So says the New York Times in its editorial earlier this week. The article doesn’t call for a constitutional amendment, but for more states to approve the National Popular Vote Compact, an agreement that each signing state will direct its electors to vote for the winner of the national popular vote. This seems like a clever solution, until you consider that states would be bound to vote for a candidate that perhaps carried only a small portion of the votes... Read more
This is a post I’ve been sitting on for a while, as the situation in Aleppo develops and I try to figure out how to put my thoughts together. But here it goes: Is Aleppo a genocide? No. The government is not seeking to exterminate people based on their ethnicity. In fact, near as I can tell, they’re not trying to exterminate people at all – their objective is not to kill the civilian population of eastern rebel-held Aleppo. It’s... Read more
Lost in all the pre-election reporting was a report about a potential new male contraceptive injection. Or, rather, about an injection with, as it turned out, not much potential after all, as a study was published which reported that trials of this potential injection were halted when it was determined that the degree of side effects, everything from acne to mood disorders to long-lasting infertility, was too high to continue the trials. As the site Heat Street reports, that didn’t... Read more
The latest report, from all the usual news sources, is that the CIA believes that Russia intervened in the U.S. election, not just to be a troublemaker in general terms, but specifically in order to help Trump get elected. See CNN, for instance. The reason for this? Per a snipped from the New York Times as quoted by Ann Althouse, because they have evidence that the Russians also hacked Republican systems, but did not release information from those systems. Now,... Read more
“How to Make Abortion Rarer” — that’s the title of an article in this week’s Economist. And — no surprise — their solution if for women everywhere to “see the light” and start using hormonal contraception rather than condoms, and for governments to make these drugs and devices more widely available, and free of charge. Before they get to that, they claim that legal restrictions on abortion have no effect, based on a Lancet study that claimed to have determined... Read more
Here’s a piece of legislation which got pretty much zero coverage at the time it was passed: Illinois Public Act 099-0672. OK, the non-zero coverage consists of an article in the Journal-Star from Peoria. Nothing, from memory and from google, in the Chicago Tribune; only the other day, as an offhand reference in a Tribune article about women fearful of losing their “free” (no out of pocket cost) contraceptives, did I read a mention that Illinois women with true insured plans,... Read more
That’s a question I posed on my facebook page yesterday. In hindsight, I should have specified, “not counting restaurants and service providers” because it’s not particularly out of the ordinary to patronize non-chain restaurants, and places like dry cleaners are still generally individually-owned, so some of my friends’ replies were “lunch” or “the parts for a luggage repair.” Others included sheet music, a bracelet, a handmade necklace, craft-show mittens and scarf, and Magic the Gathering cards. But the reality is... Read more
So last week I wrote about a very-statistically-credible German-conducted effectiveness study for sympto-thermal NFP that showed a user effectiveness rate of 98% for couples educated in a specific method. And I further said that the CDC claimed that NFP/FAM had a failure rate of 24%, but that I couldn’t find a source for that failure rate and didn’t give it much credence. Now I’ve found the source: a study by the Guttmacher Institute that takes government survey data on contraceptive use... Read more
tell me your stories! Conservative blogs and commentary sites have been full of reports lately (here’s an example) mocking progressives who agonize over how to have a conversation with family at Thanksgiving — in some cases, progressives simply fear interacting with Trump supporters, and in other cases, they actively try to instruct each other in how to “convert” wayward family members to get them to see The Truth. Is it a small minority of progressives engaged in this hand-wringing? Maybe.... Read more
We’ve never had this situation before, have we? A president(-elect) who is simultaneously the owner of a business with dealings all over the world. To be sure, presidents generally have a fair chunk of money, but they have never been business owners, just ordinary investors, with stocks and bonds that can easily be put into a blind trust, and are interchangeable with other stocks and bonds, with the president being relatively indifferent to the particulars. Could Trump put his business... Read more
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