Pun Salad

Jerry Coyne has a long analysis of a recent skirmish in the ongoing Woke War: Why we can’t use statistics any more. His springboard is a recent article in Nautilus by one Aubrey Clayton: How Eugenics Shaped Statistics.

It's longish, but also devastating.

Briefly noted:

• Zachary M. Seward notes yet another instance of Apple's Commie cooperation: Apple hobbled a crucial tool of dissent in China weeks before widespread protests broke out.

  Anti-government protests flared in several Chinese cities and on college campuses over the weekend. But the country’s most widespread show of public dissent in decades will have to manage without a crucial communication tool, because Apple restricted its use in China earlier this month.

  AirDrop, the file-sharing feature on iPhones and other Apple devices, has helped protestors in many authoritarian countries evade censorship. That’s because AirDrop relies on direct connections between phones, forming a local network of devices that don’t need the internet to communicate. People can opt into receiving AirDrops from anyone else with an iPhone nearby.

  Apple's November 9 update only applied this "fix" only applies to iPhones sold in mainland China.

  According to this Fox Business story, "Apple did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday."

• So Donald Trump dined with Kanye West (who currently prefers to be called "Ye") and Nick Fuentes. Andrew C. McCarthy notes that Trump’s Dinner with Fuentes and Ye Renews a Key Question for GOP Voters.

  There is no substantive importance to former president Donald Trump’s hosting at Mar-a-Lago of Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, a pair of disturbed young men who’ve publicly expressed antisemitic and, in Fuentes’s case, racist views. The only significance is in the public’s learning curve, particularly the learning curve of Republican voters.

  To repeat what I’ve said for a long time, it is a ripe dead certainty that Trump cannot win a national election. And at the risk of belaboring a more recent observation, the wheels have come off the Trump Train in the two years since the night he lost the 2020 election. The former president has become increasingly erratic. Yes, he was erratic to start with, but he no longer has an array of experienced, capable people staffing him, advising him, pushing against his self-destructive tendencies, and preventing him from doing crazy stuff. We thus now find him frantically trying to put a benign spin on his dinner with Fuentes and Ye . . . just as it seems like only yesterday he was frantically putting a benign spin on his stubborn recklessness in hording scores of classified documents at the same Palm Beach club (the subject of one federal investigation) . . . much like his benign spin on the Capitol riot (the subject of another federal investigation) . . . and on his phone call with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger (the subject of a state criminal investigation) . . . which was of a piece with his equally “perfect” phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky (the subject of the first impeachment . . . that preceded the second impeachment). On it goes, and on it will go.

  Trump increasingly erratic? Say it ain't so!

• Glenn Greenwald has a lot to say about The Media's Deranged Hysteria Over Elon Musk's Promised Restoration of Free Speech.

  It is hard to overstate how manic, primal and unhinged is the reaction of corporate media employees to the mere prospect that new Twitter owner Elon Musk may restore a modicum of greater free speech to that platform. It was easy to predict — back when Musk was merely toying with the idea of buying Twitter and loosening some of its censorship restrictions — that there would be an all-out attack from Western power centers if he tried. Online censorship has become one of the most potent propaganda weapons they possess, and there is no way they will allow anyone to dilute it even mildly without attempting to destroy them. Even with that expectation in place of what was to come, the liberal sector of the corporate media (by far the most dominant media sector) really outdid itself when it came to group-think panic, rhetorical excess, and reckless and shrill accusations.

  Example, from a Taylor Lorenz (who else?) WaPo article:

  “Apple and Google need to seriously start exploring booting Twitter off the app store,” said Alejandra Caraballo, clinical instructor at Harvard Law’s cyberlaw clinic. “What Musk is doing is existentially dangerous for various marginalized communities. It’s like opening the gates of hell in terms of the havoc it will cause. People who engaged in direct targeted harassment can come back and engage in doxing, targeted harassment, vicious bullying, calls for violence, celebration of violence. I can’t even begin to state how dangerous this will be.”

  Yup, that's moral panic all right.

• We're all told, endlessly, about the conspiracist fantasies of our right-wing friends. And, yes indeed, it's out there, even at one of my local websites.

  But conspiracism is a very human phenomenon, and Stanley K. Ridgley notes an underpublicized hotbed: The Conspiracist Fantasy of University Bureaucracies.

  Critical racialism originated in the crucible of neo-Marxist critical theory and has developed into an unfalsifiable doctrine informed by the psychopathology of paranoia. Now, it is codified into a systematized, conspiracist belief system. The doctrine constructs its own reality according to a central conspiracy myth and encourages the paranoid behavior of its adherents, including a displaced sense of responsibility (blaming others), hyper-suspicion, grandiosity, delusional fixity, the creation of a pseudocommunity of persecutors, and the creation of a hermetic interpretive system within the real, normal world.

  In common parlance, this paranoid doctrine is called antiracism.

  This is how a conspiracy theory can blossom from the psyches of hyper-fearful people who form communities of paranoia. The conspiracy emerges from the tendency of its victims to see exactly what they want to see in the world—and to discount everything else.

  That's pretty relevant to folks like (see previous item) Alejandra Caraballo, isn't it?

Jorge Velasco has the answer to that burning question at Reason: Subsidies Won't Fix the Energy Industry. In fact, he argues that ending energy subsidies would cut both carbon emissions and costs.

If we treated food production like we do energy production, … oh, wait, we kinda do that too.

Briefly noted:

• OK, subsidies won't fix the energy industry.

  But is it kooky to say that anti-capitalists are using climate change as a pretext for a planned economy?

  Well, no. As Dr Rainer Zitelmann points out at FEE: It's Not Kooky to Say Anti-Capitalists Are Using Climate Change as a Pretext for a Planned Economy When They Come Out and Say It.

  World leaders met in Egypt recently to discuss climate change. This time, the focus was on the demands of poor countries that want money from rich countries because of climate change. After more than 50 years of experience with development aid, one can already predict where this money will end up—with corrupt governments in countries in Africa and other poor countries.

  Many so-called climate change activists are not really concerned about the climate and the environment. No, for them, these are merely instruments in the fight against capitalism.

  For the last three years, Greta Thunberg has said that her life’s purpose was to save the world from climate change. Now she told an audience in London that climate activists must overthrow "the whole capitalist system," which she says is responsible for "imperialism, oppression, genocide... racist, oppressive extractionism." The "activists" of the doomsday cult "Last Generation" say quite openly that their goal is the abolition of capitalism.

  I'm old enough to remember when it was thought that socialist systems were simply, scientifically, better at fostering growth and prosperity. (I had that famous Samuelson textbook that claimed “the Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.”)

  Well, that argument got debunked by reality pretty quickly afterward. So now anti-capitalists grab onto predictions of ecological catastrophe instead. Any excuse to destroy free markets will do.

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey reviews a new bio of Friedrich Hayek (link at right), and concludes Hayek Was a True Liberal. A small excerpt:

All this ideological classification can get confusing, even frustrating. It doesn't matter if you're being pigeonholed, or you're self-pigeonoling; there's no USDA regulation for what goes on your philosophical ingredient list.

If I absolutely must label myself, I usually—sorry, Deirdre!—go with "libertarian". Because I want not to be misunderstood, as I would be if I said "liberal". If I'm allowed a few more words, I add "with significant conservative leanings."

Anyway: I'll probably take a pass on the book. 824 pages, and it only goes up to 1950! I think I'd prefer to reread The Constitution of Liberty.

An October tweet that was only just now brought to my attention:

"At the end of last year, overall fossil fuels represented 81% of energy consumption. 10 years ago, they were at 82%," says Jeff Currie. "$3.8 trillion of investment in renewables moved fossil fuels from 82% to 81% of the overall energy consumption." pic.twitter.com/VhQN0S9oo9

— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) October 3, 2022

That's from CNBC, not some dubious "news" station where the next feature is on Jewish Space Lasers.

And that's not some wacky rando CNBC picked off the streets making that assertion; that's Jeffrey Currie, employed by a little firm called Goldman Sachs. In fact: he is their "global head of Commodities Research in Global Investment Research"

So that's a pretty amazing factoid, indicating a massive waste of capital that could have been more productively directed. As near as I can tell, undebunked; let me know if you see otherwise.

Briefly noted:

• Now that the Libertarian Party has been taken over by wackos and grifters (even more than usual), I cast my liberty-lovin' eyes once again to the Republicans. Any hope for me there? Bonnie Kristian is not too optimistic: Making the GOP Liberty-Friendly Requires More Than Just Rejecting Donald Trump.

  Former President Donald Trump is running for president again, seeking the nomination of a party which, for the first time in six years, isn't wholly sure it wants him back. What the GOP base decides remains a wholly open question; Trump is still the only candidate officially on offer, and history teaches polling this early in the race is useless. But the sort of Republican voter who airs his opinion in the pages of The New York Times and National Review has decided, emphatically, that the time for Trump is over.

  This may seem like a promising development to any libertarians waxing nostalgic about an earlier era of libertarian-Republican relations—a time when libertarianism was deemed, in Reason's pages, "the very heart and soul of conservatism," when the GOP's rhetorical commitment to limited government made it libertarians' preferred vehicle for political action within the two-party system, when yawning gaps between libertarians and Republicans on social and foreign policy were ignored because, uhhh, you know, communism! Taxes!

  So if the Republican Party finally rejects Trump, is that also a rejection of the authoritarian and illiberal impulses his political career has amplified? I'm open to being pleasantly surprised, but so far, the evidence answers with a resounding "no." Even if Trump loses this primary race, there's every reason to think his party will retain its present will to power.

  I had to hold my nose real hard to vote for Don Bolduc and Karoline Leavitt a couple weeks back. I hope I won't have to do that again.

Veronique de Rugy is Giving Thanks for Low-Skilled Workers.

As Vero points out, these are the people who kept the grocery stores open during the pandemic. Also hospitals, restaurants, …

Briefly noted:

• A video provided at Matt Taibbi's Substack documents the chorus of "independent" media regurgitating the same talking points in pre-election 2020, attempting to debunk the Hunter Biden laptop story as "disinformation": YouTube Censors Reality, Boosts Disinformation: Part 1.

  As subscribers by now are aware, I’m very upset about YouTube’s recent decision to censor a factually accurate video about “rigged election” comments produced for this site by Matt Orfalea. The company has given Matt a strike and labeled his/our work “misinformation,” an insult I’ve decided not to take lying down. I’m going to search for new ways to embarrass the company until they reverse their decision. As it happens, today offers an excellent opportunity.

  CBS This Morning today came out with a story claiming they obtained a copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop, sent for an “independent forensic review,” and determined it “appears genuine.” This follows up confirmation from The New York Times back on March 16th, and more importantly, the exhaustive earlier work of Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger confirming key emails in his book, The Bidens.

  Try watching the video, and try not to get mad. As the Babylon Bee says: CBS News Officially Confirms That Lincoln Has Been Shot.

  I await Part 2, and whatever else Taibbi says on this matter.

• From the student newspaper at the University Near Here: Ten Classes Worth Taking at UNH. The course titles:

  1. Personal Finance (BUS 530)
  2. Making Babies (NURS 450)
  3. Human Sexuality (HDFS 746)
  4. United States Healthcare Systems (HMP 401)
  5. Organizational Behavior (MGT 535)
  6. Nutrition in Health and Wellbeing (NUTR 400)
  7. Propaganda and Persuasion (CMN 456)
  8. Public Speaking (CMN 500)
  9. Professional and Technical Writing (ENGL 502)
  10. Stressed Out (OT 513)

  Yes, "Making Babies" and "Human Sexuality". Take both, in case you missed something.

  Ah, "Nutrition in Health and Wellbeing". That's a course that's been around, roughly, forever; when I was a grad student, it was called "Animals, Food, and Man". Yes, irredeemably sexist.

  I have a bone to pick with the paper's breezy description:

  More than half of college students suffer from malnutrition, according to Medical Daily. To combat this, Nutrition in Health and Wellbeing is a fantastic class to take. While fulfilling the lab requirement as well as a biological science discovery credit, this class teaches students the science of nutrition and how to eat to make yourself happy and healthy. Your body is a temple, right?

  Emphasis added. That Medical Daily link goes to a 2014 story, with the headline: "Food Insecurity: Why 59% Of College Students May Suffer From Malnutrition".

  So the paper upgraded the "may suffer" to "suffer". Tsk!

  But it gets worse. Following links from the Medical Daily article, brings us to the the paper (in the "Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior") that provides the 59% number: Prevalence and Correlates of Food Insecurity Among Students Attending a Midsize Rural University in Oregon. The full article can (finally) be found here.

  And, control-F tells me that the word "malnutrition" doesn't appear in the paper at all. The actual finding is:

  Over half of students (59%) were food insecure at some point during the previous year.

  Yeah, that's not the same thing.

  Worse: that number is based on a 40-item survey "distributed via e-mail" to all 5438 students at that unnamed college. The researchers got 354 completed surveys. And the 59% "food insecure" figure is based on the self-reporting of 208 respondents.

  The actual questions asked to determine insecurity seem to be here. Example: "In the last 12 months, did you ever eat less than you felt you should because there wasn't enough money for food?"

  And somehow at UNH this gets translated into "More than half of college students suffer from malnutrition". Yeesh.

The Amazon Product du Jour is but one of the items listed on Reason's The Best Ever Libertarian Gift Guide. Their article's links go to Etsy, another fine site, although I don't get a cut if you buy there:

A little too unneighborly for my tastes, but your mileage may vary according to your neighbors.

Briefly noted:

• If you're looking for something not to be thankful for, Eric Boehm has a suggestion: A Possible Holiday Railroad Strike Would Risk $2 Billion Per Day.

  A threatened railroad worker strike that appeared to have been derailed by the Biden administration is now back on track and chugging quickly toward the holiday season.

  Four of the 12 unions representing workers on America's freight rail lines have voted to reject a new contract proposed by a special presidential mediation board, once again raising the possibility of an economy-crippling strike next month. The unions that rejected the deal are now indicating that they want additional concessions from the railroads beyond what was negotiated by the Biden administration during the summer, The Wall Street Journal reports.

  Hope you're all stocked up on… whatever it is you get by rail.

• As usual, Jacob Sullum's column's headline at creators.com is a pretty good summary of the article. California's COVID-19 'Misinformation' Law Chills Constitutionally Protected Speech: The State Is Threatening to Punish Doctors Whose Advice Deviates From the 'Scientific Consensus'.

  You don't need an excerpt, really. Go read the whole thing, especially if you're a California doctor looking for (yet another) reason to move to New Hampshire.

• "Smart" people are fans of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), which will solve all our problems, including many we didn't know we had. Brendan Patrick Purdy is not smart; he is, in fact, very smart. And if some geek tries to sell you on RCV, shut him down with a pointer to Purdy's article: The Flaws of Ranked Choice. It's heavy on theory, and even gets into Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. (Bookmark it now, just in case.)

• Scott Alexander wonders: Is Wine Fake? It's an entertaining look at the expertise of wine connoisseurs. Just one paragraph will give you an idea…

  (Do wines ever have 6-carbon carboxylic acids, or 10-carbon alkanes — i.e., goats, armpits or jet fuel? I am not a wine chemist and cannot answer this question. But one of the experts interviewed on Somm mentioned that a common tasting note is cat urine, but that in polite company you’re supposed to refer to it by the code phrase “blackcurrant bud.” Maybe one of those things wine experts say is code for “smells like a goat,” I don’t know.)

  Scott's article convinced me that I'd be unable to distinguish between Caymus Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon (on sale at the NH Wine Store: $73.99 for 750ml) and the plonk I usually drink (Franzia Dark Red Blend, $18.99 for a 5L box).

Allison Schrager makes an argument for a strategy that should not need defending, but does: Economic Growth Is Still Our Best Hope.

Ms Schrager points out the fallacy to see economics as zero-sum game: that if someone gets richer, it's at the expense of someone else getting poorer. But a "degrowth" takes that fallacy and doubles down, turning (via corecive measures) it into a negative-sum game, moving everyone to a worse-off state.

Well, except for those folks implementing "degrowth": they'd be well-paid, of course.

Briefly noted:

• At Reason, Damon Root notes an amusing possible outcome from a principled legal argument: How a Gorsuch LGBT Ruling May Doom Affirmative Action in College Admissions.

  In Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia (2020), Justice Neil Gorsuch held that the act of firing an employee for being gay or transgender violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employers from discriminating against a job applicant or employee "because of such individual's…sex." "Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result," Gorsuch wrote. "But the limits of the drafters' imagination supply no reason to ignore the law's demands. When the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it's no contest. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit."

  The results of that strict textualist approach in Bostock were widely cheered by liberals. But liberals probably won't be cheering if Gorsuch adopts a similar stance in the pair of blockbuster affirmative action cases that the Supreme Court is currently weighing. Judging by last month's oral arguments in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the justice does seem to view the statutory debates over LGBT discrimination and affirmative action in a similar interpretative light.

  I liked John Roberts' simple assertaion back in 2007, and it would be nice if SCOTUS (finally) applied it uniformly in the current case: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

• Charles C. W. Cooke has some advice to GOP wannabes-but-notgonnabes: Don't Run.

  Hey, you. Yes, you. I gather you’ve started hinting that you might run for president in 2024. Here’s an alternative idea: Don’t. Do something else instead. Travel. Learn to cook. Serve on a board. Start a podcast. Build a boat. Just stay the hell out of the field.

  You know who you are. You’re the popular GOP governor of a blue state who believes that, against all odds and in spite of all the laws of supply and demand, he’s going to be nominated in 2024. You’re the Trump appointee who served in the last administration for two or three years and who has for some reason come to think that he might be credible as a MAGA-without-the-baggage candidate. You’re the morally decent Republican politician whose friends have convinced him that all it will take to transcend our current partisan trench warfare is a little integrity and a lot of pluck. You’re the long-retired former party darling who falls asleep each night telling himself that if all the cards fall in the right place, you might squeak to the front of the pack and make it to the convention. And whatever you think is going to happen to you over the next couple of years, you’re wrong.

  Charlie worries that a large GOP field would split the not-Trump vote, and cause (as it did in 2016) Trump to sail to the nomination with a weak plurality, and get creamed in November 2024 by… well, anyone not named "Hillary Clinton".

Bill Barr makes some of that good old common sense: Trump Will Burn Down the GOP. Time for New Leadership.. Skipping down to the bottom line:

Yup.

John Hawkins provides 6 Reasons It’s Always a Mistake to Think of Yourself as a Victim. And they are:

Well, that's only three. You have to subscribe to his substack to see 4-6, apparently. But, really, do you need more than those three?

Briefly noted:

• 

  Virginia Postrel recycles a USA Today article she wrote in support of her latest book, The Fabric of Civilization. It is (sort of) Thanksgiving-related. It's about the recently-restored replica of the Mayflower, the Mayflower II. Specifically, its sails.

  The sails look and feel authentic. But there’s a big difference between the 21st-century versions and the 17th-century originals. The modern fabric is a synthetic that behaves like traditional canvas but keeps its shape and resists sun damage. It will last significantly longer than the linen and hemp used in the Pilgrims’ day, and it took less time to make. Much, much less time.

  “We can’t make cloth,” says sailmaker Dayle Tognoni Ward of Traditional Rigging. “That’s where we hold the line.” Exactly duplicating 17th-century cloth would be prohibitively expensive.

  The original Mayflower’s sails were probably woven with around 30 threads to the inch in each direction. If, like the replica, they used 3,800 square feet of fabric, they would have taken nearly a million yards of yarn. Before the Industrial Revolution, just spinning that much yarn required about two years of work. That doesn’t include the laborious process of harvesting and preparing the plant fibers. Nor does it include weaving on looms powered entirely by the weavers’ muscles.

  Ms. Postrel is as insightful today as she was when she edited Reason magazine (1989-2000):

  If, as Arthur C. Clarke famously observed, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, the reverse is also true. Any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature. We no more imagine a world without cloth than one without sunlight or rain. Textiles are just there.

  And they are another thing to be Thankful for.

WIRED has the story, as told by Ramin Skibba: NASA Will Not Change the James Webb Telescope’s Name. It's WIRED's usual slant:

Unsurprisingly, Chanda-Prescod Weinstein (assistant professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in women's and gender studies at the University Near Here) did not appreciate the decision.

Let's summarize:

• If there is evidence that Webb had knowledge of, or hand in, firings of gay people at NASA, that means he was a bigot, and the telescope name should be changed.
• If there isn't evidence that Webb had knowledge of, or hand in, firings of gay people at NASA, that means he was incompetent… and the telescope name should still be changed.