AUSTRALIA “closed” so fake asylum seekers will try to break into New Zealand.
“The Australian government already is closed [the way] because every boat going to Australia comes back to Indonesia. So many people say it’s impossible. Now we not try to go to Australia,” Mr Saiful said. “What can I do? And [a people smuggler] Mr Jafar told me, ‘You can go to New Zealand from Papua’.”
Mr Saiful said the smugglers had told them that it was easier to be accepted in New Zealand than Australia.
SATIRE: Women Celebrate “Uterine Contents Shower”. Video at the link.
YES, IT WAS ALWAYS ABOUT CRONYISM: Tracking Changes in Those With Health Insurance. “Folks arguing for Obamacare in the first place sold it by implying that most all the uninsured were uninsured because they could not afford coverage or did not have access. Now it turns out a large block of the uninsured actually did have access and could afford it, they just chose not to buy it, for whatever reason. Was this really what it was all about from the very beginning, forcing people to buy a product that they could afford but did not want?”
IS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS holding back medical research? This is an op-ed for a student newspaper so it is short on well-researched conclusions, to put it mildly. But it touches on something important.
The reason doctors do not research [biological] differences as much as they should is because of feminism, said Dr. Doris Taylor, the director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota . . . If doctors attempt to present research with “sex differences” in their abstract, nobody would allow them to display their findings because it is too politically incorrect, Taylor told “60 Minutes.” . . .
If [researchers] upset too many people [by being politically incorrect], they lose their source of funding. Because men and women truly are different we could tailor medical research to each gender [sic] and even possibly each ethnicity. . . . Conditions could have customized treatments for those who[m] they would most benefit. Imagine a hospital with far lower fatality rates because they could treat a disease specifically to help a black man, a white woman or any other gender [sic] or ethnicity.
It seems that the author has struck a chord. Here is a thoughtful and informative comment in response:
You exhibit an unsettling level of arrogance in your prejudiced ignorance on these issues, especially in this continuous stream of non-factual bile . . . The bullsh*t here runs deeper than can be deciphered in a few comments–for starters, there is no scientific proof of biological difference across different ethnic groups, a fact proven time and time again in science and law since the age of eugenics–your whimsical musing on imagining “a hospital with far lower fatality rates because they could treat a disease specifically to help a black man” is utterly revolting and disturbing.
Way to prove his point. It turns out that, yes, some people do not respond well to someone pointing out differences among groups of humans, even if his purpose is to encourage better health for everyone. Anyway, let’s take a closer look at this claim: “There is no scientific proof of biological difference across different ethnic groups, a fact proven time and time again in science and law.” (Law? I didn’t realize that civil laws could prove ideas about biology.) On the contrary, there are biological differences across different ethnic groups. Skin color and bone structure aren’t socially constructed, for example. And yes, biological differences matter when it comes to medicine.
But this is a touchy matter. See the following remark by David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene:
What would you say is the most controversial topic in the book?
Race, race, race. It almost scared me out of writing the book. I was preparing my resume just in case I got drummed out of the profession. Scientists I interviewed sometimes told me they had data on ethnic differences, but would not publish them, for fear that their physiological work could somehow be construed as supporting the idea of innate intellectual differences, as if the two have anything to do with one another. These are professors with tenure, and they weren’t publishing, and there is no tenure in journalism, so I was concerned. But, as I write in the book, there are cases were ignoring ethnic differences in genes can lead to disastrous medical outcomes, so I felt compelled to write what I had learned.
So, it seems that taking into account racial differences could lead to better medical outcomes, perhaps not as dramatic as “a hospital with far lower fatality rates,” but at least something, because its staff could tailor their treatment “specifically to help a black man.” The very idea, according to the commenter quoted above, “is utterly revolting and disturbing.” This is, we discover, yet another case of reverse reverse bigotry, whereby an ideology of victimization ends up harming the very groups it intends to privilege.
A DEMAGOGUERY THAT KNOWS NO BOUNDS. Obama accuses dry cleaners of price discrimination on the basis of sex: “We’ll talk about dry cleaners next, right? [Watch all of the women shake their heads in agreement.] I don’t know why it cost more for Michelle’s blouse than my shirt. We got to make sure that America works for everybody.”
Following Obama’s false claims of gender [sic] discrimination last Tuesday, the female Executive Director of the National Cleaners Association responded later the same day with this letter to Obama [PDF] . . .
As an industry, dry cleaners do not charge more for a woman’s shirt than a man’s shirt, they charge more for a hand ironed shirt than they do a machine pressed shirt. If you check your own dry cleaning bill, you’ll find that YOU pay more for the laundering and finishing of your hand ironed tuxedo shirt, than you do for the automated processing of your everyday traditional dress shirt! The price is in the math as calculated by the labor required not the gender [sic] of the client!
Simple math. Hand ironing takes more time and requires more skill, and therefore costs the cleaner more to produce. Because it costs more to produce, he charges more for the work.
The president likely knows better. But do female voters? Heck, even if dry cleaners did actually discriminate, why should we care? Many businesses engage in price discrimination, some on the basis of age with senior discounts, and others on the basis of sex, such as bars with ladies’ night discounts — and very few people consider this to be a big deal. What’s so special about women that discrimination on the basis of sex must never be to their detriment? What delicate little flowers they must be.
WE LOOKED AT THE DATA: Trends In Global Fertility Rates Presented In Animated GIF Form.
NO, People Do Not Swallow 8 Spiders a Year While Sleeping. “Luckily for all of us, the ‘fact’ that people swallow eight spiders in their sleep yearly isn’t true. Not even close. The myth flies in the face of both spider and human biology, which makes it highly unlikely that a spider would ever end up in your mouth.”
Anyone who repeats the “fact” that people are regularly swallowing spiders while asleep clearly hasn’t thought about it. The instinct to crawl into a gaping mouth and be swallowed is a trait that would have been selected out of spiders by now.
COOL: Amateur Color Films from World War II Now Available. “Thanks to a 2013 grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, five unique amateur films from the William P. Miller papers have been preserved. Those films, made from approximately 1943 to 1945, feature footage of the North African and European theaters during World War II.”
CULTURAL ENRICHMENT: Are Millions of Africans about to Swarm into a More Open Europe?
Much of the do-gooderism of Europe was stirred to a fever pitch last October when a boat capsized off the coast of the Italian island Lampedusa where hundreds died. News accounts of the tragedy were filled with photos of coffins lined up and politicians promised to be more welcoming to illegal alien Africans.
Now Europe is about to reap the whirlwind from essentially declaring Europe to be open to anyone who wants to enter. This could easily be the Camp of the Saints year unless Europeans wake up from their liberal fantasies of universal openness and cultural relativism.
The Italian Interior Minister, Angelino Alfano, recently noted that up to 600,000 were ready to board smuggler boats in Libya alone. Multiply that by several failed states in the neighborhood plus the civil war in Syria and the number becomes millions.
MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: Dana Milbank Is Incoherent On Marriage. The title is actually incorrect. More on that in a bit.
Last week, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank mocked me and a few other women for our claim that marriage is good for women. We’d been discussing women’s happiness on a panel at the Heritage Foundation. Our larger discussion centered around how, as women’s opportunity sets have expanded dramatically, our reported measures of well-being (happiness, basically) have somehow gone way down. For more on this, read Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers on the Paradox of Declining Female Happiness (2009).
The crux of the Milbank-Grieder-MSNBC objection, then, is that it’s a terrible idea to promote marriage as good for women. . . .
The day after I was mocked for saying my piece, I’ll just note that the same Washington Post published a news story headlined ”Democrats target unmarried female voters.” Hunh. Imagine that. It’s almost like if you don’t get married, you’re much more likely to have a favorable view of big government. The story was straight news, no mocking, about how Democrats are building computer models to target single women. No one made any snarky comments about whether it’s healthy for women, much less society, to have a major political party having an incentive of keeping us single throughout their lifetimes.
Amazingly, Hemingway seems to miss the point entirely, choosing instead to condemn Milbank for not caring enough about poor women and children. (Evidently, not even Hemingway cares about poor men.) The title of her essay is wrong. Milbank et al. make perfect sense when it comes to marriage. They want to discourage it, and mock those who encourage it, precisely because it is the primary threat to their vision of government.
Hemingway, it seems, was too busy employing zingers adopted from leftist feminists to see this. (She refers to Milbank misunderstanding her position with his “man-ears,” and to his position as a “mansplaining assertion.”)
The people who really don’t make sense when it comes to marriage are those libertarians and “fiscal conservatives” who want small government but don’t care about marriage because it’s a “social issue.”
PUBLIC SERVANT AT WORK: 16-year-old violated parole 13 times and went unpunished before allegedly murdering man in cold blood; parole officer resigns. Sounds like it’s easy to be a parole officer in Indianapolis. You don’t have to do anything, and when people finally find out, you get to resign instead of being fired and denounced.
PETER FROST: Compliance with moral norms: a partly heritable trait?
Apparently some people are more norm-compliant than others. This is the conclusion of a recent twin study from Sweden (Loewen et al., 2013) [PDF]. . . .
The jury is still out, but it looks like compliance with moral norms has a specific heritable component. . . .
Swedes seem to be better than most people at obeying moral norms. Only 1.4% think it acceptable to claim sick benefits while healthy! Maybe that’s why they’ve been so successful at creating a welfare state. . . .
Where did Western societies get this desire to treat family and non-family the same way? To some extent, it seems to be a longstanding trait. English historian Alan Macfarlane sees a tendency toward weaker kinship ties that goes back at least to the 13th century. Children had no automatic rights to the family property. Parents could leave their property to whomever they liked and disinherit their children if they so wished (Macfarlane, 2012).
Indeed, Macfarlane argues that “Weber’s de-familization of society” was already well advanced in Anglo-Saxon times (Macfarlane, 1992, pp. 173-174 [PDF]). This picture of relatively weak kinship ties is consistent with the Western European marriage pattern. If we look at European societies west of a line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg, we find that certain cultural traits predominate.
SIGNS OF DECLINE: Incurable STDs. “If gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis become incurable by 2020 and that affects 1 million people per year, how fast do adults alter their behavior? Even if we are a nation of 317 million, remove the under 15 and over 70 crowd and the pool gets smaller. Chip away with the morbidly obese or happily married, and the pool gets smaller still. Those 1 million infected become a greater chunk of the sexually active and single crowd.”
GLOBALIZING THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION: African Country Needs Food and Water; Obama Admin Sends Condoms. “But what do the women of Tanzania (as opposed to the women who work in the Obama administration) want? It turns out that they want children. According to surveys, ⅔ of Tanzanian women who have four living children don’t desire to stop childbearing. Half of Tanzanian women who have five children don’t want to limit childbearing, and ⅓ of women with six or more living children don’t want to limit childbearing. These desires accurately reflect the 5.4 fertility rate observed in the country.”
Footnotes at the link.
HOW GENEROUS OF THEM: Missouri Taxpayers Fund Out-of-State Welfare. “In December 2013, the state auditor reported 366 instances where welfare beneficiaries had received Missouri EBT cards but had accessed their cumulative $461,000 in benefits exclusively out-of-state for three months or more. These included one beneficiary who accessed $1,191 over 153 days spent in the Virgin Islands.”
Is it even proper to use the word “welfare” for this? This isn’t subsistence living, but luxury.
RIGHT TO CHOOSE UNDER ATTACK: Mom Who Birthed Baby in Bathroom, Stuffed Body in a Toilet Sentenced to Life in Prison. And to think, if she had only taken action mere minutes earlier, she’d be praised.
COST AND RISK ARE NO OBJECT When Someone Else Is Paying The Tab. “I have to admire Ms. Hobson’s chutzpah, though. She chose to have babies man-not-included, and the overburdened British taxpayer–49% of whom are men of the sort she couldn’t bring herself to marry–was stuck with the bill for her operation (low $20s for a C-section) and 60 days for two children in the NICU ($3.5K per baby per day, or roughly $42K). Yet she still complains that she didn’t receive enough support. Amazing.”
TIM CARNEY: What a woman wants: More babies.
There’s evidence that the birth dearth is explained by a large portion of women not having as many babies as they want.
Pew looks at surveys of European women near the end of their childbearing years and finds that while most have as many children as they want, about 30 percent have fewer than they would want. Only ten percent have more.
In the U.S., 40 percent of women near the end of their childbearing years have fewer children than they would like.
NEWSBUSTERS: ABC Apologizes for Story That Connected Mozilla CEO to Westboro Baptist. Perhaps they were just trying to suggest that Eich is a Democrat. After all, the Westboro leadership consists of Democrats.
JUST ANOTHER DAY IN WASHINGTON: Ex-Countrywide Exec Co-Wrote Mortgage Reform Bill. “Controversial housing finance reform legislation making its way through the Senate Banking Committee was co-written by a former mortgage trader for Countrywide Financial and Wachovia, two of the subprime mortgage behemoths at the center of the housing market crash in 2007.”
NOT WITH A BANG BUT A WHIMPER: Sweden’s Totalitarian Face.
The wave of robberies the city has witnessed is part of a “war against Swedes.” This was the explanation given by young robbers with immigrant background for why they are robbing native Swedes. The sociologist Petra Åkesson interviewed boys between 15 and 17 years old, both individually and in groups. “When we are in the city and robbing, we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes.” This argument was repeated several times. “Power for me means that Swedes shall look at me, lie down on the ground and kiss my feet.” The boys explained, laughingly, that “We rob every single day, as much as we want to, whenever we want to.”
Yet suggesting that the ongoing rise in violent crime might have something to do with mass immigration of alien and aggressive cultures is quite literally banned by law. In March 2007 during a rally supported by SSU (the Social Democratic Youth League) a man carried a sign reading, “While Swedish girls are being gang raped by immigrant gangs the SSU is fighting racism.” He was promptly arrested and later sentenced to a fine. His crime? He had “expressed disrespect for a group of people with reference to their national or ethnic background.” The local court rejected the man’s free speech argument because even free speech has its limits, and he had clearly acted in too provocative a manner.
Related: “Sweden is More Dangerous than Mogadishu”.
A young Somali journalist in Sweden named Amun Abdullahi got herself in trouble with the politically correct elite by reporting the truth about the radicalization of young Somalis in Rinkeby (a culturally enriched suburb of Stockholm), where they were recruited for jihad by the Islamic terrorist group Al-Shabab.
The treatment meted out to Ms. Abdullahi made her decide to move back to Somalia. She acknowledges that Mogadishu is a dangerous place, but she considers Sweden more dangerous, because “here you cannot tell the truth.”
Earlier: The Best Example of Western Leftist Dhimmitude Ever: “We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.” Good luck with that.
SUNSHINE MARY: Book review: Pulling Back the Shades: Erotica, Intimacy and the Longings of a Woman’s Heart, by Dannah Gresh and Juli Slattery. “After years around Protestant Christian churches, I had noticed that men’s sexual sin is not infrequently discussed in church but women’s very rarely is. I have heard the evils of pornography discussed but I have never heard women’s preferred form of pornography – erotica – discussed. I thought maybe the authoresses would try to excuse women’s sexual sin, but they did not! Instead they lovingly, in the name of Christ, but very firmly, call erotica what it is: women’s pornography.”
IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT THE MONEY: Why Are There So Few Job Losses from Minimum-Wage Hikes?
Those in favor of a minimum-wage increase are willing to accept these minor employment losses for the few in exchange for income gains for the many. But this view fails to recognize that wage income is not the only form of compensation with which employers pay their workers. There are many other forms of compensation, including fringe benefits, relaxed work demands, workplace ambiance, respect, schedule flexibility, job security, hours of work and so forth. . . .
Competition among employers and workers will not disappear with a wage increase but will merely be redirected into the components of compensation packages not covered by the wage mandate. Wage floors, therefore, restrain competitive pressures in only one of the many ways in which businesses compete. With a minimum-wage increase, employers will move to cut labor costs in other areas. As such, employers are likely to reduce fringe benefits and/or increase work demands.
Indeed, past experience has confirmed the nonmonetary impact of a minimum-wage hike on workers, not only in reduced fringe benefits but in increased work demands and decreased job training.
ANN COULTER: Competition For Thee, But Not For Me.
Adelson is an especially telling example of the self-interest of businessmen on immigration. His newspaper, Israel Today, the largest newspaper in Israel, is wildly patriotic on immigration (and everything else).
Israel Today has trumpeted the success of the 15-foot razor-wire fence along Israel’s 140-mile border with Egypt, triumphantly noting last August that, for the first time, “no infiltrations were recorded from the Egyptian border, compared to 193 from the same month last year.”
Adelson himself had suggested just such a policy to the Los Angeles Times last year, saying he wanted to “Put a big fence around our country.”
By “our country,” he, of course, meant Israel. In America, he wants illegal immigrants pouring across the border to provide him with an endless supply of cheap labor.
A GLIMPSE OF THE FUTURE: Percentages of births by race at the state level.
DIVORCE IS ACTUALLY ON THE RISE, and it’s the baby boomers’ fault.
A new paper out this month from demographers at the University of Minnesota challenges the traditional narrative. Sheela Kennedy and Stephen Ruggles have found that the divorce rate hasn’t declined since 1980, it has only flattened. And when they controlled for changes in the age composition of the married population (the U.S. population was younger in 1980, and younger couples have a higher risk for divorce), they found that the age-standardized divorce rate has actually risen by an astonishing 40 percent since then. . . .
The rise of divorce has not occurred evenly across all age groups. The chart below looks at what the authors call the prevalence of marital instability, which they define as “the percentage of ever-married persons who have ever been divorced or separated.” The line for 1970 is comparatively flat — there wasn’t much of a difference in the prevalence of divorce between young people and older people. But starting with the 1980 line you can see a bulge forming at the younger end of the age spectrum as the baby boomers started divorcing. Looking at the lines for 1995 and 2010, you can watch this bulge shift rightward as the boomers age.
BOOK REVIEW: Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State,” by Stephen P. Halbrook.
Halbrook traces the development of German gun control law from the collapse of the Kaiser’s government in 1918 through the post-war chaos, the Weimar Republic’s efforts to prevent the violence of the Nazis and the Communists in the 1920s and early 1930s, and then the ways in which the Nazis used those laws to disarm anyone who they regarded as “enemies of the state” (which of course included all Jews). . . .
There are many parallels between the laws passed in the Weimar Republic and by the Nazis, and current gun control laws and proposals. For example: the nature and duration of the records that gun manufacturers and dealers were required to keep (p. 135); issuance of gun carry licenses “only to persons considered reliable and only if a need is proven” (p. 107); the use of relatively rare incidents to justify widespread disarmament of “enemies of the state” (p. 155); and the prohibition of firearms with features not generally used “for hunting or sporting purposes” (p. 134).
REASONABLE ADVICE: The Introvert’s Guide to Asking and Answering Questions.
CHILDHOOD AS DISEASE: Idea of New Attention Disorder Spurs Research, and Debate.
Called sluggish cognitive tempo, the condition is said to be characterized by lethargy, daydreaming and slow mental processing. By some researchers’ estimates, it is present in perhaps two million children.
Experts pushing for more research into sluggish cognitive tempo say it is gaining momentum toward recognition as a legitimate disorder — and, as such, a candidate for pharmacological treatment. . . .
Some experts, including Dr. McBurnett and some members of the journal’s editorial board, say that there is no consensus on the new disorder’s specific symptoms, let alone scientific validity. They warn that the concept’s promotion without vastly more scientific rigor could expose children to unwarranted diagnoses and prescription medications — problems that A.D.H.D. already faces.
“We’re seeing a fad in evolution: Just as A.D.H.D. has been the diagnosis du jour for 15 years or so, this is the beginning of another,” said Dr. Allen Frances, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Duke University. “This is a public health experiment on millions of kids.”
MARK PERRY: The college degree gap: women earned a majority of degrees at all levels in 2012, and the degree gap for blacks is stunning. “Black women outnumber black men earning college degrees by a ratio of about 2:1 for all four degree levels, and earn such a disproportionate share of Master’s degrees that there were 239 black women earning Master’s degrees in 2012 for every 100 black men!”
GENDER [sic] GAPS Vs. Gender [sic] Facts.
While not empirical in nature, the paper by Browne (2013) focuses on the following suggestion: gender [sic] differences that appear to favor men are far more often to be viewed as “gaps” requiring remediation, while gender [sic] differences that appear to favor women are viewed more as “facts” and of little or no moral or social concern. Browne (2013) runs through a few interesting examples of these disparities, among which are: the special focus on violence against women despite men being more likely to be a victim of almost any type of violent crime, women being less likely to be stopped or cited for traffic violations, women being sentenced to less time in jail if convicted of a crime, domestic abuse allegations of men being ignored at greater frequency than women’s, women earning more of the degrees than men in the US, and men making up a bit more than 9 out of every 10 workplace deaths. . . .
One of my favorite passages from the paper concerned research on one of the former issues: traffic stops. . . .
…[W]hen a Massachusetts study of racial and gender profiling found that, contrary to the authors’ expectations, women were substantially less likely to be stopped or cited than men, the authors did not then express concern that maybe there was gender profiling against men; instead, they emphasized the need for further information on “the traffic stop behavior of individual officers . . . to determine if some officers are stopping [a] larger number of female drivers compared to their similarly situated peers.” The fact that all officers, as a whole, were stopping a larger number of male drivers was simply not on the authors’ radar as a problem.
SHAKEDOWN: Treasury now seizing tax refunds to pay for decades-old Social Security overpayments to parents.
Social Security claims it overpaid someone in the Grice family — it’s not sure who — in 1977. After 37 years of silence, four years after Sadie Grice died, the government is coming after her daughter. Why the feds chose to take Mary’s money, rather than her surviving siblings’, is a mystery…
“It was a shock,” said Grice, 58. “What incenses me is the way they went about this. They gave me no notice, they can’t prove that I received any overpayment, and they use intimidation tactics, threatening to report this to the credit bureaus.”
WILLIAM M. BRIGGS on the precautionary principle, or “the somebody-might-get-hurt! fallacy.” “The old joke used to be that a sweater was defined as an article of clothing that a child put on when its mother got cold. Now it’s the same joke but ‘mother’ has been swapped for ‘government.'”
AARON CLAREY: Viewing Cities as HOAs. “No matter how big a city is, when you decide to purchase property within those city limits you are consciously or not joining a ‘club’ or an ‘association’ the members of which consist of the entire city’s population. This population, like a HOA out in the burbs, will determine the quality of life you have, not to mention the ultimate financial cost associated with owning a home in that municipality. If the people are high quality people, you can expect quality services, a quality standard of living and low HOA’s fees. But if it’s the typical vermin that populate our major metros you can expect to pay through the nose for bad roads, crime, people bigoted against conservatives/libertarians, and a perpetuity financial liability that forever will increase, rendering your home worthless. The choice is yours.”
WOULDN’T SURPRISE ME: Report: NSA Exploited Heartbleed to Siphon Passwords for Two Years.
Earlier: Heartbleed Bug: Public urged to reset all passwords.
TOM JAMES: The Primary Caretaker Standard.
Prohibited from overtly deciding custody on the basis of sex, judges used this information to fashion a rule of decision that would seem gender-neutral on its face, but that would, in practice, continue to favor mothers: the primary caretaker standard.
The primary caretaker standard was simply a presumption that a child’s best interests are served by being placed in the sole custody of the person who historically has been the child’s primary caretaker. . . .
The problem with the primary caretaker standard, from a feminist point of view, was that it did not work to the advantage of working women. This became a significant concern during the last quarter of the century when the percentage of married women with children pursuing employment outside the home sharply increased. Less than one in four married women with children worked outside the home in the 1960′s. By 1980, nearly half did; and by the end of the century, a majority did. Feminists therefore complained that the rule penalized working women. (That it had always disadvantaged men in exactly the same way, and for exactly the same reason, apparently was not thought to have been of any great consequence.) Accordingly, those states that had adopted the primary caretaker presumption quickly scrapped it.
COOL: Caterpillars Sneak into Ant Nests by Singing like Queens. “Before they become butterflies, some caterpillars transform themselves into ants. Rather than living out in the open and braving predators while they grow up, these caterpillars sneak into ant nests for free food and lodging—or they just eat the ants. Either way, scientists have found, part of the caterpillars’ disguise involves mimicking the sounds of an ant queen. When worker ants hear this tune, they drop everything to tend to the mooching invaders.”
JONAH GOLDBERG: Biased Views of Confirmation Bias.
Of course, President Obama has the same mindset. He often talks about how he’s not an ideologue but a pragmatist, and how he’s essentially a disinterested public servant pushing no agenda other than what all the experts agree is the best policy — on health care, the environment, the economy, etc. He likes to say how he’s open to new ideas from everywhere, but the new ideas he takes seriously just happen to come from the left and always involve more government. It’s not that he’s liberal, he’s just right. Or, as Krugman once put it, “The facts have a liberal bias.”
Such arrogant groupthink not only leads to bad policies, but it also reinforces a mass psychology that simply takes it for granted that liberals have sole access to the Truth. It’s like having God on your side without having to believe in God.
CULTURAL ENRICHMENT: France: Muslim Zones Are Dangerous for White French Citizens.
WORTH LOOKING INTO: “Correlational health studies would be more impressive (and useful) if they included IQ and personality data.”
As for this particular finding, the apparent link between depression and processed food consumption, assuming it’s real at all, what’s behind it? Well, what does processed food consumption correlate with (hint: negatively)? IQ. This is indeed the subject of James Thomspons’ latest post (IQ, Neuroticism, booze, and those damn vegetables again).
On that, one very large study (of Swedish conscripts) found that IQ was negatively correlated with severe depression (and other things like schizophrenia). So there’s that, anyway.
WHEN LIBERTARIANS TURN to the morals of the statists in power.
Catholic libertarian Jeffrey Tucker recently introduced us to the concept of “libertarian brutalism.” The distilled version: Libertarianism is well and good, but can’t we do something to make sure people only use freedom of association in ways that are palatable to progressives?
Now Reason is getting in on the act, proposing a libertarianism beyond the (actually sort of incredibly stupid and childish) non-aggression principle: It’s also about caring, maaaan. The article, replete with scare images of men in Klan robes—the necessary result of a libertarian society unconcerned with “tolerance” or whatever the term is these days—goes through a lot of tired old left-libertarian tropes.
In practice, this means carrying water for the leftists.
ALWAYS LOOKING TO BE OFFENDED: University may change fight song after complaints that ‘Utah Man’ is sexist and racist.
Professor Joanna Yaffe said she sees not only sexism in the song but also racism — explaining that a line which states that the school’s “coeds are the fairest” could be interpreted as a reference to skin color.
What?
Sam Ortiz, president of the Associated Students of the University of Utah (ASUU), said changing the song is an important step in making students feel comfortable.
It’s pretty clear that there’s no end to the requirements for people to “feel comfortable.” There’s always something else.
DOG BITES MAN: Catholic University to Host Pro-Gay Drag Show. Two questions: 1) Is the “Catholic” label just handed out like candy at Halloween? 2) Is there such a thing as an anti-gay drag show?
RACHELLE DEJONG: What I Learned in a Sustainability MOOC.
That the environment might be resilient and humans might be innovative in finding new ways to replace nonrenewable resources faded in comparison with the imminent doom-of-the-commons tragedies, species extinction, and the impending threat of famine. Neo-Malthusianism, I found, is alive and kicking, despite two centuries of evidence to cast its predictions in a doubtful light. . . .
The title of week 4 declares that the question of global warming is one of degree, not of reality: “The climate of the near future: hot, hotter, or hottest?”
Such confidence stems from a “scientific consensus” among researchers who believe, but have no conclusive evidence for, the existence of continued global warming.
Wait. People pay for this? Don’t we hear this stuff all the time anyway?
NORMALITY WILL NOT BE TOLERATED: Kirsten Dunst Offers Reasonable Opinions on Marriage, Sex Roles, is Immediately Attacked.
VOX DAY: A feminist rationale for young motherhood. “It probably hasn’t occurred to most women who are putting off child-bearing until the deadline to realize that if men do the exact same thing, they will be waiting until they are in their fifties or sixties to have children.”
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Code words: comfort care.
It doesn’t mean what you think it means. (See also “palliative care,” which means the same thing.) . . .
If your loved one is in the hospital, you shouldn’t infer from, “This doctor or nurse seems like a nice person” or even “This doctor or nurse is a Christian” that “This doctor or nurse would voluntarily and explicitly tell me if the proposal is to remove food and hydration from my loved one. I can trust the rhetorical sound of what this doctor or nurse proposes to me.” You can’t. You can’t trust it. And you certainly cannot infer that such a good person in a medical role would never recommend leaving someone without food or water until death. . . .
A Facebook friend shares the following story about her son, now six, who was born with a serious health condition. She was pressured to put him on “comfort care” when he was a newborn:
It’s very loaded how they present the options. I still remember the way the staff worded it: “Do you want us to do everything possible or do you want to make him as comfortable as possible? Do you want him to be comfortable?” Obviously, we were meant to take “doing everything possible” as being the opposite of being comfortable. It’s easy to see how parents and family members could be tricked/guilt-tripped into something without fully comprehending to what they just agreed[.]