Wednesday Open Thread
I’m kinda sorta taking the night off. Will Tweet a bit on and off but other than that, it’s Be-Lazy-On-The-Couch-In-Front-Of-The-TV night. 😉
Just how corrupt is the Congressional Black Caucus? Part two
A follow-up to this story:Â It seems Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson was a lot more directly involved than she has admitted in funneling scholarship money meant for poor children to her own relatives:
It’s official: Democrats are hurting Andy Griffith’s reputation
Bad news for America’s favorite sheriff:
In which I tackle a best-selling author/sex expert’s arguments on infidelity
It really rubs me the wrong way when so-called “experts” make overly generalized arguments about very serious topics, especially when the only stats they have to “back up” what they’re asserting are either purely anecdotal or “based on what I know.” I know everyone is prone to generalizing from time to time, but when you’re a renowned “expert” in your field, and you write books based on your “expertise,” and/or your writings are published at news outlets online and in print, and/or you travel around the country and/or world giving speeches on the topic you know so much about, it’s very important that you are specific and cite actual statistics, rather than just pull out facts out of your you-know-what. Ideally, people who read/hear such generalizations would resesarch the information they’ve been given to see if it’s got any basis in reality, but all too often people don’t do that. They just accept what they hear as truth – and as a result, “conventional wisdom” on a given topic is born, and it often takes years, sometimes even decades, to undo the damage that comes from such misconceptions.
An infantilized society
The economic troubles in Europe are leading to public unrest, as EU governments try to pare back their bloated public sectors, in some cases trimming wages and benefits, in others by delaying access to them. In France, plans to save the national pension system by raising the retirement age from 60 (!) to just 62 has lead to a massive strike of over one million people: