HUH. I THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED. Federal Lab Forced To Close After ‘Disturbing’ Data Manipulation.
Archive for 2016
June 26, 2016
BOY, ABC SURE GOES OUT OF ITS WAY TO OBSCURE THE SOURCE OF THIS PROBLEM: Risk of FGM Increasing for Women in the U.S., says CDC.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Oberlin College Offers Buyouts To Faculty And Staff.
If only someone had seen this coming.
TWO DAYS AFTER BREXIT VOTE, Spanish Conservatives Gain In Election.
MARK RIPPETOE: Another Example Of Why You Should Never Lift Weights Alone. “My questions for the Westchester County authorities investigating this incident: What weight was loaded on the barbell when Dr. Ashe was found, and how much was Dr. Ashe actually capable of benching? Somebody knows these numbers. If, for example, he was a 225-pound bencher and 405 was on the bar, this suggests either a critical lapse in judgement, or a different explanation for the unfortunate choice of the attempted weight. The folks in the Dobbs Ferry Police Department would do well to analyze their crime scene evidence with this in mind.”
THIS SEEMS LIKE SOMETHING IOWAHAWK WOULD DO: Let It Burn: How Quickly Can We Drive Through a Tank of Gas?
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Britain’s forgotten voters — and ours.
THE LAST REAL PACKARD: On this date in 1956, Detroit built the last Packard that was actually designed by Packard. “It’s always sad when a carmaker dies, and we never wish for that to happen. Not even for Mitsubishi.”
QUOTE OF THE DAY:
In many ways, members of the global professional class have started to identify more with each other than they have with the fellow residents of their own countries. Witness the emotional meltdown many American journalists have been having over Brexit.
—“‘Citizens of the World’? Nice Thought, But …”, Megan McArdle, Bloomberg View.
LAYERS OF EDITORS AND FACT-CHECKERS: BBC Swallows “Petition For Second Brexit Referendum” Prank from 4Chan and thinks it’s real.
DISGRACED U.N. LEADER JOHN ASHE DIED IN WEIGHTLIFTING ACCIDENT, MEDICAL EXAMINER RULES.
Flashback: The long, strange saga of Harry Reid and the exercise band.
As the conspiracy theories regarding Ashe start to flow, Mark Rippetoe writes that whatever happened, his death is “Another Example of Why You Should Never Lift Weights Alone.”
IT’S THE 21ST CENTURY. GARAGE-DOOR OPENERS SHOULD BE COOL. This Is One Seriously Cool Garage-Door Opener. Seriously. The battery backup for power outages is a good feature, though other garage door openers already on the market have that.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Britain’s forgotten voters — and ours.
REVOLUTIONS ALWAYS DEVOUR THEMSELVES EVENTUALLY: For Some Gays, San Francisco Pride Parade Too ‘Straight, White, and Corporate.’
LIFE IN OBAMA’S AMERICA: Idaho Federal Prosecutor Wendy J. Olson Threatens Critics.
The prosecutor — a prosecutor backed by the might of the federal government — is not just condemning “threatening statements.” She is equally condemning “inflammatory” statements “about the perpetrators or the crime,” as well as “the spread of false information.”
There is no First Amendment exception for “inflammatory” statements; and even false statements about matters of public concern, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, are an inevitable part of free debate. While deliberate lies about particular people may lead to criminal punishment in some states that have carefully crafted “criminal libel” statutes, that would be under state law, not federal law; and though Idaho still has an old criminal libel law, it is almost never used, and is likely unconstitutionally drafted given modern First Amendment standards. Moreover, honest mistakes on matters of public concern are often constitutionally protected, especially against criminal punishment.
The federal prosecutor surely knows how to speak carefully and precisely about what very limited sorts of speech she can prosecute. Yet she chose to equally threaten federal prosecution not just for the punishable true threats — or for the deliberate lies that may be punished under state but not federal law — but also for an unspecified range of “inflammatory … statements about the perpetrators or the crime itself,” as well as for “the spread of false information” (with no limitation on the spread of deliberate lies). It looks like an attempt to chill constitutionally protected speech through the threat of federal prosecution.
For this sort of thing she should be removed from office and disbarred. There should be zero tolerance for abuse of power. But, remember, Obama’s election in 2008 was marked by prosecutors threatening people who said negative things about him. So I rather doubt there will be much in the way of consequences, though perhaps someone will complain to the Idaho bar.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Elon Musk’s new company is developing robots to do your housework.
THEY’RE DESPERATE FOR RELIEF, so they’re ingesting worms. “The story describes a burgeoning movement made up of patients who infect themselves with parasitic worms, or helminths, in an attempt to cure ailments ranging from allergies and inflammatory bowels to Crohn’s disease and multiple sclerosis. Proponents swear by it, building on the theory that modern life is too antiseptic and that these parasites can help the body’s natural defenses.”
PURGATORY IS READING THE NEW YORK TIMES. In “Hell Is Other Britons,” Tom Whyman, a 27-year old “lecturer in philosophy at the University of Essex” illustrates why he’s far more comfortable around abstract concepts than his fellow imperfect flesh-and-blood citizens:
My parents’ house stands in the middle of a 1980s housing development of suburban ugliness, all detached red-brick blocks and generously proportioned driveways. There is not supposed to be nature in the suburbs, but in Alresford (pronounced AWLS-fud) nature is still powerful — every year the grass at the top of the road will suddenly grow tall, and fill with wildflowers, hedgehogs, little birds of delirious and unusual colors. Every morning the birds wake you up at 4 with a chorus of hoots and trills.
But no sooner has nature started to assert itself than the grass gets cut back and the mornings return to being silent and still. Alresford becomes human again. Human in a normal, provincial English way, in a place where people own homes, save for pensions and vote to leave the European Union — as 55 percent of the population of Hampshire county did on Thursday.
It sounds like a perfectly pleasant sleepy little British town, and looks that way in Google’s cache of photos. And Whyman wouldn’t lose much sleep if ISIS or a reconstituted Luftwaffe bombed it back to the stone age:
Sometimes, in the summer, I walk up the hill and I look out over it, the housing development on one side and the Georgian town center at the bottom of the other, and I have this fantasy image of how it once was, before Alresford was founded in the Middle Ages, when all of this was untouched: just the wild, untamed nature that it keeps wanting to turn itself back into. And sometimes, I think: I wish that would happen. Because all that humans have ever done here is ruin things.
Alresford is my personal hell.
Here’s more from Whyman’s New York Times-approved cri de cœur:
Since my late teens, every effort I have ever exerted has been with the intention of escaping Alresford. And yet, I am an early-career academic and so I am forced to move back, every summer, to live with my parents because I cannot afford to pay rent elsewhere after my temporary teaching contract ends. Then, sometimes, I think: What if I’m actually secretly comfortable here? What if I have chosen the security of death in Alresford over the risks of life elsewhere? What if I am in fact fully in the clutches of Alresfordism?
As Christopher Caldwell of the Weekly Standard wrote of America’s leftists, “At some point, Democrats became the party of small-town people who think they’re too big for their small towns:”
It is hard to say how it happened: Perhaps it is that Republicans’ primary appeal is to something small-towners take for granted (tradition), while Democrats’ is to something that small-towners are condemned for lacking (diversity). Both appeals can be effective, but it is only the latter that incites people to repudiate the culture in which they grew up. Perhaps it is that at universities–through which pass all small-town people aiming to climb to a higher social class–Democratic party affiliation is the sine qua non of being taken for a serious, non-hayseed human being.
For these people, liberalism is not a belief at all. No, it’s something more important: a badge of certain social aspirations. That is why the laments of the small-town leftists get voiced with such intemperance and desperation. As if those who voice them are fighting off the nagging thought: If the Republicans aren’t particularly evil, then maybe I’m not particularly special.
Just substitute the countries, and replace “Republicans” with “British voters in both parties who chose Leave.” Caldwell’s observation remains true for how the majority of Brits who wished to remain in the warm safe bureaucratic banana-measuring hands of Belgium stare down their noses their fellow countrymen who seek to regain freedom and independence.
During the early days of World War II, an event that one way or another would “fundamentally transform” England, George Orwell, an avowed socialist who was prepared to do plenty of fundamental transforming as well, took stock of his fellow Brits:
When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning – all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle?
But talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers, and you are brought back to the same thought. Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
Would that today’s socialists maintain the same humanity regarding their fellow citizens.
READER BOOK RECOMMENDATION: Reader Bruce Webster recommends The Kidnap Plot (The Extraordinary Journeys of Clockwork Charlie).
FASTER, PLEASE: 3 Ways to Build an Artificial Kidney.