Coyote Blog

As I mentioned last week on twitter, I have retreated from that platform for a variety of reasons and will focus again on long-form blogging of the style this site has been pursuing for 16 years.

For the last several months, I have been a lockdown skeptic, at least for the healthy population under 55 or 60 years old.  I will confess my early tendency toward skepticism was driven as much by the behavior of lockdown hawks as any data or knowledge on my part.  Whenever I hear appeals to authority, use of non-transparent computer model results as facts, politicization of scientific positions, and restrictions on dissent in any scientific issue, I immediately get skeptical of the orthodox position.  As I have watched things unfold, I am increasingly convinced that this virus is (like most new viruses in history) going to run its course until large sections of the population have gained immunity.  Lockdowns, while they may have salutary effects in preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed, just seem to be delaying the inevitable -- when we come out of hiding, reservoirs of the disease are still there and infections mount again.  "Flatten the curve" made sense to me, but that seems as far in the past of political rationals as does the Tiger King mania.

But to some extent my opinion on lockdowns does not matter.  The one thing I AM sure of is that, whether lockdowns are effective or not, it is perfectly reasonable to balance the costs of such interventions against their benefits.  But I remember clearly when this commitment to making thoughtful tradeoffs marked one as practically Hitler.  Many of our intelligentsia, particularly on the Left, argued that it was immoral even to consider effects on the economy of COVID interventions.  I always thought this was ironic, because the worst economic effects were sure to hit lower income folks first -- they had jobs you had to, you know, show up for and they had less savings to weather the storm.   Paraphrasing one of my commenters, "Stay at home, work remotely by computer, and keep up with your family on Zoom" has to be one of the most white privilege government orders ever.  But nevertheless there was the Left self-righteously advising exactly this, with pundit after pundit who had portable jobs writing on a computer criticizing any hair dresser who wanted to actually be able to ply their trade as well.

So I was floored when I saw these charts on Kevin Drum's site as part of a criticism of the Republican reluctance to extend rich unemployment benefits:

You know what my reaction to these charts is?  No sh*t, Sherlock.  Many of us warned of EXACTLY this when the lockdowns began.  And folks on the Left treated our warning as not just irrelevant but evil. They would say, "How can you be so callous as to suggest jobs are more important that lives?"

But wait, now the economic impact of the lockdowns IS a problem?  I refuse to defend the Republican morons in Congress or the White House, but I can say that many of them warned of exactly this problem with the lockdowns while the Democrats were full steam ahead on economic shutdown.  I could accept Drum's post as self-criticism of the sort like "Wow, I really underestimated this when I was advocating for lockdowns" but now, he uses this as a platform to blame other people for the problem.

Libertarians have often highlighted how the government tends to create problems by their actions and then gains more power by saying that it needs to fix the problem its own actions created.   I can't imagine we will ever have a better example of this effect -- here is Drum advocating that the government simply must send more money to help people who were willing, even eager, to work but were not allowed to do so by the government.  COVID has been a socialist dream, converting payment for productive work to payment for breathing.

And let's discuss the exact program he is advocating.  He wants an extension of the Federal unemployment supplement of $600 a week which takes most state benefits to $1000 to $1200 a week.    Realize that is $50,000 to $60,000 a year we are paying people to not work (one only qualifies for these benefits if one does not work -- take a job and they are gone).  Look at the former income levels in his chart -- who is going back to work with this kind of government payment?  We are training people that they should be paid this much for not working and encouraging them not to seek actual employment -- this is a terrible message (and one reason a UBI makes far more sense if we are going to transfer this much money).   I think this is contributing somewhat to the position of the teachers' unions.  The public game now is to get paid and not work.

We have 13+% unemployment and our company has to struggle to hire anyone in these conditions.   I posted this on twitter as a comment on a Paul Krugman post, and his followers dutifully lined up to tell me that it was because I did not pay a fair wage.  People are making $25-$30 an hour on unemployment.  I thought $15 was our idea of "fair" -- are we really going to set $30 as our minimum wage?  Will anyone be employed?

Postscript:  I have one other rant related to employment and COVID.   Every blue check mark and Hollywood star bends over backwards on every occasion to thank health care workers during the pandemic.  Good, I agree, health care work is particularly fraught right now.  But you know who else worked through the pandemic?  I will give you a hint:  I bet you never had problems filling your car with gas, that you always had gas and electricity at home, and that (with a few brief exceptions) you always had plenty of food choices.  There are a lot of folks out there who showed a lot of commitment during COVID on whom we rely, and a lot of them are in industries (oil, manufacturing, farming) the elite of the Left tends to look down its nose at as backwards and inferior.

Postscript #2:  I am well aware that Drum has had significant medical issues that make him likely particularly vulnerable to this virus.  I am thrilled that he has a career he can pursue without endangering himself via public contact.  Our family made certain choices we might not have to protect my 85 year old mother in law.  But I am exhausted with people applying their own personal preferences and risk trade-offs to others who may be in very different situations.

In an authoritarian regime, those in power demand obedience but not necessarily agreement from their subjects.  Even if many of their subjects might oppose the regime, the rulers are largely content as long as everyone obeys, no matter how grudgingly.

Totalitarians are different.  They demand not only obedience but lockstep belief.  In some sense they combine authoritarian government with a sort of secular church where attendance every Sunday is required and no heresy of any sort is permitted.  Everything is political and there is no space where the regime does not watch and listen.   Even the smallest private dissent from the ruling orthodoxy is not permitted.  Terror from the state keeps everyone in line.

I have tried out a lot of words in my head that are less inflammatory than "totalitarian" to describe the more radical social justice elements on modern college campuses, but I can't find a word that is a better fit.  The attempts to drive out dissenting voices through modern forms of social-media-fueled mob terror are both scary and extremely disheartening.

I was thinking about all this in reading an article about Camille Paglia and the students and faculty of her own university who are trying to get her thrown out.  I find Paglia to be consistently fascinating, for the very reason that the way her mind works, the topics she chooses to focus on, and sometimes the conclusions she draws are very different from my own experience.  The best way to describe her, I think, is that we have traditional axes of thought and she is somewhere off-axis.

Anyway, after horrifying Conservatives for many decades, Paglia has over the last few years run afoul of the totalitarian Left.  One example: (emphasis added)

Camille Paglia, the controversial literary and social critic who identifies both as queer and trans, is drawing fire yet again. Students at her own institution, the University of the Arts (UArts) in Philadelphia, are calling for her to be fired. An online petition, currently with over 1,300 signatures, reads in part:

Camille Paglia should be removed from UArts faculty and replaced by a queer person of color. If, due to tenure, it is absolutely illegal to remove her, then the University must at least offer alternate sections of the classes she teaches, instead taught by professors who respect transgender students and survivors of sexual assault.

Another demand in the petition is that, if she can't be canned, the university will stop selling Paglia's books on campus and permanently disallow her from speaking on campus outside of her own classes. Although it's mostly non-faculty speakers who get deplatformed, Paglia is merely the latest target being attacked by students from her own institution. Students at Sarah Lawrence, for instance, are calling for political scientist Samuel Abrams to be fired for writing an op-ed in The New York Times calling for ideological diversity among administrators.

Paglia's critics claim that, despite her own alternative sexual identity, she is so hostile and bigoted towards trans people that her mere presence on campus constitutes an insult or threat. There's no question that she has been dismissive of some claims made by trans people and, even more so, dismissive of students who claim that being subjected to speech with which they disagree is a form of trauma.

What I got to thinking about is this:  How far away are we from "her mere presence on campus" constituting a threat to being threatened by "her mere presence in the same country?"  I fear it may not be very long.

Postscripts:  I wanted to add a couple of postscripts to this story

1. I find that the "mere presence is a threat" argument being deployed by LGBT activists is extremely ironic.  In the camping business I run we have always had a disproportionate number of gay couples managing individual campgrounds.   Fifteen years ago I remember twice getting push back from people in the surrounding community (both times in southern, more traditionally religious areas) that the very presence of gay men around young children constituted a threat.  I thought this argument was complete nonsense and basically told the protesters to pound sand.  But it is ironic for me to now hear LGBT activists deploying the "mere presences is a threat" argument that has been used against them so often in history
2. We have clearly dumbed down what constitutes a threat when speech is equated with violence.  But have we also dumbed down the concept of terror?  People -- particularly university administrators but you see it all over -- constantly fold under the pressure of negative comments on twitter.  This sure seems a long way from the SS showing up at your door at 4AM, but amazingly social media terror seems to be nearly as effective an instrument of control.  Years ago my dad ran a major oil company and he did it with a real sense of mission, that they were doing great things to keep the world running.  But he endured endless bombing threats, kidnapping threats, existential threats from Congress, screaming protests at his doorstep, etc.  After being personally listed on the Unibomber's target list, I wonder what he would think about the "threat" of social media mobbing.

I encourage you to click through to an animated visualization of the largest cities in the world, by year.

A few surprises, but the biggest one to me was how long Naples hung around on the list.

The fall and rise of the Chinese cities is also interesting.  People seem to get freaked out by China's growing prosperity, a fear for which I have zero sympathy -- people exiting poverty in China is an unalloyed good.  But here is a thought for context.  I can't absolutely prove that it is correct but I am pretty sure it is true.  The history of the world is that, with the exception of the 200 years from about 1800-2000, China has for 4000 years been the largest economy in the world.  Chinese prosperity today is not some aberration, it is a return to normal.

Update:  OK, I think I got it to embed:

New project:

A “Bar Chart Race” animation showing the changing ranks of the 10 biggest cities in the world since 1500.

Fascinating to watch giant cities vanish after falling in conquests, and amazing that three UK cities were in the top 8 in the late 1800s. pic.twitter.com/KglMZbYobr

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 18, 2019

From a fascinating article on Amazon and its automation vision:

After a customer places an order, a robot carrying the desired item scoots over to a worker, who reads on a screen what item to pick and what cubby it’s located in, scans a bar code and places the item in a bright-yellow bin that travels by conveyor belt to a packing station. AI suggests an appropriate box size; a worker places the item in the box, which a robot tapes shut and, after applying a shipping label, sends on its way. Humans are needed mostly for grasping and placing, tasks that robots haven’t mastered yet.

Amazon’s robots signal a sea change in how the things we buy will be aggregated, stored and delivered. The company requires one minute of human labor to get a package onto a truck, but that number is headed to zero. Autonomous warehouses will merge with autonomous manufacturing and delivery to form a fully automated supply chain.

I got some cr*p on twitter a while back about writing this, but I think it is pretty much vindicated by the "one minute" factoid above:

Amazon likely is being pressured by the tightening labor market to raise wages anyway.  But its call for a general $15 minimum wage is strategically brilliant.  The largest employers of labor below $15 are Amazon's retail competitors.  If Amazon is successful in getting a $15 minimum wage passed, all retailers will see their costs rise but Amazon's competition will be hit much harder.

Is it really worth it to ban straws? #StrawBan pic.twitter.com/TCbc6bEyER

— The Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 10, 2018

Via Engadget

Twitter is continuing to act on its promise to fight hate speech, however imperfectly. The site has banned Wisconsin Congressional candidate Paul Nehlen after he posted a racist image that placed the face of Cheddar Man (a dark-skinned British ancestor) over actress and soon-to-be-royal Meghan Markle, who's mixed race. The company said it didn't normally comment on individual accounts, but said the permanent suspension was due to "repeated violations" of its terms of service.

Nehlen, who's hoping to unseat Paul Ryan in the 2018 mid-term elections, has a long history of overtly expressing his racist views. Twitter suspended him for a week in January over anti-Semitic comments, and he has regularly promoted white supremacist ideology. In private, he used direct message groups to coordinate harassment campaigns. Breitbart supported Nehlen's ultimately unsuccessful run against Ryan in 2016, but distanced itself from him in December 2017.

As the title of the post implies, I am torn on this.  On the one hand, there is an argument that removing a powerful communications tool from bad people makes it harder to spread their, um, badness.  On the other hand, I am not sure that driving these folks underground is the right approach.  Sure, Nehlen has likely rallied some people of a similar mind to his side, but the flip side is that he has advertised himself to  LOT of people as having distasteful views.  I know that from my point of view, my awareness that awful folks like this still exist on the peripheries of power has grown from social media, whereas without it I likely might have convinced myself this sort of stuff was a thing of the past.

It reminds me what I wrote a while back about putting the Confederate flag on license plates:

Which brings me back to license plates.  If a state is going to create a license plate program where people can make statements with their license plates, then people should be able to make the statement they want to make.  ... Let's assume for a moment that everyone who wants to display this symbol [the Confederate battle flag] on their car is a racist. Shouldn't we be thrilled if they want to do so?  Here would be a program where racists would voluntarily self-identify to all as a racist (they would even pay extra to do so!)  What would be a greater public service?

To take this to an extreme, think about the effort to de-platform certain college speakers.  I like to imagine who the most extreme example of such a controversial college speaker would be, and I come up with that old standby, Adolf Hitler.  So what if in 1938 Adolf Hitler came to the States for a college speaking tour in 1938.  Couldn't that have been a good thing?  Many of the mistakes made by the world in 1938-1945 was underestimating both Germany's appetite for expansion and its ruthlessness in its approach to the Jews.  Wouldn't it have been better to listen to a bad guy and potentially get some clues to this future?

Those who have read this blog for a while know that I have an up and down history with Twitter.  I think it is a perfectly valid platform for sharing breaking news, following celebrities, posting cute animal pictures, and notifying folks that blog posts or longer articles are available.  I have always used Twitter for the latter function, and for those who follow me there, I will still use it to automatically publicize my blog posts.

From time to time, though, I have dived deeper into Twitter and tried to use it to actually have conversations and discussions about certain topics.  The first time I tried this I had to get off after a month.  I reported here that Twitter was making me both unhappy and a worse person, the latter because I fell quickly into the Twitter trap of going for zingers and gotchas rather than treating people's arguments civilly and with nuance.  A few days ago I gave it one more try, perhaps unfortunately the day after Trump's state of the union.  In the process I came to a final conclusion that Twitter is an impossible platform for political discourse, at least for me.  I am open to considering that the failure is in part my own, that I am simply incapable of making the kind of arguments I want to make within the Twitter character limit.   Never-the-less, I have deleted my twitter app from my phone so I will not be tempted to dive back in when I am stuck in the doctor's waiting room.  I will still scan it to see what is going on, but if I want to respond to something, I will do it here.

Just for fun, I thought I would dig through the detritus of my last 48 hours on Twitter and see if I could pull up a few examples of just what drove me crazy.  I want to make it clear that I am not leaving because people *gasp* disagreed with me, but because that disagreement was embodied in really poor discourse, the poverty of which I think is necesarily related to the nature of the platform.  After considering several, here is a good example of why I left.

It started with my seeing this post in my feed from a guy named Nick Searcy.  I don't really know who that is, but he is not just some rando with 8 followers, he has almost two orders of magnitude more followers than I.  He wrote:

Democrats want an Open Border policy.

Why don't they want an Open House policy?

Why should you be able to lock your doors at night? That is so discriminatory! What if someone needs something?

— Nick Searcy, Stable Genius (@yesnicksearcy) January 31, 2018

While there are some solid arguments for why truly open borders might not work in today's USA, I have always considered this analogy of a country's borders to private property boundaries to be a really weak argument.  Not only weak, but one that dangerously undermines the meaning of private property and makes it harder to defend the property rights that Conservatives say they support.   I actually wrote hundreds of words on this argument here, so you can probably guess I struggled to respond to this in one tweet.  I tweeted:

Because only in a socialist does one entity own the entire country like it is their property. If I want to hire someone from Mexico in my business, and I want to rent that person a place to live on my property, why do you get to lock the door barring that person from my property?

— Coyoteblog (@Coyoteblog) January 31, 2018

(lol, the unmentioned problem I also have with Twitter is the inability to edit after the fact.  In a socialist ... what?  Dammit Coyote, learn to self-edit)

So I will confess the property rights argument is a subtle one for most people, and a difficult one to make in part because even strong defenders of property rights often don't have a very clear understanding of them.  The picture I think many property rights defenders have in their head is the old coot sitting on his front porch with a shotgun across his lap yelling "get off my land."  But for property rights to be meaningful, one needs to not only be able to protect the borders of that property but also hire whom they like to work on their property, sell to whom they like, rent to whom they like, entertain whom they like, etc.  Its not just about one's ability to exclude people, but also one's ability to associate with people of one's choice.

Now, I can imagine a number of reasonable rebuttals.  Someone might argue that this is all fine and good when 100 people want to come and seek a job from folks like me, but what if the number is a billion?   Anyway, we could have an interesting discussion along those lines.  But instead I got this:

Because of these little things called “laws.” Laws are important when you are trying to keep a country safe. Read them. @Coyoteblog

— Nick Searcy, Stable Genius (@yesnicksearcy) January 31, 2018

Uh, what?  This makes about zero sense in context.  He was criticizing a open border policy, which would represent a change in current law.  I offered a partial defense of open borders and why I thought his property rights analogy for border restrictions was a bad analogy.  And so he answers "because laws".  Honestly, this may be my failing, but I really did not understand how laws were the reason we could not change immigration laws (he may have an implicit assumption that immigrants are dangerous and laws are thus necessary to protect us from them, but if this is his core assumption driving this comment it goes entirely unstated).   So I assumed I had not explained myself well, and made the mistake of trying to clarify my point (instead of just walking away as I should have).  I will confess that the 40+ likes he got for a tweet which was true on its face but made zero sense in context influenced my decisions to try again.  Perhaps if I clarified, so would he, so I tweeted:

You made an analogy between border restrictions and locking your house. I was explaining why that is a bad analogy. When you advocate for immigration restrictions you are limiting my property and association rights, not protecting them

— Coyoteblog (@Coyoteblog) February 1, 2018

And here you go, the payoff for reading so far into this post, the true WTF moment of the thread

Your property rights don’t allow you to harbor criminals, dolt. Read a law book someday. @Coyoteblog

— Nick Searcy, Stable Genius (@yesnicksearcy) February 1, 2018

and here, because repetition using slightly different insults just reinforces the point

And it’s a ridiculous argument because your property rights do not allow you to harbor criminals who break the law.Sorry, loser @Coyoteblog

— Nick Searcy, Stable Genius (@yesnicksearcy) February 1, 2018

I am not even sure how to parse this.  More than even the statement itself, the 60 likes and 4 retweets just sort of floored me.  "Yeah, Nick, you showed that guy!"  Anyway, I assume what is going on here is that rather than understand my actual argument, he assigned to me the same package of both real and straw man arguments Conservatives assign to all immigration supporters and then started arguing some of those, rather than the actual issue we were arguing.   Anyway, just to make sure I had the full Twitter experience in this thread we had an appearance by the super Internet sleuth who has figured it all out:

Coyote = someone who helps people enter the country illegally...interesting

— Humanitarian (@BagofParts) February 1, 2018

lol, nice job.  The few folks who were reading my blog at the beginning -- which had its first post in 2004 a full 18 months before the first tweet on Twitter -- will know the blog is named after the Warner Brothers animation character, who in my mind should be one of the patron saints of small business owners -- he works his *ss off to achieve a goal and something unexpected screws his quest up every time.

Anyway, I guess I should make clear that my position on Twitter is roughly the same as it is on incentives.  In the case of incentives, bad organizations don't have bad people, they have ordinary average people with bad incentives.   As far as Twitter goes, I am more than willing to believe that, despite what he thinks of me, that Nick Searcy is not a dolt or a loser.  He is likely a reasonably smart guy on a platform that turns everyone on it into morons and *ssholes.

So I will use twitter to publish so people can find my articles in their feed there, and I will look at it from time to time if I need a blogging topic, but otherwise I am going to limit my discourse to places I can write in long form.

Postscript: OK, I figured out who this guy is.  I have not seen him in a lot of things but he played Deke Slayton in the HBO mini-series From the Earth to the Moon and that entire series, including his contribution, was excellent.  I give him kudos as an (apparently) vocal Conservative in the entertainment world, as I think the constant drumbeat of unthinking Leftism in that industry tends to cause most of the Conservatives to just go into turtle mode to protect their careers and sanity.   Still don't agree with him on immigration.

This comes to us from that bastion of freedom called Canada, where half of Americans wanted to run when Trump got elected.

It’s like something out of George Orwell’s 1984**.

Canada’s Competition Bureau, an arm’s length agency funded by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to the tune of almost $50 million annually, investigated three organizations accused of denying mainstream climate science for over a year, following a complaint from an environmental group.

The bureau discontinued its 14-month probe in June, citing “available evidence, the assessment of the facts in this case, and to ensure the effective allocation of limited resources”, according to Josephine A.L. Palumbo, Deputy Commissioner of Competition, Deceptive Marketing Practices Directorate.

But it will re-open its investigation should it receive relevant new information from the public.

The complaint was filed by Ecojustice on behalf of six “prominent” Canadians, including former Ontario NDP leader and UN ambassador Stephen Lewis.

It accused three groups, Friends of Science, the International Climate Science Coalition, and the Heartland Institute of making false and misleading claims about climate change, including that the sun is the main driver of climate change, not carbon dioxide, and that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.

When it launched its complaint in December, 2015, Ecojustice told the National Observer it would press the Commissioner of Competition to refer the matter to the Attorney-General of Canada for “criminal charges against the denier groups”.

**I presume the author is referring to the general understanding of what 1984 was about, rather than Hillary Clinton's revisionist opinion that 1984 was a cautionary tale about the danger of not having enough respect for government authority figures.

Bizarre misreading: @HillaryClinton thinks the lesson of Orwell's 1984 is that you should trust experts, leaders and the press pic.twitter.com/7rPbrq11fV

— JamesHeartfield (@JamesHeartfield) September 12, 2017

About 30 years ago there was a Kevin Costner movie called "No Way Out".  If you never saw it and ever intend to, there is a major spoiler coming.  Anyway, Costner is a military officer having a fling with a woman played by Sean Young, who is also having a fling with Costner's superior officer.  Sean Young turns up dead (probably a fantasy for the director since every director who worked with her wanted to kill her).  There is some sense that Costner's superior officer may be guilty, and Costner is named by the officer to lead the investigation, but with a twist -- the officer is trying to get the girl's death blamed on a mysterious Russian spy, who may or may not even be real, to divert attention from his adultery and possibly from the fact that he was probably the killer.  Things evolve, and it appears that Costner is going to be framed not only for the girl's death but also as the probably mythical spy.  The movie is about Costner desperately trying to escape this frame, and in the end is successful.  But in the final scene, Costner is seen speaking in Russian to his controller.  He is the spy!  The original accusation was totally without evidence, almost random, meant to divert attention from his superior's likely crimes, but by accident they turned out to be correct.

I feel like that with the Russian election hacking story.  For months I have said the Russian election hacking story was a nothing.  It made little sense and there was pretty much zero evidence.  It was dreamed up within 24 hours of the election by a Clinton campaign trying to divert attention and blame for their stunning loss.  I have called it many times the Obama birth certificate story of this election.

But it turns out that pursuing any Trump connection whatsoever with Russia has turned up some pretty grubby stories.  In particular, seeing a Presidential campaign -- and the President's son -- fawning over unfriendly foreign governments to get their hands on oppo research is just plain ugly.  That the Clinton campaign may have done shady things to get oppo research of their own is irrelevant to the ethics here (and perhaps one good justification for electing Republicans, since the media seems to be more aggressive at holding Republicans to account for such things).

Sorry.  I fell victim to one of the classic blunders - the most famous of which is "never get involved in a land war in Asia" - but only slightly less well-known is this: "Never underestimate the stupidity and ethical flexibility of politicians."

Postscript:  In general, my enforced absence from both twitter and highly partisan blogs is going quite well.  I will write more about it soon, but I have to mention this:  I had a small break in my isolation yesterday when I was scanning around the radio on a business trip.  I landed on Rush Limbaugh, and would have moved on immediately but the first words I heard out of his mouth were "golden showers".  OK, I was intrigued.  He then used that term about 3 more times in the next 60 seconds (apparently he was going with the "everybody does it" defense of Trump by accusing the Clintons of getting oppo research from the Ukraine, or whatever).  Anyway, any issue that has a Conservative talk show host discussing golden showers from Russian hookers can't be all bad.

Australian man successfully checks single can of beer on his flight.

This Aussie checked his can of beer for his flight! ? #dedication https://t.co/TzPA6lpJIs pic.twitter.com/8WDlT1e2Wv

— Bottoms Up Beer (@BottomsUpBeer) July 10, 2017

Well, I guess it should be obvious that I have not totally given up blogging.  I thank everyone for the nice emails and the nice comments.

However, I am going to try some new rules for the next month, less on my blogging and more on how I engage with the news.

1. No more Twitter.  For those of you who use Twitter as a news aggregator, my posts will still appear on twitter and from time to time I will post things there that fit on twitter better than in a full blog post.  But I am not going to read my feed, and I am really not going to engage with things in my feed.  Everyone is trying to piss me off, and worse, a few times they have been successful and I have posted juvenile retorts that I later regretted.  I am going to keep a Civ 6 game on my computer and every time I am even tempted to open twitter I will play a couple of turns of Civ 6, worrying instead how to keep Gandhi from nuking me again.  Ironically, I just today ticked over 1000 followers on Twitter, so thanks very much for the support, but if you tweet at me over the next month I won't see it.
2. Paring down my RSS feed.  I have read partisan political blogs on both sides of the aisle for years.  In fact it has been a point of pride that I read from both sides.  But these folks are all crazy, all the more so because they waste so many electrons arguing their side is sane and the other is crazy.  Everyone on these blogs is trying to just make me angry or afraid.  I am not going to play.  I can get angry and afraid all by myself.  All the political blogs are going out the window for the next month.  The more polemical climate blogs are going out.  Anyone who uses the words "Comey" or "Russia" or "Impeach" or "Benghazi"  in two out of three posts is gone.  Unfortunately, this means, at least for this month, that I cast off Instapundit as well, which is hard for me because Professor Reynolds really gave me my first traffic and helped promote my book.
3. I have been reading the same stuff for years.  Over time I need to find some like-minded folks interested in discussing policy while still capable of assuming that folks who disagree with them may actually be people of good will.  But I don't want to spend my time in full wonk mode either.  I will call Megan McArdle my benchmark of what I am looking for, and I am accepting recommendations for folks Left and Right of her to read.  Kevin Drum for example on the Left was pretty good on this dimension when his guys were in office but he is much more in team politics mode now (Mother Jones banning me didn't help, particularly since they banned me for referring to the "NRA" in a comment -- particularly funny since I was referring to FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act and not to the much-hated-by-progressives National Rifle Association).

My wife never reads my blog and probably is not too in touch with my existential blogging angst of late, but out of the blue the other day she suggested it would be fun to set up a salon where we could bring together folks across the political spectrum to have discussions of issues of the day.  I thought this was a great idea and have been thinking about how to pull this off.  Unlike what seems to be fashionable today, we actually have friends across the political spectrum -- something that has been easy considering one of our families consists of Massachusetts Progressives (from Antioch, no less!) one is of Texas Conservatives (with oil company executives, no less!).  Our families always got along great but I worry that a few of my friends my be at each others' throats if we have them talking politics in the same room.  So we have to figure out how to discuss policy, not politics.

The world's most amazing achievement ever? How about the 78% percent reduction in extreme world poverty from 1981 to 2015. pic.twitter.com/N66RbXqAAC

— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) April 30, 2017

The same sorts of folks who are smugly marching to promote their strange, religious version of "science" are producing academic studies like this (abstract):

A Semiotic Landscape analysis, whereby a community or environment’s signage is photographed for linguistic and visual analysis, is a useful means of discovering power relationships within that community’s language use. While Semiotic Landscapes and their predecessor, Linguistic Landscapes, are traditionally used to explore differences between dominant and minority languages in a community, this research extends the concept to analyse hegemonic masculinity at a CrossFit gym. It also shifts the analysis from an outdoor landscape to an indoor, more private setting. Using an autoethnographic approach, the author argues that while many of the CrossFit signs are designed to appear as humorous entertainment or motivation, they simultaneously encourage the subordination of women and certain men, and the naturalizing of a particular view of hegemonic masculinity, as embodied by the ideal CrossFit male.

I wonder if the real point was to get her gym membership paid for through a grant?  By the way, for those not in the know on the words used here, "autoethnographic" means "I didn't do any actual research or study or anything one would traditionally consider scholarship, I just sat around and thought about it and then started writing whatever came into my head."  There is little actual difference between autoethnographic research and posting rants on Facebook, except one has to go to school for years and years to be able to drop grand-sounding but essentially meaningless terms like "linguistic landscapes".

I would love to see a study attempting to count the percentage of academic papers in the humanities nowadays that are autoethnographic.  I am trying to imagine having some of the economics professors I know acting as a thesis adviser and trying to sell them on the idea of writing my thesis as autoethnographic research based on how bummed out I am that I keep running out of money before payday.  Hegemonic masculinity is forcing me to dine on two-year-old cans of Spaghetti-Os I found in the back of the pantry!

If you enjoy this sort of thing in a kind of black humor sort of way, I recommend to you @RealPeerReview on twitter.

I wrote last week that I thought the whole "fake news" thing was just another excuse for censorship from the Left.  I think the problem in online political discourse is not so much with "fake news" but mis-characterized news -- ie the problem is not the news itself but the headline and spin that are layered on top of it.

From time to time I get absolutely inundated with comments on some post from folks who are not regular readers.  When I read these comments, my first question is, "did they even read the article?"  And you know what I have learned?  They did not.  Someone on some other web site has written some odd summary of what I have written, spun to fit whatever narrative they are pushing, and then sent folks to my site, who comment on the article as if that 3rd party summary was an accurate precis of the article, eliminating the need for anyone to actually read it.  The article I wrote years ago called the Teacher Salary Myth still to this day generates hostile comments and emails because the NEA and various other organizations love to link it with some scare summary like "this author is happy you can't afford to feed your family" and send 'em on over to troll.

Here is my experience from reading most partisan websites on both sides of the aisle:  the facts of an article linked, if you really read it, seldom match the headline that sent me over to it.  Here is an example I pick only because it is the most recent one in my news feed.  Apparently, according to blog headlines all over, a professor at Rutgers threatened on twitter to kill all white people and was thus dragged off to well-deserved psych evaluation.   The Breitbart headline, for example, was:  "Rutgers University Professor Taken in for Psych Evaluation for Tweets Threatening to Kill White People."

But if you read even their own article, you can find the tweet in question:  "will the 2nd amendment be as cool when i buy a gun and start shooting at random white people or no…?”  Yes, I know it is horrible that a professor at a major university has so little facility with English, but beyond that I am not sure how any reasonable observer can take this as a threat.  He is clearly making a point that folks might change their opinion on gun control if lots of white folks, rather than black folks I assume, got shot.  I actually think he is wrong -- people would have the opposite reaction -- but it is true that a far higher percentage of blacks fall victim to gun violence than whites and I don't think this formulation of his is an unacceptable way to raise this topic.  It is really no different than when I asked, any number of times, how New Yorkers' opinion of stop and frisk would change if it was done at the corner of 5th and 50th (in Midtown)  rather than in black neighborhoods.  The scary part of this, if you ask me, is a professor was dragged into psych evaluation like he was Winston Smith or something.

So here is my advice for the day -- before you retweet or repost or like on Facebook -- click through to the link and see that it says what you think it says.  I have not always followed my own advice but many times when I have not, I have regretted it.

When some sort of "bad" phenomenon is experiencing a random peak, stories about this peak flood the media.  When the same "bad" phenomenon has an extraordinarily quiet year, there are no stories in the media.  This (mostly) innocuous media habit (based on their incentives) creates the impression among average folks that the "bad" phenomenon is on the rise, even when there is no such trend.

Case in point: tornadoes.  How many stories have you seen this year about what may well be a record low year for US tornadoes?

Extreme lack of extreme with tornadoes. Will need "second season" to stop it from being quietest year on record! pic.twitter.com/PuBvgjJBvn

— Joe Bastardi (@BigJoeBastardi) November 8, 2016

Postscript: By the way, some may see the "inflation-adjusted" term in the heading of the chart and think that is a joke, but there is a real adjustment required. Today we have doppler radar and storm chasers and all sorts of other tornado detection tools that did not exist in, say, 1950. So tornado counts in 1950 are known to understate actual counts we would get today and thus can't be compared directly. Since we did not miss many of the larger tornadoes in 1950, we can adjust the smaller numbers based on the larger numbers. This is a well-known effect and an absolutely necessary adjustment, though Al Gore managed to completely fail to do so when he discussed tornadoes in An Inconvenient Truth. Which is why the movie got the Peace prize, not a science prize, from the crazy folks in Oslo.

Guess where I am supposed to fly on Saturday?

Hurricanes #Madeline and #Lester churning westward across the Pacific, latest NHC / CPHC forecast tracks included pic.twitter.com/2ldwQ1F3Qg

— NWS OPC (@NWSOPC) August 29, 2016

Update: This will totally paint me as a geek, but does this remind anyone of the Romulan plasma torpedos in the Star Trek episode "Balance of Terror"?

Back in the depths of WWI, the Germans woke up one day and found that their erstwhile ally Austria-Hungary, to whom they had given that famous blank check in the madness that led up to the war, was completely incompetent. Worse than incompetent, in fact, because Germany had to keep sending troops to bail them out of various military fixes, an oddly similar situation to what Hitler found himself doing with Italy in the next war.  (This is a really interesting book if you have any doubts about how dysfunctional the Hapsburg Empire was in its waning days).

Anyway, Germans soon began to wonder if they were "shackled to a dead man."

I am reminded of that phrase as I see that the Republicans have officially nominated Donald Trump for the presidency, perhaps the worst choice the party has made in its history, Nixon included. I don't think "shackled to a dead man" is quite right. I think that "shackled to a suicide bomber" is more apt. Trump is not only going to lose big in this election to an incredibly weak Democratic candidate, but he is also going to kill the Republicans in the House and Senate and any number of down-ballot elections. Nutty over-the-top crazy talk that might have been mildly entertaining in the primaries is not going to be very funny to voters trying to pick who sits at the other end of the red phone.

As I said on twitter this morning, I almost wish I had not left the Republican party 30 years ago so I could quit today.

from my Twitter account:

Your government: IRS web site actually closes after business hours https://t.co/o65g0ZHlhr @instapundit @reason pic.twitter.com/nIMlM16spX

— Coyoteblog (@Coyoteblog) March 24, 2016

Apparently Alexa ranks Coyoteblog 181 among "Conservative" and center-right news and opinion sites sites.  I am not sure how a web site that supports gay marriage, legalized narcotics, and legalized prostitution can be "Conservative" but I understand that there are those who group everyone who is not socialist under the "conservative" moniker.  Honestly, in the age of RSS feeds and twitter and many other ways to read a site, I am not sure if this means anything.  Particularly since I see no possible way we have more readers than Volokh.  But there you go.  Thanks for the link from Maggies Farm, who aces us out at 159.

I am with Kevin Drum.  I got tired of using "his or her" or some other such kluge some time back.  I am using "their" until someone defines a better third person possessive pronoun that is gender-neutral (ditto "them" for "him or her").  After all, unlike French, English is a bottom-up language defined by common use rather than unchanging top-down rules.  So if enough of us use "their", it will become correct.

For those of you too young to remember, the invention of "Ms." as a generic women's prefix was one of the greatest improvements in the English language in my lifetime.  If you despair sometimes in looking down a list of names and trying to guess if the person is a "Mr." or "Ms." (remember "Pat" on Saturday Night Live), you wouldn't believe what a pain in the rear it was to figure out if one should use "Miss" or "Mrs."  for a given female.

I suppose I should weigh in on the great airplane seat lean back or not kerfuffle.  A number of tall people like Megan McArdle have argued for leaning seats back.  I am in the opposite camp, despite being 6-4 and even taller than Ms. McArdle.  And the reason is sort of ironic, given McArdle's old blog title and twitter handle:  the benefits for leaning a seat back are not symmetric.   When the person in front of me leans their seat back, two things happen:  1:  my knees get scrunched and 2.  I can't use my laptop any more because the screen will not raise (given the position of the table and angle of the seat).  Leaning my seat back does not fully relieve either of these.  In other words, I gain less knee room leaning back than I lose from the person in front of me leaning back.  It is a form of the prisoner's dilemma where looking at only my choices, I  am always better off leaning back.  But I am worse off if everyone leans back.  My gut feeling is that everyone must experience the same thing.  Which is why there has grown up an unspoken agreement among most frequent flyers not to lean seats back, just as the solution to the prisoner's dilemma is for the prisoners to collude and keep their mouths shut.  I greatly appreciate McArdle's work and she is one of my favorite writers, but on airplanes she is the prisoner that cheats.

PS-  Brian Lowder argues we should go back to dressing up when we travel.  Yeah, we used to put on coats and ties to fly when I was little.  Well, I'll go back to dressing up when airplane travel goes back to being romantic again.  But that ship, not to mix metaphors, has already sailed.  The odds are that in a given week, at 6 feet 4 tall, my four hours on an airplane are the least comfortable four hours I spend all week.  I am not going to make it worse by putting on a coat and tie.  I dress in the most comfortable clothes I can, which means baggy cargo shorts and a polo shirt.

The Peoria, IL mayor used the city police to raid and shut down the owners of a Twitter account that mocked the mayor.  The original twitter feed probably had about 12 followers when it was shut down.  I suggest that it is now past time for him to Google the "Streisand Effect"

Too bad she didn't have a police force.

Update:  Told you so.  Popehat has a go

From our favorite politically-blinkered economist who used to be smart:

Chait stresses the youth aspect:

Fortunately for Obama, this field of battle favors his side. To pass the law, he needed to win over skeptical senators. To defend it in court, he needed conservative jurists. But identifying and persuading young people is a battle Obama does not expect to lose to Republicans, and in place of the federal outreach funds, the administration is deploying a campaignlike array of weapons: microtargeting, including door-to-door outreach, and all forms of media. (A few weeks ago, Katy Perry tweeted out a link informing her 42 million followers that health care was available beginning October 1.)

Yep, when it comes to reaching hipsters, or young people in general — I know, Katy Perry — Dems have big advantages; all that coastal cultural elite hatred suddenly turns into a big disadvantage for the right.

A couple of thoughts:

• Katy Perry is part of the cultural elite?  We have sure dumbed down that concept.
• As to Ms. Perry, whose music is actually a guilty pleasure of mine, health care has been available to your twitter followers all their lives, not just beginning October 1.  A better way to put this is that, as of October 1 you will be forced to buy some amount of health care whether you want it or not.  
• The whole campaign aimed at young people is simply obscene.  I understand that folks like Ms. Perry honestly believe that young people are getting a better deal, and that she is doing them a service.  Fine, millionaires can be low information voters too.  But people in the Administration have a much more cynical purpose, which explains the magnitude of the campaign described by Chait:  For Obamacare to work and not be a fiscal disaster, it depends on young people overpaying for health insurance.  The Administration knows that young people are overpaying -- the whole system depends on it -- and yet they are telling them it is in their interest to sign up.   A private company that did this would be in jail.
• I think this whole campaign is going to fail due to a basic fallacy of Progressive thinking.  Progressives are convinced that consumers are helpless dupes of advertising.  They in fact criticized health care advertising expenses in the private world for years for this reason, making this whole campaign incredibly ironic.  Obama and company are convinced that with enough advertising, average consumers will buy anything, even if it is a bad deal, because they are convinced that this is how consumer capitalism works (it got him elected, didn't it?)  I think they are going to be disappointed.

The other day I noted the impending death of Google Reader.   Having started to survey the alternatives, I feel much better about the transition.  But I did not fail to note a different implication -- that RSS has never really caught on as a syndication vehicle -- twitter and Facebook and I suppose Google circles are more popular.

Well, I am happy to to adopt technology where it makes sense.  I loath Facebook as a personal tool (seriously, is there a worse laid out web page on the planet?) but my customers love it so we have adopted it enthusiastically as a business tool, using Facebook pages to create a dialog with our customers.  Here is a good example of a great business Facebook page - people are doing our advertising for us.

In the same vein, I likely will never really be able to use Twitter like other pundits do, to fire off witty, biting remarks in 140 characters.  I have trouble keeping post titles under 140 characters.  But I am happy to use it as a syndication tool.

So, starting now (actually starting with the previous post), Coyote Blog posts will be tweeted out at twitter.com/coyoteblog and linked at facebook.com/coyoteblog.  If that is your preferred way of discovering web content over RSS or just surfing the site itself, go for it.  I am still working on Google, but that will come soon.  By the way, for other bloggers interested, I am using the free version of Netscripts: Social Networks Auto Poster plugin.

PS-  I am sure my friend Tom, who is driven to distraction by my typos and grammatical errors, would observe at this point that at least in 140 characters there is less room for me to make mistakes.

Once upon a time, years ago, I actually had one of the original twitter accounts.  I had  (I guess I still have it) a really short name, sort of the equivalent of having a 2-letter URL.  I quickly gave it up for a variety of reasons, the most compelling of which is I find it impossible to say anything I want to say in 140 characters.  I am just not a master of the glib and witty little phrase.  Even one of my shortest blog posts ever, which read

My summary on the immigration debate:  Republicans want immigrants who work but don't vote.  Democrats want immigrants who vote but don't work.

does not make the cut.   These thoughts return to me when I see this:

Nigel Leck, an Australian software developer, grew tired of debating climate realists on Twitter so he created a spambot to "wear down" his opponents. The bot, @AI_AGW, scans Twitter every five minutes looking for key phrases commonly used by those who challenge the global warming orthodoxy.  It then posts one of hundreds of canned responses hoping to frustrate skeptics. CFACT's Twitter account @CFACT (follow us!) often receives many of these unsolicited messages each day. Since the bot became active on May 26, 2010, it has sent out over 40,000 tweets, or an average of more than 240 updates per day!

Technology Review gushed that Leck's bot "answers Twitter users who aren't even aware of their own ignorance." Leck claims that his little bit of trollware is commonly mistaken as a genuine Twitter user leading the unsuspecting to sometimes debate it for days. Eventually it wears people down.

Here is a good rule of thumb:  Anyone on either side who thinks anything substantive can be argued for or against the science behind the hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming in 140 characters can be safely ignored.