The protocols of religious Jewish advocacy groups in the US

In a recent report on religious advocacy groups in the US, Pew lists the top 40 organizations by advocacy expenditures and policy makers and other government agencies and officials. Unsurprisingly, AIPAC comes in at number one.The top 40 groups account for 85% of all dollars spent by religious groups for the purpose of influence peddling. Because I tend to use the term "neocon" disparagingly, it follows that I must harbor an envious hatred of Jews...

Which division is the NFL's best?

The NFC North is arguably (in sports, what's inarguable, after all?) the best division in the NFL this year. There's a good chance both of the conference's wild card teams will come from it if Detroit is able to steal a big win against the Saints next week and Hanie is able to make things happen the way Cutler does. If the Packers are able to protect Rodgers against the Giant's front four in East Rutherford, it's not difficult to see Green Bay going...

AE on facebook

To avoid privacy issues and still maintain an effortless archival system, I've created an Audacious Epigone facebook account. When I initially began using facebook for blog archiving, the social network still required a unique university email address to be tied to each account to keep it from becoming a myspace where spam accounts proliferated. That was sufficient (and effortless), but awhile back, the privacy settings that had kept the archives...

More on the demographics of mental health

In the previous post, we looked at the likelihood to have received treatment for a mental health problem by political orientation based on GSS data. It turns out that self-described political liberals are twice as likely to have been treated for mental health issues as conservatives are, with moderates falling in between*. This spurred several intriguing comments that I'll turn to the GSS again to address.Firstly, the inevitable racial issue. An...

Conservatives are mentally healthier than liberals

Ed Tom Kowalsky asks:I've often wondered if mental illness is more common among those who self identify as liberal than those who self identify as conservative. I suspect the answer is a resounding "yes," but I don't know if there is solid evidence justifying my suspicion.I'm not familiar with the relevant science, but a bit of googling turns up some survey results showing that Republicans are more likely than Democrats are to describe themselves...

Old Republican white men know what's going on in the world

Over the last four years, I've tracked the results of Pew's "News IQ" quizzes that are periodically administered to a random sample of around 1,000 Americans. A couple of remarkably consistent results are how men are better informed than women are and that the average American is far less informed than readers of this and similar blogs are.Unfortunately, as honest as Pew is when it comes to the reports it commissions, politically correct acts of...

Sayonara sucker

A couple of months ago, I experienced a personal first--a wart on the inside of my right pinky finger. Never having had to deal with such a hideous thing before, I just ignored it for several weeks. It was small and only noticeable at all when my fingers were spread out. I'd heard that the solution involved freezing it off, which isn't something I figured I'd be able to do on my own, and it wasn't something I was going to bring to the attention of...

Ness misses home

When I was growing up, my family's moves around the country paralleled my dad's climb up the corporate ladder. Homesickness became an all-too-familiar status ailment of my childhood. I'd spend the first several months in a new state yearning to be back in the one from which we'd just come, and spend the last several months there dreading the next move to to yet another place....

Taxes paid and income made in the US, by quintile

Recently, I created a boring graph tracing the federal tax burden over a 15 year period by income quintile. The story has been and will likely continue to be steady as she goes. There are no intended polemical points in that post or in this one--they're just outgrowths of my ignorance and curiosity.The following table shows the share of federal tax burden as a percentage of total money income (defined here, a couple of pages down) by quintile in...

HBD

... now shows human biodiversity as the first definition at Urban Dictionary. Nice work again, everyo...

White, black, and Hispanic birth rates by state

In the comments of a previous post, I wondered to what extent intra-state birth rates correlated across racial groups. That is, in states where white fertility is high, are black and Hispanic fertility rates also high?I am unable to find birth rates broken down by race at the state level, but the Kaiser Family Foundation (which maintains a fantastic, data-rich website) does provide live births by race at the state level with data as recent as 2008...