Just a collection of some interesting reading…
Cool Stories
Extreme Swimmer Crosses Ice Fjord in Greenland (Andrew Freedman, Axios, 1 min.)
Twins Conjoined at Head Separated After Rare Surgery in Israel (BBC, 2 min.)
Oldest US Veteran of WWII Celebrates His 112th Birthday (Associated Press, 3 min.)
Behold, Carbon-Free Steel Now Exists (Dharna Noor, Gizmodo, 4 min.)
A New Company With a Wild Mission: Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth (Carl Zimmer, The New York Times, 12 min.)
A.I. Can Now Write Its Own Computer Code. That’s Good News for Humans. (Cade Metz, The New York Times, 12 min.)
Video
’Imminent Threat’ or Aid Worker: Did a U.S. Drone Strike in Afghanistan Kill the Wrong Person? (The New York Times, 11 min.)
Inside TikTok’s Highly Secretive Algorithm (Video, The Wall Street Journal, 13 min.)
20 Years Later
America's Post-9/11 Surveillance Authorities Were Inevitably Turned Against Its Own Citizens (Scott Shackford, Reason, 12 min.)
FBI Releases First Secret 9/11 File: Saudi Embassy Official Let Two Hijackers Stay at His Apartment and Helped Them in LA Before the Attack, Was 'Facilitator' for Al-Qaeda and Distributed Extremist Muslim Literature (Andrew Court, Daily Mail, 15 min.)
Policing
De-policing is No Myth (Charles Fain Lehman, City Journal, 6 min.)
A response to an article by the Marshall Project, covered here in a previous post.
Last November, City Journal documented that at least half of America’s 50 biggest cities had seen staffing drops.
Because the large majority of violent crime takes place in big cities, a shift of manpower away from them and into suburbs and rural regions leads to increased violence and produces a dramatic decline in force readiness in big cities without changing the overall number of cops.
After Floyd’s Killing, Minneapolis Police Retreated, Data Shows (Brad Heath, Reuters, 25 min.)
Minneapolis police officers have adopted a hands-off approach to everyday lawbreaking in a city where killings have surged to a level not seen in decades.
In the year after Floyd’s death, the number of people approached on the street by officers who considered them suspicious dropped by 76%.
Officers stopped 85% fewer cars for traffic violations. As they stopped fewer people, they found and seized fewer illegal guns.
About a quarter of the city’s uniformed officers have retired or quit since Floyd was killed.
Veiled Condescension
No, We Do Not Need to ‘Protect the Vaccinated’ (Kaylee McGhee White, The Washington Examiner, 5 min.)
Vaccinated adults no longer need to fear COVID-19. They are more likely to die from a car crash or a bee sting or a dog attack than from COVID-19.
The vaccines work — let’s stop pretending they don’t, and allow everyone, vaccinated and unvaccinated, to get back to their lives.
Wrestle Not Against Flesh and Blood (Glenn Loury, Journal of Free Black Thought, 15 min.)
Notions such as "white silence equals violence" or "check your privilege" are predicated upon the idea that black people have to be treated with kid gloves in all situations, to ensure they don’t feel offended, uncomfortable, or unwelcome.
This infantilization of black people supposes that the slightest “off” word or gesture might somehow threaten their very sense of wellbeing.
It begs the question: why are white people presumed resilient and impervious while black people are presumed fragile and vulnerable?
Uninformed Consent: The Transgender Crisis (Paul McHugh and Gerard V. Bradley, Commentary, 25 min.)
Eighty-five to 90 percent of children with gender dysphoria abandon it if their puberty proceeds without interference.
Clinicians cannot actually parse true gender dysphoria from children who complain of it but who will naturally outgrow it.
Blocking pubescent development, and then substituting for it a drug-induced simulacrum of post-pubescent development, assumes more than anyone can about the outcome of these manipulations.
No one can even know either what person would have emerged had it not been followed or what human costs were paid because it was.
Double Standards
We Don’t Need Cops - We Have Private Security (Dorothy Moses Schulz, City Journal, 10 min.)
Between April 15 and June 28, [Representative Cori] Bush spent nearly $70,000 of her campaign funds on personal security:
the most of any House lawmaker
more than a third of her second-quarter campaign expenditures
almost $20,000 above the yearly median household income for residents in her district, covering St. Louis and adjacent communities.
$54,120.92 went to RS&T Security Consulting, a New York firm with two addresses in Manhattan and a website under construction. The sole local recipient, Nathaniel Davis, whose address is the same as Bush’s campaign committee, received three payments totaling $15,000.
Other “Squad” members were more modest in their security expenditures, but they still spent far more than most House members.
Jan. 6-BLM Riots Dataset and Side-by-Side Comparison (RealClearInvestigations, 15 min.)
George Floyd rioters used more sophisticated and dangerous tactics than did the Capitol rioters, and in some cases weapons of greater lethality.
Authorities have pursued the largely Trump-supporting Capitol rioters with substantially more vigor than suspected wrongdoers in the earlier two cases.
Many accused Capitol rioters, unlike accused participants in the other riots, have been held in pretrial detention for months – with one defendant serving more time than the maximum sentence for the charge to which he pleaded guilty. Some allegedly endured solitary confinement and other mistreatment.
With authorities applying lenient prosecutorial standards in many major cities torn by the summer riots, the vast majority of charges last year were dismissed, as were charges in the Inauguration 2017 unrest. Charges have to date been dropped in only a single Capitol riot case.
All White Men Are White Men (Freddie deBoer, 20 min.)
In this article, deBoer addresses the (mostly) online phenomenon of people who, with no sense of irony, signal their identitarian exceptionalism by making snarky and sweeping criticisms of demographics to which they, in fact, belong.
I find it cynical and gross to go through the motions of pretending to indict yourself when doing so is really just a strategy to elevate yourselves above others. It’s like religious types who self-flagellate specifically to appear more holy than others, a pantomime of humility driven by hubris. It’s a special kind of hypocrisy. These are the kinds of guys who loudly mock “not all men,” but their entire careers amount to one long performance of “not all men.”
COVID
Changing Risks
One in 5,000 (David Leonhardt, The New York Times, 10 min.)
For the vaccinated, the risks of getting the virus are small, and of getting badly sick they are minuscule. But letting the virus dominate life has large costs.
In Seattle on an average recent day, about one out of every one million vaccinated residents have been admitted to a hospital with Covid symptoms.
Masking in Schools
CDC Tightened Masking Guidelines After Threats From Teachers Union, Emails Show (Joe Schoffstall, Fox News, 6 min.)
Biden administration tightened its masking guidance after a prominent teachers union threatened White House officials with publicly releasing harsh criticism, internal emails show.
Emails show further coordination between the White House and teachers unions months after reports highlighted unions influencing messaging on school reopenings.
In at least two instances, suggestions offered by the American Federation of Teachers were "adopted nearly verbatim" in the final text of a CDC document.
There's Little Rationale for Masking School Kids, but Teachers Unions Are Demanding It (Robby Soave, Reason, 6 min.)
New York magazine's David Zweig reviewed 17 different studies cited by the CDC and found little reason to believe that masks make a difference in schools.
The students are overwhelmingly safe—because they are young people—and the teachers and staff are also safe—because they can take the vaccine.
Vaccine Mandate
Seattle Police Could Lose 200+ Officers Over Vaccine Mandate Terminations (Jason Rantz, MyNorthwest, 4 min.)
The Seattle Police Department has lost roughly 300 officers since last year’s push to defund. Mayor Jenny Durkan’s vaccine mandate may lose 200 more.
Some officers argue the government shouldn’t have the right to data on private medical decisions, even if they may be vaccinated.
At least one union negotiating with the city is asking for severance packages for staff who choose to forgo vaccination.
The SPD is already staffed at record lows not seen since the 1980s. Many times, there are only about 70 officers patrolling the city on any given night.
This has led to a surge in violent crime with the city on pace to break the 26-year-high homicide rate set in 2020.
Biden’s Vaccine Mandate is a Big Mistake (Robby Soave, The New York Times, 10 min.)
Vaccination provides such robust protection that 99 percent of coronavirus fatalities in the United States now occur in the unvaccinated population.
But forcing it on a minority contingent of unwilling people risks shredding the social fabric of a country already being pulled apart by political tribalism.
There is little benefit to vaccination for people who are already reasonably protected by antibodies from a previous Covid case, according to recent data.
Mr. Biden is presiding over a vast expansion of federal authority, one that Democrats will certainly come to regret the next time a Republican takes power.
Unions Fight Back Against Vaccine Mandates (Jim Geraghty, National Review, 12 min.)
Is the vaccine mandate worthwhile if it exacerbates the pressure on hospitals that it was supposed to relieve? For example…
The Henry Ford hospital system in Michigan can now boast a 98 percent vaccination rate among its staff — but it also just announced it was closing 120 beds across five hospitals because of a staff shortage.
Are vaccination supporters willing to have significant numbers of nurses, nursing-home workers, firefighters, emergency first responders, cops, and prison guards fired in order to enforce the mandate?
Book Review: “The Genetic Lottery” by Katherine Paige Hardin
Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matter? (Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker, 75 min.)
As twin studies proliferated throughout the nineteen-eighties, their results contributed to substantial changes in our moral intuitions. When schizophrenia and autism, for example, turned out to be largely heritable, we no longer blamed these disorders on cold or inept mothers. But, for such freighted traits as intelligence, liberals remained understandably anxious and continued to insist that differences—not just on a group level but on an individual one—were merely artifacts of an unequal environment. Conservatives pointed out that an à-la-carte approach to scientific findings was intellectually incoherent.
'The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality'—A Review (Robert VerBruggen, Quillette, 20 min.)
But there’s been pushback among some progressives recently, based on the idea that anyone who cares about equity or social justice should care about genes. After all, the genes we get are purely a function of luck—an unfair and unequal system of advantages and disadvantages whose effects can be addressed through public policy. In this regard, at least, genes aren’t too different from other forms of “privilege” that progressives talk about all the time.
Genes don’t operate in a vacuum, but instead express themselves within human societies characterized by their own unique biases, technologies, cultural practices, economic structures, and educational systems. To the extent that genes can be said to cause anything, they do so in a way that’s influenced by environmental context.
As sociologist Christopher Jencks once pointed out, in a society that refused to educate redheads, a gene for redheadedness would be seen as a “cause” of illiteracy: If you randomly assigned a child to possess that gene, the child would grow up unable to read. The resulting redhead/brunette gap would be nominally associated with a genetic marker, but the gap would hardly be intractable, because society could fix it by being more equitable to redheads. The wide availability of eyeglasses, a technology that addresses genetic disadvantages associated with bad eyesight, is a non-hypothetical example that shows how the effects of a genetic difference can vary widely based on the societal or technological environment in which that difference is expressed.
Harden writes that school curricula can be structured in a way that’s “equity-promoting” or “performance-maximizing.” But it isn’t clear what the best tradeoff between these two goals is. If you focus educational efforts on the lowest-ability students, you might bring everyone up to an important baseline of mathematical and verbal skill. But teaching to the highest-ability students might drive more achievement at the top of our economy, with more inventions and medical breakthroughs that help everyone (including people born in the future, whatever their genes).
Why Resist Blank Slate Thinking? For One, Look to No Child Left Behind (Freddie deBoer, 15 min.)
It is not remotely scientifically contentious to say that literally all elements of our physiological selves are influenced by our genome. If that’s true, how could it possibly be the case that there is no influence of our genes on our behavior or cognition, which arise from the physical bodies that we all acknowledged are built by DNA? That notion is so obviously untrue that almost no one is willing to come out and state it directly. But since denialists also don’t want to acknowledge that it’s unthinkable that our genomes could mean everything to our bodies but nothing to our behavior, they partake in lawyering as a means of avoidance. I have already read several reactions to Dr. Harden’s book that fixate on minute details, the typical methodological criticisms of kinship studies and GWAS, without once engaging with the question of whether it’s even remotely conceivable that bodies that are built with DNA can house minds that are completely uninfluenced by that DNA. But that’s the fundamental question, the essence of this whole debate. If given perfectly matched environments, will two people with different genomes have the exact same outcomes? And how could such a condition square with 150+ years of research suggesting that genes change everything?
Genes Believe in You (Freddie deBoer, 20 min.)
Within 50 years, perhaps within 30, rich parents will routinely pay to have children whose genomes have been manipulated or selected for higher intelligence and other attractive qualities. I do not know what specific technologies will enable this to happen, but I do know that it will happen. And when the monetary elite uses genetic science to further strengthen the unearned dynastic advantages of their progeny, locking in the privileges that they already enjoy and pass down through inheritance, DNA, and our rotten system … what will the people attacking Paige have to say about it? What arguments will they be able to muster, against genetic engineering for those who can afford it, after decades of denying that genes matter in human behavior at all?
The only thing you can do is to have an honest conversation about the fundamental fact of our species, that life is not fair, and a corollary of that fact, that we are not all equal in our abilities. You can then hope that the conversation sparks social action that mitigates, in whatever way possible, that ubiquitous unfairness.
Cancel Culture
The Good Death - Cancel Culture and the Logic of Torture (Christophe Van Eecke, Quillette, 40 min.)
A long but fascinating (and scary) article that uses literature on torture and public executions to draw parallels with so-called cancel culture, de-platforming, and censorship.
Self-Cancellation, De-Platforming, and Censorship (Nick Gillespie, Reason, 50 min.)
Other Reading
If the Police Lie, Should They Be Held Liable? Often the Answer Is No. (Shaila Dewan, The New York Times, 15 min.)
Thousands Were Released From Prison Because of Covid. Will They Have to Return? (Patrice Gaines, NBC News, 15 min.)
What Should We Do About Systemic Racism? (John McWhorter, The New York Times, 15 min.)