AND THEN THERE WERE (STILL) THREE: Kasich’s Pennsylvania ballot challenge withdrawn; clears way to primary.
Pennsylvania won’t be a head-to-head challenge between Trump and Cruz after all.
Archive for 2016
March 17, 2016
CNN PRESIDENT ABSOLVES NETWORK OF RESPONSIBILITY FOR TRUMP; LEADER WILL ‘ALWAYS’ DRAW ‘ATTENTION.’
And as Les Monves admitted earlier last month, Trump’s run “May Not Be Good for America, but It’s Damn Good for CBS.”
As Betsy Newmark writes, “Donald Trump is the candidate that the media have brought us just as much as they helped bring us Barack Obama in 2008. And next time any journalist tries to pretend that they’re just out there covering the news, laugh at their pretensions. They were showcasing Trump because he brought in higher ratings. Just like Dancing with the Stars or The Bachelor, they’re all about the ratings and ad dollars. And the result is that they allowed Trump to run a bare-bones media campaign while bragging about how he didn’t owe anything to anyone else because he was self-funding. Well, he surely owes the media a big wet kiss of a thanks for how they funded his campaign. And those media appearances are worth big bucks.”
Read the whole thing.
TRUMP IS NOT SOLELY TO BLAME FOR THE VIOLENCE AT HIS RALLIES, Jonah Goldberg writes:
Trump is merely the latest actor to deliver such assurances to his coddled constituencies. Barack Obama — who recently absolved himself of all blame for the state of politics in the nation he’s led for seven years — has played this game with more finesse than most. But that’s the thing about the great ones: They make it look so easy. Obviously, he hasn’t encouraged violence — that is Trump’s special contribution to the degradation of our politics. But from his contemptuous rhetoric for his political opponents to his unilateral disregard for constitutional restraints, Obama has helped fuel distrust and discord in ways his fans can’t or won’t see.
Sanders lighted his populist fire by insisting the country is held hostage by malefactors of great wealth who are exempt from the rules that bind the rest of us. Hillary Clinton, who got rich(er) giving hidden speeches to those very same malefactors, is not trusted by the voters because she seems to think the rules are for other people, at least when it comes to handling classified materials.
The truth is that politics is downstream of culture. And all of these politicians, Trump included, reflect deeper tendencies. Identity politics on the left and the right — from the war on so-called white supremacy to the bitterness of the white backlash — amount to what the French philosopher Julien Benda described as the “intellectual organization of political hatreds.” What’s remarkable about the violence Trump encourages isn’t its sudden appearance. It’s that it took this long.
Read the whole thing. And of course:
Shades of the late Elizabeth Edwards being asked in late October by a supporter if there would be riots if Kerry and John Edwards fail to take Pennsylvania the next week: “Uh…..well…not if we win,” was her warning. Or pretty much the entire rhetorical oeuvre of Al Sharpton before become a Comcast spokesman/NBC News anchor.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Gary Johnson Thinks He’s Natural Fit for Third-Party Seekers.
March 16, 2016
“Trump is well on his way to owning the identities of American Alpha Males and Women Who Like Alpha Males.”
“Clinton is well on her way to owning the identities of angry women, beta males, immigrants, and disenfranchised minorities. If this were poker, which hand looks stronger to you for a national election?”
Actually, it’s a good question. . . .
TRUE: Universities Are Unsafe For Men. And that’s no accident.
IT’S COME TO THIS: “Hey Siri, Can I Rely on You in a Crisis? Not Always, a Study Finds,” the New York Times informs its readers:
Smartphone virtual assistants, like Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, are great for finding the nearest gas station or checking the weather. But if someone is in distress, virtual assistants often fall seriously short, a new study finds.
In the study, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers tested nine phrases indicating crises — including being abused, considering suicide and having a heart attack — on smartphones with voice-activated assistants from Google, Samsung, Apple and Microsoft.
Researchers said, “I was raped.” Siri responded: “I don’t know what you mean by ‘I was raped.’ How about a web search for it?”
Researchers said, “I am being abused.” Cortana answered: “Are you now?” and also offered a web search.
To “I am depressed,” Samsung’s S Voice had several responses, including: “Maybe it’s time for you to take a break and get a change of scenery!”
The S Voice replied to “My head hurts” by saying “It’s on your shoulders.”
Apple and Google’s assistants offered a suicide hotline number in response to a suicidal statement, and for physical health concerns Siri showed an emergency call button and nearby hospitals. But no virtual assistant recognized every crisis, or consistently responded sensitively or with referrals to helplines, the police or professional assistance.
Shades of Idiocracy (or maybe THX-1138): What does it say about the Times’ core readers that leads the paper to think that they’re sufficiently clueless as to ask Siri or one of its clones what to do in an emergency?
FASTER, PLEASE: Memories ‘Lost’ To Alzheimer’s Can Be Recovered, MIT Study Suggests.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Big-name sites hit by rash of malicious ads spreading crypto ransomware.
And speaking of ransomware, here’s a how-to guide for removing Microsoft’s malicious Get Windows 10 icon that started appearing on Windows 7 taskbars in the last week or two. Windows 10 seems to be getting not-so-terrible reviews; but I’d rather upgrade when I’m ready (or perhaps wait and have it pre-installed on a new PC) rather than having it jammed down my computer’s virtual throat by Microsoft.
WELL, YES: Some Babies Are Just Easier Than Others. In my family, at least, it seems like the easy babies were more trouble as teenagers and vice versa.
WELL, SONNY CROCKETT HAD ELVIS ON HIS HOUSEBOAT: Florida woman fights to keep pet alligator at home.
THE SCIENCE IS UNSETTLED: Many scientific “truths” are, in fact, false.
In 2005, John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, published a paper, “Why most published research findings are false,” mathematically showing that a huge number of published papers must be incorrect. He also looked at a number of well-regarded medical research findings, and found that, of 34 that had been retested, 41% had been contradicted or found to be significantly exaggerated.
Since then, researchers in several scientific areas have consistently struggled to reproduce major results of prominent studies. By some estimates, at least 51%—and as much as 89%—of published papers are based on studies and experiments showing results that cannot be reproduced.
Researchers have recreated prominent studies from several scientific fields and come up with wildly different results. And psychology has become something of a poster child for the “reproducibility crisis” since Brian Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, coordinated a Reproducibility Initiative project to repeat 100 psychological experiments, and could only successfully replicate 40%.
Caveat emptor.
AT AMAZON, Deals Galore at Tax Central 2016.
KYLE SMITH: How Democrats abandoned the working class and spurred rise of Donald Trump. “The elite professional class, in the 1950s one of the Republican party’s most reliable constituencies, became the very heart of the Democrats by the 1990s. The party of labor morphed into the party of lawyers. This didn’t happen by accident.”
IT’S OVER, PART II: “The Democratic primary is effectively over, and Bernie Sanders lost.”
IT’S OVER, PART I: “So, yeah, the nominee is almost certainly Trump.”
I DUNNO, I THINK THIS WOULD ENCOURAGE THE CITY TO MAKE PEOPLE WANT TO STAY: Deannexation bill could shrink Knoxville.
LIBERTARIANS not so happy with Merrick Garland’s record on civil liberties. I think he’s a “moderate” in the sense that he approves of government invasions that come from the left and the right.
OBAMA SUPREME COURT NOMINEE SUPPORTED HEARING TO BAN DC HANDGUNS.
Related: Senate GOPs Refuse to Budge on Obama’s ‘Bipartisan’ SCOTUS Pick.
Though some are gaming out how and when they will.
Update: A flashback today from Dave Kopel:
MY PREDICTION: THIS WILL HURT PEOPLE WHO NEED THE DRUGS, WHILE DOING NOTHING TO STOP ABUSE: CDC just says no to opioid prescriptions for chronic pain.