65 YEARS AGO TODAY: Revisiting the first presidential debate — and its improbable audience split.

Over the decades, memories of Nixon’s baffling tactics have been obscured by enduring fascination with a phenomenon that has come to define the first debate — a phenomenon that almost surely did not occur.

The phenomenon is known as “viewer-listener disagreement,” which means that Kennedy won the debate among television viewers while Nixon won among radio listeners. It’s an optics-driven interpretation that serves to confirm the presumed decisiveness of visual cues. It also is useful shorthand for explaining the debate’s outcome — that Nixon lost because he was gaunt and sweated under the studio lights.

The notion of viewer-listener disagreement endures, even though it was thoroughly dismantled 33 years ago in a scholarly journal article that pointed out the phenomenon is supported by almost no empirical data. The little survey data collected about the debate’s television and radio audiences were flawed, incomplete, and wholly inadequate to support such a sweeping theory. The authors, David Vancil and Sue Pendell, wrote in the Central States Speech Journal that “the inference that appearance caused Nixon’s loss or Kennedy’s victory is classic post hoc fallacy.”

Even if television viewers “disliked Nixon’s physical appearance,” they added, “the relative importance of this factor in viewers’ selection of a debate winner is a matter of conjecture.”

Read the whole thing.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE CHILDREN GONE? Where are they now? Urban public schools see steep fall in enrollment.

One third of students in mostly black districts are not in traditional public schools, Barshay notes. Students in high-poverty districts also are more likely to “lost” to their neighborhood schools.

Some of the missing students enrolled in charter schools, which saw their share of enrollment rise from 5 percent to 6 percent. “Virtual” schools’ share rose form 0.7 percent to 1.2 percent. As vouchers expand, private schools may begin growing too, but there’s not much evidence of that yet.

“Roughly 6 percent of students in the United States, or somewhere between 3 and 4 million, choose homeschooling — and that number seems to be growing,” write homeschooling advocates Angela R. Watson and Matthew H. Lee in Education Next.

I suspect many homeschoolers and microschoolers are flying under the radar, and don’t show up in official statistics.

Let’s hope they stay under the radar, where “helpful” busybodies won’t notice them.

WOW. THANK YOU:  Three Good Reads.

IT CERTAINLY IS: Public Health Policy As Public Choice Failure. “Examining three key policy areas—vaccine rollout, mask mandates, and ventilation standards—the Article demonstrates how misaligned political incentives led officials to prioritize short-term appeasement of a pandemic-weary public over science-based strategies that would maximize long-term welfare. In each domain, political actors faced strong incentives to downplay risks, overpromise solutions, and delay difficult decisions, resulting in a pandemic response that was often too little, too late, and too beholden to partisan interests. The Article concludes that reckoning honestly with these failures is a crucial first step toward reforming our public health institutions and ensure a more effective response to the next crisis. It offers recommendations for rebuilding public trust, depoliticizing public health communication, and institutionalizing science-based policymaking. More broadly, the Article underscores the urgent need to realign political incentives with the public interest in the prevention of and response to public health emergencies.”

QUESTION ASKED:

Antifa wants an insurrection leading to a legitimacy collapse and a communist/left-anarchist revolution. But there's a very basic question: where's it going to find the troops, and how's it going to train them?

In one of my previous analysis posts I identified three overlapping…

— Eric S. Raymond (@esrtweet) September 25, 2025

LOOKS PRETTY ORGANIZED TO ME: Antifa Issued Anti-ICE Threats Pre-Shooting.

EH. I’M RUSTY (VERY) BUT I WENT THE ROUNDS WITH COPY EDITORS BACK IN THE DAY:  What people get wrong about Elizabethan English. How to sound like Shakespeare.

CHANGE:

🚨#BREAKING: The NC House of Representatives has just passed “Iryna’s Law” which ends cashless bail for violent criminals.

You have not been forgotten, Iryna ❤️ pic.twitter.com/HnTSepkJ0w

— Matt Van Swol (@matt_vanswol) September 23, 2025

GREAT RECKONING IN SMALL ROOMS:  Hegseth Orders Generals, Admirals Worldwide to Attend Meeting Next Week.

NEED YOU ASK?  Did Hillary Have Another Deplorables Moment…While Trying to Say We Shouldn’t Have Those Anymore?

EVERY MARINE KNOWS WHAT TO DO WHEN PRESENTED WITH A CHALLENGE COIN:  Trump Saw the Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon on the South Lawn. Here’s What Happened Next.

ALL  THE BETTER TO INCREASE GOVERNMENT’S CONTROL OVER A VITAL RESOURCE:  NYC passes new appliance mandate that critics argue will make rent, other costs skyrocket.

AN IDEA TO RETHINK:  On Professional Teachers.

THIS WILL END IN TEARS:  I will not comply: No to Starmer’s Digital ID, we must Defend Britain’s Ancient Liberties Against Modern Tyranny.

Two decades ago, my friend Francis Turner wrote a story about Tony Blair’s similar bright idea. He suspects, and I agree, that Two Tier Keir will make a similar mess.

LIKE SOMETHING OUT OF A DARK FANTASY NOVEL:  Pregnant Women Butchered, Babies Sold — Cartel Leader ‘La Diabla’ Arrested.

ALL THE WRONG MESSAGES, YES:  ABC sends the wrong message with Kimmel’s return.

Among them that they think lying about the right is great. Which means that they’d lie about more than half of their potential audience.

IT IS ACTUALLY OIKOPHOBIA IN XENOPHILIA MASK:  “Intentionally elevating strangers above ourselves, xenophilia, is artificial”.

YEP, CLINTON LIED PREFERENTIALLY:  QotD: The Clinton years.

BUT BUT BUT …. IT’S TOTALLY THE RIGHT’S FAULT:  The post also explains Antifa’s ideology: sociopathy, chaos, destruction and violence for the sake of “becoming ungovernable.” This is why Antifa’s focus changes from Occupy-related rioting to BLM to trantifa. Anything they can use to incite violence, they will exploit.

And this is for all the Xless rabble (in arms or not.)

THE COVIDIOCY DIDN’T HELP, BUT I’D SAY MOST IT’S WHAT HOLLYWOOD KEEPS OFFERING:  Tribalism Needs to End. Did Covid put theaters on life support, or was that Hollywood’s responsibility?

AND IT’S REALLY HARD NOT TO CHUCKLE:  Democrats Won’t Like What Trump Has Planned If They Push for a Government Shutdown.

AN ARMY OF THE INSANE. POSSIBLY INTENTIONALLY DRIVEN SO:  An Army of Gremlins.

THINKING THEY’RE WAKING UP FROM THAT REQUIRES BELIEVING THEY AREN’T FULL CULTISTS:  They Think they are the Good Guys.

INTERESTING:  Denmark Now Giving Greenland Some Much Needed Attention.

SOME DAYS YOU CAN’T WIN, BUT THERE’S A SHORT STORY OF SORTS:  I’ve been receiving…. best way to put it… snippets of things in Elly (the ever growing file is called It Came Through the Portal In Head). I think this one inflicted itself on me because Nikre Lyto is one of the view point characters for book two.

I did make some progress on typesetting volume 3 and should upload it tomorrow.