Travel Memories

Trump Hotels tried to have a Twitter conversation about favorite travel memories. Twitter rose to the occasion. Here are a few of my favorite.

History Calling

For better or worse, history is giving us an opportunity to answer this question for ourselves. Think carefully. Make sure you make decisions that you’ll be proud to explain to your grand kids. To St. Peter, if you like. To your future self in the mirror. And remember: silence is consent.

Helping ISIS Recruiters

From a September, 2016 NY Times article on Anwar al-Awlaki, Al Qaeda recruiter:

Today, with the war between Muslims and the West escalating,” Anwar al-Awlaki said in the video, “you cannot count on the message of solidarity you may get from a civic group or a political party, or the word of support you hear from a kind neighbor or a nice co-worker. The West will eventually turn against its Muslim citizens.

It was an audacious pitch. No matter what you may think, the American-born Mr. Awlaki told Western Muslims, sooner or later your governments and fellow citizens will come after you. So you must join our violent cause.

Now, Donald Trump does his best to prove him right. I’m sure ISIS recruiters everywhere are celebrating. Luckily, it appears they are receiving substantial support from their fellow citizens.

Fake News Rundown

Today an item scrolled by on my Facebook feed that alleges evidence of 800,000 illegal votes in the 2016 election. The source of the article was the highly partisan Sean Hannity, quoting a Washington Times piece:

Political scientist Jesse Richman of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, has worked with colleagues to produce groundbreaking research on noncitizen voting, and this week he posted a blog in response to Mr. Trump’s assertion.
Based on national polling by a consortium of universities, a report by Mr. Richman said 6.4 percent of the estimated 20 million adult noncitizens in the U.S. voted in November. He extrapolated that that percentage would have added 834,381 net votes for Mrs. Clinton, who received about 2.8 million more votes than Mr. Trump.

I decided chase down this study. Here was what I found with just a little bit of effort searching Google for Jesse Richman

As a primary author cited in this piece, I need to say that I think the Washington Times article is deceptive. It makes it sound like I have done a study concerning the 2016 election. I have not.

He has more explanation of his method, and a link to the original article quoted in the Times piece. As a bounus, his original study has serious methodological shortcoming.

Perhaps a bigger problem with utilizing CCES data to make claims about the non-citizen voting in the United States is that some respondents might have mistakenly misreported their citizenship status on this survey (e.g. response error)… In fact, any response error in self-reported citizenship status could have substantially altered the authors’ conclusions because they were only able to validate the votes of five respondents who claimed to be non-citizen voters in the 2008 CCES.

Just a reminder to use your build-in BS detector, or at least try a little Googling.

Texas Women’s March Round-up

Texas Monthly round-up of Texas Women’s Marches:

50,000 marchers packed the streets in Austin; 22,000 gathered in Houston; as many as 9,000 in Fort Worth and 8,000 in Dallas; more than a thousand in San Antonio; 2,500 in Denton; at least 1,000 in El Paso; 500 in Amarillo; 350 in Lubbock; more than 300 in Brownsville; hundreds in Beaumont and Nacogdoches; 200 in Abilene; more than 150 in Wichita Falls; about 100 in Corpus Christi; about fifty people marched in Midland, and another fifty in College Station; and even in cold, rainy Alpine, nearly 100 marchers trekked about 1.5 miles up a hill.