IN PUBLISHING AT LEAST IT WAS ALWAYS A KIND OF SCAM: The twilight of the ‘West Wing’ economy?
Archive for 2016
June 10, 2016
DON’T HATE YOURSELF BECAUSE YOU’RE HUMAN: Even Elephants Know Humans Exceptional.
BUT IT’S WHAT THE PHILOSOPHY ENCOURAGES! How one mother urged her daughters not to be —’that’ kind of feminist.
FRAUDULENT TIDE RISING: The Zombie Voter Apocalypse: California Refuses to Admit Its Voter Fraud Problem.
June 9, 2016
LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND SOCIAL SCIENCE: Study showing conservatives showed signs of ‘psychoticism’ turns out to be bunk.
The paper originally stated that, “In line with our expectations, P [for “Psychoticism”] (positively related to tough-mindedness and authoritarianism) is associated with social conservatism and conservative military attitudes.”
Surprise! The authors set out believing conservatives were authoritarian and they “proved” they were right. . . .
But hold on there, because it turns out the researchers completely mixed up their conclusions. “The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed,” the researchers wrote in the January 2016 copy of the American Journal of Political Science – four years after the study was published there.
“Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response,” the correction said. “Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.”
The researchers tried to downplay the significance of this error by arguing it didn’t matter what the conclusions were, they were only interested in the “magnitude of the relationship and the source of it.”
Yeah, okay.
The correction was first noticed by Retraction Watch on Tuesday, which regularly watches for these kinds of things.
This is yet another example of why you should take studies that perfectly prove a particular narrative with a grain of salt.
Biggest correction of the year? Maybe. Maybe not. The year is young still.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Is This Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy? If we’re living in a computer simulation, it’s important to keep it entertaining.
I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST ABOUT HER AND CHELSEA’S YOGA SCHEDULE: Emails in Clinton Probe Dealt With Planned Drone Strikes. “Law-enforcement and intelligence officials said State Department deliberations about the covert CIA drone program should have been conducted over a more secure government computer system designed to handle classified information.” Ya think?
ED MORRISSEY: It’s Time to Blame Obamacare for Losing So Many Full-Time Jobs.
UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF OFFICIAL MISCONDUCT? Judge Finds Prosecutors Withheld Evidence in Freddie Gray Officer Case.
DR. HELEN INTERVIEWS ED MORRISSEY: Video shot at this past December’s first Bullets and Bourbon event at Rough Creek Lodge in Texas; click here for details on how to attend this year.
Ed’s new book is Going Red: The Two Million Voters Who Will Elect the Next President–and How Conservatives Can Win Them, which he’ll be discussing in details at Bullets & Bourbon this coming December.
(Bumped.)
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Law Grad Responds To Fundraising Appeals From ‘Greedy’ Law School: ‘Go To Hell, You Parasite.’ “I’m not blaming you for the collapse of the legal job market. … I’m blaming you because you lied to us. You reported employment statistics — even back in 2007, when things were decidedly rosier — that led prospective students to believe that a huge portion of your graduates walked out of your hallowed halls and right into lucrative associate positions at fancy law firms. The reality, as we now know, is that you were counting everyone with any kind of job at all — from the guy working just a few hours per week at the 7-Eleven to the girl who took your perennial temporary position in the student affairs office — as employed, for the purposes of bragging about postgraduation employment.”
TODAY WOULD HAVE BEEN LES PAUL’S 101st BIRTHDAY: I was fortunate to interview Les in 2002 for both Vintage Guitar magazine (article sadly not online) and one of the first Blogcritics articles. At the time, he was getting ready to celebrate his next birthday with a blowout party at his regular haunt, the Iridium Club. After the interview, I borrowed a line from Woody Allen on the occasion of one of Groucho Marx’s later birthdays: I’m sorry I can’t attend your 87th birthday party — but I expect you to be at mine!
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Still in law school? Artificial intelligence begins to take over legal work.
EXCLUSIVELY ON AMAZON: The Segway Mini Pro.
KURT SCHLICHTER: Seven Awesome Conservative Lifehacks. I endorse them all, especially #2 and #7.
THE RETURN OF THE PRE-FAB FOUR: Four Reasons The Monkees Are Back on Top.
As bubblegum as they were (especially when compared to the Beatles, whose movies inspired the TV show), the Monkees had some great songs, courtesy of Brill Building songwriters such Gerry Goffin, Carole King, and Neil Diamond. Though as a kid, I was more a fan of Mike Nesmith’s pioneering country rock material, and the psychedelia the band dabbled in during their show’s second season, after they broke with Don Kirshner.
The return of the Monkees certainly makes sense from a timing perspective — since we currently have a president who’s the second coming of LBJ, we might as well have a soundtrack from that era as well.
WELL, NOW THAT THE BAREFOOT-RUNNING FAD IS OVER, I GUESS IT’S TIME: Meet the Ultra-Fat, Super-Cushioned Running Shoe. “Can fat-soled shoes that appear to have been constructed in part from marshmallows help you run better? The first study of a new kind of thickly cushioned running shoe suggests that this type of footwear may not make running any easier. But it probably also will not make it harder. And nobody knows yet whether these maximalist running shoes, as they’re called, are the answer to preventing the painful injuries that sideline as many as 90 percent of runners at some point.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The focus on extreme political correctness at Oberlin and other elite colleges risks obscuring what less privileged undergraduates are dealing with. “Nadeau was one of 15 students in a class I’d visited the previous day. When I asked how many of them would be graduating with debt, 13 of the students raised their hands. If few seemed concerned about ‘microaggressions,’ it’s perhaps because they were too busy trying to keep up with their coursework while earning money in their limited spare time. The very real aggression they experienced was their financial bind.”
A cynic might say that universities foment the race-gender stuff to distract students from what’s really going on.
IT’S COME TO THIS: NJ sixth-grader may be punished for insulting vegetarian:
A school district is allowed to discipline a sixth-grader for bullying because he made disparaging remarks about a classmate’s vegetarianism.
In a case that climbed up the legal ladder, the state Commissioner of Education’s office has ruled that the Montgomery school district can give detention to the student who told the other sixth-grader that “vegetarians are idiots.”
The case rose to the commissioner’s office because the student’s parent contested the district’s finding that the remarks about vegetarianism constituted bullying, a finding that was later backed by a state administrative law judge.
The case began on Oct. 30, 2014, when the two 11-year-old sixth-graders were having lunch in the cafeteria of Montgomery’s Lower Middle School. One of the students, identified in court papers as C.C., made the comments to another student, K.S., about his decision not to eat meat.
The investigation by the school’s anti-bullying specialist, guidance counselor Lesley Haas, found that C.C. told K.S. that “it’s not good to not eat meat” and that “he should eat meat because he’d be smarter and have bigger brains,” according to court papers.
C.C. also admitted that he told K.S. that “vegetarians are idiots.”
Haas concluded that C.C.’s comments met the legal definition of harassment, intimidation and bullying under state law because they targeted a student’s “distinguishing characteristic” and “substantially interfered with the rights of K.S. and had the effect of insulting or demeaning him.”
I wonder what would happen to the teacher in the Montgomery school district who assigns his students George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier from 1937:
The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. This last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it has perhaps been taken over en bloc from the old Liberal Party. In addition to this there is the horrible — the really disquieting — prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured ‘Socialists’, as who should say, ‘Red Indians’. He was probably right—the I.L.P. [Independent Labor Party] were holding their summer school at Letchworth. But the point is that to him, as an ordinary man, a crank meant a Socialist and a Socialist meant a crank. Any Socialist, he probably felt, could be counted on to have something eccentric about him. And some such notion seems to exist even among Socialists themselves. For instance, I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say ‘whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian’. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people. And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.
Trigger warning! Safe space violation! Double-plus ungood thoughtcrime! (To borrow from a later book by Orwell.)
FURRY FRIENDS: Meet the dogs of Amazon.
Plus, Father’s Day gifts.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Is This Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy? If we’re living in a computer simulation, it’s important to keep it entertaining.
IN THE DEPTHS OF THE DIGITAL AGE:
Every technological revolution coincides with changes in what it means to be a human being, in the kinds of psychological borders that divide the inner life from the world outside. Those changes in sensibility and consciousness never correspond exactly with changes in technology, and many aspects of today’s digital world were already taking shape before the age of the personal computer and the smartphone. But the digital revolution suddenly increased the rate and scale of change in almost everyone’s lives. Elizabeth Eisenstein’s exhilaratingly ambitious historical study The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) may overstate its argument that the press was the initiating cause of the great changes in culture in the early sixteenth century, but her book pointed to the many ways in which new means of communication can amplify slow, preexisting changes into an overwhelming, transforming wave.
In The Changing Nature of Man (1956), the Dutch psychiatrist J.H. van den Berg described four centuries of Western life, from Montaigne to Freud, as a long inward journey. The inner meanings of thought and actions became increasingly significant, while many outward acts became understood as symptoms of inner neuroses rooted in everyone’s distant childhood past; a cigar was no longer merely a cigar. A half-century later, at the start of the digital era in the late twentieth century, these changes reversed direction, and life became increasingly public, open, external, immediate, and exposed.
Virginia Woolf’s serious joke that “on or about December 1910 human character changed” was a hundred years premature. Human character changed on or about December 2010, when everyone, it seemed, started carrying a smartphone. For the first time, practically anyone could be found and intruded upon, not only at some fixed address at home or at work, but everywhere and at all times. Before this, everyone could expect, in the ordinary course of the day, some time at least in which to be left alone, unobserved, unsustained and unburdened by public or familial roles. That era now came to an end.
It’s an interesting article on the dangerous of an omnipresent medium, but the frequent references to Virginia Woolf are a dual-edged sword; the nihilistic Woolf was driven to madness and eventually suicide a half century before the World Wide Web was even conceived.
WHAT DEMOCRAT ISN’T RIGHT NOW? Is Fauxcahontas Auditioning for VP?
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Protein design provides a novel metabolic path for carbon fixation.