LEGISLATOR TO ANDREW CUOMO: ““You look at me, Mr. Governor, but you don’t see me. You see my black skin and a woman.”
Well, to be fair, that’s consistent with current Democratic Party doctrine.
Archive for 2017
August 9, 2017
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First it was arson, then it was crack, now it’s farm-fresh goat cheese.
Will the horror never end? Can Newark ever catch a break? The questions are implied in a New York Times piece this week headlined with a lament from one city resident that Whole Foods, which opened its Newark branch in late winter, is “not for us.” Newark’s population is only one-fourth white, and it seems obvious that the sentiment being expressed here, as well as the use of the word “gentrification,” are what in other contexts might be called “racial dog whistles.” The Times frets that it’s a “tense moment” and that development is happening “unevenly” in Newark, that only certain neighborhoods have benefited so far. No doubt this is correct. You might think a paper based in New York would be aware of another city where development occurred in an uneven pattern. The Upper West Side gentrified in the 1980s, Times Square in the mid 1990s, the Lower East Side in the late 1990s, Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in the 2000s. Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant are gentrifying as we speak. It takes a while to renovate a city. . . .
Let’s recap the slate of urban worries on the left. “Food deserts,” meaning a lack of availability of fresh food (or a lack of market demand for it), are bad. The opening of a gigantic store dedicated to selling healthy comestibles and produce, though, is also bad. When large corporations don’t invest in urban communities, that’s shameful. Investment? Also shameful. White flight by people moving to suburbs in the 1960s? Racist. Their grandchildren’s return? Also racist. Increased disorder that leads to garbage-strewn vacant lots, abandoned buildings, and declining property values is troubling, but increased order that leads to refilled buildings, cleaned-up neighborhoods, and rising rents is also troubling. Segregation? Bad. Integration? Bad. Such thoughts are not restricted to the fringe. Ta-Nehisi Coates, perhaps the most revered thinker on black life in America, advances them in his National Book Award winning memoir-cum-manifesto Between the World and Me. When white people started moving into his neighborhood, he felt this way: “I saw white parents pushing double-wide strollers down gentrifying Harlem boulevards in T-shirts and jogging shorts . . . their sons commanded entire sidewalks with their tricycles. The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs.”
Spike Lee compared the gentrification of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where he grew up, to genocide after someone called the police to complain about his musician father playing late at night. Cornel West equated gentrification with “land-grabbing” and “power-grabbing,” and in an interview with AlterNet he denounced Harlem as “49 percent vanilla” as white people have moved in to “leave precious and poor working people dangling with very little for a place to go.” In his very next comment, he deplored the large number of abandoned buildings in places like Philadelphia as a result of “neoliberal hegemony.”
Sounds racist to me. And what about the Statue of Liberty?
WHY ARE LEFTY INDUSTRIES SUCH CESSPITS OF DISCRIMINATION? Top journalist sues Time magazine for ‘sex and age discrimination.’
FASTER, PLEASE: Constructing full earth like conditions in Space with technology proven in the sixties. The sixties were a good decade for space technology.
JOURNALISM: WaPo’s Erik Wemple: New York Times guilty of large screw-up on climate-change story.
Correction: August 9, 2017
An article on Tuesday about a sweeping federal climate change report referred incorrectly to the availability of the report. While it was not widely publicized, the report was uploaded by the nonprofit Internet Archive in January; it was not first made public by The New York Times.That correction, which sits at the foot of the story, dutifully straightens out the record. Yet given the magnitude of the screw-up, it should sit atop the story, surrounded by red flashing lights and perhaps an audio track to instruct readers: Warning: This story once peddled a faulty and damaging premise.
That premise suggests that the Trump administration is stifling a damaging draft report — part of the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment — with dire warnings about climate change. . . .
As it detailed the conclusions of the draft report, the New York Times highlighted an equally scary prospect: That without the intervention of the New York Times, it might not have seen the light of day. . . .
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders blasted away in a statement: “It’s very disappointing, yet entirely predictable to learn The New York Times would write off a draft report without first verifying its contents with the White House or any of the federal agencies directly involved with climate and environmental policy. As others have pointed out – and The New York Times should have noticed – drafts of this report have been published and made widely available online months ago during the public comment period. The White House will withhold comment on any draft report before its scheduled release date.”
Next up, a big New York Times expose on “endangered feces,” followed by “never mind.”
PENNSYLVANIA TRUMP-HATER KILLS NEIGHBOR: “A man is under arrest, accused of killing his next door neighbor in West Goshen, Chester County. Police have charged Clayton Carter, 51, in the shooting death of G. Brooks Jennings. . . . Neighbors say Carter was a quarrelsome, argumentative man. Court records claim Carter had a history of disputes with multiple neighbors. His front yard was crowded with cars and hand lettered anti-Trump signs.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: SELF-DEFENSE SKILLS THAT WILL KEEP YOU ALIVE.
TYPICAL*: Google Women Staying Home After James Damore Manifesto Proved His Point.
*I kid, I kid.
TABLET HIRES GRETCHEN HAMMOND: The Chicago journalist, removed from her job after breaking the DykeMarch news, will start this month. “On June 24, Hammond broke the news that three women flying Pride flags festooned with the Star of David were forced by organizers to leave Chicago’s Dyke March—setting off a massive news story and a national conversation about anti-Semitism on the left. One week later, Gretchen was reassigned to nonjournalistic duties at the paper.”
As Iowahawk likes to say, “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.” It’s good to see Hammond land on her feet after violating the first rule of the DNC-MSM and actually breaking news – or at least news that damages the reputation of some faction of the left.
TRUMP IS TOTALLY OUT OF CONTROL: Canada sends soldiers to migrant border crossing.
SLATE STAR CODEX: Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences.
An article by Adam Grant called Differences Between Men And Women Are Vastly Exaggerated is going viral, thanks in part to a share by Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg. It’s a response to an email by a Google employee saying that he thought Google’s low female representation wasn’t a result of sexism, but a result of men and women having different interests long before either gender thinks about joining Google. Grant says that gender differences are small and irrelevant to the current issue. I disagree. . . .
Galpin investigated the percent of women in computer classes all around the world. Her number of 26% for the US is slightly higher than I usually hear, probably because it’s older (the percent women in computing has actually gone down over time!). The least sexist countries I can think of – Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, etc – all have somewhere around the same number (30%, 20%, and 24%, respectively). The most sexist countries do extremely well on this metric! The highest numbers on the chart are all from non-Western, non-First-World countries that do middling-to-poor on the Gender Development Index: Thailand with 55%, Guyana with 54%, Malaysia with 51%, Iran with 41%, Zimbabwe with 41%, and Mexico with 39%. Needless to say, Zimbabwe is not exactly famous for its deep commitment to gender equality.
Why is this? It’s a very common and well-replicated finding that the more progressive and gender-equal a country, the larger gender differences in personality of the sort Hyde found become. I agree this is a very strange finding, but it’s definitely true. . . .
In the year 1850, women were locked out of almost every major field, with a few exceptions like nursing and teaching. The average man of the day would have been equally confident that women were unfit for law, unfit for medicine, unfit for mathematics, unfit for linguistics, unfit for engineering, unfit for journalism, unfit for psychology, and unfit for biology. He would have had various sexist justifications – women shouldn’t be in law because it’s too competitive and high-pressure; women shouldn’t be in medicine because they’re fragile and will faint at the sight of blood; et cetera.
As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female.
And everyone says “Aha! I bet it’s because of negative stereotypes!”
This makes no sense. There were negative stereotypes about everything! Somebody has to explain why the equal and greater negative stereotypes against women in law, medicine, etc were completely powerless, yet for some reason the negative stereotypes in engineering were the ones that took hold and prevented women from succeeding there. . . . As long as you’re comparing some poor woman janitor to a male programmer making $80,000, you can talk about how it’s clearly sexism against women getting the good jobs. But once you take off the blinders and try to look at an even slightly bigger picture, you start wondering why veterinarians, who make even more money than that, are even more lopsidedly female than programmers are male. And then you start thinking that maybe you need some framework more sophisticated than the simple sexism theory in order to predict who’s doing all of these different jobs. And once you have that framework, maybe the sexism theory isn’t necessary any longer, and you can throw it out, and use the same theory to predict why women dominate veterinary medicine and psychology, why men dominate engineering and computer science, and why none of this has any relation at all to what fields that some sexist in the 1850s wanted to keep women out of.
Read the whole thing. And note this: “Silicon Valley was supposed to be better than this. It was supposed to be the life of the mind, where people who were interested in the mysteries of computation and cognition could get together and make the world better for everybody. Now it’s degenerated into this giant hatefest of everybody writing long screeds calling everyone else Nazis and demanding violence against them.”
YOU KNOW, THIS “SEX DIARY” FEATURE doesn’t make being single in New York sound all that appealing.
ALL OUR HOPES ARE PINNED ON YOU: Conservative Koch Brothers Are Secret Investors in ‘Wonder Woman.’
Though they might be the most reviled figures among Hollywood’s liberal crowd, the Koch brothers have been a silent investor in Warner Bros.’ slate of movies for four years.
Sources say Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch — who are worth a combined $96.2 billion and wield enormous power in political circles as major backers of right-wing politicians — took a significant stake valued at tens of millions of dollars in RatPac-Dune Entertainment. Now-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin brought the brothers in as investors as part of a $450 million deal struck in 2013 — a move that was never disclosed because RatPac-Dune is a private company.
Though Mnuchin is no longer involved with the slate financing facility, having recently put his stake into a blind trust in order to avoid a conflict of interest, the Koch brothers continue to be stakeholders in such films as Wonder Woman, Dunkirk and Steven Spielberg’s upcoming Ready Player One.
A RatPac spokesperson didn’t respond to a request. A spokesperson for Koch Industries says, “Charles Koch, David Koch and Koch Industries do not have any involvement with this investment.”
The brothers aren’t the only unlikely billionaires who have sunk money into the Warner Bros. deal. Sources say Mnuchin also brought in Bill Gates for an amount similar to the Koch brothers’.
What a nothingburger — which you wouldn’t get from Hollywood Reporter shrieking “KOCH BROTHERS” in the headline.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Five Things to Know About James Damore and Google.
POE’S LAW INSTANTIATED: Protests Break Out Over Proposed Blazing Saddles Showing. “We’ve got a culture of hate and anger running through our country now, and I’m not going to stop until I’ve destroyed all of it.”
BUT OF COURSE: White Males Barred From College’s Social Justice Journalism Grant.
White males deserve whatever happens to them, because justice.
WAIT, I THOUGHT GOOGLE BELIEVED IN DIVERSITY: Google Board Gave Six Times More Money to Democrats Than Republicans.
SAD: Overbrook bakery closes, blames city soda tax.
CC Orlando & Sons, which baked countless wedding and holy communion cakes and pastries since its founding on an Overbrook corner in 1948, closed after business Sunday.
The Orlando family cited not only the challenges of the baking business in these days of ubiquitous Dunkin’ Donuts shops and 24-hour supermarkets but the city’s 1.5-cent-per-ounce tax on sugary beverages and a recent rise in property assessments.
“The soda tax was the kill shot,” said Anthony Voci Jr., a grandson of Christopher Columbus “Chick” Orlando and now a lawyer in Philadelphia.
Why are Democrat-run cities so hostile to mom & pop businesses?
GOOGLE CEO: ‘People Must Be Free To Express Dissent.’
Just not, you know, free-free.
DRIVING THE 2017 Ford GT.