While I appreciate when governments express support for natural human rights, I wonder if they really understand the rights they claim to support. Roosevelt County was recently declared a “Second Amendment Sanctuary” by the county commission. How serious are they?
Tag: change
Being Wrong and Being Smart
Imagine someone who plays Trivial Pursuit. Getting a lot of answers right is impressive. But if someone gets every single answer perfectly correct every single time, something’s up. They memorized all the correct answers. They’re unerring, but also kinda dumb.
The Peace of Mind in Probabilistic Thinking
It’s very stressful to be confronted with questions and claims about culture, physics, politics, psychology, health, economics, history, ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy and feel the need to have a clear answer. Especially when answers immediately get interpreted as sides and you’ll get lumped in with some tribal collective blob and be associated with whatever bundle of biases they may have, real or imagined. It’s like behind every possibility lurks a mob shouting, “Are you with us or against us?!”
Don’t Panic: The Retail Apocalypse Isn’t Disaster, It’s Progress
Nearly 30 years after it became widely publicly accessible, the Internet is in the final stages of killing off physical retail as we once knew it. But it’s not killing the economy.
The Shadow Factory
All units (individuals) have agenda. Each human will try to attach her agenda to the agenda at the highest levels attainable — for instance, in The Shadow Factory, the top set of agenda is that of the White House (nominally authored by George W. Bush, truly by Dick Cheney), a lower but very high set of agenda for the NSA, expressed by and through General Mike Hayden.
Wish List Politics: Green No Deal
The resolution calls, fuzzily, for “a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal,” but it doesn’t advertise that as a cost. It calls such a “mobilization” an “opportunity” and claims that its named predecessors “created the greatest middle class that the United States has ever seen.”
I Win My European Unemployment Bet
In 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate exceeded Europe’s for the first time in decades. Apologists for European labor market regulation rejoiced, so I publicly bet that European unemployment would exceed U.S. unemployment over the next decade. The original authors I targeted turned me down, even after I offered a 1 percentage-point spread. But noted economist John Quiggin took the bait.
Who’s In, Who’s Out?
Last week there was a sort of sea change in the ongoing saga of the ships of fools. POTUS’s former personal attorney, Mr. Cohen, appeared before an assembled committee of congresspersons. The first takeaway was that Cohen was not a compelling witness. The second takeaway was that the warring parties fell all over themselves trying to make something of the proceedings.
Childhood Play and Independence Are Disappearing; Let Grow Seeks to Change That
Many of us are old enough to remember how childhood used to be. Our afternoons were spent outside playing with the neighborhood kids—no adults or cell phones in sight. Sometimes we got hurt, with occasional scraped knees or hurt egos, but we worked it out. We always knew we could go home. We had paper routes, mowed lawns, ran errands, and babysat at ages much earlier than we allow our own kids. What happened to childhood in just a generation that now prompts neighbors to call the police when they see an eight-year-old walking her dog?
Starting the Day on My Own Terms
I don’t have a morning routine. Sometimes I experiment with one, other times I alter my mornings based on other larger goals. In some phases of life, I’ve slept in ’till eight or nine. In others I’ve gotten up at five or six. Sometimes I do both from day to day. I’ve done email first…