So Media Matters took offense to Tucker Carlson's series on "Men in America" and how, outside of the top 10 percent or so, men aren't not doing very well (which I've written about here and here). I guess Media Matters was trying to present a damning case against Carlson, but I don't know, it seems they did little but amplify his message:

So Tucker Carlson says true things. And also some edgy Youtubers said similar true things, but in a mean way. Thus, Tucker Carlson hates women and wants them barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen, or something. 

What is the big problem here? Tucker Carlson notes that male suicide is a huge problem? Well, it is. Is it that Carleson says divorce and fatherlessness are huge problems. Well, they are. Is it that he says there's a lot of anti-male coverage in the media and academia? Ummm, is water wet?

This is ridiculous guilt-by-association even though these Youtubers aren't even associated with Carlson. It's also ridiculous to conclude that just because Paul Joseph Watson and his ilk are opposed to modern feminism and are also edgy and in-your-face, that they therefore hate women. Paul Joseph Watson after all, goes on and on about all the abuse of women going on in Europe today by grooming gangs that the government actively covers up. Hmmmm, let's see what Media Matters has to say about that particular issue:

To quote that "fringe right-wing anti-feminist," imagine my shock...

So former child actor Corey Feldman, who has claimed that "The number one problem in Hollywood was, is and always will be pedophilia" got stabbed yesterday. He was rushed to the hospital and appears to be alright. Last year, he claimed two trucks tried to run him off the road.  

I mean, is it just me or has the last year or two just made these "conspiracies" seem more plausible? I mean, there was the "Hollywood is ran by perverts" thing. Yep. "The CIA spies on you through your computer and phone." Yep. "The CIA funded ISIS." Probably (hopefully) just out of stupidity, but yep. The Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign. More or less, yep.

Oh, and for those Democrats out there: Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia!!!!!!!!

​In other news, Nickelodeon parted ways with TV producer Dan Schneider who produced hit kids shows like The Amanda Show, What I Like About You and Zoey 101. Many seem to think this will be the next big scandal to break and Viacom is trying to create some distance. Here's RedState back in October of 2017,

"Schneider has also been the subject of some very disturbing and consistent rumors for years. One need only search his name on the internet to find pretty damning rumors about him going back years. There are stories of his foot fetishes and how he acts them out on young extras alone in his office. There are stories about his relationships with his underage teenage stars and how they led to spin-off shows for the girls or blacklisting for those who didn’t participate."

He also seems to have a very weird, little kid foot fetish. At the very least, he's been disgustingly over-sexualizing kids on his shows for a long time as this Twitter thread shows. We'll see where the chips fall.

Contrary to popular wisdom, gun ownership actually does not correlate with just about anything. And to show that, I highly recommend checking out BJ Campell's recent piece on Medium: 

Here's the best-fit R^2 regression for the various states' in the United States:

A very slight negative best-fit correlation between gun ownership and gun murders with an R^2 value of 0.0031, which is in other words, noise. There is no statistical correlation between the two.

And here goes for every nation on Earth:

Again, the best-fit correlation is slightly negative but also worthless because the R^2 value is only 0.0107.

​Campbell then runs the same analysis for low-crime, high-crime and European countries and again, finds absolutely no worthwhile correlations. 

He then shows that many liberal sites have been cooking the books by including gun suicides, gun accidents and conveniently not including several countries. For example, while the United States has over 100 guns per 100 people, Germany, Switzerland and Canada all have around 25 to 35. Sweden, Finland and Norway, those Nordic countries love so much, do as well. And while Campbell doesn't go into this, what would the gun ownership rates in the United States be if we didn't include those rural areas where good ole boys own 20+ guns apiece? By the way, there are very, very few murders in rural areas.

He also doesn't note the statistical slight of hand in talking about "gun murders." The basic economic principal of substitution would imply that if someone wants to murder someone else, but can't get a gun, they're probably going to murder said person with a knife or poison or baseball bat or car or whatever. Gun murders are a red herring. The murder rate itself is what to look at.

That being said, this data still doesn't support that hardcore gun nuts that tell us "an armed society is a polite society. Guns don't seem to bring down crime rates, they're just, at least mostly, fairly irrelevant to  it. Although the gun nuts do seem to be right that gun bans generally increase murder rates, but that's another story.

I just posted one of the most important articles I've written (which of course, given my level of importance, isn't really that important). I make the case that you should get rid of your TV. Or as the absolutely Godawful new Star Wars film put it "Let it die. Kill it if you must."

I start off with my own story,

"One of the most important decisions I made when I moved out to Kansas City seven years ago was that I would not buy a TV. I’ve been going seven years strong without one, and other than not being able to have people over to watch the big game, I can’t say I’ve missed it even slightly."

Then I go on to describe the evidence television is awful, mostly by quoting Robert Putnam's great book, Bowling Alone,

"…Those who watch an hour or less of television per day are half again as active civically as those who watch three hours or more a day. For example, 39 percent of the light viewers attended some public meeting on town or school affairs last year, as compared with only 25 percent of the demographically matched heavy viewers. Of the light viewers, 28 percent wrote Congress last year, compared with 21 percent of the heavy viewers. Of the light viewers, 29 percent played a leadership role in some local organization, as contrasted with only 18 percent of heavy viewers. Light viewers were nearly three times more likely to have made a speech last year than were equally well-educated heavy viewers (14 percent to 5 percent)” (Putnam 229)."

Hang out with your family, read a book, hang out with friends, go to the gym, travel, go camping, do something! But please, stop watching television.

Check it out!

So I guess Britain just convicted a guy for being "grossly offensive" because he taught his pug to sieg heil in a dumb, but obvious joke.

In other news, the town of Telford covered up for decades the grooming and rape of over 1000 British girls ... just like Rotherham did before. 

The only joke right now that Britain seems to allow is the country itself.

When I first heard about the whole controversy regarding Cambridge Analytica, my first thought was "at least this isn't another contrived 'muh Russia' controversy." 

My second thought was, "wait, didn't we already know that Facebook and other big tech companies did stuff like that?" Was the controversy just that an outside firm got access? Or was it just because it helped Donald Trump? Well, perhaps.

From the Independent Journal Review,

"A former Obama campaign official is claiming that Facebook knowingly allowed them to mine massive amounts of Facebook data — more than they would’ve allowed someone else to do — because they were supportive of the campaign.

"In a Sunday tweet thread, Carol Davidsen, former director of integration and media analytics for Obama for America, said the 2012 campaign led Facebook to “suck out the whole social graph” and target potential voters. They would then use that data to do things like append their email lists."
​
Regarding Big Tech, you're not the customer, you're the product. These tech companies are basically the closest thing to Big Brother out there, well, aside for the NSA and CIA. This doesn't surprise me at all, but it is gravely concerning given the well-known political leanings of these companies and what that could mean going forward. 

As if we needed more evidence that the supposed wage-gap between men and women, here comes Uber to pile on a little more,
​
"Uber, which pays its drivers not on an inherently subjective individual basis but via a formula that takes into account time and mileage driven, still has a 7 percent pay gap between male and female drivers. That’s right: a company that allocates salary in a way that is necessarily blind to an employee’s sex has still generated a pay gap, because men and women make different choices.

"It turns out that female Uber drivers work shorter hours, are less likely to work during peak times, and drive more slowly. Because the compensation structure is automatic, Stanford researchers were able to pin down the three factors that caused the gap: experience on the platform, willingness to work at peak times and in busy areas, and driving speed preferences."

Shockingly, men tend to drive a bit faster.

As Jordan Peterson pointed out to a clueless Cathy Newman during one of the most one-sided debates of all time, you "never run a single-variate analysis." As I've shown before, including in my book on economic myths, when you control for all of the variables instead of doing an apples-to-oranges gross wage comparison, the supposed-wage gap all but disappears.

Maybe someday the gender warriors will take a break and this obvious economic fact will finally sink in.

We are living in Bizarro world right now. Unions are praising Trump for the steel and aluminum tariffs he announced and liberals are condemning him for it. What timeline is this again? 

I have, for most of my life, been a proponent of free trade, albeit a soft one. I've never gone out of my way to support it as I've always felt a bit ambivalent about it. But, I have always recognized that it was a tax on American consumers, which is one reason I opposed them.

But maybe that's one reason to support them.

I don't like taxes, but let's not kid ourselves, they're not going away. So if we need to raise tax revenue, what better way to do it than to prop up and incentive domestic industry with tariffs? If the government raises money through import tariffs, it could, say, pass a large tax cut. 

Let's say you have two options:

Option 1: Pay $100 dollars for a foreign good, but have to pay $10 extra in taxes. Or;

Option 2: Pay $110 dollars for that foreign good (with the added price price of the tariff passed along to the consumer). 

Both are effectively the same, so who cares? 

Or perhaps an American company will pay an additional $10 in taxes because the government needs to raise that money somehow. Well, in that case, both are the same to the consumer, but the producer would stay in the United States creating jobs here at home.

Of course, there's a lot more to it than that and you have to be careful not to start a trade war (although the United States would have a huge advantage if one started), but given that taxes are about the only thing we can be sure of outside of dying, it would seem to me to make more sense to put those taxes on imports than on our own income or that of American companies.

​It's becoming more and more well known that reproducibility, or more accurately the lack thereof, is an enormous problem in science. At the very least, scientists are starting to agree,

"More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature's survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research."

52% said it was a significant crisis and 38% said it was a slight crisis. Only 3% said it was not a crisis at all. 

This shouldn't be a surprise at all, for example, from the 2015 paper "Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science," the abstract notes,

"Reproducibility is a defining feature of science, but the extent to which it characterizes current research is unknown. We conducted replications of 100 experimental and correlational studies published in three psychology journals using high-powered designs and original materials when available... Ninety-seven percent of original studies had significant results (p < .05). Thirty-six percent of replications had significant results..."

Indeed, the lack of replication seems to be the only, consistently reproduced result these days.

And sure, the"softer" sciences such as psychology are going to be hit the hardest. (Or one's with financial incentives, like drug tests.) And the social sciences will get wiped out. Science on the whole is having a real hard time replicating.

Science is great and all, but it's by no means infallible. Scientism, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb, calls it, is just another religion. Right now, science on the whole has a major crisis. Without reproducible results, science just doesn't tell us much. It's high time scientists look at this as a crisis and work to find out how to solve it.