A great thread, via Instapundit (click through), "A DELIGHTFUL THREAD FROM MARY KATHARINE HAM: Christmas surprises and OpSec failures."
Wednesday, December 23, 2020
Friday, April 20, 2018
Thursday, January 25, 2018
America's Extreme Poverty
This is a horrifying read from Angus Deaton. Alas, I fear he underestimates the ability of Americans to hide from reality. https://t.co/tpODq5u1yc— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) January 25, 2018
You might think that the kind of extreme poverty that would concern a global organization like the United Nations has long vanished in this country. Yet the special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, recently made and reported on an investigative tour of the United States.Keep reading.
Surely no one in the United States today is as poor as a poor person in Ethiopia or Nepal? As it happens, making such comparisons has recently become much easier. The World Bank decided in October to include high-income countries in its global estimates of people living in poverty. We can now make direct comparisons between the United States and poor countries.
Properly interpreted, the numbers suggest that the United Nations has a point — and the United States has an urgent problem. They also suggest that we might rethink how we assist the poor through our own giving.
According to the World Bank, 769 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2013; they are the world’s very poorest. Of these, 3.2 million live in the United States, and 3.3 million in other high-income countries (most in Italy, Japan and Spain).
As striking as these numbers are, they miss a very important fact. There are necessities of life in rich, cold, urban and individualistic countries that are less needed in poor countries. The World Bank adjusts its poverty estimates for differences in prices across countries, but it ignores differences in needs.
An Indian villager spends little or nothing on housing, heat or child care, and a poor agricultural laborer in the tropics can get by with little clothing or transportation. Even in the United States, it is no accident that there are more homeless people sleeping on the streets in Los Angeles, with its warmer climate, than in New York.
The Oxford economist Robert Allen recently estimated needs-based absolute poverty lines for rich countries that are designed to match more accurately the $1.90 line for poor countries, and $4 a day is around the middle of his estimates. When we compare absolute poverty in the United States with absolute poverty in India, or other poor countries, we should be using $4 in the United States and $1.90 in India.
Once we do this, there are 5.3 million Americans who are absolutely poor by global standards. This is a small number compared with the one for India, for example, but it is more than in Sierra Leone (3.2 million) or Nepal (2.5 million), about the same as in Senegal (5.3 million) and only one-third less than in Angola (7.4 million). Pakistan (12.7 million) has twice as many poor people as the United States, and Ethiopia about four times as many.
This evidence supports on-the-ground observation in the United States. Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer have documented the daily horrors of life for the several million people in the United States who actually do live on $2 a day, in both urban and rural America. Matthew Desmond’s ethnography of Milwaukee explores the nightmare of finding urban shelter among the American poor.
It is hard to imagine poverty that is worse than this, anywhere in the world. Indeed, it is precisely the cost and difficulty of housing that makes for so much misery for so many Americans, and it is precisely these costs that are missed in the World Bank’s global counts.
Of course, people live longer and have healthier lives in rich countries. With only a few (and usually scandalous) exceptions, water is safe to drink, food is safe to eat, sanitation is universal, and some sort of medical care is available to everyone. Yet all these essentials of health are more likely to be lacking for poorer Americans. Even for the whole population, life expectancy in the United States is lower than we would expect given its national income, and there are places — the Mississippi Delta and much of Appalachia — where life expectancy is lower than in Bangladesh and Vietnam.
Beyond that, many Americans, especially whites with no more than a high school education, have seen worsening health: As my research with my wife, the Princeton economist Anne Case, has demonstrated, for this group life expectancy is falling; mortality rates from drugs, alcohol and suicide are rising; and the long historical decline in mortality from heart disease has come to a halt...
The other day, over at my local Ralph's supermarket on Culver and Walnut in Irvine, I saw a young woman with a baby panhandling for money in the parking lot. The baby was in a chest sling, sleeping; the woman was holding a sign, asking for money, which I couldn't read very well. I didn't even flinch. I walked over to her and asked if she and the baby had enough to eat. She said yes and held out her hand, showing some of the dollar bills folks had given her. I gave her a couple of bucks and urged her to get inside and get some food.
I remember when living in Santa Barbara, the staff at the local homeless mission told us not to give cash handouts to the city's downtown homeless people. The mission gave us food tickets that the homeless could use if they went down the organization's main shelter, which was on the south side of Highway 101. I guess a lot of panhandlers weren't buying food with the cash, but rather alcohol, drugs, or who knows what? But the beggars are persistent and ubiquitous, especially on State Street downtown. You want to help when you can, until you become so tired of the solicitations you give the beggars a wide berth (and I did that sometimes).
In any case, now I've been thinking about the homeless camp in Anaheim, and debating whether I should go over there myself to do a photo-blog. I'm not as motivated on this stuff as I used to be, although I'm just curious to check out the encampments. Many of the people there told the police they weren't moving, and it's a miles-long encampment, so I doubt we've heard the last of the news from that location.
And of course the homeless issue is just one facet of poverty in America; it's the most visible one, and gets a lot of media attention, especially given the current scale of the problem and the community backlash. As longtime readers will recall, I used to live in Fresno, and anyone who drives up Highway 99, and stops by and drives through some of the small migrant farming towns, which routinely have poverty and unemployment rates in the 30 and 40 percent range, knows what I'm talking about. It's hard out there. In California public policy is so bad it's a national disgrace. Remember, the so-called bullet train is scheduled for billions of dollars in cost overruns and may never be completed. How much money is being wasted on these high-theory policy programs, which mostly are focused on combating "climate change" as opposed to making any person's life better, to say nothing of relieving poverty? It makes me mad.
Note something else about Professor Deaton's essay: It reaffirms President Trump's nationalist focus of making our own country great again. We should be working in fact to help our own people more than we're helping other populations in other countries around the globe. Thinking about his findings, and his exhortations for citizens to give more, Deaton writes:
None of this means that we should close out “others” and look after only our own. International cooperation is vital to keeping our globe safe, commerce flowing and our planet habitable.What to do?
But it is time to stop thinking that only non-Americans are truly poor. Trade, migration and modern communications have given us networks of friends and associates in other countries. We owe them much, but the social contract with our fellow citizens at home brings unique rights and responsibilities that must sometimes take precedence, especially when they are as destitute as the world’s poorest people.
Well, don't rely on the Democrats to make any serious efforts to combat poverty and improve economic performance at home. That's not the agenda of the "intersectional" left right now. This radical intersectionality finds its home among the coastal urban elites in big cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, New York, Boston, and elsewhere. The poster child for the urban elitist mindset is California State Senator Scott Wiener, notorious for authoring legislation decriminalizing HIV-infected blood transfusions. He's also one of state's leaders behind the urban density movement, cosponsoring a recent bill seeking to change California's zoning laws to allow high-density and high-rise housing near urban public transportation centers. The rationale? To reduce "climate change," what else? If you build more units near transportation centers, less people will rely on private vehicles, with less pollution, so the theory goes. But the types of folks targeted by these policies are high-income tech- and cultural-sector workers who help drive up property values, already high property values, and keep low-income workers out and the poor down. Leftist policies are driving the unaffordable housing trends in the state. (See Berkeleyside for more, "Berkeley mayor on Wiener-Skinner housing bill: ‘A declaration of war against our neighborhoods’.")
You're going to have poverty. You're going to have it in a market economy. Those times when we've seen dramatic reductions in the poverty rate have been during periods of robust economic growth. We're currently seeing something of this right now, with the black unemployment rate falling to its historic low in December. (This happened during the late-1990s too, when the first dot com boom pushed national unemployment down to under 4 percent.) A rising tide lifts all boats, I heard somebody say.
Lots more could be added here, but I'll have to save more commentary for later.
RELATED: "A 'Mixed Bag'? Fifty Years Later and That's All to Be Said for 'War on Poverty'?"
Saturday, May 13, 2017
Court Rules Kentucky Print Shop Has Right to Avoid Making Gay Pride T-shirts
Screw the homosexual Nazis.
At WSJ (via Memeorandum and Vox Populi):
Court Rules Kentucky Print Shop Has Right to Avoid Making Gay Pride Shirts... https://t.co/xEoLZoiPgp— DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) May 13, 2017
A Kentucky appellate court on Friday ruled that the Christian owner of a printing shop in Lexington had the right to refuse to make T-shirts promoting a local gay pride festival.Flashback to the Weekly Standard, "You Will Be Assimilated":
The dispute represents the latest court fight testing the limits of antidiscrimination protections for gays and lesbians following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 landmark ruling legalizing gay marriage nationwide.
The cases have led to a number of state court rulings against Christian-owned businesses that refused to bake cakes, design floral arrangements or take portrait photographs for same-sex weddings.
The ruling by the Kentucky Court of Appeals favored the business owner. A crucial difference in this case was the expressive nature of the service denied: literally words on a shirt.
In a split vote, a three-judge panel concluded that the store, Hands on Originals, couldn’t be forced to print a message with which the owner disagreed.
The dispute started in 2012 when Gay and Lesbian Services Organization in Kentucky asked Hands on Originals to make T-shirts with the name and logo of a pride festival...
You Will Be Assimilatedhttp://t.co/1gu8Ivan7U pic.twitter.com/dguZejRK72— The Weekly Standard (@weeklystandard) June 26, 2015
Sunday, April 2, 2017
Newlyweds Hold Wedding Reception at In-N-Out
At ABC 15 News Phoenix:
Newlywed couple holds wedding reception at In-n-Out in California.https://t.co/MXpyp7xZlE #abc15 pic.twitter.com/6xyvZM0ZbM
— ABC15 Arizona (@abc15) April 2, 2017
Friday, March 24, 2017
Christina El Moussa Looks Spectacular in a Bikini
Instapundit's posting some Rule 5, "A “REVENGE BODY?” I’ve never really seen the point of that, but whatever. It’s Blog Sweeps Week!"
Also, at People Magazine, "See Christina El Moussa’s cute matching bikini with her daughter Taylor."
And at the Wrap, "‘Flip or Flop’ Star Christina El Moussa Blasted for ‘Completely Inappropriate’ Mother-Daughter Bikini Photo."
It's just a bikini, for crying out loud.
Now, don't get me going about the divorce (that's another story).
Monday, March 20, 2017
'Cuckold Stands by Wife' After She Cheats with 14-Year-Old Boy
That's a harsh headline.
Maybe the dude just loves his wife and practices Christian forgiveness.
That said, being "cuck" is kind of a thing these days, lol.
At the New York Post:
A husband stood by his wife after her affair with a middle school kid https://t.co/PFojR41y7T pic.twitter.com/xe5rP3p8P3
— New York Post (@nypost) March 20, 2017
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Derek Jeter Marries Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Hannah Davis
She's a longtime feature of Rule 5 blogging around here. See, "Hannah Davis for Sports Illustrated Swimsuit." (More here.)
And at the New York Post:
Today's cover: Derek Jeter marries Hannah Davis https://t.co/TIfceK5uIL pic.twitter.com/1uniRnhId4
— New York Post (@nypost) July 10, 2016
Monday, June 27, 2016
Scenes from a Wedding
Mrs. McCain, our son and his bride, and some old dude.
— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) June 27, 2016
From my son's wedding Sunday
(Photo by @KirbyMcCain) pic.twitter.com/Uy2uzNzfwP
Thursday, May 12, 2016
How Marriage Influences Male Economic Success (VIDEO)
And check out his study, "For Richer, For Poorer: How Family Structures Economic Success in America."
Monday, February 1, 2016
Shop for Valentine's Day Gifts
I used to take candy and flowers to my wife at work when I was in grad school. My wife worked the fragrance counter at Robinson's department store back then, and having the husband drop of the Valentine's presents like that gained my wife some high creds with her female colleagues, heh.
At Amazon, Shop Amazon - Top Valentine's Day Gifts.
MORE: Shop for gym bags and running shoes.
Saturday, January 30, 2016
Murrieta's Erica Harris Marries Man She Never Met in Person at Ontario International Airport (VIDEO)
Cupid indeed strikes!
Dudes, you better be on Instagram to hook up with your long-desired hottie!
At CBS News 2 Los Angeles:
Saturday, January 9, 2016
Dakota Meyer Has Filed Court Papers Asking for Joint Legal and Physical Custody, and Child Support, for Sailor Grace, His Daughter with Bristol Palin
And here I thought they were going to be married.
At London's Daily Mail, "EXCLUSIVE: Who's the daddy? Dakota Meyer's custody battle with Bristol Palin escalates as he's forced to take PATERNITY TEST amid questions of baby's actual birth date."
There was the controversy last year over his previous marriage, so perhaps the paternity test and court filing relates.
I don't know, but Victory Girls posted on this at the time, "Yes, Chicks on the Right, Dakota Meyer IS Legally Divorced From His First Wife."
Monday, September 28, 2015
Tinder Decries L.A. Billboard Warning Users to Get Tested for STDs (VIDEO)
They want that billboard to come down.
At the Los Angeles Times, "Tinder demands removal of L.A. billboard that tells dating app users to get STD test":
Tinder has sent a cease and desist letter to the AIDS Healthcare Foundation after a billboard went up in Los Angeles last week that draws a link between dating apps and a growing rate of sexually transmitted diseases.Hey, we've got you covered at AmPow. The Vanity Fair piece is here, "The Tinder Hookup Culture and the End of Dating."
The foundation said the billboard's purpose is to raise awareness about the increasing STD rate and to encourage dating-app users to get regular screenings or a “free STD check.” The billboard features silhouettes of people and the words “Tinder, Chlamydia, Grindr, Gonorrhea.”
“In many ways, location-based mobile dating apps are becoming a digital bathhouse for millennials wherein the next sexual encounter can literally just be a few feet away—as well as the next STD,” Whitney Engeran-Cordova, the foundation’s public health division director, said in a statement.
“While these sexual encounters are often intentionally brief or even anonymous, sexually transmitted diseases can have lasting effects on an individual’s personal health and can certainly create epidemics in communities at large,” the statement continued.
But Tinder, a location-based dating app, has fired back, saying the ad wrongly associates the app with venereal disease.
“These unprovoked and wholly unsubstantiated accusations are made to irreparably damage Tinder’s reputation in an attempt to encourage others to take an HIV test by your organization,” Tinder attorney Jonathan Reichman said in a letter to the foundation.
The foundation responded that it would not remove the billboard. It also referenced a Vanity Fair article that attributed a boom in casual hookups to the emergence of dating apps like Tinder...
Yep, goodbye dating and hello STDs!
There's still more at the Times, heh.
Monday, August 31, 2015
Robert Stacy McCain Blogs 'Tinder Is the Night'
At the Other McCain, "‘Hit-It-and-Quit-It on Tinder’."
'Hit-It-and-Quit-It on Tinder' http://t.co/yiQDHnPIe0 h/t @AmPowerBlog #tcot pic.twitter.com/l7QjocEUDg
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) August 31, 2015
The Tinder Hookup Culture and the End of Dating
Heh.
At Vanity Fair, "Tinder and the Dawn of the “Dating Apocalypse”":
Mobile dating went mainstream about five years ago; by 2012 it was overtaking online dating. In February, one study reported there were nearly 100 million people—perhaps 50 million on Tinder alone—using their phones as a sort of all-day, every-day, handheld singles club, where they might find a sex partner as easily as they’d find a cheap flight to Florida. “It’s like ordering Seamless,” says Dan, the investment banker, referring to the online food-delivery service. “But you’re ordering a person.”Sorry. Not buying it.
The comparison to online shopping seems an apt one. Dating apps are the free-market economy come to sex. The innovation of Tinder was the swipe—the flick of a finger on a picture, no more elaborate profiles necessary and no more fear of rejection; users only know whether they’ve been approved, never when they’ve been discarded. OkCupid soon adopted the function. Hinge, which allows for more information about a match’s circle of friends through Facebook, and Happn, which enables G.P.S. tracking to show whether matches have recently “crossed paths,” use it too. It’s telling that swiping has been jocularly incorporated into advertisements for various products, a nod to the notion that, online, the act of choosing consumer brands and sex partners has become interchangeable.
“It’s instant gratification,” says Jason, 26, a Brooklyn photographer, “and a validation of your own attractiveness by just, like, swiping your thumb on an app. You see some pretty girl and you swipe and it’s, like, oh, she thinks you’re attractive too, so it’s really addicting, and you just find yourself mindlessly doing it.” “Sex has become so easy,” says John, 26, a marketing executive in New York. “I can go on my phone right now and no doubt I can find someone I can have sex with this evening, probably before midnight.”
And is this “good for women”? Since the emergence of flappers and “moderns” in the 1920s, the debate about what is lost and gained for women in casual sex has been raging, and is raging still—particularly among women. Some, like Atlantic writer Hanna Rosin, see hookup culture as a boon: “The hookup culture is … bound up with everything that’s fabulous about being a young woman in 2012—the freedom, the confidence.” But others lament the way the extreme casualness of sex in the age of Tinder leaves many women feeling de-valued. “It’s rare for a woman of our generation to meet a man who treats her like a priority instead of an option,” wrote Erica Gordon on the Gen Y Web site Elite Daily, in 2014.
It is the very abundance of options provided by online dating which may be making men less inclined to treat any particular woman as a “priority,” according to David Buss, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in the evolution of human sexuality. “Apps like Tinder and OkCupid give people the impression that there are thousands or millions of potential mates out there,” Buss says. “One dimension of this is the impact it has on men’s psychology. When there is a surplus of women, or a perceived surplus of women, the whole mating system tends to shift towards short-term dating. Marriages become unstable. Divorces increase. Men don’t have to commit, so they pursue a short-term mating strategy. Men are making that shift, and women are forced to go along with it in order to mate at all.”
Now hold on there a minute. “Short-term mating strategies” seem to work for plenty of women too; some don’t want to be in committed relationships, either, particularly those in their 20s who are focusing on their education and launching careers. Alex the Wall Streeter is overly optimistic when he assumes that every woman he sleeps with would “turn the tables” and date him seriously if she could. And yet, his assumption may be a sign of the more “sinister” thing he references, the big fish swimming underneath the ice: “For young women the problem in navigating sexuality and relationships is still gender inequality,” says Elizabeth Armstrong, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan who specializes in sexuality and gender. “Young women complain that young men still have the power to decide when something is going to be serious and when something is not—they can go, ‘She’s girlfriend material, she’s hookup material.’ … There is still a pervasive double standard. We need to puzzle out why women have made more strides in the public arena than in the private arena.”
Attractive women have tremendous power. And frankly, if this story's any clue, looks like you're getting a lot of skanky people of both sexes on Tinder. Perhaps there's a few classy babes using the apps (or some real together dudes), but if you're hot and single, it's not like the chances for hooking up were all that bad before all these dating gizmos. Maybe the quantity has gone up, but not the quality. And for some people, that's not going to be an improvement. (But then, what do I know? I'm a fifty-something happily married man in the process of losing a few pounds, heh. I'm not on any dating market, which is kind of a relief.)
But keep reading. It's a kind of juicy piece, heh.
Saturday, June 27, 2015
Confederate Flag Supporters Rally at South Carolina Statehouse
Seen just now on Twitter:
Hours after woman arrested removing #ConfederateFlag, flag supporters rally at S.C. Statehouse
http://t.co/Xogda18MTh pic.twitter.com/9f7kYPwAW1
— Tx_Laney (@Babbsgirl2) June 27, 2015
Bree Newsome, #BlackLivesMatter Extremist, Tears Down Confederate at South Carolina Statehouse (VIDEO)
This is just extreme. No, it's beyond extreme. It's frankly insane.
The woman, Bree Newsome, is on Twitter here. She's a radical leftist and #BlackLivesMatter activist.
At Memeorandum, "Woman removes Confederate flag in front of SC statehouse."
“We removed the flag today because we can’t wait any longer. It’s time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality.”
And at the Charleston Post & Courier, "Woman removes Confederate flag in front of South Carolina statehouse (has video)."
...the flag is intolerable only because it primarily offends black people (who racists already feel are "taking over their country").
— Bree Newsome (@BreeNewsome) June 20, 2015
The refusal to firmly acknowledge and condemn the racism only fans the flames further because it makes it seem like...
— Bree Newsome (@BreeNewsome) June 20, 2015
They're trying to displace the decision from themselves; the flag has gotta come down because "some people" don't like it...
— Bree Newsome (@BreeNewsome) June 20, 2015
White politicians calling for removal of the confederate flag because "to SOME people it's a symbol of racism and hate" is problematic...
— Bree Newsome (@BreeNewsome) June 20, 2015
The flag will come down, neo-confederates will rise up and USA will face a day of reckoning for original sin it still refuses to acknowledge
— Bree Newsome (@BreeNewsome) June 21, 2015
They allow monuments to the confederacy all throughout the southern U.S. but suppress the history of the slave rebellions. Why is that?
— Bree Newsome (@BreeNewsome) June 21, 2015
San Francisco Homosexuals Celebrate Supreme Court Same-Sex Marriage Ruling
Homosexual Flag Goes Up Over Civic Center, City of Long Beach, California
From the Twitter feed of homosexual Mayor of Long Beach, Robert Garcia:
Day of decision rally is tonight at 5:30PM in the plaza at the Long Beach Civic Center. info http://t.co/cQYb9GnZEm pic.twitter.com/r7FRz8dSZi
— LB Mayor's Office (@LBMayorsOffice) June 26, 2015
Long Beach raised a rainbow flag today in front of City Hall. pic.twitter.com/etTBvzHel0
— Lauren Raab (@raablauren) June 26, 2015