Links - 21st August 2019 (1)

READ: WAPO Opinion Piece Proves the NRA Doesn’t Only Exist for “Old, Straight, White Men” - "When offered a job at the NRA, McLaughlin expresses his hesitation.“While I was considering the position, friends urged me to say no because the NRA was homophobic and only existed for old, straight, white men. But I convinced myself that I would be able to leave my sexuality at home and bring my Second Amendment passion to work. I took the job.”After starting his new job, McLaughlin realized how inclusive the NRA is.“Two weeks after I started, at the NRA’s annual meeting in Dallas, Chris W. Cox, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, gave a speech that impressed me. He said, “We fight for you whether you’re black, white, rich, poor, gay or straight, because your life matters equally. You have every right to be proud of it and every right to defend it, and the National Rifle Association is proud to represent you.” McLaughlin writes.“I decided to be open about my sexuality at work. I was met with nonchalance. No one cared. I was embraced as a fellow Second Amendment supporter, just like everyone else. I work with people from all over the United States, from different faiths and of different races. Also, I’m not the only gay person. We are united in our belief that no one can take away our right to defend ourselves.”However, after McLaughlin released his op-ed, he was met with a lot of hostility from the “tolerant left” and took to twitter to express his disappointment.
"Interesting responses to my WaPo piece about being a gay 2A supporter:
The “tolerant” left called me racist, a traitor, ugly, fat, a nazi, a terrorist, homophobic and a disgrace.
Conservatives called me American, a patriot, a gentleman, a trail blazer, and a friend. #EnoughSaid""

The Use Incineration Bottom Ash As Land Reclamation Material - "Incinerationis a common waste treatment process that involves the combustion of municipal solid wastes to produce incineration ashes. More than 80% of these ashes comprise of a heavy fraction known as incineration bottom ash (IBA). IBA has been used in a few countries in road construction, embankments and other civil engineering applications. Another potential use for IBA is in land reclamation. Binding IBA with marine clay with additives produced solid matrices with high physical strength and low environmental impacts. Results showed that heavy metal concentrations within the matrix meet the Dutch criteria for industrial land use."
So much for the moral panic about running out of landfill space in Singapore

Trump Uses Chaos to Get Stuff Done - "the exhausting storms that mark political life in Washington obscure the ruthlessly effective work happening across the federal government."

Canada Declares Climate Emergency, Then Approves Massive Oil Pipeline Expansion - "Only one day after declaring a climate emergency, Canada has approved the expansion of a massive pipeline that will increase oil production in Alberta and release more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere."

Kuroš Taheri-Golværzi - "That face you make when Democrats constantly repeat 'no one is above the law' while refusing to enforce immigration law"

L. on Twitter - "I told my homegirl “I attract fuck boys” She was like “you’re a woman, a pretty woman, you attract everyone. Then, you chose fuck boys” I damn near jumped out the car"

Mike Cernovich on Twitter - "No one talks about the Cambodian Genocide, which is among the worst holocausts as Cambodia never recovered. The reason why the media rarely brings it up? Pol Pot was a left wing communist"

Average internet speed up one year after net neutrality repeal - "Nearly a year after the repeal of net neutrality took effect, the average internet speed in the United States for fixed broadband rose 28% and the country is now ranked No. 7 globally.When the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal net neutrality in December 2017, average internet download speed was approximately 77 Mbps and the U.S. was ranked No. 12 globally in average speed... Since the repeal took effect on June 11, 2018, average internet download speeds have increased 28% from 93 Mbps to 120 Mbps. "When I became FCC Chairman in January 2017, investment in our nation’s broadband networks had declined for two straight years," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement released last week. "So we turned the page on the failed policies of the past and charted a new course. We focused on reducing unnecessary regulatory burdens and cutting red tape that discourages broadband deployment. And we concentrated on updating our rules to match the modern communications marketplace ... The latest evidence reaffirms that our policies are working""

How do Spanish speakers feel about the term 'Latinx,' a gender neutral alternative to 'Latino'? - Quora - "Breaking the binary, as they put it, of the Spanish language is the ultimate measure of disrespect you could possibly do to the language. By attempting to ruin the grammar of their very language, which in many cases is the only thing binding every Latino together, you are showing that you do not care about Spanish. The only thing you care about is imposing an ideology and your dogma on a group of people who never asked for it. Or in other words, cultural imperialism, the very thing these people claim to be fighting against... If you genuinely respect the language and the people who speak this language on a day to day basis, and want to prevent this sort of strong-armed spread of words to cultures and languages who wish to not bear the brunt of a new wave of cultural imperialism, please keep using Latino and Latina. It is the correct way, it is the respectful way, it is the right way."
"Latinx is yet another term recently concocted by Western leftists that nobody in the real world wants or asked for. It’s another way for self-righteous westerners to feel good about themselves by supposedly fighting injustice and trying to include “everybody” by practising newspeak instead of actually doing something to change what they perceive as injustice.Just like cultural appropriation, hardly anyone outside the mainstream Western world (NA+WE+NE) cares... since many American Latinos were never taught in formal Spanish, they do not have the same kind of respect towards the Spanish language that a native Latino would... Latinx is a politically-driven word with no use other than to include an imaginary ultra-minority of third wave feminists. Unfortunately since this vocal minority dominates college campuses, the administrations of universities that are typically made up of pushover non-Hispanic whites (who don't understand the context) tend to follow along and use “latinx” as a way to refer to all Latinos out of respect to this vocal minority."

Why Men Don’t Like Funny Women - "After the students finished writing their quips, a new set of participants rated the captions. They found the men’s punch-lines to be ever-so-slightly more clever—about .11 points more on a five-point scale... In a 2011 study in the journal Intelligence, male participants also penned more amusing captions than women did... Men wrote some of the best jokes, but they also used more profanity and sexual humor, and those jokes weren’t rated very funny... In a later experiment, Mickes gave both male and female participants a list of random words, such as “beef jerky” and “water slide,” and asked them to write paragraphs using the words. Without prompting, the men wrote funny paragraphs. The women’s paragraphs were more creative and better-written, but they weren’t funny. However, a surprising thing happened when Mickes explicitly told the participants to try to be funny in their paragraphs: Both genders used humor, and in equal measure. As in hockey, it appears, so in lols: You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. The 2011 Intelligence study similarly found that men wrote more captions overall, both funny and lame. In other words, men make more attempts at humor, so they are successful more of the time.“Men are willing to take more risks [in humor], and they also fail more miserably,” Gil Greengross, an evolutionary psychologist with Aberystwyth University in Wales and author of the 2011 study. But for the man, “it's worth it. If you fail and you're not funny, you lost maybe a few minutes. But if the person laughs, the benefit can be huge.”... Funny people are more likely to be smart. (In one of the many New Yorker studies, the students who scored higher on intelligence tests also generated the funniest captions.)... we rely on humor as a proxy for intelligence. On average, women tend to use their laughter to lure in potential mates, while men use their jokes to attract as many women as they can... both genders would say they wanted someone “with a good sense of humor.” It was only when researchers pressed their subjects on what they meant, specifically, by “sense of humor,” that the sex difference became clear. Women want men who will tell jokes; men want women who will laugh at theirs... The neuroscientist Robert Provine once listened in on dozens of spontaneous conversations in public spaces and identified 1,200 distinct “laugh episodes.” He found that women laughed significantly more than men did, especially when a man was nearby... A 2001 study that analyzed casual conversations among young people found that while men told more jokes and more successful jokes in mixed company, women told many more jokes when they were in all-female groups. “Evidently,” the researchers concluded, “women only joke when men are not around.”"
The research seems to suggest that men are funnier than women

FactCheck: do black Americans commit more crime? - "It’s true that around 13 per cent of Americans are black, according to the latest estimates from the US Census Bureau.And yes, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, black offenders committed 52 per cent of homicides recorded in the data between 1980 and 2008. Only 45 per cent of the offenders were white... academics have noted that the proportion of black suspects arrested by the police tends to match closely the proportion of offenders identified as black by victims in the National Crime Victimization Survey.This doesn’t support the idea that the police are unfairly discriminating against the black population when they make arrests."

Racial differences in homicide rates are poorly explained by economics - "a one standard deviation increase in percent black corresponds to a bit more than a one standard deviation increase in the county homicide rate. Controlling for the poverty rate, single-motherhood rate, and racial segregation rate, as we see in model (4), reduces the association with black to about 0.6 SD...
Although the data are somewhat noisy and single-motherhood is quite strongly associated with the black population (r=0.76 at the county level), it seems to me that:
there is a non-linear relationship between single-motherhood and homicide (which may be throwing off the linear model estimates somewhat)
counties with very high rates of single-motherhood have very high homicide rates even with negligible black populations
blacker counties with low-rates of single-motherhood seem to have homicide rates much closer to the national average (the same cannot be said for other covariates)...
Controlling for single-motherhood rates with an unweighted loess regression I find little evidence to suggest that percent black adds much in the way of predictive validity... By now I think it should be pretty clear that the economic conditions of each group are not particularly strong predictors of their victimization rates and that they certainly don’t come close to closing the white-black gap. Even poor “white” counties have homicide rates quite a bit lower than affluent “black” counties with low poverty rates... While blacks are more likely to live in “high-poverty neighborhoods” (>= 40% poor at census-tract level), only about 10% of blacks live in these neighborhoods nationwide... It’s also worth noting that the hispanic poverty concentration is pretty similar to blacks and yet their homicide rates are much lower (even controlling for poverty rates)... black immigrants in the US experience vastly lower rates of incarceration (much closer to the white average). It’s also not likely to be explained well by selection (e.g., cognitive ability, education levels, etc) because we find these differences even controlling for education levels... it’s hard to even grapple with these things productively as a society when we deny basic objective facts and suppress vocal dissent."
Keywords: Single parent, do not predict, single parenthood predicts criminality better than race

The Real Root Causes of Violent Crime: The Breakdown of Marriage, Family, and Community - "State-by-state analysis by Heritage scholars indicates that a 10 percent increase in the percentage of children living in single-parent homes leads typically to a 17 percent increase in juvenile crime.
The rate of violent teenage crime corresponds with the number of families abandoned by fathers.
The type of aggression and hostility demonstrated by a future criminal often is foreshadowed in unusual aggressiveness as early as age five or six...
Neighborhoods with a high degree of religious practice are not high-crime neighborhoods.
Even in high-crime inner-city neighborhoods, well over 90 percent of children from safe, stable homes do not become delinquents. By contrast only 10 percent of children from unsafe, unstable homes in these neighborhoods avoid crime.
Criminals capable of sustaining marriage gradually move away from a life of crime after they get married.
The mother's strong affectionate attachment to her child is the child's best buffer against a life of crime.
The father's authority and involvement in raising his children are also a great buffer against a life of crime...
Since 1965, welfare spending has increased 800 percent in real terms, while the number of major felonies per capita today is roughly three times the rate before 1960. As Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) says, "If social spending stopped crime we would be the safest country in the world... between 1950 and 1974 black income in Philadelphia almost doubled, and homicides more than doubled. Even the Reverend Jesse Jackson, whose prescriptions for social reform mirror conventional liberal ideology, admits that black-on-black homicide is not an issue of poverty. The crime rate in other communities also shows no link between low incomes and crime. The Chinese in San Francisco in the mid- 1960s, for instance, had the lowest family income of any ethnic group (less than $4,000 per year) but next to no crime: only 5 Chinese in all of California were then in prison. There is a widespread belief that race is a major explanatory cause of crime. This belief is anchored in the large disparity in crime rates between whites and blacks. However, a closer look at the data shows that the real variable is not race but family structure... According to the professional literature, the absence of the father is the single most important cause of poverty. The same is true for crime... "A close and intense relationship between a boy and his father prevents hostility and inappropriate aggressiveness."... The dominant role of fathers in preventing delinquency is well-established. Over forty years ago, this phenomenon was highlighted in the classic studies of the causes of delinquency by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck of Harvard University. They described in academic terms what many children hear their mothers so often say: "Wait till your father gets home!"... The benefits a child receives from his relationship with his father are notably different from those derived from his relationship with his mother... "The woman has a contract with the government: She will continue to receive her 'paycheck' as long as she fulfills two conditions: 1) She must not work; and 2) She must not marry an employed male.""

Addendum: Also see: The Impact of Income and Family Structure on Delinquency
CDC: Children do best with two biological parents - "Two biological parents provide the safest environment for a child, according to a study released last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics. The study is the first to look specifically at biological and non-biological parents, rather than married, cohabitating, or same-sex parents.The study found that children are more likely to experience potentially traumatic events, like household violence or a parent’s incarceration, when they live with only one or neither of their biological parents."