SNAIL THOUGHT TO BE EXTINCT BECAUSE OF “CLIMATE CHANGE” turns out to be alive and well.
Archive for 2014
September 9, 2014
THE S.S. UNITED STATES: The Fight to Save America’s Last Great Ocean Liner.
AT AMAZON, new fall deals on Men’s Watches.
AMERICA’S NEW CLASS SYSTEM: My USA Today column this week is about Joel Kotkin’s important new book, The New Class Conflict.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: In D.C., a 13-year-old piano prodigy is treated as a truant instead of a star student. “Deciding that a truancy prosecution over piano competitions was ridiculous, Avery’s parents withdrew her from Deal. And this year, instead of touring the world as a first-class representative of D.C. public schools’ finest, she is going as a home-schooler.”
All is proceeding as I have foreseen.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: The Asteroid-Mining Race Begins.
SOME PEOPLE REALLY DON’T LIKE COMPETITION: New Orleans Cab Company Owner Calls Uber A ‘Cyber-Terrorist Group.’
OPERATION I-TOLD-YOU-SO: What Is Mitt Romney Up To?
My reading of Romney is that he’s a man who doesn’t lack an ego, but that he has far less ego than most politicians. I think he actually is interested in public service, and that right now he’s been casting about—after over a year of laying low and thinking, and recovering from his defeat—for the role he can take on to best serve the nation and even the world.
If that’s grandiose, so be it. And the conclusion I think he may have come to is that he can serve as a guide to the party and as a symbol of solidity, a “what might have been” for the American people to compare and contrast to Obama and other Democrats. As such, he can remind them that the current decline and chaos weren’t inevitable, and needn’t be inevitable for the future, if they are smarter next time and elect a more conservative candidate than Hillary Clinton or whoever will be the Democratic nominee.
Will it work? I don’t know. But I think that’s his plan, and so far he’s executed quite nicely.
Plus, it’s always fun to say “I told you so.”
READER BOOK PLUG: From Paul Duffau, Trail Of Second Chances.
HAVEN’T THE JEWISH PEOPLE SUFFERED ENOUGH? Gwyneth Paltrow Converting To Judaism, Says She’s ‘The Original Jewish Mother.’
SAVE YOUR TIME, LAURA — OBAMA’S TAKING CARE OF THAT ALL ON HIS OWN: Laura Bush’s latest role: Booster of her husband’s legacy.
SPENGLER: 14 Million Refugees Make the Levant Unmanageable. “There are always lunatics lurking in the crevices of Muslim politics prepared to proclaim a new Caliphate; there isn’t always a recruiting pool in the form of nearly 14 million displaced people. . . . When people have nothing to lose, they fight to the death and inflict horrors on others. That is what civilizational decline looks like in real time. The roots of the crisis were visible four years ago before the so-called Arab Spring beguiled the foreign policy wonks. The Arab states are failed states, except for the few with enough hydrocarbons to subsidize every facet of economic life. Egypt lives on a$15 billion annual subsidy from the Gulf states, and if that persists, will remain stable if not quite prosperous. Syria is a ruin, along with large parts of Iraq. The lives of tens of millions of people were fragile before the fighting broke out (30% of Syrians lived on less than $1.60 a day), and now they are utterly ruined. The hordes of combatants displace more people, and these joint the hordes, in a snowball effect. That’s what drove the 30 Years War of 1618-1648, and that’s what’s driving the war in the Levant. When I wrote in 2011 that Islam was dying, this was precisely what I forecast. You can’t unscramble this egg.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: In America, student debt now exceeds $1.2 trillion—about 7% of the country’s GDP.
JOURNALISM: “The gaming press wants gamers to believe that the Zoe Quinn story is about her sex life and misogyny in the gaming community, but in reality they are trying to shield themselves from accusations of journalistic impropriety that they don’t want to address.”
Also: “If I were a video games journalist, I’d be terrified right now, because I’d know that, for all my shrill protestations, sneering and arrogance, my industry had just entered a death spiral entirely of its own making. . . . No longer can sites such as Polygon or Kotaku, owned by Left-wing east coast media blog Gawker, claim to represent young, affluent male gaming enthusiasts – or indeed any of the other gamers sympathetic to the #GamerGate movement, which seeks to expose corruption in journalism.”
IT’S COME TO THIS: Harry Reid is mad that Republicans didn’t obstruct his bill.
THE HILL: Support For ObamaCare Continues To Fall.
AMERICA’S NEW CLASS SYSTEM: My USA Today column this week is about Joel Kotkin’s important new book, The New Class Conflict.
IN THE MAIL: From Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
Also, today only at Amazon: 45% off New Balance Running Shoes. For men, women, and kids.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 488.
IS THERE ANYTHING OBAMA HAS GOTTEN RIGHT? Marc Thiessen: George W. Bush was right about Iraq pullout. “In the summer of 2007, Bush warned of the dire consequence of pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq against the advice of our commanders on the ground.”
MEGAN MCARDLE: The Shallowness Of Lefty Self-Congratulation.
I am reluctant to make sweeping generalizations about a very large group of people based on a single study. But I am reluctant indeed when it turns out those generalizations are based on 85 drunk people and 75 psychology students.1
When highlighting studies like this, you should probably describe it with words like “suggestive,” “possible” and “may.” Waldman writes as if we’re dealing with Proven Scientific Fact, rather than something that a small team of researchers found in three small groups.
This is particularly vital when you’re dealing with research about conservatives, done by a profession that skews liberal by something like 200 to 1. The unstated assumptions of the group are bound to slip into things such as the questions they ask and how tempted they are to go back and look for a “mistake” when they get an answer suggesting that liberals are close-minded barbarians.
To see what I mean, consider the recent tradition of psychology articles showing that conservatives are authoritarian while liberals are not. Jeremy Frimer, who runs the Moral Psychology Lab at the University of Winnipeg, realized that who you asked those questions about might matter — did conservatives defer to the military because they were authoritarians or because the military is considered a “conservative” institution? And, lo and behold, when he asked similar questions about, say, environmentalists, the liberals were the authoritarians.2
It also matters because social psychology, and social science more generally, has a replication problem, which was recently covered in a very good article at Slate. Take the infamous “paradox of choice” study that found that offering a few kinds of jam samples at a supermarket was more likely to result in a purchase than offering dozens of samples. A team of researchers that tried to replicate this — and other famous experiments — completely failed. When they did a survey of the literature, they found that the array of choices generally had no important effect either way. The replication problem is bad enough in one subfield of social psychology that Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman wrote an open letter to its practitioners, urging them to institute tougher replication protocols before their field implodes. A recent issue of Social Psychology was devoted to trying to replicate famous studies in the discipline; more than a third failed replication.
That’s okay. The purpose of deploying these studies is to make the useful idiots feel good about themselves.