Politics, parenting, science, education, and pretty much anything I find interesting
September 25, 2016 Leave a comment
Love this Washington Post gallery of photos of the Solar System and beyond:
Geyser-like jets of water vapor, gas and ice spurt from the southern pole of Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, suggesting that the icy moon has a subsurface ocean with volcanic activity on the sea floor. NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
September 25, 2016 2 Comments
1) At least temporarily– and hopefully longer– NYT has put an end to awful he said, she said journalism with regards to Trump’s lies.
2) More evidence showing that it’s much better to be a 6th grader not in a middle school.
3) Ross Douthat with a very thought-provoking column on Clinton’s “Samantha Bee” problem. This provoked a lot of interesting social media discussion among my professor friends.
But the Democratic Party’s problem in the age of Trump isn’t really Jimmy Fallon. Its problem is Samantha Bee.
Not Bee alone, of course, but the entire phenomenon that she embodies: the rapid colonization of new cultural territory by an ascendant social liberalism.
The culture industry has always tilted leftward, but the swing toward social liberalism among younger Americans and the simultaneous surge of activist energy on the left have created a new dynamic, in which areas once considered relatively apolitical now have (or are being pushed to have) an overtly left-wing party line…
At the same time, outside the liberal tent, the feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion — which may be one reason the Obama years, so good for liberalism in the culture, have seen sharp G.O.P. gains at every level of the country’s government.
4) NYT editorial takes on NC’s horribly misguided HB2.
5) Not a single Fortune 100 CEO has given to Trump. A whole bunch gave to Romney. And this is despite the fact that Trump assures them large personal tax cuts.
6) And speaking of which, Trump’s tax plans would cause deficits to explode. But nobody cares because it’s Trump and policy.
7) Drew Magery knows he’s not going to convince any Trump voters, so he just unloads with what he really thinks:
8) Does terrorism help Trump? Saletan says the evidence says no.
9) And Adam Gopnik on New Yorker’s non-terrorized response to terrorism.
10) Kevin Drum on who Republican elites listen to summed up in a single chart:
11) Ed Yong with a really nice piece on the inevitable survival of the fittest of bad science (it’s all about the bad incentives).
12) I’ve never been one to fool myself by thinking getting food off the floor in less than five seconds will render it bacteria free (the latest research suggests decidedly not), yet, I figure I would think nothing of picking up a pencil off the floor than eating some food. So, I’ll just count on my immune system– it’s worked well so far.
13) Political Scientist and media critic extraordinaire, Thomas Patterson, on the media coverage of Trump and Clinton:
IF Hillary Clinton loses the presidential election in November, we will know the reason. The email controversy did her candidacy in. But it needed a helping hand — and the news media readily supplied that.
My analysis of media coverage in the four weeks surrounding both parties’ national conventions found that her use of a private email server while secretary of State and other alleged scandal references accounted for 11% of Clinton’s news coverage in the top five television networks and six major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. Excluding neutral reports, 91% of the email-related news reports were negative in tone. Then, there were the references to her character and personal life, which accounted for 4% of the coverage; that was 92% negative. [emphasis mine]
While Trump declared open warfare on the mainstream media — and of late they have cautiously responded in kind — it has been Clinton who has suffered substantially more negative news coverage throughout nearly the whole campaign.
14) Just in case you didn’t hear about the Trump county chair in Ohio who said that racism was over in America until Obama brought it back.
15) It’s from just about a year ago, but this Brendan Nyhan piece on the media’s misguided search for “authenticity” is great.
16) Paul Waldman asks if Trump is running the sleaziest foundation in America? Hell, yes! The fact that pretty much only the Post is taking this issue seriously is perhaps the largest media failure of the campaign.
In case you haven’t been following the story of the Trump Foundation, that last part is critical: Trump has given zero dollars to the Trump Foundation since 2009. Instead, he gets other rich people to donate money to the foundation, and he then uses their money for self-aggrandizement and sometimes self-enrichment. As Fahrenthold has documented, Trump has used foundation money for things like buying a six-foot-tall painting of himself, sometimes at charity events held at Mar-a-Lago, where he charges the charity for use of the facility, which means that not only is he not making the donation for which everyone is praising him, he’s actually making money on the deal. And then of course there’s the conveniently timed, illegal $25,000 donation from the foundation to Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, which was followed quickly by her decision not to join a lawsuit charging Trump with fraud over Trump University.
We’ll have to see if the IRS investigates the self-dealing Fahrenthold has identified and what kinds of fines might result. But one of the many striking details in this story is the shock experts in nonprofit and foundation law express when they hear about how Trump uses the Trump Foundation. “I represent 700 nonprofits a year, and I’ve never encountered anything so brazen,” one lawyer told Fahrenthold. “If he’s using other people’s money — run through his foundation — to satisfy his personal obligations, then that’s about as blatant an example of self-dealing [as] I’ve seen in a while.”
17) No, immigrants are not taking jobs from Americans (says the latest study).
18) Dahlia Lithwick on why Hillary should not stoop to Trump’s level in the debate:
But it seems to me the real challenge for Clinton is that she must stand on a stage and debate the single most awful political person in modern American consciousness. Trying to stifle the impulse just to walk across the stage and belt him in the face would seem an insurmountable task. Add to that the fact that Clinton is expected to speak and listen, and it seems beyond human capability.
When considering these obstacles, Clinton should realize that she has one sole job in these debates: Be the grownup. She doesn’t need to be funny. (She isn’t.) She doesn’t need to be emotional—that’s how the deeply unfortunate “basket of deplorables” remark happened. She doesn’t have to bend over backward to be charming or personable. Her job is to ignore the crazy circus monkey with the broken cymbals and do what she does best: Listen carefully, respond reasonably, and speak to the part of America that truly understands what it means to entrust someone with the nuclear codes.
19) Short Term 12 is a sweet little movie you probably never heard of. It’s streaming on Netflix and it’s really good.
20) Tim Noah on the death of telephone calls.
21) How lobbying for government regulations helped make the EpiPen so expensive.
22) You really should read James Fallows‘ great Atlantic cover story on the debates before the debate.
September 18, 2016 4 Comments
1) The evolving relationship between facebook and politics.
2) Great collection of anti-women’s suffrage propaganda.
3) Italy has an incredibly low birth rate. Not good. Their PR campaign to improve things is, also, not good.
4) Drum on the totally ignored Bush-Cheney email scandal.
5) Also very much enjoyed Drum’s takes on Trump’s maternity leave proposal. (Partial short version: it is a pointless exercise to take anything Trump says about public policy remotely seriously).
6) 538 on the science of your body clock:
Foster also pointed out that being an early riser or a late sleeper is hardwired into our genetic code. It’s a gift from our parents, who, by hereditary law, will always have a say in when we go to bed at night. This, he said, is what makes it so difficult to reset our biological clock when we travel across the world or take up the night shift.
Hardwired or not, my wife has recently transitioned to being an early riser rather than a late sleeper (never a night owl). Weird.
7) Jedidah Purdy on NC Republicans versus NCAA basketball. My favorite part is the absurdity of our Tea Party Lieutenant Governor:
Asked about the loss of tournament revenue, Forest replied, “Our women and girls in North Carolina are not for sale. They’re not for sale to Hollywood, to any concert venue, to the N.B.A., or the N.C.A.A.” Warming to his theme, he added, “I don’t put a price tag on our women and girls. I think it’s shameful that these entities would think it’s acceptable to invade the privacy or security of a woman or a girl in a shower or a locker room. I think that’s a shameful act.”
The lieutenant governor’s chivalrous assurances fall into a familiar Southern tradition: defending legally enforced separation as the only bulwark against sexual predators. For its apologists, Jim Crow segregation protected white womanhood from black rapists. Now those rapists have been replaced by the farcical figure of the sexual opportunist who switches genders for a look inside the women’s room. As anyone familiar with the pervasive victimization of trans people would expect, the Charlotte statute was designed to avoid potentially threatening encounters, not produce them. Either Forest does not know better or he believes that his constituency does not know better, or perhaps both.
8) Inside the collapse of Trump’s DC Policy shop. So unpredictable and surprising this would not stand the test of time.
9) Lawrence Krauss on 20 science questions for Trump. Somebody in his campaign who actually can string together coherent sentences answered these. Still not quite ready to admit that climate change is real.
10) Kristoff’s take on the false equivalence:
I’m wary of grand conclusions about false equivalence from 30,000 feet. But at the grass roots of a campaign, I think we can do better at signaling that one side is a clown.
There are crackpots who believe that the earth is flat, and they don’t deserve to be quoted without explaining that this is an, er, outlying view, and the same goes for a crackpot who has argued that climate change is a Chinese-made hoax, who has called for barring Muslims and who has said that he will build a border wall and that Mexico will pay for it.
We owe it to our readers to signal when we’re writing about a crackpot. Even if he’s a presidential candidate. No, especially when he’s a presidential candidate.
There frankly has been a degree of unreality to some of the campaign discussion: Partly because Hillary Clinton’s narrative is one of a slippery, dishonest candidate, the discussion disproportionately revolves around that theme. Yes, Clinton has been disingenuous and legalistic in her explanations of emails. Meanwhile, Trump is a mythomaniac who appears to have systematically cheated customers of Trump University.
Clinton’s finances are a minefield, which we know because she has released 39 years of tax returns; Trump would be the first major party nominee since Gerald Ford not to release his tax return (even Ford released a tax summary). And every serious analyst knows that Trump is telling a whopper when he gleefully promises to build a $25 billion wall that Mexico will pay for.
Then there’s the question of foundations. Yes, Clinton created conflicts of interest with the family foundation and didn’t fully disclose donors as promised. But the Trump Foundation flat out broke the law by making a political contribution.
11) Are you an egoist? Actually, I don’t think I’m too bad. I think it helps that I know so many super-smart and successful people. Also, all the references to the Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, remind of of A Man in Full, one of the most entertaining novels I’ve ever read.
12) Why the Democrats don’t have a Freedom Caucus. Great take on the party asymmetry.
13) John Cassidy with a pretty good argument that Trump may very well not be paying any income taxes.
14) Seriously, what’s David Frum doing with a tweetstorm instead of a regular column?! But it’s a damn good one about Trump and the media.
15) I’m not impressed by explanations I quickly found for why we have two kidneys. If we really only need one (like a heart, liver, spleen, etc.,) why would natural selection have not eliminated the extra over time rather than wasting resources on an unnecessary organ?
16) Liberals who are unhappy with Clinton and supporting Gary Johnson are morons. Jim Newell version. And Drum.
17) Maine voters keep on being really stupid with their gubernatorial votes. Ranked choice would be a good solution for them.
18) Alternatives to asking your teenager “how was school?” Ironically, my teenager usually spends 10-15 minutes telling me about his day in high school where I have the hardest time getting more than “fine” or “just a normal day” out of my 5th grader.
19) No,, Jimmy Fallon is not exactly a hard news reporter. But with Trump, still…
20) The Post takes a look at who the prominent climate change deniers are.
21) Damn did Trump make the cable news networks look like fools with his birther announcement.
22) What’s with all the Japanese virgins?! Sure, I get it in misogynistic societies with a great stigma on pre-marital sex, but that’s not Japan.
23) Krugman on Obama’s “trickle-up” economics.
24) Missouri has passed new gun laws. Time for a new motto, “The Shoot Me State.”
25) It is breathtaking how pathetic our NC Governor, Pat McCrory is:
Speakers at Hood Hargett Breakfast Club events routinely take questions from the floor. McCrory required that all questions be submitted in advance in writing.
When the moderator asked how to get started, McCrory said, “Anything you like. No filter here.” Sure, who needs a filter when you posed the questions yourself?
When I tried to ask McCrory a question, the filter went up. “We’ve got three Observer questions answered already. I think you guys dominate the news enough.”
Of course, those weren’t Observer questions. They were softballs from his staff about what he wanted to do with his next term; how he wanted to reduce the state’s rape kit backlog; and how the state crime lab performed under McCrory’s opponent, Roy Cooper.
When the event was over, McCrory did not meet with the throng of reporters who were there. He ducked out a side door and down a hall that led to a back exit. I followed him to try to ask him about HB2, but his staff blocked me.
26) This interview with Sasha Issenberg on how Trump’s campaign is a throwback to 1980 style campaigns (and not in a good way) is really, really good. Kept meaning to give it it’s own post.
Issenberg: I’ll say that I think Trump has a more coherent worldview about campaigns than many politicians, and his tactics actually do a pretty good job of reflecting his strategic assumptions. He considers campaigns to be purely a candidate-driven, mass-media exercise. One could also say, perhaps less charitably, that he sees his candidacy as an extension of the mechanism of becoming a celebrity: It’s about using television to get in front of as large an audience as possible to get as many people as you can to like you. Even as his campaign has grown and changed, he has been remarkably disciplined at not spending much time or money on anything that doesn’t reflect that approach.
Now I think that dramatically fails to appreciate the extent to which campaigns are not just about changing people’s opinions to get them to like you. Now more than ever, thanks to partisan polarization, campaigns are about modifying the behavior of people who already like you — getting the unregistered to register, mobilizing infrequent voters to turn out. That is best done through targeted communications that don’t involve the candidate.
September 17, 2016 Leave a comment
1) Kaepernick’s girlfriend is Muslim. Official embarrassment to Congress, Rep. Steve King, thinks that must mean he supports ISIS.
2) James Hamblin on Clinton’s pneumonia. I love the headline and subhead, “Hillary Clinton Attended a 9/11 Memorial Service Despite Illness: Some see this as weakness.”
Pneumonia would explain both the coughing and fatigue. In contrast to the classically severe bacterial pneumonias that are a common cause of death in older and chronically ill people, a relatively mild “walking pneumonia”—usually caused by an atypical microorganism like Mycoplasma—tends to leave a person feeling well enough to walk around despite fighting a significant infection. Patients often don’t take adequate time to rest and recover, but try to operate while coughing and feeling fatigued.
The condition is common and treatable, and as a cause of Clinton’s symptoms—even for those who have no trust in the candidate’s physician—this is simply a much more likely diagnosis than anything more serious. And having pneumonia, especially of the variety where a person is so high-functioning, does not raise concern over her ability to execute the duties of the office. Presidents can and have served well with much more serious conditions (coronary artery disease,paralysis from Guillain-Barré syndrome, Addison’s disease, and, of course, various bullet wounds).
Rather, Clinton was told to rest and take it easy, but instead made a point of going to a 9/11 memorial service.
3) NYT feature on just what Trump supporters in rural Kentucky are thinking.
4) Yes, many obese people should try a low-carb diet before going with bariatric surgery, but if it was just as simple as following a diet, would they be so obese?
5) Speaking of which… how the sugar industry successfully (and disastrously for American’s health) shifted the blame to fat.
6) This essay on the “Falling Man” photo of 9/11 is fabulous. Seriously, just read it:
The resistance to the image—to the images—started early, started immediately, started on the ground. A mother whispering to her distraught child a consoling lie: “Maybe they’re just birds, honey.” Bill Feehan, second in command at the fire department, chasing a bystander who was panning the jumpers with his video camera, demanding that he turn it off, bellowing, “Don’t you have any human decency?” before dying himself when the building came down. In the most photographed and videotaped day in the history of the world, the images of people jumping were the only images that became, by consensus, taboo—the only images from which Americans were proud to avert their eyes. All over the world, people saw the human stream debouch from the top of the North Tower, but here in the United States, we saw these images only until the networks decided not to allow such a harrowing view, out of respect for the families of those so publicly dying. At CNN, the footage was shown live, before people working in the newsroom knew what was happening; then, after what Walter Isaacson, who was then chairman of the network’s news bureau, calls “agonized discussions” with the “standards guy,” it was shown only if people in it were blurred and unidentifiable; then it was not shown at all…
But the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky—falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame—the Falling Man—became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew’s photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.
That we have known who the Falling Man is all along.
7) Fairfield, CT spends $16,000 per student per year and way outperforms Bridgeport and it’s $14,000. But I’m sure if you switched those numbers, little would change. Yes, Bridgeport may need more funding, but this is ultimately a story about the impact concentrated poverty has on school systems.
8) Krugman on Trump’s Putinophilia:
There are good reasons to worry about Mr. Trump’s personal connections to the Putin regime (or to oligarchs close to that regime, which is effectively the same thing.) How crucial has Russian money been in sustaining Mr. Trump’s ramshackle business empire? There are hints that it may have been very important indeed, but given Mr. Trump’s secretiveness and his refusal to release his taxes, nobody really knows.
Beyond that, however, admiring Mr. Putin means admiring someone who has contempt for democracy and civil liberties. Or more accurately, it means admiring someone precisely because of that contempt.
When Mr. Trump and others praise Mr. Putin as a “strong leader,” they don’t mean that he has made Russia great again, because he hasn’t. He has accomplished little on the economic front, and his conquests, such as they are, are fairly pitiful. What he has done, however, is crush his domestic rivals: Oppose the Putin regime, and you’re likely to end up imprisoned or dead. Strong!
9) Apparently, the giant island of garbage in the Pacific is pretty much a myth. Whoa! Not that we don’t have a huge problem with ocean pollution.
10) This XKCD on global warming is so, so good. Take a look.
11) It’s a shame that the NYT’s Public Editor just doesn’t get the problems with false equivalence. Chait eviscerates her.
12) Now NC is losing NCAA tournament basketball games (and NCAA soccer championships right here in Cary!) due to HB2. And all the GOP can offer up is the most absurd comments.
13) Another example of our party asymmetry. Democratic governors just never are half this crazy, “Kentucky Gov Predicts, Calls for Bloodshed If Hillary Wins.”
14) So guilty of this common mistake of basing my spending/time decisions based on percentages instead of absolute dollars.
15) David Frum with the case against college diversity officers:
Today’s New York Times offers one modest illustration. Over the past 18 months, the Times reports, 90 American colleges and universities have hired “chief diversity officers.” These administrators were hired in response to the wave of racial incidents that convulsed campuses like the University of Missouri over the past year. They are bulking up an already thriving industry. In March 2016, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education held its 10th annual conference in San Francisco. Attendance set a new record: 370. The association publishes a journal. It bestows awards of excellence.
As diversity officers proliferate, entire learned specialties plunge into hiring depressions. In the most recent academic years, job postings for historians declined by 8 percent, the third decline in a row. Cumulatively, new hirings of historians have dropped 45 percent since 2011-2012.
I anticipate the response: This only represents a tiny fraction of the growth among administrators! Diversity is important! Graduation rates among black university students have improved in recent years. Surely all these chief diversity officers are accomplishing something?
Yet the closest studies of disadvantaged-student performance discover that what such students need most is more intensive teaching and mentoring. As my colleague Emily DeRuy has reported, young people from impoverished backgrounds live in “relationship poverty”: “Research, which involved surveys of thousands of young people and in-person interviews with more than 100, suggests that if a web of supportive relationships surrounds these students, the chances that they will leave school shrink dramatically.” But that’s not only expensive—it also requires extraordinarily hard work, with uncertain chances of success. Even more relevantly: The students at risk are not all or even mostly “diverse,” as diversity is conventionally understood in the United States in 2016. If J.D. Vance’s marvelous Hillbilly Elegy pounds any one idea into the heads of America’s university presidents, that idea should be it.
But maybe the university presidents already know it. “Diversity” is an easier problem to manage than “disadvantage.”
16) Blaise Pascal figured out back in the 17th century the social-science-validated approach for how to change minds.
17) Conor Friedersdorf explains how Trump exploited charity for personal gain. Of course, since this is just Trump being Trump, nobody seems to care. Imagine if Romney or McCain or Clinton had done these things.
18) James Surowiecki on the huge, anti-reform, problem of police unions:
On August 26th, Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, refused to stand for the national anthem, as a protest against police brutality. Since then, he’s been attacked by just about everyone—politicians, coaches, players, talk-radio hosts, veterans’ groups. But the harshest criticism has come from Bay Area police unions. The head of the San Francisco police association lambasted his “naïveté” and “total lack of sensitivity,” and called on the 49ers to “denounce” the gesture. The Santa Clara police union said that its members, many of whom provide security at 49ers games, might refuse to go to work if no action was taken against Kaepernick. A work stoppage to punish a player for expressing his opinion may seem extreme. But in the world of police unions it’s business as usual. Indeed, most of them were formed as a reaction against public demands in the nineteen-sixties and seventies for more civilian oversight of the police. Recently, even as the use of excessive force against minorities has caused outcry and urgent calls for reform, police unions have resisted attempts to change the status quo, attacking their critics as enablers of crime.
Police unions emerged later than many other public-service unions, but they’ve made up for lost time. Thanks to the bargains they’ve struck on wages and benefits, police officers are among the best-paid civil servants. More important, they’ve been extraordinarily effective in establishing control over working conditions. All unions seek to insure that their members have due-process rights and aren’t subject to arbitrary discipline, but police unions have defined working conditions in the broadest possible terms. This position has made it hard to investigate misconduct claims, and to get rid of officers who break the rules. A study of collective bargaining by big-city police unions, published this summer by the reform group Campaign Zero, found that agreements routinely guarantee that officers aren’t interrogated immediately after use-of-force incidents and often insure that disciplinary records are purged after three to five years.
19) House Freedom Caucus looking to impeach the IRS Commissioner because they hate taxes that much. Shameful.
20) Apparently Chromebooks are about to transform laptop design.
21) A full deconstruction of the hilariously absurd NC GOP response to the NCAA.
22) Ginning up false fears of voter fraud in Wisconsin.
23) Andrew Rosenthal on the deplorableness of Trump’s deplorables. And the photo KE cannot resist:
Damon Winter/The New York Times
24) So, how much do parents really matter anyway? Lessons from around the world.
Friedman: Is there one particularly brilliant parenting technique you came across in the course of your research?
Sarah: In South Asia—I’ve worked a lot in Nepal, and also in India—I’m very impressed by two particular parenting behaviors. One is that parents are very physically affectionate. Fathers as well as mothers, and close relatives are too. And that is combined with totally clear expectations on the part of the parents: You know, “I love you—and this is what we expect of you.”
Well, I’ve at least got one of the two, down🙂.
25) Really good Toobin piece on Kaepernick and a famous Supreme Court case on free speech:
More important, even amid the patriotic displays associated with the mobilization for war, the degradations of Nazi Germany had impressed themselves upon the American conscience. The result of the case flipped the result to a six-to-three victory for the family, and Jackson’s opinion in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette stands as perhaps the greatest defense of freedom of expression ever formulated by a Supreme Court Justice—and, not incidentally, a useful message for the N.F.L.
The core idea in Jackson’s opinion is that freedom demands that those in power allow others to think for themselves. In nearly every line, Jackson’s opinion is haunted by the struggle on the battlefield against, in his phrase, “our present totalitarian enemies.” “Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good, as well as by evil, men,” Jackson wrote. “Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. It seems trite but necessary to say that the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.” Such melodramatic phrasing may feel more appropriate for the worldwide crisis of that era than for the present one, but the message of tolerance also resonates on the less fraught setting of a football gridiron.
September 10, 2016 8 Comments
1) I found this analysis of how Chip Kelly’s NFL offenses have failed to evolve, a fascinating look at how football offenses and defenses are always in some what of an evolutionary arms races of ideas. Evolve or lose.
2) Analytics and the Clinton campaign.
3) Philip Bump, “It’s not clear that Donald Trump understands the relationship between the president and the military.” Of course, you can add that to a giant list of important things about how government works that Trump does not understand.
4) Speaking of which, all those generals supporting Trump? Not actually at all impressive in context.
5) NC State research on how middle school teachers’ climate change beliefs influence their students.
6) Apparently, chemicals in the venom of Brazilian vipers are pretty awesome for curing things.
7) I’ve actually been using the neighborhood social network, Nextdoor, for a few months. Not great, but I really like the concept. Apparently, alas, a lot of racial bias goes on in posts about crime. But, awesomely, Nextdoor is doing what they can to limit it.
8) The gender wage gap explodes in the 30’s because…. kids.
9) Drum has been on a tear with a series of great posts about Hillary Clinton’s email. This was a really good one:
When you put all this together, it leads to an obvious conclusion: Hillary Clinton did want to protect her emails from FOIA, but the emails she was concerned about were her personal emails. [emphasis in original] Unfortunately, her initial decision to use only a single email account—probably because she was technically illiterate and simply didn’t understand why this was such a bad idea—turned everything into a circus. Before turning her records over to State, she had to carefully pull out all the personal emails and then make it clear that she wanted them deleted so they could never, ever be retrieved. Her experience led her to believe that personal or not, if they were somehow accessible they would be subpoenaed and leaked and everyone would go bananas over them.
So her staff complied. Once the official emails had all been turned over, they ordered the electronic records deleted, the hard disks erased with BleachBit, and the backups destroyed, along with a new retention policy that all of Clinton’s personal emails would be deleted after
60 days. This was done not because there were missing official emails they wanted to hide, but because they wanted to make sure Clinton’s personal emails were well and truly gone.I believe the fact pattern of Clinton’s email usage fits this conclusion far better than any other. We’ve now seen tens of thousands of Clinton’s official emails—more than we’ve ever seen from any other high-level federal official—and they’re boring as hell. We’ve seen emails that were deleted and then recovered from other people’s accounts. They’re boring as hell. The vast bulk of them are short conversations with a handful of close aides, and are largely restricted to the tedious minutiae of press releases, talking points, schedules, and other day-to-day matters.
What’s more, paranoia over exposure of her personal emails fits perfectly what we know about Clinton’s character. She distrusts Republicans in Congress, she distrusts the press, and she feels that both will take any chance they can to embarrass her with out-of-context leaks of her personal life. Whether or not you think this attitude is justified, it’s unquestionably the attitude she has.
10) The exceedingly disturbing view of immigration propagated by Breitbart.
11) The lack of racial diversity for soccer in the US is a really intersting problem.
12) The headline says it all. Based on smart analsis from Brookings, “Why the federal government should stop spending billions on private sports stadiums.” Hell yeah!
All together, the federal government has subsidized newly constructed or majorly renovated professional sports stadiums to the tune of $3.2 billion federal taxpayer dollars since 2000. But because high-income bond holders receive a windfall gain for holding municipal bonds, the resulting loss in total revenue to the federal government is even larger at $3.7 billion.
13) Tom Edsall on the return of the paranoid style in American politics.
14) How GMO-based vaccines can save lives.
15) David Pogue with the best take on the headphone-jackless IPhone I’v read. At first I thought this was nuts till I learned the new phones will actually use the lightning port for a jack. Number of times I’ve personally wanted to charge my phone and use the headphones? Zero.
16) Not at all surprised to learn that in the competetive process for NYC’s best public high schools, higher SES kids have a huge advantage.
17) Just came across this from three years ago, but I love it. It’s ridiculous that we expect high school students to answer essays on their college admissions that might be hard for a 44-year college professor to answer.
18) With all that talk about Matt Lauer’s horrible moderating, it is important to note, as Drum does here, that what has been overlooked is Trump’s fabulous ignorance of national security:
The phrase “not even wrong” is a cliche by now. It was Wolfgang’s Pauli’s reaction to a physics paper he had been given to read, and it basically means that something is so far off point that it’s entirely
meaningless. It’s like asking about 2+2 and answering “blue.”This is what Donald Trump sounded like tonight at the Commander-in-Chief Forum on NBC. It’s hardly even possible to fact-check him. What have you done in your life to prepare for sending men and women to war? I have great judgment. Can we afford a president who pops off all the time with stuff he later regrets? After my visit to Mexico, some guy was forced to resign. Do you really believe you know more about ISIS than the generals? Obama has reduced the generals to rubble. After you crush ISIS, how will you make sure another terrorist group doesn’t come back? I’d take the oil. How would you take the oil? I would just leave some guys behind where the oil is. How would you de-escalate tensions with Russia?Did you see that China didn’t put out stairs for Air Force One last week? Do you really want to be complimented by a guy like Vladimir Putin? We’re losing jobs like we’re a bunch of babies. What are you doing to prepare for being president? I’ve been endorsed by 88 admirals and generals. How much time are you spending on this? A lot.
19) It’s really just flat-out morally wrong that one county with an overzealous prosecutor can completely ruin lives in a way that would not happen at all a few miles over in a neighboring county. Just so wrong:
LAWRENCEBURG, Ind. — Donnie Gaddis picked the wrong county to sell 15 oxycodone pills to an undercover officer.
If Mr. Gaddis had been caught 20 miles to the east, in Cincinnati, he would have received a maximum of six months in prison, court records show. In San Francisco or Brooklyn, he would probably have received drug treatment or probation, lawyers say.
But Mr. Gaddis lived in Dearborn County, Ind., which sends more people to prison per capita than nearly any other county in the United States. After agreeing to a plea deal, he was sentenced to serve 12 years in prison.
20) The formula for a richer world– equality, liberty, and justice. Sounds good to me. Let’s have more of all three.
August 14, 2016 7 Comments
1) Frum on why the Supreme Court is not a good enough reason for Republicans to vote Trump:
Yet Trump’s supposed commitment to appointing conservative judges is still not reason to support him—and here’s why:
1) It’s a Trump commitment, and Trump commitments are notoriously worthless. The only thing you can be sure you get with Trump is … Trump himself. Every other offer is subject to cancellation without notice.
2) Trump’s lack of understanding and interest in constitutional issues is notorious. This is the man who imagines there are 12 articles in the Constitution, and who believes that generals must obey any order from the commander-in-chief whether it is lawful or not. He wouldn’t be able to identify the next Antonin Scalia if a reincarnation of the great conservative justice were to sing opera in front of him.
3) President Trump’s judicial selections will therefore be driven not by him personally, but by his White House staff. Yet we’ve all seen the kind of people Trump surrounds himself with: incompetent at best, thuggish at worst. Trump chose the reality-TV star Omarosa to direct his outreach to African Americans. Who’s he going to put in charge of judicial selection?
2) At least in one experiment, those with high interest in science are less susceptible to motivating reasoning. I certainly know that at this point in my life I am more interested in reading things that challenge, rather than confirm, what I think I know. That’s how you learn new things. Major caveat, we are talking about the fact-based world (i.e., not going to start reading conservative blogs anytime soon).
3) Fascinating discussion between Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Thompson on Caster Semenya, gender, unfair advantages, and the logic of Olympic competition. Semenya is a tough case, but I’m with Gladwell:
The physiologist Ross Tucker had a wonderful piece on this issue recently, and it’s worth—I think—quoting from it at length:
We have a separate category for women because without it, no women would even make the Olympic Games (with the exception of equestrian). Most of the women’s world records, even doped, lie outside the top 5000 times run by men. Radcliffe’s marathon WR, for instance, is beaten by between 250 and 300 men per year. Without a women’s category, elite sport would be exclusively male.
That premise hopefully agreed, we then see that the presence of the Y chromosome is thesingle greatest genetic “advantage” a person can have. That doesn’t mean that all men outperform all women, but it means that for élite-sport discussion, that Y chromosome, and specifically the SRY gene on it, which directs the formation of testes and the production of testosterone, is a key criterion on which to separate people into categories. . . .
So going back to the premise that women’s sport is the protected category, and that this protection must exist because of the insurmountable and powerful effects of testosterone, my opinion on this is that it is fair and correct to set an upper limit for that testosterone, which is what the sport had before C.A.S. [the Court of Arbitration for Sport] did away with it.
When Semenya’s testosterone was lowered to “normal” levels, she ran in the two-minute range for the eight hundred metres, which put her comfortably among the best in the world. Now that that restriction has been lifted, she is running six seconds faster. She has gone from being very good to being, potentially, the greatest half-miler in the history of women’s running. No one will beat her in Rio. She could run the last fifty yards backward and still win. How do you think the other women in that race feel about that? …
I used to be something of a doping/natural-advantage skeptic. But the deeper I get immersed in the world of athletics—and the more seriously I take track and field—the more of a purist I’ve become.Sports is the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles. If athletes can’t accept that fact, they should try another sport—like, say, football, where getting busted for doping apparently makes not a whit of difference to coaches or fans.
4) And David Epstein on the difficult of drawing lines of fairness in sports (and if you are a sports fan and haven’t read The Sports Gene, what are you waiting for?!)
5) Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Hillary’s emails:
Washington right now is in a period of enforced transparency, with Edward Snowden; WikiLeaks; Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi committee; and the alleged Russian operative, or operatives, Guccifer 2.0. What they have revealed is not some new hidden system of levers beneath the capital but, rather, the same old system that we’ve more or less tolerated all along. Access to governmental power depends too much on personal relationships; rich friends of politicians have too easy a time gaining an audience. “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal; the scandal is what’s legal,” the journalist Michael Kinsley famously said, during the George H. W. Bush Administration, and for a long time that was regarded as a truth about Washington. As a matter of ethics, it still holds; as a matter of politics, it seems outdated.
6) Kristof thinks Trump is making America meaner. I think he’s right.
7) We’ve learned less from HM’s brain than you might think. Brains are complicated.
8) Not surprisingly, planning your meals well ahead leads to much better food choices. I try and do this as much as I can, but it’s hard to stick with the plan when you are in the moment and confronted with pecan pie, cake, pizza, etc.
9) Interesting article about Facebook fighting back against ad-blockers. Personally, I never use ad blockers. Facebook (and all on-line media) is not actually free! The cost is access to my personal data and my eyeballs on their advertisers ads. That’s how the world works. If there were not on-line advertising there would not be all the awesomeness on-line.
10) Reeves Weideman says women’s gymnastics needs better tv coverage. Hell yes.
Biles is perhaps the greatest gymnast of all time, and these Olympics may be the only time most Americans will get to see her perform. Might they want to know what makes her so good? There is, for instance, the fact that she requires fewer steps and less speed to get into the meat of tumbling runs, enabling her to fit more skills, and score more points, in her routines. Or that her lift off the floor is so huge that Jonathan Horton, a 2008 Olympic medallist, told me that he was embarrassed to work out with her. Or that Martha Karolyi, the American national team’s coördinator, believes Biles could be world-class on the uneven bars, the only event in which she is not the gold-medal favorite, but that for a long time Biles was too scared of the bars to commit to the apparatus. Biles’s toe-crossing on her vault may seem minor, but it’s a tic no less notable than Michael Jordan sticking his tongue out on his jump shot, except that it actually affects competitions—she loses a tenth of a point each time.
11) Rapid advances in battery technology making renewable energy far more cost-effective in the near future? Maybe.
12) There’s been a lot of pieces of late about “what we learned” about Trump supporters based on a Gallup analysis of 87,000 interviews. Actually, those paying attention didn’t learn all that much. Race!
“The results show mixed evidence that economic distress has motivated Trump support,” he writes. “His supporters are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations, but they earn relative high household incomes, and living in areas more exposed to trade or immigration does not increase Trump support.” Rothwell adds that his results do not present a clear picture of the connection between social and economic hardship and support for Trump. The standard economic measures of income and employment status show that, if anything, more affluent Americans tend to favor Trump, even among white non-Hispanics. Surprisingly, there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign…
But Rothwell also found a second factor that correlates highly with Trump support:
This analysis provides clear evidence that those who view Trump favorably are disproportionately living in racially and culturally isolated zip codes and commuting zones. Holding other factors constant, support for Trump is highly elevated in areas with few college graduates, far from the Mexican border, and in neighborhoods that stand out within the commuting zone for being white, segregated enclaves, with little exposure to blacks, Asians, and Hispanics.
In other words, race is important.
13) The Republican war on public universities.
14) Seriously, we need to teach new drivers the zipper merge and have signs on roads telling drivers to do it. Oh, and Traffic is an awesome book.
15) New research strongly suggests that humans first came to America not by land bridge, but by boat.
16) Okay, Michael Phelps is awesome and amazing. But swimming has way too many events. I went on a swimming rant the other day for my friends and thought I’d see if I could find one on-line. This from 2012 makes almost exactly the same points I did:
It’s long bothered me that swimming hands out so many medals. At the 200-meter distance, Phelps’ specialty, they hand out five individual gold medals. In 2008, three of his medals came at this same distance, as he swam the 200-meter freestyle, the 200-meter butterfly and the 200-meter medley.
For the same distance that Usain Bolt got one medal, Phelps got three…
Phelps has rarely been the fastest person in the pool at any distance. At only one distance in one Olympics was Phelps the fastest person. In 2008, he had the fastest 200m time of any swimmer at any stroke. Why? Because the freestyle is the fastest way to get from point A to point B. Every other Olympic games, he wasn’t the fastest person at any distance.
Do you think if Phelps was trying to evade a great white shark he’d break into the butterfly? Like Dressage in Equestrian, he mastered the form of an artistic swim stroke, and he’s taken advantage of it.
Swimmers will say I don’t understand the sport, that I don’t understand the nuances of each stroke and how difficult it is to master two of them. I understand it just fine. I realize there are different skills, different muscles, used for each event. I understand the butterfly is very different from the backstroke.
But imagine if track and field took swimming’s lead and created distinct ways to get to the finish line, confusing the measurement of simply being the fastest.
We’d have the 100-meter “skip,” where athletes have to skip down the track as fast as possible. The 400-meter “backwards run” would be a crowd favorite, as athletes put their quads – and spatial awareness – to the test, running backwards around the track. My personal choice would be the 200-meter “cartwheel,” where athletes would have to do cartwheels all the way around until they crossed the finish line.
If track and field went the direction of swimming, Carl Lewis would have 30 Olympic medals.
17) Haven’t actually read this NYT Magazine feature on the fracturing of the Arab world yet, but it’s obviously a must read.
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