A few thoughts on Russia and the election

Last updated on: January 9, 2017 at 9:06 am By Jane the Actuary

“Did cyberhacks hurt Clinton?” That’s the title of an article in the Chicago Tribune which appears in the online LA Times with the headline, “U.S. intelligence report doesn’t say whether Russian hacking helped elect Donald Trump.” The key points of the article: The new intelligence report concludes that Putin sought to help Trump win the presidency, but doesn’t make any claims about whether the e-mail hacks and other Russian actions actually made the difference in enabling Trump to win the... Read more

4 easy Obamacare fixes

Last updated on: January 7, 2017 at 10:59 pm By Jane the Actuary

There’s a lot of chatter about how Republicans are going to repeal Obamacare and replace it with, well, either nothing, or a few miserly tax credits, or maybe they won’t at all because they’ll realize how popular its provisions are, even though people don’t realize it when they label the whole thing “Obamacare.” Not long ago Megan McArdle wrote an article about these various popular provisions that Trump and the Republicans are talking about keeping, seemingly not recognizing how complicated it... Read more

A dog-owning ethics question

Last updated on: January 7, 2017 at 3:22 pm By Jane the Actuary

Put simply, is it ethical to own a dog to provide you with companionship, even if you won’t be able to care for it properly? This is a question that I’m asking myself in connection with my mom. She’s 77, and has owned two dogs, Shelties, getting the first one just after I went off to college, while my younger brother was in high school, and replacing him after he died. It seems to me that it’s been 5 years... Read more

An update (sort of) on Gaza

Last updated on: January 6, 2017 at 12:04 pm By Jane the Actuary

Man, oh, man, is Gaza a mess. I wrote pessimistically about this region? territory? geographical place? earlier, and speculated that the fact that they have such an astonishingly high birth rate and such a low median age, would alone go a long way towards explaining its extremism, if the place is simply hugely, disproportionately, occupied by young people. Nearly 2/3rds of the population is under the age of 25, and their birth rates and population youthfulness is much more extreme than... Read more

Women and alcohol – and facebook?

Last updated on: January 4, 2017 at 10:47 am By Jane the Actuary

Late last week, the Washington Post reported that “Drinking is killing twice as many middle-aged white women as it did 18 years ago.” Specifically, for white women aged 35-54, the death rate increased from about 8 per 100,000 (it’s a graph, so that’s just an approximation from a dot) in 1997 to 18 per 100,000 in 2015. Now, to be sure, that’s not a large number in absolute terms, but it is a dramatic jump, and the post pairs this... Read more

Can you be a Christian introvert?

Last updated on: January 2, 2017 at 11:46 am By Jane the Actuary

And, mind you, “introvert” carries with it a bit of “somewhere, somebody is probably secretly diagnosing me as on the autism spectrum.” Ill at ease in social situations, never quite relaxed because you’re worrying that you’ll say the wrong thing, or, at any rate, won’t say the right thing, and then will give everyone around you the impression that you’re a half-wit for standing there stupidly. That’s been me, pretty much my whole life, and I feel like I’ve become... Read more

The Three State Solution

Last updated on: December 27, 2016 at 2:24 pm By Jane the Actuary

Yes, three states. It goes like this: Israel engages in land swaps to some reasonable fashion to construct defensible borders, and keeps the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. Egypt takes back Gaza, which it held from 1948 to 1967 anyway. Jordan takes back the remainder of the West Bank, and the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem, which it held from 1948 to 1967. Both these areas may be wholly incorporated or semi-autonomous, but with Egyptian and Jordanian troops, respectively, guaranteeing the security... Read more

Three questions on the anti-settlement UN resolution

Last updated on: December 27, 2016 at 2:24 pm By Jane the Actuary

Obligatory link to context: Ann Althouse (with links in her own post), BBC (containing the claim that Obama orchestrated the resolution), a tweetstorm by Omri Ceren. Just before Christmas, the UN passed a resolution condemning Israeli settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as in violation of international law, and reiterating the demand that Israel must withdraw from all lands taken from Jordan in 1967, and all Jewish residents as well. Not only did the U.S. abstain from voting rather than... Read more

The “True Meanings” of Christmas

Last updated on: December 25, 2016 at 6:23 pm By Jane the Actuary

Plural. Some years ago, I attended Catholic mass on Christmas Day for the first time, and learned that the readings are not the standard nativity narrative you hear on Christmas Eve, but are instead the opening to John: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through... Read more

Imagine a country without segregation (more on the election system)

Last updated on: December 23, 2016 at 11:00 am By Jane the Actuary

And by segregation, I only partly mean racial segregation. I also mean those various other ways in which cities, counties, regions, differ in socio-economic class, religious affiliation, and all those other differences that predict political affiliation. Consider that there is a well-established requirement that states, when determining Congressional districts, set district boundaries in such a way as to ensure that there are likely to be, considering the black population of the state as a whole, a roughly proportionate number of... Read more