I’m proud to say that I’ve made a conscious effort to avoid the blow-by-blow of the Presidential horse race this year. In fact, I’ve spent more time – a combined 5 minutes – watching actual horse racing in the last month than I’ve spent watching the political equivalent; I find it leaves me feeling less dirty.
The brouhaha over Cory Booker epitomizes why.
Here’s what I’ve gathered about the situation: apparently, Obama’s campaign released an ad attacking Mitt Romney’s background in private equity. The ad hurt Romney’s feelings (assuming he has them). Booker, in response to a question on a show watched by roughly 1% of Americans, said that he thought the ad was out of bounds, going so far as to compare it to attacks on Obama regarding Jeremiah Wright. Liberals were outraged, OUTRAGED, by this, and conservatives pounced. Booker then walked his comments back, but not in a terribly convincing manner. Continue reading this post…
“We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”
-Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)
“To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”
-Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1953)
Humans are strange creatures. We’re brilliant problem-solvers, capable of extraordinarily high levels of reasoning. But that reasoning is not all that makes us human; our humanity is characterized as well by the fact that we are each motivated by a complex range of emotions, feelings, and values. Some of these feelings and values we seem to have collectively agreed are “good” motives, whilst others are indisputably “bad.” Indeed, where an act is motivated some of these “bad” values, we’ll even go so far as to conclude that the action is irrational. An act out of anger, or hate, or just visceral discomfort is generally an act of which one is to be ashamed. An act of benevolence, or love, or pure joy is generally an act of which one is to be proud. Continue reading this post…
Via Balko, in 2011, German police fired a total of 85 rounds in incidents with human beings, killing 6 and injuring 15, with the majority of those rounds (49) fired solely as “warning shots,” meaning they only fired 36 rounds at human beings that entire year. This in a nation of more than 80 million people.
In 2009,* the New York Police Department, serving a city of a little over 8 million people, fired a total of 184 rounds in 47 “adversarial incidents” with human beings, killing 12 and injuring 20. The NYPD explicitly prohibits the use of “warning shots,” so each of these rounds is definitionally a round fired “at” a human being; in only 7 of these 47 incidents, accounting for 4 of the deaths, did the person shot at actually discharge a firearm at the police officer. Together, this all means that the average New Yorker is about 15 times more likely to get shot by a police officer than the average German. It also means that, per capita, New Yorkers are subject to about 60 times as many rounds fired at people by cops than Germans, this despite the fact that the number of rounds discharged by the NYPD in 2009 was by far the fewest since NYPD began tracking this information. Continue reading this post…
Various random thoughts and theories that have occurred to me of late that I may or may not be prepared to defend, but seem like they’d be fun to discuss.
1. A thought that occurred to me while watching “Texas Singer/Songwriter” Pat Green perform an unreal version of Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” in Philly the other night: New Jersey is to the Northeast what Texas is to the Southwest.
2. Speaking of Texas – what are the odds that the epicenter of American football worship, anti-soccer hatred, and decent country music would produce the single most successful American soccer player of all time: Clint Dempsey, currently in the top 7 highest goal scorers in this season’s EPL, possessor of multiple hat tricks in different competitions this year, and the scorer of the game-winning goal for the USMNT against Italy. Moreover, what are the odds that this soccer player would not only be from Texas, but would be a white rapper from Nacogdoches?
[Updated below] Dear Readers: We have uncovered overwhelming evidence of no fewer than 8 sockpuppets operated by a single individual, each with its own persona. In the process, we have also determined that our list of bannees is not 4, but in fact only 3 individuals (for what it’s worth, one of the previously banned sock puppets had the persona of an uncompromising movement conservative, the other of a similar movement liberal). Specifics of the investigation are below the fold, ...
Due to reporting from Madeleine Morgenstern that answers a lot of the concerns I had raised about the North Carolina Lunch Box Story, I have retracted my post on the subject to the extent inconsistent with Ms. Morgenstern’s reporting. Crow tastes bitter.
[UPDATED 2/16; see end of post for update] [UPDATE II: 2/17 - Please see this piece of reporting from Glenn Beck's site The Blaze. Beck's reporter, Madeleine Morgenstern, has done what the original stories did not, and put together a reasonably well-sourced story that sheds a lot of actual light on what happened here. The story is not anonymously sourced, contains an actual copy of the letter at issue here, and fills a lot of the holes that the original ...
One of the more common second-order views held by libertarians is that unions and free markets are antithetical to each other, and indeed that unions are inherently hostile towards free markets. This view goes a long way towards explaining why libertarians as a group tend to be overwhelmingly hostile towards unions, and indeed rarely put any meaningful effort in towards cooperating with unions even where union policy preferences might otherwise closely align with libertarian preferences. To be fair, it is ...
Seeing as I disliked both teams in The Big Game equally, I was unusually interested in the halftime show this year. I am not a terribly big fan of Madonna’s, but I’ve always appreciated her influence and capacity for showmanship, the latter of which was why I thought she would be an all-too-rare good choice for the halftime show. I have to say that not only did she fail to disappoint, but she turned in what was in my view ...
I don’t know why, but I’ve been rediscovering early Barenaked Ladies and early Pat Green the last week or two. I can’t say that I care much for what BNL have done since (and including?) “One Week,” nor that I care much for what Mr. Green has done since around 2003, but “Old Apartment” still makes me want to start singing – badly – at the top of my lungs, and early Pat Green still gets me to fall in ...
This CBO study is being touted as proof by conservatives that the answer to this question is a resounding “YES!” Going nearly as far is Megan McArdle, who nonetheless argues that “the CBO’s data suggest that we could probably get workers with a bachelor’s or lower for less money than we are now paying, and not suffer much decline in quality.” A quick summation of the study’s results: on average, the federal government paid about 16% more in total compensation (wages ...
….Which is why I definitely did not see a bumper sticker this morning proclaiming that “All I needed to know about ISLAM I learned on 9/11,” right next to another bumper sticker admonishing one to “Work Harder…Millions on Welfare Are Depending on You!” I definitely did not see this while driving around a state with one of the nation’s highest percentages of Muslims.
In response to Mike’s emergency preparedness post, BlaiseP discusses the role of community in emergencies and specifically his experiences with the Amish in his area of Wisconsin, writing; The Amish around here have been off the grid for a few centuries now. Their proscriptions on being connected to the electrical grid don’t prohibit them from generating Amish Electricity with diesel motors. They’ll make telephone calls for business, from someone else’s phone. Lots of us give them rides here and there. ...
I had hoped to avoid a formal foray into the inevitable dissection of Ron Paul, his newsletters, and his ties to the far right that seems to have hit right on schedule.* As one who at the time was pretty well plugged in to the libertarian blogosphere, the first incarnation of that process, in January 2008, was more than a little exhausting and brought a lot of ugly things about libertarianism to the surface that I’d rather not relive. However, ...
I see that Elias has jumped on the study making the rounds that the net worth of America’s wealthiest family, the Walton’s, is greater than the combined net worth of the bottom 30% of Americans combined. I must admit that upon first glance, I was just about equally shocked by this statistic. It certainly seemed that it was quite proper to tout the study as a particularly outrageous example of the severity of income inequality in this country. But then ...
Since it’s Opposite Week still, at least nominally, I figured today is as good as any to post my favorite explicitly pro-socialist anthem of all time. Larry Kirwan’s voice has a tendency to be pretty polarizing, which combined with his outspoken political lyrics is probably why Black 47′s appeal has always been limited, but dammit count me amongst the group’s fans. And while we’re on the subject of Irish singers, I don’t think it’s possible to pass up an opportunity ...
I know this is a few days old, but while we’re on the subject of internet trolls, it seems worth pointing to this masterpiece of the anti-trolling genre from one of our old friends at Popehat.
This weekend, we took our daughter to see The Muppets, her first time watching a movie in a theater. We chose the movie because we figured it would at least be tolerable for we parents in addition to being a guaranteed hit with our daughter. After all, how bad could a movie with a then-97% (now 98%) rating at Rotten Tomatoes fail to at least be tolerable for the parents, we thought. Having now watched the movie after suffering through ...
Updated, 11/19. Please also see my response to James Hanley in the comments for some additional thoughts. Intertubes Intelligence Agency World Factbook Entry for the League of Ordinary Gentlemen Date of Independence : January 20, 2009 Flag: Black Bowler hat on white background Long form name: The League of Ordinary Gentlemen Short form: The League or LoOG Denonym: LoOGers or Leaguers Geography: The League is an archipelago of 9 small floating islands currently in the Northern Blogospheric Ocean, slightly off ...
Libertarianism in a Nutshell I fancy meself a South Park Republican, no prig he, more likely to laugh at the ineptness of somebody trying to offend him than to be offended. A Piss Christ or a Virgin Mary made of elephant shit is so last century it’s hardly worth the bother of feigning outrage.
But I do confess that our friends and allies in Japan have come up with something I’m compelled/appalled enough to hide behind a link.
The only consolation is that there’s really nothing to be done for an encore. ( 44 comments)
Amy Tuteur, MD 
darlene 
Patrick Cahalan 
DensityDuck 
Kolohe 
Sock Puppets: Not Just for Kids Anymore
by Mark Thompson February 29, 2012[Updated below] Dear Readers: We have uncovered overwhelming evidence of no fewer than 8 sockpuppets operated by a single individual, each with its own persona. In the process, we have also determined that our list of bannees is not 4, but in fact only 3 individuals (for what it’s worth, one of the previously banned sock puppets had the persona of an uncompromising movement conservative, the other of a similar movement liberal). Specifics of the investigation are below the fold, ...