Month: December 2015

WFB: Planned Parenthood in Ohio caught dumping babies in landfills.

Elections matter: “All three Planned Parenthood facilities in Ohio disposed of aborted fetuses in landfills, thereby violating state code, the attorney general announced Friday.”  The attorney general in question (Mike DeWine) went looking for any indication that Planned Parenthood facilities in Ohio sold harvested baby parts; thankfully, he didn’t find any evidence that it was happening in his state.  What DeWine did find, however, was that Planned Parenthood was illegally dumping aborted babies in landfills – and possibly lying to the disposal companies about it, although I’d take that quick denial from at least one disposal company in question with a grain of salt.

If you watch the WFB video of local news at the link, you’ll see that the magic word ‘injunction’ was used.  Live by the regulatory state, die by it, ye Democrats.  And maybe you should do due diligence before you start dumping aborted babies in landfills, hey?

The Suspenders of Shame have arrived in the mail.

I’m calling them that mostly because it makes my wife wince; it will come as no surprise to most of you that I am not a six-foot athlete built on the Apollo Greek god model.  I am, in fact, more or less a hobbit.  Got gut, not butt; so a belt just ain’t cutting it anymore.

So I look all of this up, and lo! – There is an entire subculture of men just like me.  If we were more trendy, we’d have activists and causes and candle vigils for our plight.  As it stands, though, we get: buy some suspenders and/or shirt stays.  …So it goes, so it goes.

Moe Lane

PS: I will be merciful, and omit pictures.

Update on the Patreon situation. https://www.patreon.com/MoeLane?ty=h

The potential awkwardness has been resolved: a couple of people signed up, and a couple of people have adjusted their pledges.  I no longer have to worry about suddenly below-minimum pledge levels.  I do have to say, though: I’m not sure that Patreon thought this one through beforehand. I imagine that this has spawned drama… safely elsewhere, hopefully.

So, crisis averted.  But, hey, sign up anyway.

Interesting set of survey results here on Kentucky, Obamacare, and Kynect.

Very short version?  Kentuckians hate Obamacare, want to keep Kynect, don’t want to cut back Medicaid… and yet, they just decisively elected a guy who only agrees with them on the first point.  If not-going-to-be-Governor Jack Conway is reading this article, it’s probably with a bottle of bourbon in his fist.

Meanwhile, Matt Bevin? He’s probably reading it and shrugging.  The people of Kentucky did elect him, after all. And it’s not like they didn’t know what he was going to be doing, right?

Quote of the Day, Poll Analysis Is Dark Sorcery edition.

Below in an excerpt from a very good basic primer by Kristen Soltis Anderson on how to think about polls. I particularly like this part:

…it is important for us to separate out the “predictive” quality of these horse-race polls (they are not really predictive, despite everyone loving to use them as a forecasting metric) and the “validity” measures that give us reason to believe or doubt polls as they stand today.

When deciding if you “trust” the polls, I would encourage people to stop worrying about whether these polls are predictive, because they really aren’t. I do think we need to be very critical about whether or not these polls are valid measures of this current snapshot in time, and I think there are important questions to be raised on that front.

I’ll add to it that valid polls largely only become predictive ones after the fact; you can easily have a situation where a poll is accurately describing the national political environment until it suddenly isn’t. I think that it’s generally safer to keep in mind that it’s safer to analyze polls in terms of the present than in trying to use them to predict the future. And if 2012 taught us anything, it’s that trying to mutate any one result in order to fit them fit the past is not a good idea…

 

Well, I suddenly have a problem on Patreon. Which *you* can help with.

The short version is, Patreon recalculated the way that it calculates public pledge totals so that they reflect what creators actually receive.  Let me note for the record right now that I was fine with the idea of Patreon getting a cut, and the size of that cut; they gotta eat too, right? Besides, I don’t really know how to do what they do, and they don’t know how to do what I do, so we had a good arrangement here.

Still… under the recalculation I have still been knocked below the $60/month pledge total that unlocked new 1,000 word short stories every month.  I don’t know, exactly, what the ethical position is, here. People signed up for that level in good faith, and obviously I didn’t change things, and I’m wondering whether sixty bucks is a reasonable price to charge for what’s essentially creative writing practice work, and this would all be easily resolved if I just got a couple more $5/month pledges tossed in the kitty that made the whole thing moot.

So feel free (click here), if you haven’t already.  Seriously: if you haven’t already.  Existing Patrons shouldn’t worry about it; again, as I said, good faith.