Category Archives: Intelligence

Trump’s List

Intellectualism, Intelligence, Justice, Law, The Courts

Amy Coney Barrett: How can one fail to be impressed by this 46-year-old mother of seven, former Notre Dame law professor and clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia?

Speaking on Fox News (7/5), constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, certainly an intellect, intimated to Jason Chaffetz that none of the justices on Trump’s list quite matches Neil Gorsuch for intellect. Turley sagely advised that the president “choose intellect, not optics.”

As Micky Kaus grumbles, the Federalist Society vets for Roe v. Wade. But do they vet for Flores? Making sure Trump doesn’t pick a Bushesque act-of-love justice seems like Job #1 for border controllers right now.

Ted Cruz and Rand Paul support Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), for reasons they don’t specify. They say he has fine principles. Well, what are Lee’s principles?

Principle is important. So is intellect.

This Washington Post item is crammed with grammatical mistakes. Mismatched subject and verbs, for example. Disgraceful. But here is, “Trump narrows list for Supreme Court pick, with focus on Kavanaugh and Kethledge.”

UPDATED (7/9/018): Non-‘Shithole’ Countries Seem To Recover Quickly From Disasters, Natural Or Man-Made

Business, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Human Accomplishment, IMMIGRATION, Intelligence, Technology

In 2008, Iceland collapsed under the weight of its banking industry’s federal-reserve like excesses.

In 2018, Iceland’s is a red hot economy. The highly able population has shifted from finance to technology and tourism. No bailout—allowing the banks to collapse and a natural recovery take place—has a lot to do with it.

“… rather than stepping in with taxpayers’ money like the British and Americans did, the Icelandic government let its banks go bust.”

Likewise did Chile cope reasonably well with what was “one of the most powerful earthquakes in history.” We hear nothing of Chile’s struggles to recover.

Not so Haiti, the Africa of the Western Hemisphere.

Haiti is forever convulsed by political and natural disasters. It remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, where four out of five people live in poverty and more than half in abject poverty (NYT).

It’s nearly two decades since a pair of earthquakes struck El Salvador in 2001. The US government granted Salvadorians a generous grant of privilege in the late 1990s, in the form of a temporary protected status (TPS) for nearly 200,000.

Ditto the “Haitians who were stranded after an earthquake in 2010.”

To the din of protest, “the United States’ Department of Homeland Security had only recently revoked the so-called temporary protection (it lasted nearly 2 decades).

“Shithole countries,” a Trump coinage, don’t seem to recover very well from disasters, natural or man-made, do they?

SEE RELATED READING:

“Trump’s ‘Shithole’ Controversy Deconstructed (Part 1)”
“Why Trump Pooh-Poohed ‘S-ithole’ Countries (Part 2)”

UPDATE (7/9/018):

Meanwhile in Haiti ...

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UPDATE III (12/13/018): A New Kind Of Bi-Partisan Non-thinking

Celebrity, Conservatism, Democrats, Intelligence, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Philosophy, Republicans

Wikipedia calls Candace Owens an “American conservative commentator, and activist.”

I call Samantha Bee a smarmy, left-liberal—one among many—who purports to do comedy.

Yet the aforementioned Owens calls Bee a “liberal thinker.” (I believe that such a pronouncement was made on Martha MacCallum’s “The Story,” or on another of those interchangeable programs.)

The above is a new kind of non-thinking.

So is the self-explanatory Samantha-Bee contretemps below:

Bee came under fire for calling Ivanka Trump a cunt. “You know, Ivanka, that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child,” Bee said as the photo flashed onto the screen, “but let me just say, one mother to another: Do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless cunt! He listens to you!”

The moment faced harsh criticism, both from the White House, which called her statement “vile and vicious,” and from some on the left, who argued that calling women “cunts” reduces them to their genitalia and is a slur that’s meant to teach women that their bodies are disgusting and shameful. (Bee also received praise from others on the left, who argued that cunt is just a word and that the real issue is Donald Trump’s immigration practices.) In the wake of the backlash, Bee tweeted an apology to both Ivanka Trump and her viewers, saying, “I crossed a line, and I deeply regret it.”

UPDATE I (6/13):

ON THE OTHER SIDE, THERE IS Chris Cuomo, part of CNN’s thought-police enforcement. Here he goes after Republican Corey Stewart, who’s for the working man, by… calling Stewart a white supremacist and a racist. Is that’s all the filthy libs have?

UPDATE II (12/11/018):

MORE Little League cat fight.  My term for the bickering between two “giants” of conservative thought: Candace and Tomi, aforementioned.

 

UPDATE III (12/13/018): Speechless at the hubris:

The Dismal Scientists Of Microeconomics Are ALSO Struggling To Do Science

Critique, Economy, Intelligence, Pseudoscience, Science

Almost every bit of research cited in support of some or another ridiculous claim in the popular press seems abysmally designed. At least to this former student of research methodology.

Samples are too minuscule to claim generalizeability of findings beyond the sample, to the broader, targeted population. Likewise, you just know sample selection is poor, too. Variables are not often operationalized in an intelligent way. The actual hypothesis frequently sounds wacky. On and on.

It transpires that the same methodological flaws that “bedevil most social sciences, and some hard sciences, too,” have infected the dismal scientists of microeconomics.

“Many results in microeconomics are shaky.” From the a series “on the shortcomings of the economics profession” in the Economist:

A recent examination in the Economic Journal, of almost 7,000 empirical economics studies, found that in half of the areas of research, nearly 90% of those studies were underpowered, ie, that they used samples too small to judge whether a particular effect was really there. Of the studies that avoided this pitfall, 80% were found to have exaggerated the reported results. Another study, published in Science, which attempted to replicate 18 economics experiments, failed for seven of them.