Wha tthe Times Gets Wrong About Slavery in America

https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2019/10/02/what-the-times-got-wrong-about-slavery-in-america/

Do the math

Jim Geraghty on Warren last night:

David A. Graham writes, “[Warren] seemed to be focusing on emotion.” Yeah, no kidding. Every presidential candidate prefers to focus on emotion. Obama talked about “hope” and “yes we can,” Trump vented his spleen and offered a vision of an America that was “great again.” Every candidate wants to focus on emotion because it’s easier than getting the math to add up. You would think the electorate would learn after getting so many consecutive cycles of believing in the next great inspiring hope and then being disappointed by the results.

Emotion is easy. Everybody’s got a sad anecdote about losing someone they loved, or knowing someone who faced an unfair, undeserved hardship. Everybody’s got some inspiring anecdote about someone who fought through adversity and is now living the American dream. Everybody’s heard about some kind of injustice that is technically legal but morally wrong, and that gets an audience’s blood boiling.

You know what kind of people want you to focus on emotion? Salesmen, con artists, cult leaders, and demagogues. Emotion empowered Bernie Madoff; math caught him.

You want to know why you have problems, America? Because you don’t like doing the math. Your checkbook doesn’t add up, you didn’t read the fine print, you didn’t realize how bad the interest rate on your credit card was, you didn’t think your adjustable rate mortgage would adjust so soon, and you can’t believe you agreed to buy that timeshare.

You know why you get lured into bad ideas? Because people play on your emotions. The people in the commercials using that product look so happy. They flatter you and flirt to win you over and get you to let down your guard. They boast about how great their life is to make you envious and insecure. Human beings shop excessively, or eat too much, or drink too much, or take drugs because of how it makes them feel.

The higher the stakes of the decision, the more you ought to make sure your emotions aren’t clouding your judgment and blinding you to facts that will cause you problems down the road. Yes, it’s reassuring to hear ‘if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” But it turns out that if you make a ton of changes to what kinds of health insurance plans are legal, some people will not be able to keep their plan or keep their doctor. Yes, it feels good to hear that the problem of illegal immigration will be solved by a “big beautiful wall” that will be paid for by Mexico. It turns out that Mexico is not willing to pay for a border wall — and that the president will have to keep insisting that Mexico is indeed technically paying for it through a new trade deal that is still not enacted by Congress.

This doesn’t mean we have to be Vulcans, but to quote a guy you may have heard of, “facts don’t care about your feelings.”

Chernobyl and Nuclear Power

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/05/09/the-reason-they-fictionalize-nuclear-disasters-like-chernobyl-is-because-they-kill-so-few-people/#4ff7ad5f41fc

Love,

Dad

According to the official United Nations report (p. 66) on the accident, just two workers, not dozens, or hundreds, were killed within a few hours of the explosion.  Neither of the workers died from radiation. One was killed by the rubble from the explosion and the other by thermal burns from the fire.

Two weeks later, firefighters and first responders started to die. Having been burned in the fire appears to have played a major role. Two-thirds of the Chernobyl first responders who died had thermal (fire) burns in addition to having been exposed to extremely high levels of radiation.

According to the United Nations, 31 deaths are directly attributable to the accident. Three people died at the scene of the accident and 28 died several weeks later. Since then, 19 died for ”various reasons” including tuberculosis, cirrhosis of the liver, heart attacks, and trauma. The U.N. concluded that “the assignment of radiation as the cause of death has become less clear.”

What about cancers? There have been 20,000 documented cases of thyroid cancer in those aged under 18 at the time of the accident, and the UN’s most recent white paper from 2017 concludes that only 25%, i.e. 5,000, can be attributed to Chernobyl radiation (see paragraphs A - C in the Executive Summary).

In earlier studies, the UN estimated there could be up to 16,000 cases attributable to Chernobyl radiation. Since thyroid cancer has a mortality rate of just one percent, that means the expected deaths from thyroid cancers caused by Chernobyl will be 50 to 160, with the vast majority of them occurring in the elderly.

That’s it. There is no reliable evidence that radiation from Chernobyl caused an increase in any other disease or malady including birth defects.

Some More AGW BS

https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-seattle-times-story-on-massive-heat.html

That it got published shows the weaknesses of the peer-review system and a clear example to the public and the media  that they should be careful before taking a single paper like this too serious.   The fact that a major U.S. newspaper, such as the Seattle Times, rushed to put such obviously problematic work on the front page is disturbing.  This is not educating the public, but attempting to scare them and gain clicks.  One does not have to wonder why some vulnerable individuals are suffering from "climate anxiety" when local media publishes such unfounded and unsupportable predictions of massive deaths.

Pharmaceutical Costs and Comparing Life Expectancy

https://www.city-journal.org/price-controls-on-pharmaceuticals

American teenagers and young adults are also more likely to die for reasons unrelated to medical care. About half of the overall longevity gap between the U.S. and other developed countries stems from its higher mortality rate below age 50, which is partly due to infant mortality but mainly to the much higher rates of homicides, fatal motor-vehicle accidents (Americans drive much more than Europeans do), and other injuries—notably, drug overdoses. In middle age and beyond, one of the chief causes of the longevity gap is the U.S. rate of obesity, which is nine times higher than Japan’s and about double the rate of Europe. When a National Academy of Sciences panel in 2011 analyzed the longevity of Americans above age 50, it concluded that obesity accounts for 20 percent to 35 percent, and possibly more than half, of the gap with other affluent countries.

An even bigger factor is smoking, which was much more common through the 1980s among Americans, especially women. Samuel Preston, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania who was one of the editors of the National Academy report, estimated that smoking accounted for 41 percent of the life-expectancy gap among men and 78 percent of the gap among women. He found that if deaths due to smoking were excluded, the United States would rise to the top half of the longevity rankings among developed countries.

Considering all these disproportionate killers in the United States—smoking, obesity, fatal injuries, and the rest—why isn’t the life-expectancy gap even larger? Because Americans receive better treatment, particularly for cardiovascular disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death after 45. While heart disease is more prevalent in the United States than in other developed countries (no surprise, considering all the overweight Americans with a history of smoking), people with high cholesterol and hypertension are more likely to receive treatment for their condition in the U.S. than in other countries.

Global Warming BS

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/05/06/opinion_why_the_nyts_maple_syrup_story_tastes_funny.html  

How did the New York Times get things so wrong? Is it carelessness? Or is there an ideological agenda at play, one that requires the reporting and writing to lead to a preestablished conclusion? On Twitter, the NYT reporter calls herself Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis. That is no doubt a gesture at self-aware humor. But it also suggests that her reporting is skewed: If you see gloom as your beat, by definition you ignore information that doesn’t advance the narrative of impending doom. And then there is the larger institutional bias. Pierre-Louis is officially a "climate reporter" for the Times; she leads NYT-branded "student journeys" to places such as Iceland (cost: $8,190 per high-schooler for 15 days) to teach the risks of a warming planet. In other words, the Times has a business built in part around Pierre-Louis that depends on her being a warning voice on warming.

Those sounding the alarm about climate change do a lot of fretting over what may happen 50 to 100 years from now. Fair enough — or at least it would be if those delivering the warnings were in more of a habit of playing it straight. It would be much easier to credit their predictions of future catastrophes if they were more honest about what is actually, observably, happening right now.

Medicaid Crowding Out State Education Spending

https://www.educationnext.org/higher-ed-lower-spending-as-states-cut-back-where-has-money-gone/#

There has been a gradual decline in public financial support of higher education over the past 30 years. The average state spends $2,337 less today per full-time-equivalent college student than in 1987. This divestment has been passed on to students partly in the form of higher tuition and partly through reduced spending, both of which have been shown to negatively impact students. While the public discussion around college usually focuses on the price paid by students, recent work by economists David Deming and Chris Walters suggests that declines in the amount colleges and universities spend may have a larger impact on student outcomes.

This essay asks a simple question: where did the money go? Reduced spending on higher education must go somewhere¸ and the goal of my analysis is to produce the best possible estimates of where the spending went, the degree to which changes in different categories of spending explain changes in higher-education spending per student.

In reality, there are 50 different answers to this question, but in the aggregate, states have shifted most of their former investment toward public-welfare programs, particularly Medicaid. This finding highlights the struggle state legislatures face to balance the immediate needs of today against investments in the future. Most important, it illustrates that constraining the rise of health-care costs is critical not just for those who care about health-care reform but for the public-higher-education landscape as well.