And who better to start off the craziness than...
Ross Douthat who doesn't just believe in the the Big Daddy theory of Republicanism, he believes that wanting to make sure your little girl is happy turns you... conservative.
... previous research on this question had suggested the reverse, with parents of daughters leaning left and parents of sons rightward. And those earlier findings dovetailed neatly with liberal talking points about politics and gender: Republicans make war on women, Democrats protect them, so it’s only natural that raising girls would make parents see the wisdom of liberalism ...
But the new study undercuts those talking points. Things are more complicated than you thought, liberals! You can love your daughters, want the best for them, and find yourself drawn to ... conservative ideas! Especially if you’re highly educated, which is where the effect was strongest! Better dust off a different set of talking points — maybe something about the family as the source of all oppression and how deeply internalized patriarchal norms make parents subconsciously inclined to tyrannize their female offspring and then we can argue about that!
But let me make a more limited, more personal argument on the subject. The next round of research may “prove” something completely different about daughters and voting behavior. But as a father of girls and a parent whose adult social set still overlaps with the unmarried, I do have a sense of where a daughter-inspired conservatism might come from, whatever political form it takes.
Why, Ross, tell us why decorating the nursery in pink causes you to pencil in that vote for Ted Cruz to occupy Kay Bailey Hutchinson's old seat?
It comes from thinking about their future happiness, and about a young man named Nathaniel P.
This character, Nate to his friends, doesn’t technically exist: He’s the protagonist in Adelle Waldman’s recent novel of young-Brooklynite manners, “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.” ... He’s well intentioned, sensitive, mildly idealistic. Yet he’s also a source of immense misery — both short-term and potentially lifelong — for the young women in his circle
To make a long, circuitous and spontaneously generated explanation drawing from multiple literary tropes short, Ross's theory is that liberal men will make your daughter weepy, which ultimately leads to...
...a kind of moral traditionalism that dare not speak its name — or that can be spoken of only in half-jest, as when the novelist Benjamin Kunkel told Traister that the solution was “some sort of a sexual strike against just such men.”
Parents have a girl, suddenly realize that liberal men are indecisive wimps who will only cause their girls misery, and the result is scorn for clean air regulation and a deep desire to see tough, steely-eyed men like Dick Cheney deciding their daughter's future.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
Actually, more like parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus (And I'm officially declaring PMNRM a bit of chatspeak that should exist).
I have two theories of my own from reading this article. First: Ross Douthat doesn't actually read many novels, but does enjoy pulling out the NYT Review of Books to peruse a few commentaries. Second: that sometimes, just sometimes, if you survey two totally unconnected things you'll find some weak trace of a correlation that you, assuming you are a polling organization that makes a living between elections peddling trite bits of X=Y to media outlets, can push forward as something "interesting."
I also have a theory that Republicans are hard wired to operate on the "coincidence? I think not!" principle. Like the belief that Ronald Reagan had something to do with the fall of communism.
Come on in, it's turtles all the way down.
Dana Milbank cuts open the political entrails to look for signs and portents.
Why did President Obama shake hands with Raúl Castro at the memorial service? What was up with the sign language interpreter at the memorial? What did Hillary Clinton think of George W. Bush’s paintings when he showed them off on Air Force One? And, most of all, was Michelle Obama really miffed when her husband posed for a "selfie" photo with British Prime Minister David Cameron on the camera phone of Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt of Denmark?
What does Milbank find in the tea leaves? Um, politicians have big egos. Somehow escaping Milbank's all-seeing eye: political media is focused on trivia and repeating trite just-so-isms.
Alan Fuer explains the origin of one of those things you hear about all the time, but probably haven't indulged in... yet.
If you’ve only recently tuned in to the seemingly endless conversation about bitcoin, you could be forgiven for thinking that the digital currency is little more than the latest Wall Street fetish or a juiced-up version of PayPal. ...
But all the talk about bitcoin’s value (or lack thereof) obscures the fact that it was never really meant as an investment nor primarily as a way to purchase sex toys or alpaca socks — let alone a brand-new Lamborghini. One could argue that bitcoin isn’t chiefly a commercial venture at all, a funny thing to say about a kind of online cash. To its creators and numerous disciples, bitcoin is — and always has been — a mostly ideological undertaking, more philosophy than finance. ... bitcoin isn’t merely money; it's "a movement" — a crusade in the costume of a currency. Depending on whom you talk to, the goal is to unleash repressed economies, to take down global banking or to wage a war against the Federal Reserve.
For those with an uncertain understanding of its history, bitcoin entered the world on Jan. 3, 2009, when a shadowy hacker — or team of hackers — working under the name Satoshi Nakamoto released an ingenious string of computer code that established a system permitting people to transfer money to one another online, directly, anonymously and outside government control...
The origin of bitcoin comes complete with a Galt-esque libertarian polemic against central banks. Because, you know, you can't trust the government. But you can trust a shadowy hacker who may or may not be more than one person. No coincidence that one of the primary bitcoin exchanges is run by the same guy who is famous for producing a 3D-printed gun.
Paul Clift and Sarah Erush are here to tell you that something you're already doing, is probably crazy.
The Joint Commission, which is responsible for hospital accreditation in the United States, requires that dietary supplements be treated like drugs. It makes sense: Vitamins, amino acids, herbs, minerals and other botanicals have pharmacological effects. So they are drugs.
But the Food and Drug Administration doesn't regulate dietary supplements as drugs — they aren't tested for safety and efficacy before they’re sold. Many aren't made according to minimal standards of manufacturing (the F.D.A. has even found some of the facilities where supplements are made to be contaminated with rodent feces and urine). And many are mislabeled, accidentally or intentionally. They often aren't what they say they are. For example:
In 2003, researchers tested "ayurvedic" remedies from health food stores throughout Boston. They found that 20 percent contained potentially harmful levels of lead, mercury or arsenic.
In 2008, two products were pulled off the market because they were found to contain around 200 times more selenium (an element that some believe can help prevent cancer) than their labels said. People who ingested these products developed hair loss, muscle cramps, diarrhea, joint pain, fatigue and blisters. ...
The F.D.A. estimates that approximately 50,000 adverse reactions to dietary supplements occur every year. And yet few consumers know this.
But wait! Not only did I hear that these particular pills were good from Dr. Oz, which is just short of finding it in chapter 12 of Revelation, but this supplement is backed by a completely made-up self-promotional organization with no real grounding in science, just like Rand Paul's medical license. So it must be good.
The New York Times shows one reason why so many crazy theories gain traction.
The nation has to enlarge its pool of the best and brightest science and math students and encourage them to pursue careers that will keep the country competitive.
But that isn’t happening. Not only do average American students perform poorly compared with those in other countries, but so do the best students, languishing in the middle of the pack as measured by the two leading tests used in international comparisons. ... Over all, the United States is largely holding still while foreign competitors are improving rapidly.
Valerie Strauss condems mythology around the Common Core education standards... then builds up some mythology of her own.
Carl Hiaasen adds his voice to pointing up a craziness we've allowed for too long.
If you haven’t yet seen Blackfish, download it today. The film has been shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination, with good reason.
Last week, Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart also scratched a SeaWorld show amid the outcry. The rock group has roots in Seattle, which isn’t far from the site of brutal roundups of baby killer whales during the late 1960s and early 70s.
The early minutes of Blackfish present footage of one such expedition, and it’s heart-wrenching to observe the misery of the adult whales as the young ones are netted and loaded on ships. (Those that died were slit open, loaded with weights and sunk to conceal the evidence).
One of those captured whales is still performing as "Lolita" at the Miami Seaquarium. Another that was snatched 30 years ago from the waters off Iceland is in the Shamu extravaganza at SeaWorld Orlando.
Its name is Tilikum, the subject of Blackfish. At six tons, "Tili" is said to be the largest bull orca in captivity. It’s also one of the most volatile and emotionally damaged, involved in three human deaths. ...
Orcas are complex, highly intelligent mammals that in the wild would be traveling vast distances in close-knit family pods. Captive specimens spend their days in glorified guppy ponds performing stunts designed purely to amuse paying customers.
Amen, brother. This is a pointless cruelty with an all too simple solution: it's not just entertainers who should boycott facilities which hold orcas captive, it's the customers who pay the bills for these torture chambers.
Richard Feldman and Arkadi Gerney present something so crazy, I wish it was true.
A year ago, in the days after 20 schoolchildren and six adults were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., it seemed for a moment that something had changed in America's long-running cultural debate on guns. A new kind of national conversation — even some consensus — seemed possible. But that was then. Today the voices on both sides of the gun policy debate are back to being as shrill as ever.
Still, behind the heated rhetoric, there are areas of agreement. While polls show Americans almost evenly divided on the question of whether they want more gun control or stricter laws, they overwhelmingly support expanded gun-buyer background checks and overwhelmingly oppose bans on handguns.
Those two strongly held positions suggest potential for crafting a grander bargain on guns, a new set of policies that would be premised on two complementary goals: protecting the rights of responsible, law-abiding gun owners and gun sellers, while giving law enforcement better tools to deter and prosecute criminal access to guns.
I'm glad to see that there's potential for some progress, but I have to say that even though I've been a gun owner all my life (my grandfather passed on a .410 shotgun when I was
3), the last couple of years have turned my position from modestly pro-gun ownership to indifferent shading to antagonistic. I'm now roughly as concerned with the "rights of responsible, law-abiding gun owners and gun sellers" as I am with the rights of law-abiding owners and peddlers of king cobras. I suppose some people have reasons, but "because I want it" shouldn't be enough.
Ray Jayawardhana has a theory that's not at all crazy.
Ever since another Nobel-winning genius, Leon Lederman, branded it the “God particle” some 20 years ago, the Higgs boson has captured the public imagination and dominated the media coverage of physics. Some consider Professor Lederman’s moniker a brilliant P.R. move for physics, while others denounce it as a terrible gaffe that confuses people and cheapens a solemn scientific enterprise. Either way, it has been effective. Nobody ever talks about the fascinating lives of other subatomic particles on "Fox and Friends."
Sure, the story of Higgs is a compelling one. The jaw-dropping $9 billion price tag of the machine built to chase it is enough to command our attention. Plus, there is the serene, wise man at the center of this epic saga: the octogenarian Peter Higgs, finally vindicated after waiting patiently for decades. Professor Higgs was seen to shed a tear of joy at a news conference announcing the discovery, adding tenderness to the triumphant moment and tugging ever so gently at our heartstrings. For reporters looking for a human-interest angle to this complicated scientific brouhaha, that was pure gold.
But I say enough is enough. It is time to give another particle a chance.
I'm not going to spoil it for you... oh, wait, I am. It's the neutrino. You really should read the piece anyway.
John Timmer has a few facts to throw at all those who want to maintain that cutting energy use is a threat to the economy.
There was a metaphor that made a number of appearances at this year’s Nobel Week Dialogue: opening scissors. To get the metaphor, you have to look at graphs. In the closed-scissors portion of things, two items remain linked and run along the graph in parallel. In fact, the correlation has run so deeply into history that everybody assumes that there’s a causal relationship between the two, and it’s impossible to separate them.
Then the scissors open. Suddenly, one of the items starts tracking on a different trajectory, and the two show an increasing divergence. The scissors have been opened. ...
More directly relevant to energy has been the link between economic growth and energy use—and therefore with carbon dioxide emissions. In the US, those scissors were opened within the last few years by a combination of a switch from coal to natural gas, greater energy efficiency, and a rise in renewable power (in order of importance). In Sweden, the scissors opened back in 1987; since then, the cumulative GDP growth has reached 60 percent, with greenhouse gas emissions remaining flat.
Go over to Timmer's brief article to see the really neat diagram. Energy does not equal growth. Not anymore.