left vs. the Center”
I’ll do the same here, focusing on a set of questions we asked to tap voters’ views on three culturally freighted issues that are sure to loom large in the impending campaign: immigration, climate, and transgender controversies. The data strongly indicate that Democrats’ positions on these issues appear to correspond closely to the views of the left of the party but not to the views of the rest of the electorate, especially those voters who occupy the electorate’s center ground.
Taking immigration first, we asked voters to choose from three options:
People around the world have the right to claim asylum and America should welcome more immigrants into the country;
America needs to secure its borders and create more legal and managed immigration paths to bring in skilled professionals and workers to help our economy grow; or
America needs to close its borders to outsiders and reduce all levels of immigration.
Under a quarter (24 percent) chose the first option, emphasizing the right to asylum and admitting more immigrants, which is closely associated with the Democratic Party. By far the most popular option was the second one, emphasizing border security and skilled immigration, which 59 percent favored. The draconian third option, which favors just closing the border and reducing all immigration was chosen by 17 percent. The latter two positions outnumber the permissive first position by three to one…
Turning to climate and energy, we offered voters these three choices:
We need a rapid green transition to end the use of fossil fuels and replace them with fully renewable energy sources;
We need an “all-of-the above” strategy that provides abundant and cheap energy from multiple sources including oil and gas to renewables to advanced nuclear power; or
We need to stop the push to replace domestic oil and gas production with unproven green energy projects that raise costs and undercut jobs.
Once again, the Democratic-identified first position, emphasizing ending the use of fossil fuels and rapidly adopting renewables, is a distinctly minoritarian one, embraced by just 29 percent of voters. The most popular position is the second, all-of-the above approach that emphasizes energy abundance and the use of fossil fuels and renewables and nuclear, favored by 46 percent of voters…
So cultural leftism not only does not represent the views of most voters; it also doesn’t represent the views of vast segments of the very party—the Democrats—that is now identified with promulgating said cultural leftism. This is not how a big tent party should act. Many Democratic politicians appear to believe they can get away with indulging, if not promoting, such cultural leftism because Trump and the Republicans are so terrible. This is short-sighted. The best and surest way to beat Trump and Trumpism is to embrace the electoral center of the country (not to mention the views of tens of millions of their own partisans) and assure these voters that Democrats are their party and not beholden to an aggressive leftist minority in their own ranks.
2) AI plus biotech is the ultimate combination, “AI Is Building Highly Effective Antibodies That Humans Can’t Even Imagine”
3) Loved this interview about the Webb space telescope:
If size is but one challenge for space telescopes, what you would say is the greatest one?
Oh, my gosh. I think, right now, the greatest challenge is just time. The telescope is about one hundred times more powerful than anything we’ve had before. In the same observing time, it can see things that are a hundred times fainter than we could see with Hubble or with the Spitzer Space Telescope. So it is this powerful beast, and, in the first year of science operations, we have about five hundred different observing programs—in total, thousands of people from all over the world—who are using this telescope.
In a given day, we will observe a quasar, which is an accreting black hole that is as far away as we can see, and then, a couple of hours later, we’ll go observe an asteroid in our own solar system. Then we might go observe a nearby galaxy. We have a schedule, and we are doing observations that were selected competitively by the scientific community as the most compelling. And we are doing observation after observation, and then getting those data out to the world. The ingredient for discovery is just time.
What are the main questions J.W.S.T. must answer for this mission to have been considered a success?
Well, it’s worth taking a moment to go back a bit. Hubble launched in 1990, and there were three key questions that it set out to answer. One was: How old is the universe? Which is really a measurement about how fast the universe is expanding. We now know that that wasn’t the most exciting question to ask. In the course of measuring that expansion of the universe, astronomers came to understand that the universe’s expansion is accelerating. That was the unexpected discovery.
The second one was: What are quasars, and what is their relationship to galaxies? Well, from work with many telescopes, including Hubble, we now know that quasars are supermassive black holes of a million to a billion solar masses in the hearts of galaxies that are fuelling—that is, they are feeding on gas, and even destroying stars—and, in doing so, are shining as bright or brighter than their parent galaxies. We know that every galaxy has such a black hole in its heart but that most of them are asleep. A small fraction of them, however, are turned on and are fuelling. We don’t really understand how the black holes and their parent galaxies evolve together. We have evidence that one’s controlling the other, but we don’t know how.
Third, Hubble was also built to study the gas between galaxies. And we now understand that galaxies are constantly being fed by this web of gas that links galaxies together—like, this structure spanning the void with a beautiful kind of filamentary geometry. And we know that how galaxies are connected to that network determines how they’re able to fuel and grow. It’s fun to think back over thirty years and realize how little we understood thirty years ago, and how far we’ve come.
What about J.W.S.T.?
For J.W.S.T., the questions that we knew we were going to ask were: What did the first billion years look like? How did galaxies get started? From the data we have so far, we’re going to do a great job on that question. We are finding galaxies further back than we knew were possible. We’re seeing back in time to about three hundred million years after the big bang. The elevator pitch we used when J.W.S.T. was sold was that we’ll see the baby pictures of the universe. And we will definitely do that.
J.W.S.T. was also built to study the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars. That’s the other really high-profile science case. And we’re doing that, but we haven’t gotten far enough yet during our first year of science observations.
What gaps in science do the J.W.S.T.’s unique capabilities fill?
J.W.S.T. works in the infrared. It was designed to see the light from the universe that is totally invisible to Hubble, which sees primarily in the optical and ultraviolet. About the “bluest” light that J.W.S.T. can see is the shade of red wine, and then it goes redder from there.
Because of the big bang, space is expanding—not just stuff in space but the fabric of space itself. And the light that we see from distant objects has actually been stretched by the expansion of the universe as well. That causes light from those distant objects to get stretched to longer wavelengths. It gets shifted to the red, to lower energies.
It’s just really cool that we can see almost to the end of the universe, right? We can do that because that light only travels so fast: the speed of light. We are studying galaxies whose light has been travelling for more than thirteen billion years. The universe is only about 13.8 billion years old! Those are the baby pictures of literally everything, and, in particular, of the baby galaxies that would have turned into mature galaxies like our Milky Way.
4) Loved this from Chait, “College Sports Is a Failed Experiment in Anarcho-capitalism”
And now, finally, the fans are experiencing in full this turn toward unbridled capitalism. Conferences have added and subtracted members as long as they have existed, but only in recent years have they begun to act like corporate raiders. Their strategies are now driven entirely by the logic of television contracts, and the networks designing those contracts have little sense of the regional ties that form the backbone of college sports culture.
Television executives in New York may grasp that creating new matchups between teams with little previous history has a novelty appeal to viewers. But the sport’s long-term value lies not in novelty but in familiarity — rivalries taking shape over generations. Many of the deepest rivalries have begun to disappear: Nebraska-Oklahoma, Penn State–Pittsburgh, and Kansas-Missouri games are no longer played because the schools have changed conferences in search of bigger television deals. Many more such contests are likely to disappear in the coming years.
Whatever financial logic has compelled the Oregon Ducks to stop playing their rivals from Oregon State so they can fly to Piscataway, New Jersey, and play Rutgers instead has no bearing on the actual value college athletes or fans place on their sports. The new megaleagues will be too engorged to have real conference champions: There will be too many teams in each league and too few games to fairly crown a winner.
The new wave of conference realignment follows the relentless logic of market competition, in which every conference seeks to add new markets — and if it hurts their competitors, all the better. The flight of USC, UCLA, Washington, and Oregon destroys more value for the Pac-12 than it creates for the Big Ten. But there’s nothing stopping the stronger conferences from pursuing a beggar-thy-neighbor strategy…
A rational system would ensure some reasonable balance of power between conferences, preserve traditional rivalries, minimize travel for players, and secure the existence of viable leagues in every region. But a rational system requires some central authority capable of making strategic decisions in service of the greater good. The NCAA currently has barely any power to enforce its own rules, let alone direct the actions of conferences and programs.
College athletics has decided — or effectively decided by dint of failing to decide anything — to govern itself according to anarcho-capitalist principles. The result, predictably, is vast riches for the few and misery for the many.
5) Excellent from Alex Morey in Persuasion, “Keep Politics Out of Academic Hiring: Right-wing pressure jeopardized the employment of two teachers at Texas A&M. It’s a major blow to free speech.”
A revealing report from The Texas Tribune late last month describes how the university quickly took steps to discipline Alonzo after Dan Patrick, the state’s lieutenant governor, learned she was criticizing him in class. According to the paper’s timeline, which includes allegations supported by documentation acquired through open records requests, events unfolded like this: The daughter of a close Patrick political ally was a student in Alonzo’s presentation; her mother, the Texas Land Commissioner, later called Patrick; Patrick’s office called university higher-ups; within hours, a university official texted Patrick directly:
“Joy Alonzo has been placed on administrative leave pending investigation re firing her. shud [sic] be finished by end of week.”
We don’t know exactly what Patrick or his office said to A&M, but investigating Joy Alonzo was a decision A&M made, and it appears they were all too happy to roll over at the mere whiff of a politician’s disapproval.
That absolutely violates the First Amendment. Decades of well-settled law protects the right of faculty to speak freely on matters of public concern, to exercise academic freedom without government interference, and to criticize laws and lawmakers impacting the faculty member’s field. In fact, criticizing public figures is core political speech—the type of speech where, in the words of the Supreme Court, the “First Amendment’s protection is at its zenith.” …
Taken together, these two Texas-sized controversies are a testament to what happens when universities bend over backwards to please powerful outside actors. They raise the question of how lawmakers, alumni, and donors nationwide are using their power and influence to dictate the ideas taught in college classrooms, particularly in red states.
Of course, there is far from an ideological monopoly on censoring disfavored speech. Slightly more than half of documented scholar sanction attempts come from the left of the speaker. Progressive students routinely report their peers and faculty for so-called “hate speech.” Predominantly left-leaning administrators, in many cases, are all too happy to punish “offensive” or “discriminatory” speech or, recently, to force faculty to pledge allegiance to highly specific versions of DEI. Controversial not-progressive-enough speakers are also frequent targets.
But while this sort of pressure is the hallmark of the left, political meddling is the trending censorship tactic of the right.
6) So much failed effort to limit online porn. Until now. “A Simple Law Is Doing the Impossible. It’s Making the Online Porn Industry Retreat.: Pornhub has pulled out of multiple states rather than comply with age-verification laws.”
Unlike past efforts to curb online porn that had simply declared the sites a danger to public health, these laws are not symbolic. And they are having real effects on how the massive online porn industry does business. Pornhub, the YouTube of pornography, gets more global users than Amazon or Netflix. In 2019, the last year Pornhub released its data, the site was visited 42 billion times, or 115 million times each day.
Lawsuits have been filed by the porn industry’s trade association, the Free Speech Coalition, against Utah and Louisiana, but in the meantime, porn companies have had no choice but to comply with the laws. According to Ethical Capital Partners, the private equity company that owns Pornhub, traffic in Louisiana has dropped 80 percent.
In the other three states where the laws have been in effect for months — Utah, Mississippi, and Virginia — Pornhub did something even more unprecedented: It simply stopped operating. Users in these states who attempt to visit the site are greeted with a safe-for-work video of Cherie DeVille (a porn star), clothed, explaining the site’s decision to pull out of the state.
As the video instructs, some angry porn users have called their legislators, but that has not dimmed the joy of lawmakers. According to Utah state Sen. Todd Weiler, the chief sponsor of Utah’s bill, many of his colleagues are celebrating the improbable and unexpected retreat of the pornography behemoth. Weiler said his colleagues “think it’s hilarious” and have been “high-fiving” each other in boyish triumph.
7) John McWhorter on Florida’s curriculum on slavery:
There was considerable controversy recently when in Florida, the African American History Standards work group assembled by Gov. Ron DeSantis proposed a new social studies and African American curriculum plan. I was uncomfortable with some of the ways this issue was covered by the media. Context got lost, and the agonized tone of the response from many seems to me to have been disproportionate.
The plan was reviled for a passage it contained directing that “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”…
The passage is certainly ungainly, and it bears editing at least, and probably deletion. My colleague Jamelle Bouie has usefully outlined that any real evidence of slaves “benefiting” from their work skills took place after emancipation, not during it. Moreover, the idea of any kind of benefit gained amid the pitiless horror of slavery is highly strained, creative and almost certainly unnecessary in a curriculum instructing students about this stain on the nation’s past.
However, from the tone of coverage of this passage, one might suppose that it was a central plank in the curriculum. Instead, it was but one passage amid hundreds of others, which constitute an almost exhaustive coverage of the gruesomeness of slavery in the United States. Taken together, they are such an informed recitation of our racist past that it is almost surprising DeSantis would approve them.
Many consider it unwise to condemn someone’s character permanently on the basis of one clumsy tweet. Likewise, judging this curriculum on the basis of a single sentence — a great many of the other passages consist of small paragraphs — means not seeing it whole. Yes, it is a flaw. But does it justify assailing the work group’s efforts as a sinister attempt at “gaslighting” students? …
The idea behind the disproportionate response to this one passage seems to have been that any statement that recalls the way slavery was presented to America’s children until the 1960s — as a benevolent institution whose dissolution subjected the South to unfair punishment — must be decried as a menace that threatens a return to old assumptions. This exemplifies a snag in argumentation that I observe frequently. Too often the idea of the slippery slope is presented as a given, rather than as an assertion requiring evidence. The idea that this one sentence in an otherwise rather ordinary document must be treated as so fearsome implies that we teeter always upon the possibility that students will be taught a vision of slavery out of “Gone With the Wind.”
But I’m not sure I see actual evidence of that, or anything close to it. I certainly do not detect maximal nationwide enlightenment about slavery. But I do perceive that America has become infinitely more informed about slavery than it was 50 years ago.
8) And Drum’s take:
I’ve had enough of this. There are plenty of problems with Florida’s Black history curriculum,¹ but the “skills” passage isn’t one of them. It is:
- A single footnote to a single standard in the curriculum.
- True. (In fact, not even controversial.)
- In no way minimizes the evil of slavery.
This is an example of the way liberals spend way too much time focusing on the wrong stuff whenever race is in play. We are still claiming that cops shot a defenseless Michael Brown in Ferguson even though this was debunked years ago. We insist that police kill lots of unarmed Black suspects even though the actual rate is extremely low and declining (a grand total of seven in 2022). We blame standardized tests for low Black admittance to selective high schools instead of accepting the fact that we do a lousy job of educating them. We refuse to come to grips with the fact that Black men really do commit violent crimes at triple the rate of white men.
Conservatives are so horrific on race that it’s only natural for liberals to feel that they can never cede even the slightest ground to them. I get pissed off all the time at the fact that conservatives virtually never even acknowledge racism aside from the occasional pro forma “Of course….” As in: “Of course racism is still around, but ________ is not the right way to deal with it [followed by 3,000 words on why we shouldn’t do anything].” In these kinds of constructions, _______ is every single racial remedy ever proposed in American history.
But spending time on ridiculous stuff does nothing but give right-wing apologists more ammunition. We really need to be more serious about where we focus our energy.
¹Among them: (a) It spends too much time telling kids that American slavery was unexceptional because everyone did it; (b) It spends too little time describing the actual conditions of North American slavery; and (c) It significantly overplays the virtue of white abolitionism.
9) Arthur Brooks, “To Get Happier, Choose to Read This Column: Even if you don’t quite believe you have free will, you’re better off acting as if you do.”
We aren’t going to sort out the puzzle of free will here. I have my hunches about all of the theories, and you have yours, but they are just that. The question at hand is how best, allowing for this uncertainty, to act to improve your happiness. The answer, doubts notwithstanding, is to embrace the idea of your own free will over your actions and life. This is a pragmatic strategy, similar to Blaise Pascal’s famous wager about belief in God: You should believe, because if you are wrong, you lose little, but if you are right (and live accordingly), you have a huge amount to gain…
Social scientists have demonstrated that a belief in free will is associated with life satisfaction, as studies have shown among adolescents and adults. This finding does not seem culturally dependent, appearing in collectivist cultures as well as in individualist ones. Furthermore, this belief can affect anyone, because people whose belief in free will was found to be weaker in research studies tended to score higher than others in aggression and social conformity, and have lower self-control.
Regardless of their underlying beliefs, when people are simply exposed to statements about free will, that influences their attitudes toward life. In an experiment written up in the journal Philosophical Psychology in 2016, scholars asked participants to read either statements affirming free will, such as “I have feelings of regret when I make bad decisions because I know that ultimately I am responsible for my actions,” or statements denying free will, such as “All behavior is determined by brain activity, which in turn is determined by a combination of environmental and genetic factors.” The researchers found that after reading the pro-free-will statements, people set more meaning-filled goals for themselves. After reading the anti-free-will statements, the participants in a parallel study perceived less meaning in their lives.
10) If you’ve heard anything about the infamous case of the “transgender” assault in a Loudon County, VA high school bathroom, here’s the definitive account and the story of the political battle.
11) Enjoyed this from Thomas Pueyo, “How to Make Cities Safe”
In summary, according to Jane Jacobs, and supported by research, the most important thing to make a neighborhood livable is to stave off crime, and to achieve that, you need eyes on the street to police each other. That means you need a lot of people, of whom many should be local and resident a long time, with lots of visibility for everybody to see what’s going on. This includes tall buildings and mixed uses (with residential and commercial uses).
12) This is a debacle because Republicans literally want it that way, “America’s Latest Health-Care Debacle Has an Absurd Cause: Millions of people are losing Medicaid because of paperwork.”
Across America right now, parents face a possible nightmare: taking a sick child to the doctor, only to be told at the front desk that their health insurance is no longer valid. The reason is that millions of low-income American families have lost Medicaid benefits because they have to jump through an unexpected administrative hoop, resulting in a slow-burning crisis.
The problem stems from the ending of a pandemic-era rule requiring states to maintain continuous Medicaid coverage for everyone on their rolls. Eligibility for Medicaid is primarily determined by income, and normally requires periodic verification. Now states have ceased providing continuous coverage. But that involves reestablishing the eligibility of all their enrollees in just six to 14 months, which means reaching a population that sometimes moves frequently because of housing instability and that hasn’t had to deal with the verification process since 2020…
The mass disenrolling also reflects partisan priorities, or lack thereof: The GOP pressed to hastily end continuous coverage, and both parties have systematically underfunded Medicaid infrastructure over the years. Although community groups are doing their best to reach affected families, the response from policy makers has been uneven. The federal Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicaid, has offered states some additional flexibility and required a dozen states to briefly pause disenrollments to fix various issues. Otherwise, the department has made no move to force states to significantly slow down or change course on disenrollments, nor has Congress proposed any substantial legislative changes.
13) Michael Hiltzik, “Red states are threatening to criminalize out-of-state abortions. These blue states are fighting back”
The blue states assert that the Idaho law’s reach extends far beyond the state’s borders. The law, their brief says, “threatens to punish, and will chill, the ability of healthcare providers, counselors, and trusted adults” to provide their Idaho patients with “vital information and support about lawful healthcare” in their states.
They raise an important point. The Idaho law is an example of how anti-abortion fanatics aren’t inclined to stop at merely throwing the healthcare systems of their own states into chaos. They want to create the same anarchy nationwide. Travel restrictions are a tool in their arsenal…
The Idaho law fulfills the grim prediction of the Dobbs dissent of Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen G. Breyer that interstate restrictions will “soon be in the offing…. Some States may block women from traveling out of State to obtain abortions, or even from receiving abortion medications from out of State. Some may criminalize efforts, including the provision of information or funding, to help women gain access to other States’ abortion services.”
The Idaho law makes a mockery of the assurance by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, in his Dobbs concurrence, that no state would be able to bar a resident from traveling to another state for an abortion, due to “the constitutional right to interstate travel.”
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15) I’ve always been a huge advocate for joint accounts for married people and joint accounts only. I really just think there’s “our money” in a marriage.
16) I hate giant SUV’s and I love this thread.
17) I’ve watched 6 episodes of “The Bear” now. Good show, but hella overrated. I’m sure if you are really into food and restaurants you just love all the food porn scenes, but I don’t get excited watching sauces being made with frenetic editing. The whole thing is, honestly, about the most over-directed show I recall watching. deBoer:
I quite enjoy the show. I really do. It has a lot of great qualities. It’s impeccably cast, the acting is generally excellent, Jeremy Allen White’s performance consistently brings a desperately-needed dose of restraint to the proceedings, and absolutely every frame bursts with the obvious passion that everyone involved brought to the show. I like it, honestly. The trouble is that I want to love it, but I can’t because the show is just too. damn. much.
Fully Myelinated 
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