Weird Sociological Research

John Tierney, who posts occasionally at the Instapundit blog, weighs in with the following sad tale from academia.

Which values matter most to professors? Researchers at the State University of New York at New Paltz surveyed nearly 200 academics around the country and found variations according to the professors’ gender, political ideology, and department. Females, liberals, and professors of education prioritized prioritized social justice and students’ emotional well-being; males, conservatives and business professors prioritized academic rigor and knowledge advancement.

The lead author, Glenn Geher, is a tenured psychology professor who has published more than 100 academic papers, but he couldn’t find any journal to publish this one. So he published it himself along with an account of his saga.

As a retired "business professor" who is also male and conservative, I'm very happy he found those still active in my field coming down on the side of "academic rigor and knowledge advancement." I am of the opinion "student emotional well-being" is seriously over-rated.

Justifying Snobbishness

Writing at The American Conservative, Rod Dreher reacts to the book-and-film Hillbilly Elegy and summarizes his lived experience in a powerful quote.

Educated middle class liberals talk a lot about “privilege,” but I believe their discourse — at least among white people — is mostly in bad faith. They keep it to matters of race as a way of avoiding class. (snip) Put more bluntly, I think the “privilege” discourse among middle class educated white liberals is mostly about rearranging prejudices to make lower class white people deserving of the scorn of the uppers.

Social class snobbery has much explanatory power. Brits obsess about it, Americans pretend it doesn’t exist. Both are unrealistic, extreme views. Hat tip to Instapundit for the link.

My Position

I’m guessing some COTTonLINE readers believe I’m not placing enough emphasis on the court challenges being mounted to various presidential vote counts which look hinky. Would I like a series of decisions giving the election to Trump? Certainly. Do I believe it likely? Sadly, no.

In this country, we don’t have a history of overturning locally determined election outcomes. The rules of how votes are cast, counted, and reported are local ones, not national. Thus the decisions of local courts are largely final, and many of those urban courts are staffed by judges picked by local Democratic political machines.

In metaphorical ‘uncharted waters,’ which these widespread challenges represent, the wise ship captain falls back on experience. Experience suggests that the election will go forward much as currently reported. It may be fraudulent, as John F. Kennedy’s was when Chicago’s Mayor Daley ‘found’ extra ballots to beat Richard Nixon but it will likely stand.

The most reasonable rejoinder to my argument is that Donald Trump is a path-breaker, his career arc follows few rules. I admit as much. If anybody can pull off a challenge, “the Donald” has a better chance than most because he has done similar improbable things already.

And so ... I sit back and watch what comes.

Blame a Catholic Childhood

Instapundit takes a dim view of poor old Joe Biden’s apparent lack of knowledge about Psalms and what those might be, as documented in a Tweet. It shows nominally Catholic Biden had a non-Catholic speech writer and hadn’t pre-studied what he read off the Teleprompter.

As the other DrC, who was raised Roman Catholic, is fond of telling me, “Catholics didn’t know the Bible, they weren’t encouraged to read it.” Translation: priests read the Bible and interpreted it for those attending mass or teaching CCD to children. 

Apparently learning what a psalm might be wasn’t considered a priority in Biden’s childhood PA diocese, maybe in most. On the other hand, Palm Sunday is a medium-to-big deal for RCs. 

Confusing the two is easily understood and excused. What is inexcusable is Joe not having made sure he either (a) understood what he was to read in public or (b) deleted the unclear reference. 

It’s evidence of laziness. Perhaps we’re in for another laid-back Eisenhower-style presidency. Coincidentally or not, Ike was also known to garble his public statements.

My Turkey Story

The DrsC cooked a turkey yesterday, more specifically the other DrC cooked it and I carved it. Carving a turkey always reminds me of living next to a turkey farm for three years while growing up. 

My uncle had Lake's Turkey Farm at the corner of CA 33 and Tico Rd. in an Ojai Valley neighborhood called Mira Monte. He raised hundreds of turkeys each year for sale.  We lived around the corner with maybe 150 yards of orange orchard between us and often ate turkey.

Raising turkeys was a business he got into during WW II when beef and pork were rationed. Turkey was not rationed and meat-hungry people consequently ate a lot of it.

By the time I have a vivid memory, as the war ended and through the rest of the 1940s, it was a moderately large operation. During the fall and early winter, wearing a long rubber apron, uncle killed the birds and removed their feathers. By days end he was splattered head to toe in blood and feathers.

He employed several neighbor ladies to prep the birds for sale. This involved gutting, pulling the pin feathers, and getting the organ meat and neck ready to accompany the bird. One rainy Christmas season my mother helped out, taking phone orders for pickup.

The end of rationing was like losing a subsidy, turkeys became less profitable to raise as demand dropped. Peacetime Americans eat beef every week and turkey perhaps twice a year. 

Uncle continued for five years and then decided he'd do better ranching beef cattle in northwestern Colorado where his wife's family farmed. He stopped raising turkeys in CA, bought acreage in CO with a log home and moved away.

Another Loose End Tidied

The New York Times, and other media, are reporting the assassination in Iran of another key player in the anti-American opposition.

Iran’s top nuclear scientist, who American and Israeli intelligence have long charged was behind secret programs to design an atomic warhead, was shot and killed in an ambush on Friday as he was traveling in a vehicle in northern Iran, Iranian state media reported.

The scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, believed to be 59, has been considered the driving force behind Iran’s nuclear weapons program for two decades.

No one has claimed credit for the hit, but the Mossad is widely suspected of another successful kill. It was pointedly done before a new U.S. president is inaugurated, as was this one.

Rethinking the Corona Virus

I have wondered about the relative effect of Covid-19 on deaths in the U.S. A quick search finds where I wrote about it previously, over two months ago.

A scholar at Johns Hopkins University has done the research. Lucianne.com links to a PJ Media column reporting exactly what I suspected. 

It turns out the level of deaths before and after the epidemic hit are essentially the same. Lots of normal deaths are being ascribed to the coronavirus, I believe at least in part because hospitals get more federal money for such patients.

The scholar was forced to withdraw the study, because it was feared it would undercut efforts to get people to be careful about the Wuflu. But never fear:

Luckily, a back-up copy remains on The Wayback Machine, and we can still read the study.

You should read the PJ Media column and check out the graph. My conclusion as a non-expert is that people who would have died from influenza, heart disease or pneumonia are dying from Covid-19 instead.

They mostly would have died anyway if it hadn't come along. The remainder of the effect likely comes from people being more careful about their health such that fewer are getting flu or pneumonia than in a normal year. 

You should no more be indifferent to, or dismissive of Covid-19 than of influenza or pneumonia. All three diseases are stone-cold serial killers, to be avoided if possible, and carefully treated if contracted. 

However, it appears your odds of dying aren't much different than they were last year when nobody wore masks or avoided restaurants. One of the less attractive aspects of human life is that, sooner or preferably later, everyone dies from something. This study shows us not a lot of folks are experiencing “sooner” mortality as a result of Covid-19.

Give Thanks for Private Property

Power Line has published a rumination on Thanksgiving and the lessons of the Plymouth Colony by historian Paul A. Rahe every year since 2009. It turns out the colony began in a socialist/collectivist format and gave it up when it didn’t keep them adequately fed. Rahe writes, quoting the words of the colony’s leader:

William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony, reports that, at that time, he and his advisers considered “how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.” And “after much debate of things,” he then adds, they chose to abandon communal property, deciding that “they should set corn every man for his own particular” and assign “to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end.”

The results, he tells us, were gratifying in the extreme, “for it made all hands very industrious” and “much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” Even “the women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”

When “the squad” and old crazy Bernie urge socialism, remember it has failed to produce abundance everywhere it has been tried, even a bunch of religious zealots couldn’t make it work. As we have written repeatedly, socialism is not - as claimed - a way to share wealth, in practice it is a way to share poverty.

Informing on Your Parents

The Washington Times reports a “Republican” governor in Vermont made this Covid-19 announcement. Am I the only one who hears an echo of the Soviets asking children to inform on their parents? 

[The Vermont Agency of Education] will direct schools to ask students or parents if they were part of multi-family gatherings and if the answer is yes, they’ll need to go remote for 14 days or 7 days and a test.

How long will it take for wily kids to figure out saying T-Day was a big gathering lets them ditch school for 2 wintry weeks? With the Christmas hols, they could basically miss all of December. That would have sounded great to me as a kid, much less so to my parents.

Symmetric Negative Partisanship

We begin to get analyses of the recent election which strike a chord, to contain some measure of the truth of it. Two Senior Fellows at the Hoover Institution write the following for Project Syndicate:

Voters turned out in record numbers on both sides because they emphatically did not want the opposing party to win. Moreover, this “negative partisanship” is symmetric. Democrats and a few moderate Republicans and independents did not want another four years of Trump, and most Republican voters appear not to have wanted to pass the baton back to the mistrusted “coastal” elites, globalists, “biased” liberal media, and Washington insiders.

Much of the time, knowing what one opposes is a stronger motivation than knowing what one favors. For sure there won’t be a lot of “kumbaya coming together” when “hating on them” is the zeitgeist. It would take something of the magnitude of Pearl Harbor or 9-11 to unite us, and then only briefly as 9-11 showed.

Biden's Foreign Policy Team

Joe Biden, widely reported to be president-elect, has named his foreign policy team. Paul Mirengoff of Power Line quotes two Republican senators characterizing the Biden team.

Sen. Josh Hawley calls the three “a group of corporatists and war enthusiasts — and #BigTech sellouts.”

Sen. Marco Rubio gets the prize. He describes them “polite and orderly caretakers of America’s decline.”

Rubio perfectly describes the Obama apology-based foreign policy. I fear we will be 'treated' to a third stomach-turning helping thereof. 

Expat Obama genuinely believed the U.S. has been a force for much evil in the world. His policy at least made sense to him, if not to the rest of us. 

For all his short-comings, home-grown Biden is unlikely to believe the U.S. is bad. Thus his continuing the Obama policy makes little sense. Perhaps he won’t.

Weird Psychological Science

A website called Big League Politics reports findings from a Pew survey that are not terribly surprising.

Survey data from a March Pew poll indicates that white liberals disproportionately suffer from mental illness. Nearly half of self-identifying white liberals between the ages of 18 and 29 reported telling a doctor or a healthcare provider that they have a mental health condition. Only 20.9% of white conservatives in the same category reported as such.

The finding was not true for non-white respondents. There was little variation among political categories in self-report of mental issues for non-whites. Do you suppose non-whites are unlikely to get treated for mental issues, or less likely to raise such issues with a medical person? I'd guess the latter.

The Trophy Wife Hypothesis

You can imagine Kurt Schlichter writing with a pen dipped in acid and cocaine. Snark flows from his word processor like sewage flows from Chuck Schumer's mouth. Check out his hypothesis of why big business backed Biden.

Our principles need to stop being a blind commitment to what Milton Freidman thought back before business started adopting the politics of the CEOs’ much younger and dumber second wives.

You know, I believe he's onto something there. Schlichter's superpower is that his snark is always based in reality.

The politics of business was more straight-forward when the wealthy had mistresses and continued to live with their original wives who then cuddled with the footman or tennis instructor. Mistresses understood the transactional nature of the relationship and didn't need to defend a fellow's business ethics to their social set.

Weird Dietary Science

The New York Post reports results of a study, done in the United Kingdom, looking at dietary restrictions and bone breaks. The study, published recently in BMC Medicine, found serious drawbacks to a vegan diet.

This is the first comprehensive study and the largest study to date to look at the risks of both total fractures (fractures occurring anywhere in the body) and fractures at different sites in people of different habitual dietary habits.

On average, vegans with lower calcium and protein intakes saw a 43 percent higher risk of fractures anywhere on their bodies, and specifically in the hips, legs and vertebrae.

Vegetarians and pescatarians had a higher risk of hip fractures than meat eaters — but when researchers factored in body mass index and adequate consumption of calcium and protein, that risk was lessened.

But the heightened risk still existed for vegans, even with those factors taken into account.

Unmentioned, because it is unflattering to non-meat eaters, is that vegetarian or vegan diets are often adopted by those attempting self-treatment for psychological or physical issues for which modern medicine has few comprehensive answers. 

In other words, people who are somehow uncomfortable in their own skin. It doesn't require a gigantic leap of logic to imagine such discomfort can be associated with self-destructive acts, inattention or poor coordination contributing to fractures. 

In spite of these findings, avoiding meat and animal products is less harmful than self-medication with street drugs, another route those with "issues" sometimes take.

Celebrate the Harvest

We celebrate our autumn harvest festival - Thanksgiving - later this week, under strange circumstances in the midst of a Covid-19 resurgence. Do what harvest festivals are known for, over-indulgence in the abundance of the harvest. Have a good day and stay safe. 

The Trump-fostered vaccines will soon arrive, giving us something for which to be thankful. I plan to get mine as soon as offered. I’m a believer in vaccines, I’ve had those for pneumonia, shingles, influenza, etc., as well as some exotics for travel to the Amazon. 

This year - 2020 - has been less-than-marvelous. Partisanship has been on steroids ever since 2016 and the two sides get farther apart month by month. 

Each side appears to feel an unwillingness to share the country with the other. Where does this take us? I can imagine it takes us to a separation, a velvet divorce if we’re lucky, a civil war if we’re not.

Like our last civil war, this political/ideological divide is tearing families apart. In the other DrC’s family there are strong feelings on both sides. Brothers and sisters disagreeing, parents and children holding opposite views.

My family is so spread out geographically, it’s hard to know what people are feeling. We seldom see each other and, honestly, aren’t particularly close emotionally. 

I’m concerned that 2021 won’t be an improvement, except perhaps if we can get enough people vaccinated to stop the coronavirus epidemic. That and the consequent reopening of restaurants and resumption of travel - flying and cruising - will certainly be welcome as will hanging up the masks. Our political divide, however, shows no signs of healing.

Weird Gerontological Science

The New York Post reports results of research done in Israel where scientists reversed the aging process in seniors by having them spend 90 minutes a day, five days a week, for three months, in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. Senescent cells declined and telomeres lengthened, both good signs.

I do hope they get this technology perfected in time for me to take advantage of it. It sounds excellent and entirely painless - it doesn't involve a weird diet of roughage and sprouts.

Good News for Seniors

The website Just The News reports as follows with regard to Covid-19:

According to the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, deaths have come down for every age group, especially for those over age 70.

We seniors need more good news like this. Let's get those highly effective vaccines into distribution.

Granny Killer Wins Emmy

Governor Andrew Cuomo, (D-NY) has won an Emmy which they claim is for:

His leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic and his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world.

As he ordered NY nursing homes to admit people diagnosed with Covid-19, Cuomo was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of seniors who were resident therein. 

Giving him an Emmy is a bigger travesty than Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. Effectively, it is rewarding manslaughter or negligent homicide.

She's Not Lovin' It

Ammo Grrrl, aka Susan Vass, writes a Friday column for Power Line. It's normally a pleasant blend of good humor, social commentary, common sense, and "life in these days." I read her every week, and enjoy it. 

Mostly she isn't political, but today her topic is the election, its aftermath, and her response to same. Her negative reactions to the election process and to pleas for us to "unite" resonate with me. Give it a look.

Not Coming Together

Joe Biden, widely reported to be president-elect, has been urging those of us who voted for Donald Trump to be reconciled with a Biden administration, to "come together" with his voters as Americans. It isn't likely.

When he asks that, those of us who saw the Paul Newman film Cool Hand Luke hear echoes of "Captain" Strother Martin saying "You need to git yore mind right." We can't interpret either Biden's or Martin's comment as anything except "Go along with the program, or suffer extremely unpleasant consequences." 

Since this isn't a prison camp, and Biden isn't a warden, our response is along the lines of: "Not happening, Joe." Our divided nation will remain divided.