Month: July 2026

July 1

Times less

I have been asked to weigh in on this several times, but I don’t think I can improve on Evelyn Lamb writing in Scientific American:

There is a phrase, or a type of phrase, that instantly causes me to feel like I’ve stumbled into Wonderland or some other topsy-turvy dream world. “X is n times less than Y” is the basic formulation, where X and Y are quantities that can be compared and n is some number, usually (but not always) a whole number.

Most recently, I encountered it in an article that stated that Spain’s maternal mortality rate is five times less than that of the USA. I don’t want to pick on that article alone, both because I don’t want to trivialize the problem of maternal mortality and because I see similar phrases everywhere. Actual growth of energy demand is three times lower than Duke Energy estimates. Graphene paper is six times lighter than steel. Relative risk ratio for immunological graft rejection is 15 times lower than DSEK (whatever that means). YouTube runs five times slower on Chrome than on Firefox. When I read one of these phrases, I can almost feel my brain rejecting it like an ill-fated transplant, perhaps one that used DSEK instead of an immunological graft.

…

When I first noticed my negative reaction to this type of phrase, I thought I just needed to think through the situations carefully, but I’ve come to the conclusion that my rejection is wholly warranted. Please, stop writing “three times less than” or “six times lighter than” or “twenty times thinner than.” Think of your long-suffering, literal-minded math writer friends and rewrite! “Steel is six times as heavy as graphene paper.” Thank you. Now I can continue my day without a pesky brain reboot.

People get funny about numbers, particularly when trying to communicate relative scale or importance. The desire to write something that sounds dramatic leads the clumsy writer astray. For example, you’ll read about a car collector who “owned more than 28 cars.” More than 28? Like, 29? Or like 2,849,999,431,291, which also is more than 28. Check my English-major theoretical mathematics here, but I think there is a whole infinity of numbers more than 28.

Kevin D. Williamson. And here I thought I was all alone in this pet peeve. I literally don’t know what this “times less” means. If it’s five times less, is the five the numerator of a fraction? That’s called “a fifth,” not “five times less.”

And I could use a fifth of something about now.

Becket Fund

On a happier note, I felt like time another paean to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty:

[T]he Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and its annual Canterbury Medal dinner, [recall] the infamous 12th-century clash between King Henry II and Archbishop Thomas Becket. Their feud ended with Becket murdered by four knights of the king in Canterbury Cathedral. Becket thus became a martyr for the idea that you don’t render unto Caesar the things that are God’s.

“The constitutional order that Jefferson helped create has sustained a deeper and more diverse religious life than even the Founders themselves anticipated,” says Mark Rienzi, a law professor at Catholic University who serves as president and CEO of Becket.

As galas go, Becket’s is a doozy, with guests sporting kippahs, turbans and zucchettos.

William McGurn, What Real Diversity Looks Like (Wall Street Journal)

I’m pretty passionate about religious liberty, and I put a non-trivial amount of money where my mouth is. All of that money goes to Becket, none to ADF (the Alliance Defending Freedom, formerly Alliance Defense Fund).

I appreciate having gotten some religious liberty (and other) training from ADF, in exchange for which I gave sundry people 450 hours of pro bono legal services over three years. But (caveat: I do not follow ADF obsessively and my impressions may be skewed) it seems to me that ADF is and always was has been a servant of Evangelicalism and its political preoccupations much more broadly than a servant of religious freedom for all.

A visit to their website June 30 tends to confirm that, as it’s clickbaity homepage stories were:

  1. The State of Washington Let Males Wrestle Girls. She Paid the Price. Kallie Keeler was sexually assaulted by a male opponent during a girls wrestling match. School officials stayed silent about it for months. Will you give today to help Kallie receive the justice she deserves?
  2. Maryland teacher asks US Supreme Court to review gender policy requiring educators to lie.
  3. School District Coughs Up $95K After Censoring Student’s Charlie Kirk Memorial
  4. Professor Gregory Brown Explains Why Men Shouldn’t Compete in Women’s Sports
  5. He Invited Friends to Pray at Home. An Ohio City Called It an Illegal Synagogue.

Becket’s homepage is (ahem!) a marked contrast.

Becket is unbeaten (13-0) in the Supreme Court; ADF pushes the envelope harder and fails oftener. So far as I can tell superficially (I didn’t click through), I don’t disagree with ADF’s take on any of its featured cases, but my preoccupations are not theirs.

Your mileage may vary.

The limits of choice

I recently asked a waitress at a Paris restaurant for a medium-rare steak. She explained that the kitchen prepared its steaks only rare or medium. I asked politely if the cook could leave the steak on the grill for somewhere between the time it took to make it rare and the time it took to make it medium. She looked at me as though I had asked her to bring me the cow so I could introduce myself.

When it comes to politics, it’s the other way around. In Europe, you will get short shrift if you ask the barista for a nonfat, no-foam, vanilla-flavored double-shot latte. But if you want a similarly tailor-made representative in government, the choice is yours.

You can have your politics served Communist, nationalist, Social Democratic, Christian Democratic, Green, Socialist, conservative, liberal and anything in between. In Britain—which, as in most things, used to look a bit like America but now seems dysfunctional and weird—there’s a six-way contest: Labour, Conservative, Reform, Green, Liberal Democrat, plus nationalists in Scotland and Wales. That isn’t including those who think it’s time Count Binface or Howling Laud Hope was given his chance.

In America, political choice is binary: R or D. There’s no soy doppio macchiato on the ballot. You can have it black or white. Next customer.

…

Few things could induce me to vote for another four years of the sort of Republicanism we are enduring now. But one of them is definitely the alternative of Islamist-friendly, open-the-borders, defund-the-police, kill-the-billionaires socialists running the country. Out of America’s vast diversity we are somehow at risk of narrowing our choice to that between a rampantly corrupt, inept, ideologically and practically capricious personality cult of a party and a party of graduate student activists with terrorist sympathies and ideas about economics that were discredited half a century ago.

Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal

I hate sports gambling …

It feels like it has been too long since I petted my peeve about sports betting. Rick Reilly at the Washington Post tees it up for me perfectly since I’d rather have a root canal than watch golf:

the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in golf was on Sunday at the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills in New York: Bros with a live betting app on their phones, cold White Claws in their hands, tried to can-open his head.

I’ll drop $1,000 on Wyndham Clark to lose and then keep screaming at him until he does.

They heckled him all day, chirped at him, messed with his mind.

“Don’t choke, Wyndham!” they yelled. “The bogeyman’s coming!” they yelled. They rooted for his ball to go into the bunker or the rough or out of bounds. They cheered when his ball trundled off the greens. They yelled at him as he drew the club back. Some of the Jabronis got thrown out for it.

…

An Irish fan living in New York named Desmond McGoldrick posted online about the “horrible behavior” at Shinnecock on Saturday, with an “infestation of young men” who were “betting on players making putts, and when they missed, yelling obscenities at them.”

I’ve been working on a golf book for the past two years, and I can tell you the phone-app wrecking of the sport is getting worse. Jabronis have realized they can’t do anything at an NFL or NBA game to improve their chances of cashing in, but they sure can at a golf tournament, where the traditional cocoon of silence before a shot is just waiting to be trashed.

Heckling from app-wielding bettors is wrecking golf

… And I’m not too crazy about predatory “Prediction Markets”, either

In his videos, George Makihara appears to have a lucrative side hustle making bets on Polymarket.

In January, the college student posted a video that showed him winning $100,000 on a wager that President Trump would publicly say the word “McDonald’s” that month.  

The bet was one of 145 that Makihara appeared to place on Polymarket’s website between January and mid-May, based on his videos—bets adding up to almost $410,000. 

But none of those bets were real, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation.

Makihara, who declined to comment, is one of dozens of mostly college-age creators Polymarket paid to film themselves making fake trades and sometimes scoring fake wins, according to an analysis of more than 1,100 videos by the Journal, along with instructional materials and interviews with creators who have worked with the company.

On Polymarket’s actual site, more than 50 accounts made the McDonald’s bet in January, public data shows. All of them lost.

In its push to draw users to its unregulated platform, Polymarket has flooded social media with videos like Makihara’s, which appear genuine at first glance. In reality, Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket.

Wall Street Journal, They Looked Like They Were Getting Rich on Polymarket—but None of It Was Real

DSA

Candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America are surging to victory on the claim that they are proponents of “a government by, for and of the working class” that will wrest power from both “far-right Republicans and corporate Democrats.”

Here’s the problem. Most of the leadership of the D.S.A. and a majority of voters who back its candidates are in no way working class. Instead, an elite made up of well-educated professionals dominates this insurgency.

The D.S.A.’s agenda, in turn, is packed with policies supported by left-wing liberals, white progressives in particular, but strongly opposed by both white and minority working-class (defined, in pollster shorthand, as non-college-educated) voters.

Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times (gift link)

That opening was your mic drop moment, Mr. Edsall. I’m not sure you needed the rest of the column (which I accordingly did not read)

Three readings of the book of JD

Despite being a relatively simple book, [J.D. Vance’s Communion] is susceptible to three distinct readings, none of them particularly Catholic. The first is that Communion is a book animated, despite its author’s conversion, by a particular kind of historical, political Protestantism, the faith of petty kings and princes always eager to bend faith in service of the crown. The second is that it is a book about Christianity as a secular force, a thin gruel of moralizing talk disconnected in all but name from the demands of real faith. The third, and perhaps most likely, is that it is what it plainly is: a book about how J.D. Vance would like to be the president of the United States.

Emmett Rensin, A Reading From the Book of J.D. Vance

What Do Americans Think When No One Is Watching?

I can’t quite shake What Do Americans Think When No One Is Watching?. It’s as if we’re relatively sane in private but we’re living a non-stop troll-a-thon in public, which even extends to the secret “public” of the voting booth.

Housing

Cities have largely lost the power to say yes to construction. To prevent officials from acting against the public interest, we have drained them of the power to act in the public interest. Every decision can be appealed, every complaint must be heard, every objection weighed. We are so committed to fairness that we have lost sight of the unfairness of doing nothing.

Binyamin Appelbaum via Frank Bruni

Shorts

  • … Donald Trump, the world’s most powerful man yet possibly the world’s smallest … (Bret Stephens)
  • New York Post: Trump Official Says US Control of Greenland Could Bring Back All-You-Can-Eat Shrimp at Red Lobster (TMD)
  • For at the end of the day, a church’s raison d’etre has to rest on more than just a lusty oaf of a king who couldn’t keep it in his pants. (Terry Cowan, explaining why the worldwide Anglican communion is of little interest to him.)
  • Although it may be true that nostalgia views the past through rose-colored glasses, such a criticism misses the point. To see the good while blinkered against evils is, nevertheless, to see the good. (Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic)
  • No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom. The assertion that “foul is useful and fair is not“ is the antithesis of wisdom. (E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful)
  • The modern West is said to be Christian, but this is untrue: the modern outlook is anti-Christian, because it is essentially anti-religious; and it is anti-religious because, still more generally, it is anti-traditional; this is its distinguishing characteristic and this is what makes it what it is. (René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World)
  • An AI use case: remembering the half-remembered, the “I seem to recall” stuff of life. (Tipsy)
  • No one hates like President Trump. He hates expansively, ornately, aerobically. He hates in sprawling speeches in the middle of crowds in the middle of the day. He hates in social media expectorations in lonely moments in the dead of night. Most of Trump’s talents are exaggerated or invented, usually by him. They’re his con. Hate is his core, and he’s an undisputed master at it. (Frank Bruni)
  • When someone reacts to yesterday’s birthright citizenship decision by saying there’s a calculated program of “birthright tourism,” remember they’re the same bastards who said Haitians were stealing and eating neighbors’ dogs and cats in Ohio.

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I offloaded a lot of Never Trumpery from this edition to elsewhere:

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.