Pun Salad

I can't recommend our Amazon Eye Candy du Jour; the author, John Quiggin, is an Aussie economist whose blog claims he writes "from a socialist and democratic viewpoint". So, no. But it's nevertheless a good illustration of Andy Kessler's WSJ op-ed: The New Right’s Zombienomics (gifted link).

Jeff Jacoby is also kinda hacked off at the Doll Commissar: The tone-deafness of 'just two dolls'. But he does resurrect a fond memory of funnier times, Dana Carvey's Grumpy Old Man:

In words:

Also making cameo appearances later in the column: P.J. O'Rourke and Boris Yeltsin. Check them out.

Also of note:

• But Gorsuch! Billy Binion recounts an amusing exchange at SCOTUS: Government Argues It's Too Much To Ask the FBI To Check the Address Before Blowing Up a Home.

  The Supreme Court last week heard a case from a family whose home was wrongly raided by the FBI, after which they were barred from bringing their civil suit to trial. Before the Court: Should the plaintiffs have been able to sue the government under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA)?

  Oral arguments got into the weeds of the FTCA, under which plaintiffs Curtrina Martin and Toi Cliatt were prohibited from suing, even though Congress revised that law in the 1970s to give recourse to victims of federal law enforcement misconduct. But there was one particularly instructive exchange between the Court and Frederick Liu, assistant to the solicitor general at the Justice Department—a back-and-forth that is decidedly less in the weeds.

  Liu: The officers here were weighing public safety considerations, efficiency considerations, operational security, the idea that they didn't want to delay the start of the execution of the warrants because they wanted to execute all the warrants simultaneously. Those are precisely the sorts of policy tradeoffs that an officer makes in determining, 'Well, should I take one more extra precaution to make sure I'm at the right house?' Here, Petitioner suggests, for example, that the officer should have checked the house number on the mailbox.

  Justice Neil Gorsuch: Yeah, you might look at the address of the house before you knock down the door.

  Liu: Yes. And, and, as the district court found at 52(a), that sort of decision is filled with policy tradeoffs because checking the house—

  Gorsuch: Really?

  Liu: —number at the end of the driveway means exposing the agents to potential lines of fire from the windows.

  Gorsuch: How about making sure you're on the right street? Is that…you know, asking too much?
  

  This case is pretty horrific, hope it works out well for the victims.

• Political science. Jerry Coyne is righteously irked: Nature tackles race and eugenics in a torturous and tortuous article.

  Yes, folks, the science journals are still flaunting their virtue in articles that are similar to a gazillion articles published before. This time (and not the first time), the article is torturous because the assertions are mostly misleading.  And it’s tortuous because it weaves back and forth between two themes: eugenics and the assumed beneficial effect of diversity on scientific productivity. And the material in the article contradicts some of its own claims. The author, Genevieve L. Woicik, is identified as “an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,Baltimore, Maryland, USA.”

  […] If you were to read it without knowing better, you would get two false impressions:

  1. The world, and especially America, is gearing up for a big bout of eugenics.
  2. Race is a social construct that has nothing to do with biology

  I see no evidence for #1 unless one is oblivious to reality, while #2, as Luana and I showed in our paper on The Ideological Subversion of Biology, is misleading. I recommend you read section 5, which is headed by one of the statements about genetics and evolutionary biology that we consider misleading: ““Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.”

  The two-page PDF of the Nature article is here.

• Hey, I noticed! Christopher Caldwell writes at the Dispatch about The Consequential Trump Move No One’s Noticed.

  Three weeks ago, Donald Trump struck another blow to the civil-rights regime. It was easy to miss, given he did so through an executive order aimed at a legal concept. But the president has taken another step toward uprooting the second constitution that has been in place since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

  Trump’s Executive Order 14281, aimed at “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” targets the judicial doctrine of “disparate impact,” which has stood since the 1970s.

  You may not know the ins and outs of disparate impact, but you’ve surely seen its effects. Under disparate impact, a business owner can be found guilty of discrimination even if he did not intend to discriminate. An aptitude test that winds up narrowing the pool of eligible black candidates, height requirements that exclude women from a police force, a job application that asks about criminal records—any hiring process that produces a lower-than-random number of protected minorities is suspect. Such actions and institutions might carry no ill intent, but they can put an employer on the wrong side of civil-rights law.

  Christopher's not quite right about the "no one's noticed". We blogged about this last month!

  At the time, the WaPo claimed that Trump's EO would "repeal key components of the Civil Rights Act of 1964". That was nonsense, and remains so. But Christopher points out:

  That disparate impact is reaching the end of the line is far from certain. Civil-rights law is a collection of public authorizations and private sector incentives. Trump can take the government out of the business of suing, regulating, and jawboning businesses for the next few years, but civil litigation will likely continue. George H.W. Bush’s Civil Rights Act of 1991 introduced disparate impact into black-letter U.S. law. It would have to be repealed to bring about the meritocracy Trump seeks. That would require more skepticism about civil-rights law than currently exists in Congress. But perhaps minds are changing, now that Trump’s executive orders are showing both parties what a devastating weapon civil-rights law can be—and, indeed, always has been.

  Christopher does a great job in documenting the history of this pernicious concept. There's still work to do on getting rid of it.