Month: July 2008

Not a fan – as far as watching movies is concerned.

On the heels of PEPFAR, a new study:

A genetic variation which evolved to protect people of African descent against malaria has now been shown to increase their susceptibility to HIV infection by up to 40 per cent, according to new research. Conversely, the same variation also appears to prolong survival of those infected with HIV by approximately two years….Around 90 per cent of people in Africa carry the genetic variation, meaning that it may be responsible for an estimated 11 per cent of the HIV burden there. The authors observe that sexual behaviour and other social factors do not fully explain the large discrepancy in HIV prevalence in populations around the world, which is why genetic factors are a vital field of study.

Razib comments here.

Nate Silver is worried:

It’s just one poll, and it’s not in a state of any enormous amount of electoral significance, but the new Rasmussen poll that shows Barack Obama trailing by 23 points in Kansas — he had been down by just 10 last month — is a little ominous. Obama’s numbers are bad across the board: he’s getting a relatively low percentage of Democrats, trailing by 17 points among independent voters, and his approval ratings are negative.

Drum has mixed emotions about GNP:

Their agenda is fundamentally natalist: they want to protect the traditional family and they want that traditional family to have plenty of kids. To accomplish that, they propose a variety of initiatives to reduce out-of-wedlock births, make divorce harder, use the tax code to subsidize childbearing, and so forth. The problem here— and it’s one they seem to understand—is that there’s something fundamentally hypocritical about this: it involves an extensive program of social engineering being put in place by conservative elites who don’t really need (or want to be bound by) any of its rules themselves.

They’re only doing it because— well, because the lower classes need it. It’s for their own good. In one sense, this arguably isn’t as bad as it sounds. Hypocrisy is vastly overrated as a sin, after all. But even with plenty of lipstick on this pig, it’s still not very pretty. And not likely to gain much support, either. Liberals, who are at least open to the idea of social engineering, aren’t going to support this particular version of it, and conservatives, who might  very well cotton to its goals, are allergic to social engineering. This is very big government indeed, and how many conservatives are likely to support that?

Minneapolis, Minnesota, 8.30 pm.

"I’m a lifelong Republican – a supply-side conservative. I worked in the Reagan White House. I was the chief economist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for five years. In 1994, I helped write the Republican Contract with America. I served on Bob Dole’s presidential campaign team and was chief economist for Jack Kemp’s Empower America. This November, I’m voting for Barack Obama.

When I first made this decision, many colleagues were shocked. How could I support a candidate with a domestic policy platform that’s antithetical to almost everything I believe in?

The answer is simple: Unjustified war and unconstitutional abridgment of individual rights vs. ill-conceived tax and economic policies – this is the difference between venial and mortal sins. Taxes, economic policy and health care reform matter, of course. But how we extract ourselves from the bloody boondoggle in Iraq, how we avoid getting into a war with Iran and how we preserve our individual rights while dealing with real foreign threats – these are of greater importance," – Larry Hunter, New York Daily News.

Larison chides me for attacking Dick Morris. I agree with this comment on his site:

It’s at best misleading to make anything of leads in polls “disappearing” and “reappearing” on a day-to-day basis. Sure, it’s possible that those shifts are significant of daily shifts in voter preferences, but overwhelmingly more likely (and militated for by Occam’s razor) that nothing at all changed in that period, and the poll had simply captured statistical noise. That’s why polling averages are useful. They help discriminate between real shifts in opinion and noise. Writing an article about fluctuations in a single daily tracking poll is a good sign of an innumerate hack, and cherrypicking a single poll that conforms to one’s biases before any verifiable trend can be adduced is breathtakingly mendacious — i.e., exactly what you’d expect from Dick Morris. True, we shouldn’t impute more errors to him than he makes on his own, but an epistemology that extends Morris the benefit of the doubt we are accustomed to extend to reasonable and honest people is bound to lead to error.

Fred Kaplan sorts through the candidates’ war speeches.

Christopher Beam spills.

A very kind defense of blogging and appreciation of my writing from Politics of Scrabble. Appell follows up on his rant here.