Todays Bad News

Facebook's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad two years or, how the victimized right wing won again and Facebook made a ton of money from it. Facebook seems to have replaced television as the yuge media source not to watch if you want to be well-informed. Link.

The New York Times gives op-ed space to discredited firearms researcher and advocate John Lott. (No link. The NYT's publishers have gone fascist. F– 'em.) I like political scientist Henry Farrell's remarks on Lott:

"Why yes indeed. You could say that More Guns, Less Crime drew heated criticism. But then, you might prefer to ask why John Lott became a public laughing stock before you got into detailed back-and-forths about the econometrics. Mysteriously disappearing surveys. The wonderful Mary Rosh, a former ‘student’ of John Lott’s who went after Lott’s critics on the Internet, and gushed about [Lott] before she was revealed as a sockpuppet for John R. Lott himself. And finally, the famous lawsuit against Steven Levitt.[…]

"What we can’t check is how many specifications Lott tries and discards before coming up with those that suit his prejudices. But we can observe that he bats 1.000 in this respect. On a vast range of subjects, his econometric analyses always come up with the same conclusion: The Right is right."

And, finally, the Department of Agriculture proposes replacing SNAP, which allows desperately poor people to buy food for their families with a government-funded debit card, with a monthly box of agribusiness-selected preserved foods. "Poverty sucks," say the rich people.