Althouse |
- "Now Henderson, a single mom in Blairsville, Georgia, is facing criminal reckless conduct charges for letting her 14-year-old babysit."
- "Have you seen the news? I'm right wing now!"
- "Left splits over Supreme Court pick pushed by top Biden ally/Rep. Jim Clyburn is stumping for judge Michelle Childs to get the president's nod. While labor interests are skeptical, not every progressive senator is."
- "Did Biden Admin ‘Fund Crack Pipes’ To ‘Advance Racial Equity’?"
- "The strongest reason to keep up pandemic restrictions is that some people remain vulnerable. Those who are unvaccinated, for example...."
- "Althaus, who helped Germany win the mixed team event three times at the ski jumping world championships, was among the women disqualified Monday when FIS ruled that their suits were 'too big and offered an aerodynamic advantage.'"
- At the Sunrise Café...
- "Boys and men across all regions and ethnic groups have been failing, both absolutely and relatively, for years. This is catastrophic for our country...."
- "Donald Trump Promised He Wouldn’t Nominate a Black Woman to the Supreme Court."
- "And the gender dynamics — male economists piling on against a female economist and a female journalist, Times' reporter Jeanna Smialek, in ways distinctive from typical academic arguments — look terrible here."
- Joe Rogan: "When people are like, 'how are you handling all this bullshit?' I send them this. Plus I’m on ��"
- "My mind, on the other hand, seems less willing to yield to discipline, behaving as though it has a mind of its own."
- I've never cared less about the Oscars.
- "I have been lazy my entire life. I just got by in school, including college where I finished near the bottom of my class...
- "Science adviser Eric Lander apologized for mistreating subordinates. The White House struggled Monday to explain why he wasn’t departing. In the evening, he quit."
- At the Sunrise Café...
- "The NYT article on MMT, written by Jeanna Smialek, is mostly a puff piece about Stephanie Kelton, MMT’s most well-known proponent."
- "A sign at a playground in Moraga, a 35-minute drive from San Francisco, advises parents that rattlesnakes are 'important members of the natural community' and to give the snakes 'respect.'"
- "Everyone in this article is incredibly annoying."
- "Perhaps nowhere is more vulnerable than Ocean Shores... the tsunami that could accompany a 9.0 rupture would wash over all of it. People could try driving out..."
- "In the spring of 2020... [i]f ever there was a time for news organizations to educate and inform the public, this was it. Instead, Zucker apparently believed..."
| Posted: 09 Feb 2022 10:27 AM PST "The charges carry a maximum penalty of one year in prison and fine of $1,000. The arresting officer, Deputy Sheriff Marc Pilote, wrote in his report that anything terrible could have happened to Thaddeus, including being kidnapped, run over, or 'bitten by a venomous snake.' (When Henderson protested that the kid was only gone a few minutes, Pilote responded that a few minutes was all the time a venomous snake needed.)... When I spoke with the district attorney, Jeff Langley, he said he felt the cops acted prudently... Langley said he believed the boy was 'wandering naked in a thunderstorm.' In reality, while the boy was wearing only a shirt, there was no storm. Langley added the officers informed him that 14-year-old Linley had 'some measure of learning disability'... Henderson told me that her daughter was previously diagnosed with ADHD. She has a GPA of 4.45, is vice president of the 4-H Club, broke school records in varsity track, completed the Red Cross Childcare program, and is certified in CPR." |
| "Have you seen the news? I'm right wing now!" Posted: 09 Feb 2022 10:21 AM PST The heart of this video is a series of statements in the form "If X is right wing, then I'm right wing." His self-identification, stated at the beginning, is strongly left wing. |
| Posted: 09 Feb 2022 09:45 AM PST
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| "Did Biden Admin ‘Fund Crack Pipes’ To ‘Advance Racial Equity’?" Posted: 09 Feb 2022 09:32 AM PST A question asked at Snopes and deemed "Mostly False." Mostly false? Okay. What part of it isn't false?
So it's "mostly false" because the program as a whole has 20 components and this is just one component, but isn't it still true that the Biden administration is funding crack pipes to advance racial equality? I've never noticed that putting something that's true on a list of other things made it "mostly false." But there's also the idea that the primary purpose of the program was to reduce physical harm from drug use — thus a "safe smoking kit" might include a rubber mouthpiece for a glass pipe. "Racial equity" came into play as applicants were required to make a "behavioral disparity impact statement" about the effect on "racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender minority groups." And the HHS stated that it would "prioritize funding for programs which address the needs of underserved communities." "Mostly false" is a subjective categorization, but considering how much trouble people get for spreading misinformation these days, I think it's misinformation upon misinformation to jump on impish clickbait headlines like "Biden administration to fund handing out crack pipes to addicts to improve 'racial equity.'" That was the original headline at The Daily Mail, which has changed the headline to "Biden administration to fund programs that hand out crack pipes to prevent infection and promote 'racial equity'" (which is in The Daily Mail). |
| Posted: 09 Feb 2022 09:01 AM PST "What do we owe to them?... Even as we heap scorn on the unvaccinated, we make sacrifices on their behalf. The unvaccinated are subject to immense pressure and moral indignation. Governments and private institutions are doing what they can to make their everyday lives difficult. A number of people, including anonymous commentators on Reddit and columnists at the Los Angeles Times, even engage in open schadenfreude when anti-vaxxers die from COVID. This is wrong. We owe every victim of this pandemic compassion... [but it's also wrong that] the unvaccinated are, implicitly, the main justification for ongoing restrictions.... Immunocompromised people and the elderly remain in significant danger through no fault of their own.... That's tragic. But it is not a sufficient reason to permanently change our society in ways that make it less free, sociable, and joyous. Just as we are willing to take on calculated risks in other areas of life, so we should be willing to tolerate some risk of infectious disease. When you set out to drive across the country, you know that you could get into an accident. You might get hurt, and so might another driver, or even a child crossing the road. But that does not create a moral obligation to stay put for the rest of your life. Because COVID will likely remain endemic for the foreseeable future, delaying a return to normal life until the risk it poses has been completely eliminated simply is not a realistic plan." From "Open Everything/The time to end pandemic restrictions is now" by Yascha Mounk (The Atlantic). |
| Posted: 09 Feb 2022 11:02 AM PST "Bigger suits could increase the time ski jumpers are able to stay aloft, given the possibility of increased wind resistance... 'I have been checked so many times in 11 years of ski jumping, and I have never been disqualified once, I know my suit was compliant," the German star [Katharina Althaus] said.... The sport is among the eight that go back to the original Winter Olympics program in 1924, but women weren't allowed to participate until 2014, after a group of athletes filed a lawsuit in 2009, ahead of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. 'It's like jumping down from, let's say, about two meters above the ground about a thousand times a year, which seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view,' former FIS president Gian Franco Kasper infamously claimed in 2005. (Kaser, a Swiss native who held that position from 1998 to 2021, did not have a medical background.)... In an Instagram post, Althaus wrote in German: 'I have no words for the decisions that were made today. Our sport was damaged as a result. Athletes and their dreams were destroyed. … It was one of the most important competitions for us women, a premiere for the entire sport and then something like that!! I am so disappointed and angry.'" From "Five female Olympians disqualified because of suits in one of the 'darker days' for ski jumping" (WaPo). I love the name Althaus, but I must say, looking at the photograph, below, that the very long crotch on those pants seems to give something of a wingsuit — or flying-squirrel — effect. I can see why competitors would seek every advantage they can get from their gear, but if they are technically in violation, they take on the risk of disqualification. It also looks bad, and so — to paraphrase Kasper — it seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a fashion point of view. Do looks matter? Is the Olympics about getting us to watch?  |
| Posted: 08 Feb 2022 05:03 PM PST  ... you can talk about whatever you want.
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| Posted: 08 Feb 2022 04:22 PM PST "Boys are more than twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder... are five times as likely to spend time in juvenile detention; and are less likely to finish high school.... Men now make up only 40.5 percent of college students.... Median wages for men have declined since 1990 in real terms. Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. More U.S. men ages 18 to 34 are now living with their parents than with romantic partners.... On a cultural level, we must stop defining masculinity as necessarily toxic and start promoting positive masculinity. Strong, healthy, fulfilled men are more likely to treat women well.... Here's the simple truth I've heard from many men: We need to be needed. We imagine ourselves as builders, soldiers, workers, brothers — part of something bigger than ourselves. We deal with idleness terribly. 'A man … with no means of filling up time," George Orwell wrote, is "as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain.'" Andrew Yang takes up the cause of men in "The data are clear: The boys are not all right" (WaPo). Let me single out the line "Strong, healthy, fulfilled men are more likely to treat women well." I've made approximately that argument myself on occasion... and gotten into some of the worst arguments of my life. I'll check the comments now because I'm sure the most liked comment will be something that shows why this seemingly moderate position can enrage those focused on women. Yes, here, from one "Jane Guy": Guess what? If men started doing their share of housework, child care, and the emotional labor of a family (which every study shows they do not), they would feel needed. They ARE needed, in fact, just not in the way you say they want to be. Our culture needs to stop defining "masculinity" as being "builders, workers, soldiers, brothers" and start defining it as being "productive members of society and equal participants in family life." |
| "Donald Trump Promised He Wouldn’t Nominate a Black Woman to the Supreme Court." Posted: 08 Feb 2022 04:03 PM PST Claims Garrett Epps at Washington Monthly. I can already hear snuffling noises off to my right protesting that he did no such thing, that Trump actually, as he said at the time, named highly qualified federal judges "representative of the kind of constitutional principles I value." Yet it is a fact that the two lists his campaign developed with the counsel of conservative activists (which he had promised not to stray from in filling the late Justice Antonin Scalia's seat on the Court) contained not a single Black woman. Trump said nothing about excluding Black female judges. He just did it.... Yes, and Biden would be in a very different position if he'd said nothing about choosing a black woman and had just done it. That's the traditional way of adding diversity to the Court. You say you're picking the very best person for the job and the person you chose is accorded the dignity of being called the best person and not merely the best within a constricted pool. But it is true that by offering the list the way he did, Trump assured anyone who cared that he would not nominate a black woman. |
| Posted: 08 Feb 2022 03:55 PM PST Writes Emily Peck at Axios in "Male economists are freaking out over a NYT profile." You may remember I talked yesterday about that NYT article and the reaction to it and said "my feminist alarm went off," so I'm interested in Peck's discussion. More from Peck: "I am sorry to see the @nytimes taking MMT seriously as an intellectual movement. It is the equivalent of publicizing fad diets, quack cancer cures or creationist theories," [Larry] Summers tweeted. ... Noah Smith, a well-known economist and former Bloomberg columnist... calls the Times profile a "puff piece," noting that Smialek writes about Kelton's outfits. The phrase puff piece wasn't much used back when Summers was credited with saving the world from an economic meltdown on the cover of Time magazine in 1999, Mark Paul, an economics professor at New College of Florida, tells Axios. |
| Posted: 08 Feb 2022 07:57 AM PST |
| Posted: 08 Feb 2022 07:59 AM PST "I have dabbled in internet 'brain games,' solving algebraic problems flashing past and rerouting virtual trains to avoid crashes. I've audited classes at a university, and participated in a neurofeedback assessment of my brain's electrical impulses. But these are only occasional diversions, never approaching my determination to remain physically fit as I move deeper into old age.... Some with life-altering disabilities — my blind friend, another with two prosthetic legs — are more serene and complain less than those with minor ailments.... My brain would have to become the muscle I counted on to carry me through these final years with the peace and purpose others had found.... I've always found it extremely difficult to concentrate when I'm in a noisy setting. At this lunch with a friend in an outdoor restaurant, a landscaper began blowing leaves from underneath the bushes surrounding our table.... The discipline so familiar to me in the gym — this time applied to my mind — proved equally effective in the restaurant. It was as though I had taken my brain to a mental fitness center...." Writes Robert W. Goldfarb, who is 88, in "The Secret to Aging Well? Contentment/Despite having many friends in their 70s, 80s and 90s, I've been far too slow to realize that how we respond to aging is a choice made in the mind, not in the gym" (NYT). I support the general goal of keeping the mind in shape, but the skill of putting up with a leaf blower right next to your table while you're eating at an outdoor restaurant makes me think he's taking the pursuit of serenity too far. There are other mental skills including protecting yourself from damaging decibels and feeling that you are entitled to basic respect. |
| I've never cared less about the Oscars. Posted: 08 Feb 2022 06:06 AM PST I'm only noticing that the nominations just came out because one of my sons texted me. |
| Posted: 08 Feb 2022 06:14 AM PST "... although I had superior SAT & GRE scores. I got a government job by scoring well on their exam (and had the required sheepskin). I continued to be lazy by being highly efficient. My supervisors always praised my work and considered me a top employee even though I was putting in little effort. Eventually, I retired early. When I am not wandering around museums and the streets of foreign cities, I spend my time reading and philosophysing (daydreaming). I also post comments. There's a lot more to life than work." Writes a commenter named Paerdegat at a WaPo advice column where the question comes from a man who is absurdly disgusted with his wife because she, unlike him, is not using the extra 30 hours — gained by not commuting to work — to be "productive." The remote work for both of them is full-time — in the field of law — and both completely fulfill household chores and cooking. But he has "read 25 biographies, developed decent conversational skills in two foreign languages, upped my running program to the point that I am marathon-ready, and started volunteering for voter registration advocacy." All she does with the leftover time is read fantasy novels — "books better suited to children" — watch some TV — not crap, but History Channel documentaries — something he calls "exercise," and this thing he puts in scare quotes: "unwind." |
| Posted: 08 Feb 2022 04:35 AM PST That's the sub-headline at the Washington Post article, "Top White House scientist resigns after review finds he demeaned staff," where is says it was published "Yesterday at 10:57 a.m. EST" and "Updated yesterday at 9:18 p.m. EST." The top-rated comment is: "It's hard to reconcile Biden's statement with the lack of consequences for Lander. The science community has no shortage of qualified individuals to fill this post. Lander should resign." So you can infer what happened. It took the WaPo article to force Lander out, but it only took a few hours for the article to work. "Biden's statement" refers to this: Lander's resignation came after the White House struggled throughout the day to explain why he had not quit or been fired, and how that squared with a pledge Biden made on his first day in office. On that day, he told staffers at swearing-in ceremony, "If you are ever working with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I promise you I will fire you on the spot. On the spot — no if, ands or buts." The editing at WaPo is slapdash: "he told staffers at swearing-in ceremony." I guess that means Lander's swearing in.
There's still an old boys network, apparently, so it's important to lay strong blame on Biden — who has used gender politics to elevate himself — when he's caught using it egregiously and to the detriment of women. |
| Posted: 07 Feb 2022 04:12 PM PST  ... you can talk about whatever you want. |
| Posted: 07 Feb 2022 10:59 AM PST "In glowing tones, it describes Kelton's clothes, her office, her house, her neighborhood, her blog, her manner of speaking, her personal story, and so on, calling her 'the star architect of a movement that is on something of a victory lap.' Very little is written about the background of the macroeconomic policy debate, and what does appear is highly questionable: 'In economics, there's a school of thought sometimes called "freshwater." It's the set of ideas that became popular at inland universities in the 1970s, when they began to embrace rational markets and limited government intervention to fight recessions. There's also "saltwater" thinking, an updated version of Keynesianism that argues that the government occasionally needs to jump-start the economy. It has traditionally been championed in the Ivy League and other top-ranked schools on the coasts. You might call the school of thought Ms. Kelton is popularizing, from a bay that feeds into the East River, brackish economics.' The brief description of freshwater and saltwater economics is fine, but to describe MMT as being 'brackish' — i.e., some sort of fusion of freshwater and saltwater, or a middle ground between the two — is absurd." From "The NYT article on MMT is really bad/The fringe ideology's star is falling, and puff pieces will not resuscitate it" by Noah Smith (Substack). Here's the NYT article: "Is This What Winning Looks Like? Modern Monetary Theory, the buzziest economic idea in decades, got a pandemic tryout of sorts. Now inflation is testing its limits." I'm in no position to judge any of this, but who cares about the metaphor? And my feminist alarm went off: A man is irked by an article by a woman about a women — in a field that's traditionally male and featuring details that seem like the stuff of women's magazines — her clothes, her office, her house, her neighborhood.... And why is it called "Is This What Winning Looks Like?" Looks?! |
| Posted: 07 Feb 2022 09:21 AM PST "Across the Bay in the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame, an animal shelter has rescued a family of skunks from a construction hole, a chameleon from power lines and nursed back to health 100 baby squirrels that tumbled out of their nests after their trees got trimmed. With the exception of the occasional aggressive coyote, the animals that roam the hills and gullies of the Bay Area — turkeys, mountain lions, deer, bobcats, foxes and the rest of a veritable Noah's Ark — find themselves on somewhat laissez-faire terms with the humans around them. Not so for the rampaging feral pigs...." |
| "Everyone in this article is incredibly annoying." Posted: 07 Feb 2022 05:58 AM PST That's the top-rated comment — by a lot — at "Sometimes I Hate My Husband's Peloton/Yes, exercise is hugely beneficial. But can too much of a good thing cause tension in your relationship?" (NYT). Some things people in the article said: "We know if we don't get this soothing time in, we become monsters." ("Soothing time" = time spent exercising.) "I cry all the time on Robin's rides, because I feel very connected to her." (Robin is an instructor on Peloton.) "My husband will walk past and hear this other guy making me laugh." (The "other guy" is a Beachbody instructor.) "I had so much FOMO that I paid for the resort's Wi-Fi and sat by the pool, watching it on my phone...." ("It" = a Peloton class characterized as a "Pride Ride" and led by a favorite instructor.) |
| Posted: 07 Feb 2022 04:19 AM PST "... but officials expect roads to be buckled and sunken, or covered in power lines, trees and debris. The expected subduction would cause the entire area to abruptly sink up to seven feet; the shaking could cause liquefaction of sandy soils before the tsunami reached shore. People could try running to high ground outside of town, but Ocean Shores sits on a six-mile-long peninsula. Those who live toward the southern end would be about eight miles away from high ground. Depending on their location, residents might have only 10 minutes after the shaking stopped before the wave started washing over them.... The best option may be to get on a rooftop or to climb a tree.... Dozens of other waterfront communities are also at risk.... To improve the chances of survival, officials in Washington State have proposed a network of 58 vertical evacuation structures along the outer coast and advised considering dozens of others. They could provide 22,000 people with an option for escape, although thousands of others would remain out of range. Each structure could cost about $3 million. Vertical evacuation structures have been embraced in Japan for years, in the form of platforms, towers and artificial berms..."  |
| Posted: 07 Feb 2022 03:45 AM PST "... it was the perfect time to exploit the situation for political gain and to help the network's ratings. Andrew Cuomo benefited from briefings that made him appear to be the adult in the room regarding COVID-19 and Trump appear to be the villain. Cuomo got a $5.1 million book deal as a result. Chris Cuomo and Zucker/Gollust/CNN benefited from marathon interviews with Cuomo's governor/brother, which didn't touch the governor's alleged nursing home scandal. Ratings soared. So, was Zucker's departure simply about a consensual relationship with a co-worker?... Moving forward, what's next for CNN when the company falls under the Discovery Channel umbrella later this year? Let's hear from its soon-to-be largest shareholder, John Malone of Liberty Media. 'I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,' Malone said...." From "CNN's collapse is now complete" by Joe Concha (at The Hill). Let's take a quick look at the Wikipedia page of John Malone, "an American billionaire businessman, landowner and philanthropist." We're told his "political beliefs have been described as libertarian, and "he is on the board of directors for the Cato Institute." Also: Here's the "amazing Wired interview," if you want to read about the "cable wars" of the early 1990s. |
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