Archive for 2019
September 10, 2019
NICE: ‘This has gone way past a shirt’ | Bullied Florida boy’s UT shirt spreads message of kindness throughout the world. “It’s a simple reminder to be kind and a reminder that Vol Nation is unstoppable.” Well, except for the football team part, anyway. . . .
THE CERTIFICATES OF DEPOSIT ARE FABULOUS: Michigan Approves America’s First Gay Credit Union Because… Discrimination?
CHANGE (IT BACK): Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986.
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Drinking coffee linked to lower risk of gallstones.
Privacy International’s report identified five apps which shared data with Facebook. It focused on two apps in particular — Maya and MIA Fem — which the report said were sharing alarming amounts of detail.
Maya has over five million downloads on the Google Play Store, while MIA Fem has one million.
Both apps had Facebook’s Software Development Kit (SDK). SDK lets apps use certain features, for example allowing users to log in via Facebook, and helps the apps manage their data. In return, the apps feed data back to Facebook.
Even if you use and enjoy Facebook, using them as your login for third-party apps is an invitation for this kind of thing.
BUT OF COURSE: A Six-Year-Old Girl Asked for Green Army Women. The Toy Company Listened. “BMC has released concept sketches (see above) of what the green army women will look like. The poses will be familiar to anyone who has ever had army men, including a kneeling infantry soldier with rifle, standing infantry soldier with rifle, and a female officer holding a pair of binoculars and a pistol. Oh, and there’s also what kids will probably call a ‘bazookawoman,’ much as the figure’s male counterpart is invariably called the ‘bazookaman’.”
Couldn’t they have just said that some of the green army men identify as women?
Two moments in “Sticks & Stones” capture Chappelle’s qualms with cancel culture, which are a bit more nuanced than the cartoon being drawn by some critics. In the first, Chappelle relates, with frustration, an incident in which a standards and practices employee at Comedy Central told him that while it was okay to use the N-word, the word ‘faggot’ was off-limits. In the second, he talks about getting a drink with a trans fan of his after a set in San Francisco. She points out that it doesn’t really make sense to claim, as some have, that his infamous (and hilarious) R-Kelly bit normalized the singer’s behavior or somehow insulated him from criticism, and to then turn around and claim that jokes about trans people harm rather than ‘normalize’ them.
Whatever you think of these particular arguments, or the amount of time Chappelle spends complaining about being criticized (not how I would use such a perch!), he is simply pointing out that these rules about what he can get away with saying can sometimes seem arbitrary and inconsistent. And this is an argument that appears to have a great deal of resonance among Americans, blue and red alike. Chappelle’s would-be cancellers ignore it at their own peril.
Those who view any critique of cancel culture or political correctness as inherently bankrupt often derail conversations about it by claiming that PC is simply a synonym for “Being a decent person” — if you’re a decent person, in other words, you won’t get in trouble, and you’ll have nothing to worry about. But this isn’t how most of the country sees things, and it doesn’t accurately capture how the rules over who can get away with saying what are made, revised, and enforced.
Arbitrary rules are never instituted for the benefit of those who must follow them.
AT AMAZON, browse the Emergency Prep Checklist.
NO MENTION IN THIS STORY OF THE EXPLODING OBESITY RATE: 40-year study sees steady rise in pregnant women’s blood pressure.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Bionic ‘Feeling’ Leg Makes Walking Easier, Reduces Phantom Limb Pain.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. No Bueno, Beto: Americans Won’t Comply With Your Gun Ban.
#TIMESUP: Attorney Lisa Bloom Sold Herself To Harvey Weinstein As Someone Who Could Help Discredit His Accusers. “We can place an article re her becoming increasingly unglued, so that when someone Googles her this is what pops up and she’s discredited.”
Plus: “If you’re wondering why Lisa Bloom, daughter of Gloria Allred and champion of victim’s rights, was so eager to badmouth Weinstein’s accusers, recall the two had a business relationship. Weinstein’s company had optioned Bloom’s book about Trayvon Martin.”
LEADERS OF 46 MAJOR ORGANIZATIONS publish joint letter condemning Chinese authoritarianism in Hong Kong.
THE COBRA EFFECT: Lessons in Unintended Consequences.
In colonial India, Delhi suffered a proliferation of cobras, which was a problem very clearly in need of a solution given the sorts of things that cobras bring, like death. To cut the number of cobras slithering through the city, the local government placed a bounty on them. This seemed like a perfectly reasonable solution. The bounty was generous enough that many people took up cobra hunting, which led exactly to the desired outcome: The cobra population decreased. And that’s where things get interesting.
As the cobra population fell and it became harder to find cobras in the wild, people became rather entrepreneurial. They started raising cobras in their homes, which they would then kill to collect the bounty as before. This led to a new problem: Local authorities realized that there were very few cobras evident in the city, but they nonetheless were still paying the bounty to the same degree as before.
City officials did a reasonable thing: They canceled the bounty. In response, the people raising cobras in their homes also did a reasonable thing: They released all of their now-valueless cobras back into the streets. Who wants a house full of cobras?
In the end, Delhi had a bigger cobra problem after the bounty ended than it had before it began.
More often than not, “policy” is a dirty word.
THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: Liberal Supreme Court justices vote in lockstep, not the conservative justices.
Ever since Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement last year, commentators have prophesied that President Donald Trump’s replacement of that moderate jurist would lead to a conservative majority running roughshod over core liberal concerns. That’s why opposition to the milquetoast establishmentarian Brett Kavanaugh was so fierce, even before the 11th-hour sexual-assault allegations.
Justice Kavanaugh was supposed to have single-handedly overturned Roe v. Wade, but a funny thing happened on the road to apocalypse. Particularly in petition rejections and other procedural votes, Kavanaugh has demonstrated a pragmatic approach. And a term with few big controversies showed the liberals voting together much more than the conservatives.
There were 67 decisions after argument in the term that ended in June. In those cases, the four justices appointed by Democratic presidents voted the same way 51 times, while the five Republican appointees held tight 37 times. And of the 20 cases where the court split 5-4, only seven had the “expected” ideological divide of conservatives over liberals. By the end of the term, each conservative justice had joined the liberals as the deciding vote at least once.
That dynamic isn’t something that sprang up in the Trump era or with the court’s newest personnel. In the 2014-15 term, with Kennedy at the height of his “swing vote” power —the last full term before Justice Antonin Scalia’s death and resulting year-long vacancy — the four liberals stuck together in 55 of 66 cases, while the four conservatives (not counting Kennedy) voted as a unit in 39.
Well, there are no press plaudits for liberals who break right. Plus: “In sum, if lockstep voting and a results-driven court concern us, it isn’t the conservatives we should be worried about. While senators, journalists and academics love decrying the Roberts Five, it’s the (Ruth Bader) Ginsburg Four that represent a bloc geared toward progressive policy outcomes. To be sure, a reinvigorated conservative grouping may yet come to dominate the court — especially if Trump fills another seat — but it hasn’t happened yet.”
NBC: Trump fires John Bolton as national security adviser.
J.P. Freire of the Federalist tweets, “Press is about to go from ‘John Bolton is a radical warmonger who never should be permitted near the Oval Office’ to ‘This is a story of how a reasonable, respected expert was dismissed by a chaotic, megalomaniacal Administration, and whatever his critique is, we agree!’”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): From this CNN report: “Trump was irked by reports that he had faced internal pushback from Bolton over his decision to host leaders of the Taliban at Camp David, multiple people familiar with his frustration say. The President announced the plans for the meeting were canceled on Saturday.”
So basically, John Bolton was channeling Justin Amash. Or maybe the other way around?
PRAGER: The Equation That Explains Evil. “Good Intentions (GI) minus Wisdom (W) leads to Evil (E).”
There are other equations that result in (E), but this one is clearly the most pernicious.
IN THE MAIL: From Andrew Pollack and Max Eden, Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies That Created The Parkland Shooter and Endanger America’s Students.
THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT? Director Rian Johnson Brings ‘Knives Out’ Against Trump Voters. “If word doesn’t get out in a big way before Knives Out is released, a lot of viewers are going to be more than a little angry at having been made the butt of Johnson’s joke twice: For two hours on the screen, and for ten or twelve bucks at the box office.”