~Lou Holtz
MARK STEYN ON CHAPPAQUIDDICK’S FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY: Speaking Ill of the Ted.
Michael W. Maizels (Harvard metaLAB) & William E. Foster (Arkansas), The Gallerist’s Gambit: Financial Innovation, Tax Law, and the Making of the Contemporary Art Market, 42 Colum. J.L. & Arts 479 (2019):
SAD BUT TRUE: Max Eden: “The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Embraces Alternative Facts.”
The Mueller Report’s Fundamental Dodge: The National Review: It misinterprets the rule against indicting a sitting president. “Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony was such a bumbling fiasco that it was easy for a viewer to be confused — and stay that way — about the main bone of Democratic contention regarding his report: the “OLC guidance” that prevents the Justice Department from charging a president with crimes while he is in office. Specifically, how did it factor into the special counsel’s decision — or, rather, non-decision — on the main question he was appointed to answer: Did President Trump obstruct justice? How did the special counsel’s dubious reliance on it as a rationale for abdicating on this question affect the publication and ramifications of the Mueller report?
We’ve plowed this ground before, but it is worth revisiting. We will do that in this weekend’s two-part series. This is Part 1…”
“As part of its continued efforts to help make the Do Not Call (DNC) data it collects more transparent and easier for consumers to use, the Federal Trade Commission today announced the debut of a new interactive public web page containing a wealth of information about the National DNC Registry and unwanted telemarketing robocalls. The page allows consumers to search the data interactively, for example, by clicking on a specific state or county. The information will be updated quarterly. In the past, similar DNC and robocall complaint data was only available to the public annually in the FTC’s Do Not Call Data Book.
How You Move Your Phone Can Reveal Insights Into Your Personality, Creepy Study Finds - Science Alert – “It may sound strange at first, but a team of researchers in Australia has come up with a method to predict your personality traits using just the accelerometer in your phone. Well, that and your call and messaging activity logs. Also, the system works for some traits better than others. But it’s an interesting take on how we may find connections through such seemingly unrelated things. There’s a wealth of previous research investigating how different aspects of your smartphone and social media use – such as your language in messages, how you style your Facebook profile, or how much physical activity you do – can be used to predict your personality traits.
“Activity like how quickly or how far we walk, or when we pick up our phones up during the night, often follows patterns and these patterns say a lot about our personality type,” said one of the team, computer scientist Flora Salim from RMIT University in Australia. In this case, we start at the Big Five personality traits. These have been used in psychology since the 1980’s to help classify five dominant parts of our personalities…” (The study has been published in Computer – Predicting Personality Traits From Physical Activity Intensity [paywall])
“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”
— Louis L’Amour
'Whiteboard of shame': Robo-debt compliance officers 'worked to targets'Jonathan Kearsley and Emily McPherson
- There was a crazy story last month about a fake presidential seal — featuring an eagle holding a set of golf clubs! — at a Trump speaking engagement before conservative teenagers. The Washington Post wrote how it happened and found the man who designed it.
- It has been five years since Ferguson. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch looks back at the faces and voices — from “protesters to police, business owners to activists, clergy to lawyers.”
- The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd stirred up some folks in an editorial — and the best (and most entertaining) way to read about the reaction is this tweet and comments.
MARK STEYN ON CHAPPAQUIDDICK’S FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY: Speaking Ill of the Ted.
Last year there was, very belatedly, a fine feature film about Chappaquiddick, which I reviewed here, and which contains a dialogue exchange taken almost verbatim from a ten-year-old column of mine:
As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:
‘Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.’
Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than ‘betrayed’ him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let’s face it, he doesn’t have Ted’s tremendous legislative legacy, does he?
That bit turns up in the movie:
Joan Vennochi’s words are put in Ted’s mouth: He says defensively that all men are flawed — ‘Moses had a temper, Peter betrayed Jesus.’ And my cheap riposte — ‘Moses didn’t leave a girl at the bottom of the Red Sea’ — is given to the outraged Joe Gargan, already on his way out, supplanted by better, colder, harder fixers. When the guy gets out and leaves the girl at the bottom of the sea, it offends the natural order: Joe is telling him he’s not a man.
He wasn’t — and nor were those who went along with it. I have rarely been more disgusted by the public discourse of a free society than by the obsequies that attended Kennedy’s passing a decade ago.
Your Job Will Be Automated—Here’s How to Figure out When A.I. Could Take Over: Fortune – “Automation is increasingly making its way into the workplace, raising concerns among employees about the ways technology will change their jobs—or eliminate them entirely. A June 2019 report by Oxford Economics predicts that 8.5% of the world’s manufacturing positions alone—some 20 million jobs—will be displaced by robots by 2030. But that’s the wrong way to think about automation and jobs, says Tom Mitchell, professor and interim dean of Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. Instead, you should look at the tasks involved in your job and evaluate how easily those tasks can be automated.
Toni Morrison, whose work enlarged the American imagination in ways we are only beginning to understand, is dead. She was 88… Vinson Cunningham… Dwight Garner… The Paris Review… Washington Post… Hannah Giorgis… Tracy K. Smith... Wesley Morris... Ron Charles... Doreen St. Félix... Troy Patterson... Kevin Brown... Hilton Als... Roxane Gay... Michelle Obama and others...... more »“Some people have a single task job, like toll booth [operators],” he says. “Those people are in trouble because their job is going to be automated.” That’s bad news for them, of course, but what does it mean for you?..”
Michael W. Maizels (Harvard metaLAB) & William E. Foster (Arkansas), The Gallerist’s Gambit: Financial Innovation, Tax Law, and the Making of the Contemporary Art Market, 42 Colum. J.L. & Arts 479 (2019):
This essay presents an account of an important moment in the emergence of the market for Pop art that was facilitated in part by a distinctly accommodating legal environment. Although Abstract Expressionism is commonly credited with causing American art’s ascendance onto the world stage immediately after World War II, its international acclaim belied a precarious institutional and financial infrastructure for living American painters. It was only with the following generation of Pop and Minimalist artists that the United States developed a self-sustaining market for the work of contemporary American artists. A significant but largely overlooked factor in that continued success was the ability of art dealers to take advantage of the unique legal and regulatory environment of the 1960s. This essay focuses on the efforts of an enterprising art gallerist, Leo Castelli, to aggressively promote his stable of Pop artists through the development of several financial structures, including some designed to leverage the relatively generous income tax deductions and anemic enforcement regime of the time. In doing so, Castelli not only seeded the ground for the international ascendance of American visual art, but also engineered financial arrangements that fostered the development of a lucrative and resilient art market that endures to this day.
SAD BUT TRUE: Max Eden: “The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Embraces Alternative Facts.”
The Mueller Report’s Fundamental Dodge: The National Review: It misinterprets the rule against indicting a sitting president. “Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony was such a bumbling fiasco that it was easy for a viewer to be confused — and stay that way — about the main bone of Democratic contention regarding his report: the “OLC guidance” that prevents the Justice Department from charging a president with crimes while he is in office. Specifically, how did it factor into the special counsel’s decision — or, rather, non-decision — on the main question he was appointed to answer: Did President Trump obstruct justice? How did the special counsel’s dubious reliance on it as a rationale for abdicating on this question affect the publication and ramifications of the Mueller report?
We’ve plowed this ground before, but it is worth revisiting. We will do that in this weekend’s two-part series. This is Part 1…”
“As part of its continued efforts to help make the Do Not Call (DNC) data it collects more transparent and easier for consumers to use, the Federal Trade Commission today announced the debut of a new interactive public web page containing a wealth of information about the National DNC Registry and unwanted telemarketing robocalls. The page allows consumers to search the data interactively, for example, by clicking on a specific state or county. The information will be updated quarterly. In the past, similar DNC and robocall complaint data was only available to the public annually in the FTC’s Do Not Call Data Book.
How You Move Your Phone Can Reveal Insights Into Your Personality, Creepy Study Finds - Science Alert – “It may sound strange at first, but a team of researchers in Australia has come up with a method to predict your personality traits using just the accelerometer in your phone. Well, that and your call and messaging activity logs. Also, the system works for some traits better than others. But it’s an interesting take on how we may find connections through such seemingly unrelated things. There’s a wealth of previous research investigating how different aspects of your smartphone and social media use – such as your language in messages, how you style your Facebook profile, or how much physical activity you do – can be used to predict your personality traits.
“Activity like how quickly or how far we walk, or when we pick up our phones up during the night, often follows patterns and these patterns say a lot about our personality type,” said one of the team, computer scientist Flora Salim from RMIT University in Australia. In this case, we start at the Big Five personality traits. These have been used in psychology since the 1980’s to help classify five dominant parts of our personalities…” (The study has been published in Computer – Predicting Personality Traits From Physical Activity Intensity [paywall])
