Archive for 2018
August 28, 2018
Say, whatever happened to the Keith Ellison domestic violence story?
WATCH PEOPLE PIVOT FROM “FREE SPEECH IS A TOOL OF WHITE SUPREMACY AND THE PATRIARCHY” TO “FREE SPEECH IS AT THE CORE OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT” IN 5, 4, 3, 2 . . . Trump aide says president weighing regulations on Google search engine that he considers ‘rigged.’
HMM: Tesla’s ‘Affordable’ Model 3 Costs a Bundle to Insure, Study Claims.
The contributing factors to the brand’s above-average insurance rate are twofold. For whatever reason, Tesla models are subject to an abnormally high number of incidents that result in insurance claims, but they’re also more expensive to fix. “Teslas get into a lot of crashes and are costly to repair afterward,” explained Russ Rader, spokesman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which operates as the HLDI’s parent organization. “Consumers will pay for that when they go to insure one.”
For the Model 3, the result is tragically high premiums. A recent study conducted by Gabi Personal Insurance Agency Inc. and posted by Automotive News shows the EV’s average insurance cost across 150 ZIP codes is $2,814 per year. That’s $35 less than the cost of insuring a Porsche 911, using the same metrics.
“In the last month we had more and more people coming in with Model 3, and they were all complaining about high insurance costs,” said Gabi CEO Hanno Fichtner. “We found cheaper deals for them, but not as cheap as we thought they would be. We even had customers tell us they are returning their Model 3 due to the high running costs.”
I wonder if this will change when Tesla starts producing lower-spec, less-expensive Model 3s in quantity.
CHICAGO 1968: THE NIGHT THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY DIED: “Fifty years ago tonight, a great American political party was murdered by its own children and closest friends.”
The media had shown sympathy earlier with rioters in places such as Watts and Detroit and Washington, D.C., but those rioters had been black, poor, and arguably living under the yoke of white racism. This was America’s privileged white youth attacking the police and shouting “f*** the pigs,” and even threatening to put LSD in the Chicago water supply. But in the glare of TV camera lights as liberals watched their youngsters being beaten by working-class cops, a new media paradigm was born. Left-wing rioters, black or white, urban poor or Harvard grads, became “protesters”; their violence would be downplayed or ignored while underscoring the justice of their cause. At the same time, the police now became the villains of any confrontation, to be portrayed as having a tendency to overact violently to challenges to their authority — and to the oppressive system they defend. A direct ideological line runs from that night to Black Lives Matter a half century later.
Read the whole thing.
RECOVERY SUMMER, MEET RECOVERY AUTUMN: Inventory Surge Signals Good Start For Q3 GDP.
THIS STORY WAS PRETTY MUCH TAILOR-MADE TO CATCH MY INTEREST: This Robot Will Hunt Lionfish to Save Coral Reefs.
SMART: Majority of Americans Agree with Trump’s Decision to Revoke Brennan’s Security Clearance. “59 percent felt Brennan should have lost his security clearance and 64 percent said Comey should lose his.”
CHECK YOUR SOURCES: CNN’s Cohen-Russia-Trump Tower Meeting Story Just Blew Up In Their Faces.
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN AGENCIES SUCH CESSPITS OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT? NYCHA employees accused of using projects for wild orgies. “The sexcapades are the latest black eye for the embattled Housing Authority. Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed to pay as much as $2.2 billion over the next decade to settle charges that it mounted a years-long cover-up to hide its failure to conduct required lead inspections, potentially left hundreds of kids exposed to the toxic substance, and the crumbling and toxic conditions in its hundreds of complexes scattered around the city.”
Well, I guess they were too busy doing each other to do their jobs.
FROM SHIRTSLEEVES TO HAIR SHIRTS IN THREE GENERATIONS: Actress and NFL Scion Kate Mara Comes Out in Favor of NFL Anthem Protests.
(Classical reference in headline.)
STIFF COMPETITION: Is This the Stupidest Book Ever Written About Socialism? “The left-wing hosts of the insanely popular Chapo Trap House podcast have no idea what they’re talking about, and their glib new book proves it.”
Bill Scher:
The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts and Reason lives up to its ironic title. The freshly published polemic is co-authored by the hosts—Felix Biederman, Matt Christman, Brendan James, Will Menaker and Virgil Texas—of the socialist, satirical podcast Chapo Trap House. The podcast rakes in six figures a month from more than 20,000 Patreon subscribers. It built its following on withering takedowns of insufficiently leftist liberals who serve up “thin, flavorless gruel” in the dying news media.
The book, which aims to expand the reach of “the Chapo Way,” begins with a self-consciously over-the-top sales pitch. By imbibing the authors’ words, “you’ll become an initiate in the Chapo Mindset and take control of the neurons that govern your weak, fragile emotions.” Apparently, we should take our “Ironic Left” cult leaders seriously, but not always literally.
Yet by the end of the book, it’s hard to escape the nagging feeling that Chapo—the podcast and the book—is, at bottom, an actual, unironic infomercial scheme. They make bank by selling you a candy-coated version of socialism, one that may offend real socialists even more than liberal gruel-peddlers like myself.
Ouch.
HOUSTON CHRONICLE: Robert “Beto” O’Rourke arrested in 1990s for burglary and DWI.
THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED — UNTIL SOMEBODY CHECKED: Researchers replicate just 13 of 21 social science experiments published in top journals.
The “reproducibility crisis” in science is erupting again. A research project attempted to replicate 21 social science experiments published between 2010 and 2015 in the prestigious journals Science and Nature. Only 13 replication attempts succeeded. The other eight were duds, with no observed effects consistent with the original findings.
The failures do not necessarily mean the original results were erroneous, as the authors of this latest replication effort note. There could have been gremlins of some type in the second try. But the authors also noted that even in the replications that succeeded, the observed effect was on average only about 75 percent as large as the first time around.
The researchers conclude that there is a systematic bias in published findings, “partly due to false positives and partly due to the overestimated effect sizes of true positives.”
The two-year replication project, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, is likely to roil research institutions and scientific journals that in recent years have grappled with reproducibility issues. The ability to replicate a finding is fundamental to experimental science. This latest project provides a reminder that the publication of a finding in a peer-reviewed journal does not make it true.
Scientists are under attack from ideologues, special interests and conspiracy theorists who reject the evidence-based consensus in such areas as evolution, climate change, the safety of vaccines and cancer treatment. The replication crisis is different; it is largely an in-house problem with experimental design and statistical analysis.
Oh, I think the two are related.
IF IT MOVES, TAX IT. IF IT DOESN’T MOVE, TAX IT. IF IT USED TO MOVE, TAX IT. Is California Planning A Statewide Sugar Tax?
In June, lawmakers in Sacramento, with the support of Gov. Brown, passed legislation, Assembly Bill 1838, that bans cities and counties from imposing any additional taxes on sodas and other sugary drinks for the next 12 years (the cities with taxes already in place are allowed keep them).
This would be joyous news if the motivation behind the bill had been to protect consumer sovereignty and personal freedom. Alas, the lawmakers who supported the bill did so for purely strategic reasons: they knew that if they didn’t pass the ban, a voter initiative coming this fall could have made it much harder to local governments to raise taxes in the future. In exchange for the soda tax ban, the voter initiative was withdrawn.
The new law, however, leaves open the possibility of establishing a statewide sugar tax, and many California legislators appear supportive of the idea. The detrimental economic impact of such a measure would be substantial, pushing Californians’ tax burden (already one of the highest in the nation) to new heights.
At least they haven’t put a tax on thingy.
IN THE MAIL: How to Cook Everything The Basics: All You Need to Make Great Food–With 1,000 Photos.
Plus, Today’s Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
THIS SEEMS LIKE A BIG DEAL: Suspended Pentagon Whistleblower Says FBI’s Russia Probe Was ‘All a Set-Up.’ “Absolute, ironclad document trail” shows that Stefan Halper “foisted the Russians on the Trump officials.”
IT TOOK NEARLY A FULL DAY TO ADMIT THIS: Twitter Reverses Ruling After Backlash, Concedes It’s Against The Rules To Wish Death Upon Dana Loesch’s Children.
Going forward, maybe a little clarity from Twitter HQ.
I REMEMBER WHEN THE SMARTEST PRESIDENT IN THE WORLD TOLD US THAT WE COULDN’T DRILL OUR WAY OUT OF OUR ENERGY PROBLEMS, AND THAT HIGH-PAYING BLUE COLLAR JOBS WEREN’T COMING BACK: 22-year-olds are making six figures amid a West Texas oilfield boom.