September 24, 2020

The Taboo On Reporting The Race Of Criminal Suspects

September 24, 2020/ Francis Menton

When you read something, you generally notice the things that the writer explicitly mentions, while you rarely take note of what the writer omits.
So at first it’s easy to skip over the omission, in nearly all reporting about violent crime in the United States, of the information about the race of the perpetrator or suspect.
Still, if you read enough about this subject of violent crime, at some point you just can’t help noticing this universal omission. Indeed, should you once start to look for information on the race of criminals or suspected criminals, you will quickly realize that something weird is going on.
Is it appropriate that this subject of race of perpetrators almost never gets mentioned? . . .

September 22, 2020

Court Rules That Illegal Aliens Are Entitled To Representation In Congress

September 22, 2020/ Francis Menton

In a post several weeks ago, I discussed a fact that I suspect most readers found astonishing: the U.S. Census up to now has been counting illegal aliens as part of the “population” for purposes of determining representation in Congress.
The occasion for the post was that President Trump had just issued a Memorandum directing the Census Bureau to inform him of how many illegal aliens are included in the count for 2020 that is currently ongoing, so that he could attempt to have those persons excluded from the population base used for congressional apportionment.
Although you might think that it is intuitively obvious that illegal aliens should not get congressional representation, prior to Trump raising the issue there was a reasonable position that there had not been any definitive court decision one way or the other. So the Census Bureau, naturally, had just gone ahead and counted the illegals.
Needless to say, all the usual suspects — led in this case by New York’s Attorney General Letitia James — immediately brought suit to enjoin everything about the President’s Memorandum. . . .

September 19, 2020

September 19, 2020/ Francis Menton

It’s not my way to speak ill of the dead, so let me say a couple of positive things about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

She clearly had a very strong work ethic.
She generally dealt civilly and respectfully with her ideological opponents. In this respect she was the polar opposite of almost all of today’s ideological left. I do not doubt that her long friendship with Justice Scalia was deep and genuine.

Those things said, Justice Ginsburg was not my idea of what a Supreme Court justice should be. Indeed, in many respects, she was the opposite. . . .

September 17, 2020

September 17, 2020/ Francis Menton

In last Saturday’s post, I provided a quote from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy that encapsulated the gist of the scientific method: “[T]heories that are permanently immunized from falsification . . . can no longer be classified as scientific.”
That seems simple enough. Surely we ought to be able to keep track of that one basic precept to distinguish the science from the non-science.
In practice, it turns out to be not so simple at all. To illustrate, let’s consider the latest from the climate apocalypse movement.
For today I’ll put aside the grand foretellings of planet-wide climate doom, and focus instead on just one little question: whether the current wave of wildfires in the West has been caused by human-induced global warming, in turn resulting from the burning of fossil fuels.

September 14, 2020

September 14, 2020/ Jane Menton

After George Floyd died in the hands of police in Minneapolis at the end of May, and with the ensuing wave of protests and riots calling for an end to police brutality, you might think that enacting policing reforms would be the number one priority of Democrats both in Congress and in state and local jurisdictions they control.
But if you look at the evidence, a better inference would be that Democrats are trying to use these issues towards their own partisan gain, with no real effort to get most substantive reforms enacted any time soon, if ever.
I have many disagreements with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, but one thing we can agree on is that policing in America needs reform.

September 12, 2020

September 12, 2020/ Francis Menton

Back at the beginning of the Trump administration in January 2017, it was all the rage for media on the left to accuse Trump and his people of being “anti-science.” I compiled a collection of such accusations in a post on January 27 of that year, using the title “Who Again Is ‘Anti-Science’?”
Among those I cited as making the accusation was the venerable magazine Scientific American, which had published a piece on January 18, 2017 with the title “Trump’s 5 Most Anti-Science Moves.”
If you look at that 2017 Scientific American piece, or the other articles that I cited in my post, you will see that those commenters are conceiving of “science” not as a special methodology, but rather as something more like: “science is what people who call themselves scientists do.” The basic complaint of the commenters was that Trump was “anti-science” because he was listening to or appointing people who disagreed with — or worse, sought to de-fund — functionaries in the government who called themselves scientists.
I have a different definition of the term “science.” . . .