Life Goes On

Cambrian ocean scene, featuring an Anomalocaris canadensis ("anomalous Canadian shrimp") chasing trilobites. Image by diorama artist Ken Doud.

In fact it's likely she meant the Cambrian, and I think it's very likely that a system of global warming, rising sea levels, and coastal erosion, worked in at least as disruptive fashion as it does now, if I'm getting this great post from Science News for Students and a Britannica article right. In a sense, I'll show, conservatives are right in their claim that the climate change phenomena we're experiencing now aren't that different from the climate change phenomena that have been around forever, and they certainly weren't caused by humans then. But don't get too comfortable, conservatives.

For the Record: McArdle on Climate Change

There goes the Virgin Mary down a flooded street in Venice, Italy...seems about right. pic.twitter.com/cdoGq59CBC

— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) November 3, 2018

This video is so funny and at the same time so deeply frightening, like a Buñuel film. [Update: It's not Venice, obviously, as Arundel notes in comments: turns out to be Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, and the video is doctored. I stand by my Buñuel remark.]  It probably wouldn't bother Megan McArdle:

She'd calmly point out that Venetians [or Canarios as the case may be] in the pre-Cambrian era managed to make it through. Oh wait, there was no life, plant or animal, on land at the time, so perhaps nobody minded in those days. The hard-shelled creatures that had just started evolving at the end of the period, 540 million years ago, might have enjoyed watching the coasts wash away.

Annals of Privilege

I would be cool with a teen murderer getting a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. I think there's good reason we expunge juvenile records, and would raise the expungement age to 21.

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) September 14, 2018

Somehow I find myself imagining this YA novel:

Nobody knows this—they don't release juvenile offenders' names, and expunge the records once you've done your time—and now that I'm on the Supreme Court, it probably sounds a little weird, but I was pretty messed up before I went to college. In fact I killed a man in Reno just to watch him die. It was really bad judgment, what can I say? I still feel bad about it all the time, to be honest. But it's important for kids to understand that you can rise above the mistakes you make in life, and if you go to the right law school and clerk with the right judges, there's no limit to what you can accomplish. So I've decided to tell my story...

Douthat just sayin, on the ACA

Via.

It's Propaganda Wednesday for Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street ("Is Obamacare a Lifesaver?"), out to let us know we shouldn't be too triumphant over the prospect of living with the Affordable Care Act "for the foreseeable future", as Ryan has said:

now that every G.O.P. policy person who ever championed a replacement plan is out wandering in sackcloth and ashes, wailing, “The liberals were right about my party, the liberals were right about my party,” beneath a harsh uncaring heaven … now, in these hours of right-wing self-abnegation, it’s worth raising once again the most counterintuitive and frequently scoffed-at point that conservatives have made about Obamacare:

It probably isn’t saving many lives.

Note how he stacks the argument in advance by calling it a "point" rather than "a basically unfounded assertion". And the weakness of restricting the issue to that of "saving many lives" (it doesn't mean anything if it improves the quality of life of millions? it doesn't matter if it only saves a relative few? how many lives would be worth the trouble?). And the hedge of "probably", which has no technical meaning here (how would you calculate the probability?) but is merely a way of saying, "Well, who knows?" Just sayin, as usual. But just sayin in italics, so we'll know it's serious all the same.

Annals of Derp: McMegan, afterthoughts

I put together a quick infographic summarizing the demographics of the Brexit vote by age. pic.twitter.com/UTEvmPVTc3

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) June 24, 2016

Commenter StringOnAStick writes, in response to yesterday's Twitter battle,

Having recently gone through their own stay or leave (the UK) drama, I suspect the Scots have already put a good deal of thought into the economic issues at hand. Well, certainly more than the various anecdata stories of Leavers who now say they "just wanted to send a message, not actually leave".

It seems most Brexit postmortems are fixated on immigration (bad economy? Blame furriners!) and nationalism, because admitting that austerity has caused the lower classes significant pain would rather give the game away regarding the ongoing wealth transfer to the elites, no? Plus those most economically wounded might stop voting for the bastards doing the wounding if they didn't think flag waving solves everything.

It's amazing McArdle thought Scotland might have gone through the whole independence campaign in 2014 without anybody ever thinking of the points she "raises". She's really remarkably stupid sometimes.

Annals of Derp: McMegan on Scotland

McArdle delighted by the English revolt against the "elites" in the "remote capital" and their burdensome regulation of the struggling and oppressed capitalist class.

Not so pleased, on the other hand, by the prospect of Scots revolting against English imperialism, or what you and I would call elite rule from a remote capital, where they extract profits out of the land and leave the people in need, when Scotland wants to keep enjoying some of that Brussels regulation and the open borders that go along with it. McArdle thinks the economic sufferings Brexit will bring to the UK are a trivial matter, but issues dark warnings on the economic dangers for the Scots if they separate from UK to be a member of the EU on their own. Which are totally wrong, of course. At least as far as I know; she hasn't replied to my last Tweet yet.

.@asymmetricinfo @RameshPonnuru In fact almost certainly not. https://t.co/uRJGMDk1cu Google is your friend you know.

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) June 25, 2016

.@asymmetricinfo @RameshPonnuru But they win oil and gas revenues just as prices begin to rise https://t.co/0el7T9F8J3

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) June 25, 2016

I told her about Google, too!

Across the Pondering

Members of the Not In My Name campaign, a group dedicated to opposing the so-called Islamic State, in Luton, Bedfordshire. None of these men is an immigrant from the European Union.

Megan McArdle finally found herself!

This past weekend, I found myself in the British borough of Luton, pondering a British exit from the European Union. “How did you find yourself in Luton?” you will ask, and I will reply, “That is a long story, and alas, a very dull one"...

Shit Megan, you sound just like fucking Thackeray. That British air has such a bracing effect upon one's literary style!

Though there's a clue to the mystery, in that

this dull story involved many hours spent in a horrible third-tier European airport with middle-class Britons heading home from their holidays.

"I'll tell you, Watson, I suspect the Luton episode of this supposedly long, dull story involves an episode of travel from England to the United States." "Good God, Holmes, how do you deduce that?" "Elementary: travel is an almost constant concomitant of presence in airports." As turns out to be the case; she had a long layover there on an EasyJet flight, and the main point of the story may well be a complaint about Bloomberg's stinginess with the expenses.

So there she was, at one of an apparently inadequate number of phone-charging stations,

Virtually everyone Megan McArdle knows

Update February 9: Hi to the cowpokes from Mike's Round Up!

Willem Haecht, Apelles Painting Campaspe, ca. 1630.

Apparently bloodthirsty rabble-rouser Josh Barro agrees with me that people who benefit from those 529 and Coverdell college savings programs that President Obama suggested taxing are not exactly middle class (as the Republican propaganda machine had it, forcing Obama to back down on the proposal), those who make $200,000 a year being in actual fact better off than 92 percent of the US population, and this makes Megan McArdle a tad uncomfortable, because, like,

Annals of derp: Comparing apples and Oregons

Paul Cézanne, ca. 1900, via WikiPaintings.

Hahahaha Megan McArdle Department:

Last May, researchers studying a randomized controlled trial of Oregon’s Medicaid expansion released a bombshell report that found no significant improvements in mortality rates or key health markers for blood pressure, hypertension and diabetes control. I did three major posts on it (one of which was a guest post from Jim Manzi...).

We'll decide what's major and what isn't, and how many of them you get to take credit for, thanks. Also too, they weren't studying the trial, they were performing the trial, or studying the expansion. Anyway,

Megan whoopee

Photo by David Shankbone via Wikimedia Commons.

Hahahaha Megan McArdle:

I apologize in advance, because I am going to talk about a book that I have not yet read. To be clear, I intend to read Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” It is sitting on my (virtual) bedside with a big stack of other (digital) books that I intend to read. But it’s far down in the queue, and I’m afraid that I can’t wait to weigh in — not on the book itself, but on its topic. 

But the topic might not be what you think it is, you know. You might want to at least read a couple of reviews all the way through, huh?