DON SURBER: The Comey Boomerang.
Archive for 2018
April 17, 2018
A REAL LIBERTARIAN MOMENT: HAPPY 75th BIRTHDAY TO UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LAW PROFESSOR RICHARD A. EPSTEIN*:
I am not the only person I know who affectionately refers to Richard as “the smartest person in the world,” and … well … we’re really not joking. There may be more lively minds out there somewhere. But I haven’t found them.
My alma mater, the University of Chicago Law School, will be celebrating Richard and his many accomplishments this weekend, and I hope to be on hand to help. I wrote this little recollection for the book the Law School is preparing for him:
It was late September, 1978—my first day of law school. Sure, I was a little scared. But mostly I was feeling confident … maybe even a little full of myself. I was a law student at the University of Chicago for goodness sake. What could be better?
I was going to defend the Constitution …
I was going to let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream …
And I had a gorgeous leather briefcase to prove it.
The only problem on that sunny Hyde Park morning was that I hadn’t really worked out the details on all that justice stuff. But I would. I knew I would. The combination of the University of Chicago and that briefcase really seemed unbeatable.
Then came Richard Epstein, speaking rapidly and in perfectly formed paragraphs. His subject was the grand old case of Pierson v. Post. He took great delight in showing that I couldn’t even settle on the just solution to a dispute over a dead fox (with or without my wonderful briefcase). As for defending the Constitution, that would need to be put on hold … maybe even indefinitely.
That morning was the last time I remember feeling confident about anything.
Incidentally, I still have the briefcase. It’s the only remnant of my pre-Epstein self.
*Yes, I know that Richard’s primary affiliation these days is with New York University. But as a University of Chicago alumna I refuse to acknowledge it.
OPEN THREAD: Enjoy!
SHE KEPT A COOL HEAD IN A CRISIS: Tammie Jo Shults, Southwest Pilot: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know.
AND YET IT’S WIDELY ACCEPTED AND EVEN ENCOURAGED: Discrimination in the name of campus diversity is not acceptable.
A SMALL MEASURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY: City suspends Jacksonville inspector over military flag flak: Mayor says inspector’s treatment of customer not acceptable behavior.
CALIFORNIA BILLIONAIRE STEYER’S CANDIDATE GUIDE PUSHES IMPEACHMENT AS GOOD POLITICS FOR MIDTERMS.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders’ Tax Day Message: We Want To Raise Your Taxes.
Between those headlines and their newfound honesty about wanting eliminate the Second Amendment and ban guns, as Steve has noted, all the Democrats have to do is not act crazy, and they can’t even manage that.
YOU PROBABLY THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: How Bad Is the Government’s Science? Policy makers often cite research to justify their rules, but many of those studies wouldn’t replicate.
Half the results published in peer-reviewed scientific journals are probably wrong. John Ioannidis, now a professor of medicine at Stanford, made headlines with that claim in 2005. Since then, researchers have confirmed his skepticism by trying—and often failing—to reproduce many influential journal articles. Slowly, scientists are internalizing the lessons of this irreproducibility crisis. But what about government, which has been making policy for generations without confirming that the science behind it is valid?
The biggest newsmakers in the crisis have involved psychology. Consider three findings: Striking a “power pose” can improve a person’s hormone balance and increase tolerance for risk. Invoking a negative stereotype, such as by telling black test-takers that an exam measures intelligence, can measurably degrade performance. Playing a sorting game that involves quickly pairing faces (black or white) with bad and good words (“happy” or “death”) can reveal “implicit bias” and predict discrimination.
All three of these results received massive media attention, but independent researchers haven’t been able to reproduce any of them properly. It seems as if there’s no end of “scientific truths” that just aren’t so. For a 2015 article in Science, independent researchers tried to replicate 100 prominent psychology studies and succeeded with only 39% of them.
Further from the spotlight is a lot of equally flawed research that is often more consequential. In 2012 the biotechnology firm Amgen tried to reproduce 53 “landmark” studies in hematology and oncology. The company could only replicate six. Are doctors basing serious decisions about medical treatment on the rest? Consider the financial costs, too. A 2015 study estimated that American researchers spend $28 billion a year on irreproducible preclinical research.
The chief cause of irreproducibility may be that scientists, whether wittingly or not, are fishing fake statistical significance out of noisy data. If a researcher looks long enough, he can turn any fluke correlation into a seemingly positive result. But other factors compound the problem: Scientists can make arbitrary decisions about research techniques, even changing procedures partway through an experiment. They are susceptible to groupthink and aren’t as skeptical of results that fit their biases. Negative results typically go into the file drawer. Exciting new findings are a route to tenure and fame, and there’s little reward for replication studies. . . .
A deeper issue is that the irreproducibility crisis has remained largely invisible to the general public and policy makers. That’s a problem given how often the government relies on supposed scientific findings to inform its decisions. Every year the U.S. adds more laws and regulations that could be based on nothing more than statistical manipulations.
All government agencies should review the scientific justifications for their policies and regulations to ensure they meet strict reproducibility standards. The economics research that steers decisions at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department needs to be rechecked. The social psychology that informs education policy could be entirely irreproducible. The whole discipline of climate science is a farrago of unreliable statistics, arbitrary research techniques and politicized groupthink.
The process of policy-making also needs to be overhauled. Federal agencies that give out research grants should immediately adopt the NIH’s new standards for funding reproducible research. Congress should pass a law—call it the Reproducible Science Reform Act—to ensure that all future regulations are based on similar high standards.
Each scientific discipline needs to accept responsibility for its share of the irreproducibility crisis and incorporate strict standards into its procedures.
There won’t be changes in behavior unless there are changes in incentives.
AND YOU THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Immune Cells We Thought Were ‘Useless’ Are Actually a Weapon Against Infections Like HIV.
- Now Starbucks is saying this was all contrary to their policy and, presumably, anyone who wants to sit in their shops and not order anything and use the bathrooms has the right to do so as long as they like.
- Starbucks, in other words, has just announced its stores are not stores primarily, but are now privately-funded shelters and bathroom facilities for the homeless. You don’t have to spend a slim dime in the store to sit as long as you please and use the bathrooms.
- That’ll be great for Starbucks’ business. Their yuppie douchebag clientele love the homeless in the abstract, but we’ll see how much they appreciate their coffee shops being jammed with them, close-up-like, occupying most tables and chairs.
- I don’t even want to defend Starbucks; I want them to have the full taste of Social Justice Warrior progressivism. If this is the company’s ideology, then they should live that ideology to the full.
Read the whole thing.
Live by Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, die by it as well. I don’t think Starbucks realizes what they’ve let themselves in for after years of leftwing virtue signaling. As Noah Rothman writes at Commentary in a post titled “Eating Their Own,” Starbucks’ management brought much of the ongoing fury on themselves via their own virtue signaling and speaking in SJW pieties:
Rosalind Brewer, Starbucks COO and a young African-American woman, called the incident a “teachable moment for all of us” and recommended “unconscious-bias” training for every Starbucks staffer. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson joined ABC’s “Good Morning America” to personally apologize to the men involved in this incident when protesters interrupted his appearance. “A whole lot of racism, a whole lot of crap, Starbucks coffee is anti-black,” they chanted. You can’t blame these demonstrators for noticing that the terms of engagement had broadened significantly.
* * * * * * * *
It is easy to see why this kind of activism is more satisfying than, say, going on about Chick-Fil-A’s Christian values. Despite a six-year-long liberal campaign dedicated to educating the public on the deliciousness of its products, the benefits and time off afforded its employees, and franchising opportunities in underserved urban markets, this chain just keeps on expanding. Imagine that. Routinely rebuffed assaults on a fortified position are exhausting. They are nowhere near as rewarding as a direct attack on a receptive target that yields a quick and gratifying victory. That explains why social justice activists are increasingly focused on exacting concessions from like minds: young adult novelists, liberal filmmakers, Hollywood executives, painters, restauranteurs, university professors and administrators, socially conscious corporations, and the left-of-center politicians who have folded these activists into their core constituencies.
These intramural feuds are transforming the progressive movement from within, but it’s not clear that the social-justice movement has secured anything other than the illusion of efficacy.
By appeasing the mob, Starbucks’ management have walked into a box canyon. Get woke, go broke? It’s going to be fascinating to see what happens next.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Seven Popular Films that Are Completely Overrated.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Mental Health Risk Higher For Transgender Youth.
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: When Was the Last Time a Boycott Worked? “Every time somebody on Fox News so much as farts, Media Matters is ready with a list of advertisers.”
SOUTHWEST PASSENGER DEAD AFTER MIDAIR EXPLOSION: “The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed the death of one flier in an afternoon press briefing, though they couldn’t immediately say exactly how that person died, or whether they were the woman who was partially sucked out of the window.”
IT MUST BE FISKING DAY AT INSTAPUNDIT! Here’s a great one looking at The New Yorker (have I reminded you how much more erudite and sophisticated than you they are? I will) and their incredible expose of the connection between a simple but tasty chicken sandwich, the knuckle-dragging cro-magnons who visit Chik-fil-A in between Klan rallies and how they are simply not welcome in New York? Have I reminded you how much more erudite and sophisticated than you The New Yorker is?
If you are reading this, you are nothing but a deplorable carbon-blob, clinging to your guns and bibles. And, apparently your chicken sandwiches, too.
YOU HAD ONE JOB: IRS payment site crashes hours before Tax Day filing deadline.
GUESS WHAT’S TRENDING?
Just think of the media as Democratic activists with bylines, and it all makes sense.
WELL, GOOD: Keytruda may prevent melanoma recurrence.