Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.

Hobby Lobby won. I was wrong.

All of the Catholic Justices, except for Sotomayor, voted in favor of Hobby Lobby. I guess I underestimated how much Catholic justices would hate morning-after contraception which religious Catholics think is like abortion, and thus they would ignore precedent (which they usually follow because they are conservative about following precedent unlike the liberal justices). Those five Catholic justices were picked by Republican presidents using an anti-abortion litmus test, so I guess the litmus test worked.

Is the pope Catholic?

According to Salon, the answer is yes, Pope Francis is Catholic. Or, as the author of the article puts it, “the new pope is every bit the sexist homophobe as his predecessors.”

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Paul wrote in the Epistles that homosexuality is sinful, and those are the earliest known Christian writings, thus it would be impossible to accept homosexuals without implying that Paul didn’t know what he was talking about, and if Paul didn’t know what he was talking about that puts the whole religion on pretty shaky grounds.

I suppose one could argue that Paul didn’t understand the true message of Jesus, despite having allegedly personally met the resurrected Jesus.

Chelsea Clinton says she doesn’t care about money

Reported by the Daily News:

“I was curious if I could care about (money) on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t,” she told Fast Company in an interview that ran in the magazine’s May edition, explaining why she gave up lucrative gigs to join her family’s philanthropic foundation.

The Daily News article is observant enough to point out that Chelsea Clinton lives in $10.5 million dollar apartment in Manhattan. Maybe she would care more about money if she was living in a crappy studio apartment in the Bronx.

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Jim writes in a comment: “Chelsea Clinton’s life of ascetic simplicity in her $10.5 million dollar Manhattan condo should be an inspiration to all of us.”

Remember Flight MH370?

I never believed that anyone intended to crash the plane into the ocean because it made no psychological sense. Now, there’s new evidence that the pilot, the older pilot with the flight simulator in his home, had practiced on his flight simulator landing a plane at “a remote island far into the southern Indian Ocean.”

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When I was writing about the missing plane a few months ago, I used Google Maps to look at islands in the Indian Ocean, and it seemed to me that even if a plane could land on an island, there would be no way to hide it very long from satellite photos. Also, I would assume that someone would notice a large commercial jet landing on a rarely-used runway.

So if the plane did land, it would have to have been somewhere remote enough that no one was around to notice anything out of the ordinary except those who were in on the conspiracy. And it would also have to have been removed from the island it landed on relatively soon after it landed in order to avoid discovery, because the longer it stayed there the more likely it would have been photographed by a satellite.

Thus people are tempted to assume that the plane must have crashed before reaching its destination, but I also find that pretty unlikely because this guy was an experienced pilot who had practiced this flight path on a flight simulator, so if he wanted to fly to an island he should have been able to get the plane there.

I don’t think Latino and Hispanic actors and actresses are underrepresented

Steve Sailer and the NY Times think that “Latinos” are underrepresented in Hollywood.

So I found a list of the most popular actresses of 2013, and 20% of them (Cameron Diaz and Jessica Alba) are Latino.

Among male actors, Tom Hanks is Hispanic.

So you see, there are more Latino and Hispanic actors and actresses than you think.

Hispanics and blacks view computer careers most favorably

Steve Sailer shared a chart showing that Blacks and Hispanics are most likely to see a career in computers as a “good choice” for them, with whites being least likely.

My interpretation is that Blacks and Hispanics see computers as a practical way to make money, while whites see careers in computers as being boring and not self-actualizing.

Unlike whites, Blacks and Hispanics think that the primary purpose of work is to get paid.

The decline of Staten Island

The longer headline for this article might be “Why Staten Island will suck even more in the future than it does today.”

As mentioned in previous posts and comments this week, people in Staten Island imagine that their borough can have a resurgence. If hipsters could gentrify neighborhoods in Brooklyn and even Harlem, why not the North Shore of Staten Island? And they imagine that the giant Ferris Wheel will magically bring tourism which will then have a virtuous circle effect bringing in more businesses and improving the entire neighborhood.

Actual demographic data tells a different story. While the white population of Manhattan and Brooklyn has increased since the 2000 Census, the white population of Staten Island is declining. Believe it or not, Staten Island is the only borough where the black population has increased since the 2000 census. So we see that while Manhattan and Brooklyn are gentrifying, Staten Island is moving in the opposite direction. Of course, Staten Island remains the whitest borough in the city, but if trends continue, we could see Manhattan becoming the whitest borough sometime in the 2020s. Staten Island became populated by prole whites in the first place because of white flight from Brooklyn. It would be ironic, indeed, if in the future we see reverse-white-flight back to Brooklyn! But more likely, the flight of prole whites will be from Staten Island to New Jersey.

The problem with Staten Island is that it is now attractive to Hispanics and Blacks for the same reason that is used to be attractive to prole whites, but it’s not in any way attractive to the desirable demographic of bobo whites who are needed to improve the quality of life on Staten Island. And the reason for Staten Island being of no interest to bobos is its remoteness from Manhattan, which is where all of the jobs are.

People talk about the “quick” 26-minute ferry ride to Manhattan, but there are two problems here:

(1) No one actually lives near the ferry terminal in St. George. There is a quarter-mile of distance between the ferry terminal and anything else, and it’s across a pedestrian-unfriendly street, and then nearly all of the buildings in the parts of St. George closest to the ferry terminal are non-residential. Plus it’s very hilly and thus a difficult walk uphill from the ferry terminal. And it should be pointed out that instead of building apartments right next to the ferry terminal, they are building a giant Ferris wheel and an outlet mall. Developers seem to have pretty much given up on the idea that anyone would want to live in Staten Island and commute by ferry to Manhattan, so instead they hope that people who live elsewhere might want to commute by ferry to Staten Island in order to shop at an outlet mall. (However if that’s the case, the outlet mall will attract poor minorities rather than desirable white bobos).

(2) Few people work near the Whitehall Street ferry terminal in Manhattan. And that’s the financial district. Hipster types who are the first gentrifiers are far more likely to work in industries located in midtown.
A more realistic commute time from Staten Island to an office building in lower Manhattan is more like an hour and a half when you factor in waiting for transportation to take you to the ferry, time spent traveling to the ferry, waiting for the ferry, the 26 minute ride to Manhattan, and then traveling on foot, or waiting for another mode of transportation to take you to your destination. A realistic commute time from Staten Island to midtown is more like an hour and forty-five minutes. There are many neighborhoods in Long Island that offer faster commutes to Manhattan via the Long Island Railroad. There are dozens of places that hipsters could hipsterfy which offer faster commutes to Manhattan as well as not being infested by guidos.

I think that the people who live in Staten Island, even the smarter ones who have ideas about developing the North Shore, just have no clue how repulsive Staten Island is to the typical bobo or hipster, a borough devoid of good dining or anything cultural.

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Holy sh**, someone at the NY Times must be reading my blog for ideas for articles!

In yesterday’s NY Times: Living in St. George, Staten Island.

The New York Times article leaves out the important fact that St. George is approximately only 25% white according to the 2010 Census, and the white population decreased from 2000 to 2010, so St. George is actually experiencing white flight rather than gentrification.

However, they do mention the presence of a big housing project, and that the hills are “thigh burning.”

Single women like to live where it’s expensive

A reader left a link to a Trulia article about sex ratios and neighborhoods.

The trend I see is that single men like to live in places with a low cost of living such as Nevada, Utah and Indiana. Men also like to live in places with good weather. (Men pick places to live for solid practical reasons.) Single women like to live in places with a high cost of living, such as Washington DC, Boston, and New York City.

This preference can even be seen within cities. The more affordable but still bobo neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens such as Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Long Island City have more single men than women, while the most expensive neighborhoods, like the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side have the most women. The most expensive neighborhood in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Heights, has the most single women in Brooklyn (excluding areas with housing projects which also have more single women because women are better at qualifying for public housing while socioeconomically equivalent men are more likely to be in prison).

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The exception to the rule is the San Francisco-Palo Alto-San Jose corridor which has a high cost of living, but also has more single men than women because of the tech jobs located there.

Giant Ferris wheel, giant boondoggle

Every time I hear about the project to build a giant Ferris wheel on Staten Island, I think how stupid the idea is. Nobody wants to go to Staten Island, and that’s not going to change just because there’s a giant Ferris wheel there.

Yet people who live on Staten Island actually think that the giant Ferris wheel will usher in a new era of prosperity. For real. You can’t make this stuff up.

Is Donald Sterling senile?

Reported by Forbes:

At the center of the legal action filed by Rochelle Sterling are medical records, “written certifications of his incapacity by two licensed physicians,” that she claims resulted in Sterling ceasing to serve as co-trustee of the trust on May 29, the day Rochelle Sterling agreed to sell the Clippers to Ballmer. The provisions of the trust, in which Sterling and Rochelle Sterling were co-trustees, say that Sterling can be removed from control of the trust if two licensed physicians determine he is medically incapacitated and incapable of performing his duties as co-trustee.

So the question I have is, is he senile because he’s senile (which happens to 80-year-old men), or is he senile because he’s a racist (which is a scary use of political correctness)?

If he’s so senile and so racist, why does a young black woman want to be his new girlfriend?

Sterling really seems to like black girls. I guess it’s true what they say, once you’ve had black you can’t go back.