This paper says Republicans are bad. At least, that's how I'm translating the academic language. The title says, Liberal Conservative Asymmetries and Anti Democratic Tendencies are Partly Explained by Psychological Differences, meaning conservatives and liberals are asymmetrical or different in their anti democratic tendencies. The paper says that conservatives, Republicans in the United States, are are more anti democratic than liberals. I have a few problems with this paper. I think they're constructing terms to get the results they want. Their underlying data set isn't public, so we can't double check them. And third, I think the sum of the relationships they present aren't really that meaningful. But first, let's review the experiment. Basically, what the authors did is they took survey responses from a nationally representative sample of over 1, 500 people. Survey questions included things like, Are you a Republican? Or on a scale of one to seven, how strongly do you identify with the Republican Party? And that's where the authors get Republican or conservative sentiment from. The authors also construct scores for different psychological attitudes. For example, they have a term called right wing authoritarianism, which is a combination of responses to these three survey questions. One, what our country really needs instead of more civil rights, is a good stiff dose of law and order. Two, what our country really needs is a strong, determined president who will crush the evil and set us on our right way again. And three, there is no such crime to justify the death penalty. I'm assuming that one is reverse scored. So if you answered yes to the first two and no to the second, you might have a three score for right wing authoritarianism. The authors also construct measures for social dominance orientation, the idea that hierarchies are good and it's good for some people to be better than others, and for political system justification, the idea that our current political system is basically good and scores for those terms are constructed out of 3 or 4 questions on the survey as well. The authors then create an anti democratic sentiment measure, and that's a combination of seven different categories, which are themselves combinations of three to four different questions. Quote, we measured pro versus anti democratic sentiment with seven different attitudes about A, rights and guarantees according to the democratic rule of law, B, political equality and voting, C, freedom of speech, D, defection from democratic rules of the game, E, willingness to use political violence. F. Tolerance of disliked groups, and G. Willingness to vote for blatantly anti democratic candidates. And each one of those letters is again a combination of three to four survey responses. So these seven separate letters made up of three or four different questions combined to form one big anti democratic sentiment score. Authors then do several multiple linear regressions to show that one self identified Republicans and conservatives are more associated with anti democratic sentiment and two the association is mediated by the psychological attitudes, the right wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation I mentioned earlier. Basic idea is conservatives have more right wing authoritarianism and having more right wing authoritarianism makes you more anti democratic. This is a, this is a brief summary of what's in the paper. I hope it's fair and accurate, but if you're interested in learning more and learning what I left out, you should read the paper. So, that said, let's get to my problems with the paper. First, the survey questions and responses are not public. The authors write that they will be made public in April of 2025, but they aren't public right now. Authors also note that their study was not pre registered, meaning they didn't publish their plan for how they were going to analyze the data before they did their experiment. And this is a problem because it's possible that the authors just ran many different multiple linear regressions with many different combinations of questions and answers and psychological attitudes and so on until they found something that was nominally statistically significant. If their data was public, then we could check how robust their results were by constructing equally plausible measures of these things, or changing their models a little bit, and seeing if we could still get the same results. Second, it seems to me like the psychological attitudes are constructed to give the authors the results they want. There are three attitudes, right wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and political system justification are all associated with conservatives and Republicans. So if you find any association between these attitudes and anti democratic sentiment, then you can only find asymmetrical associations. Meaning you aren't looking at. possible anti democratic sentiment from the left side, you're only looking at possible anti democratic sentiment from the right side. So, of course, you can only discover asymmetric anti democratic sentiment. And I think they construct their measures of anti democratic sentiment this way as well. For example, one of the components of anti democratic sentiment is willingness to vote for a blatantly anti democratic candidate. And your score there is determined by how you answered these three survey questions. One, my opponent is so dangerous that they deserve to go to jail. Two, if I lose this election, it is only because the system is rigged. I will never concede defeat to my opponent. And three, I don't care if the courts say this election is legitimate, I will decide whether to accept the results or not. Let's focus on that third point. Basically, the notional anti democratic candidate is ignoring what the courts say, even though the courts are the entity that are supposed to determine if the election was legitimate or not. The candidate is ignoring what the courts say to substitute their own judgment instead. But also, that's a very Donald Trump like thing to do. In other words, the survey question is kind of pitched. So Republicans will answer it. Yes, I would be willing to vote for a candidate who said that, but you could imagine a variation on that question. For example, I don't care what the Supreme Court says. I know that Roe v. Wade is constitutional. For me, it seems like that's an example of a candidate substituting the court's judgment for their own judgment, even though the court is the proper entity to decide what is and isn't constitutional. In my mind, it's analogous to a candidate saying, I don't care what the courts say. I know an election is legitimate or not. Another candidate says, I don't care what the courts say. I know what is and isn't constitutional. The difference is that the hypothetical question I'm posing would be more likely to elicit a yes response from a Democratic voter, whereas the actual question given to respondents is more likely to elicit a yes answer from Republican voters. The paper is defining anti democratic sentiment as things Republicans are likely to agree with, and they're defining specific psychological attitudes as things that are likely associated with Republicans, and then they discover that these two things are associated. Finally, I'm not sure how meaningful some of the presented results are quote results of our survey revealed that as hypothesized self identified conservatives and strongly identified Republicans exhibited less support for political equality and legal rights and guarantees and greater willingness to defect from the rules of the game and to vote for blatantly anti democratic. candidates. Moreover, these effects were observed even in models that adjusted for both ideological and partisan extremism, thereby disconfirming the notion that, in the U. S. at least, extremists of the left and right are equally anti democratic. Let's look at defection from the rules of the game. In the supplemental document, the authors provide a series of regression tables. In step two of the series, the authors used conservative and republican identification alone as independent variables, and their measure of defection from rules of the game as the dependent variable. They find basically no relationship. R squared is 0. 07. In subsequent steps of their regression series, they add additional independent variables. By step six, they've added all their independent variables. So they have things like age, education, race, ethnicity, income, gender, and so on. And with all of their independent variables added, their R squared is 0. 36. This means that in step six, with all of their independent variables, they are explaining only about 36 percent of the variance in answers to measures of defection from rules of the game. But that leaves me wondering how much conservatism or Republican identification is really doing here. How much conservatives are really associated with defection from rules of the game. The association seems extremely weak in step two. By step six, it's still pretty weak, and there are a lot of other variables involved. So it's just not clear to me that this really means anything in terms of asymmetries. To sum up, the authors are doing an analysis that was not pre registered and they haven't shared their data. So we can't check to see how robust their results are. Two, the variables that they've constructed seem biased to me. They're only looking at psychological attitudes associated with Republicans and not with Democrats. So of course they're going to find something asymmetrical. That's all. Their measure of anti democratic sentiment also seems biased to me. And three, I just can't really tell how much their results mean. Not all of their results seem that meaningful to me. Thanks for your time. ## Takeover Timeline  Elon Musk spent the lion's share of 2022 trying to buy Twitter. He ended up having to do it as a hostile takeover. So this is how he did it from a legal perspective.    A hostile takeover is, is when one company or person, in this case, Elon wants to take over ownership of another company called the target when the board of that target company does not want that to happen. There are basically two ways to do a hostile takeover. Number one, you can make a premium offer to the board of the target, which in turn places immense pressure on the board from the shareholders of the target company to sell at that price so they can get good value for their shares. The second way to do a hostile takeover is to go directly to the shareholders and offer to buy their shares from them. In the end, Elon launched both of these tactics within about a week of each other, and the results were pretty magical. In mid April of 2022, Elon launched his first Salvo, which was a premium offer to the board of Twitter to buy Twitter. Now, this offer was about 41 billion, which was about 54. 20 a month. Per share, it was a pretty good offer and most people agreed. This is called a bear hug in M& A deals or hostile takeover terms. Now it's still hostile and it's still a takeover, but it's a bear hug because it's theoretically a premium price for the company. And the idea is for the shareholders to like the price so much that they put pressure on the board of the target for the board to accept the price. Now, Elon was hoping that the offer was so good that either the board would just accept it outright or take it to the shareholders for a vote. The board did neither. Instead, they enacted something called the poison pill defense. You may have heard of this, but, and it gets pretty complicated, but the basic idea is upon a certain triggering event, the stock in the target is severely diluted, making it less attractive to the, Potential purchaser, Elon. Now the board didn't call it a poison pill defense. They called it a shareholder rights plan or a stock rights plan, but it's the same thing. Basically upon a triggering event, i. e. someone owning 15 percent or more of the company, a bunch of these options would vest, which would severely dilute the price of the stock, including the acquirer stock, in this case, Elon. So the idea is that Elon wouldn't be able to afford the poison pill. So he wouldn't take over the company because, you know, it would be way too expensive. You'd be paying a huge premium for the stock. Now there's basically two counters to the poison pill from the acquirer's perspective. The first is to try to push the shareholders to implement a bylaw or a resolution outlying the pill. Now this can take a while and requires broad shareholder support. So it's not necessarily the most efficient option. The second option is just to charge ahead and do it anyway. Elon, ever the gamesman, decided on the latter but thought that the former was a nice little fallback plan. Mere days after the poison pill was implemented, Elon kind of went with a tender offer to the shareholders and said, Hey look, I'm going to circumvent the board and I'm going to offer each of you that I'll buy your shares at 54. 20 a share. Deal or no deal? Now he didn't technically offer it, but he made filings with the SEC saying he was exploring the idea. So while the initial offer to the board was still on the table, Elon also went around the board and said, with or without board approval, I'll just buy the shareholder's shares. Individually, the amount of pressure, this two pronged approach placed on the board of the target is almost impossible to overstate. There was immense pressure to sell at the premium original price, but there's also pressure of all the shareholders selling their shares to Elon separately. And the company dying bit by bit, bit by bit, and being devalued in the process. At this point, Elon was basically saying, look, board, sell your company to me or your stock will be devalued to the point that you will be forced to sell your company to me. And I'll be waiting at the door with a lower price. There was also a third point of pressure in all of this, which was, this was kind of a PR nightmare for Twitter because the board was kind of seen as holding the company hostage from a really good offer just because of their distaste for Elon. And that did not look good. Cracks were starting to develop on the board itself. Jack Dorsey, who was Twitter's founder, was It was leaked that he was at odds with some of the other board members about the direction of the company. And when cracks start to develop, it's not long before the dam begins to break. The combination of the premium offer to the company, the tender offer to the shareholders, and the pressure from the public in general ultimately was just too much. And the board voted to sell the company. You see, in good M& A law, you don't need to win the initial battle to win the war. You just need to mount enough pressure from various angles, and a huge company, even a company as big as Twitter, can fall like a house of cards. --- Joycelyn Elders - Surgeon General for Clinton - Forced to resign Dec 1 1996. - Reason for resignation - Children sex ed - Drug issue - Hidden camera footage. - "We have to reach down and help them." - Rush Limbaugh played the clip in the 1990s ---  Good afternoon church! So I want to give you a little bit of background on this building or organization they call a church. The lady that you saw walk off the stage her name is, she calls herself Bishop Rosie O'Neal. Um, she is the quote unquote pastor of this building or organization that they call a church because it's not a church. I've known her for years and I've when I first saw her I wondered if she was a Christian. She is rainbowish and I really believe she is. However, I digress. I don't have any proof of that. That is just what my spirit tells me every time I see her. That's what I think of this quote unquote church has been in the news recently. Because she bought her home in the church's name and all of the big mega churches, they do this and then they label the home as a parsonage kind of, or as a retreat center. And the way they get away with that is, um, it's pretty much a retreat center. Um, when maybe, let's say a pastor comes in from out of town and speaks at their church and the pastor stays at the house. Then they can classify it as a quote unquote retreat center, you know, in times of crisis. And, and we are looking at the images of the aftermath of the hurricane. But it, it is easy in these moments of crisis to to question our faith to sometimes lose our faith for a moment. Because what we see. It's so hard to see that we lose faith or a vision of those things we cannot see, but must know. They clap for that. That will tell you how stupid they are. That didn't make any sense. Um, so scripture teaches us, let us not become weary in doing good for at the proper time, we will reap what we sow. If we do not give up, you know what else scripture teaches us that the wicked will be destroyed. So I first encountered the words of Galatians as a young girl at 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland, California, which is where I sang in the children's choir and first learned the teachings of the Bible. Now we know you lying, but if you're not, they forgot to tell you that you have to be a doer of the word, not just a hearer for it to matter. My earliest memories of those teachings are about a loving God. Whoever told you that left out the most important part. God is all of his attributes at the same time. God is love, but that love is not emotional. It's not Cupid. It's not sappy. God's love is just, and God hates the wicked. You will reap what you saw. Not just you, but all of us. Amen. A God who asks us to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, to defend the rights of the poor and the needy. And so at an early age, I learned that faith is a verb. It is something we show in action and in service. And we show it by heeding the words of my pastor, who Bishop spoke with yesterday, Reverend Dr. Amos C. Brown, who often invokes the words that we all know. One must. Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God. I ain't never heard her mention nothing about going to church before. That girl ain't never been to church in her life. And even if she did, Amos is a far left lunatic. The people of Greenville, like all Americans, have been inspired by the way communities are coming together, Bishop, in the wake of these storms. Amid ruined homes, downed power lines, swollen rivers that have been choked with debris. We have seen, we have seen children rescued by neighbors in a kayak. We have seen those who have lost everything gathering donations for others. What choice did we have? You didn't help them. You know, it's been my experience to see that in a moment of crisis, we, isn't it something when you know that often it is the people who have the least, gives the most. Well, we would all have a whole lot more to give if it wasn't for you yet church. There are some who are not acting in the spirit of community, and I'm speaking of those who have been literally not telling the truth. Lying. About people who are working hard to help folks in need. Spreading disinformation. When the truth and facts are required. And the, the, the problem with this beyond the obvious is it's making it harder than to get people life saving information. If they're led to believe they cannot trust. And that's the pain of it all. Which is the idea that those who are in need have somehow been convinced that the forces are working against them in a way that they would not seek aid. They told us that they were on the news. They said you did not show up for five days. People were sleeping on the side of the street, their cars gone up the river, their houses gone up the river, their livestock, their animals, their moms, the children, the dad, you showed up five days later. They told us that we would have no way of knowing if they didn't tell us. Who's spreading misinformation? You told them that they were going to get 750 and most of them have been denied. We always hear you're not supposed to judge. Only God can judge us. That is not the truth. The Bible says we know them by their fruit. Koala's fruit is rotten. The Democrats fruit is rotten. All types of sexual perversion, ripping life out of the womb, walking around telling children that they, if they girls, they can be boys, boys that can be girls. We don't have to judge your fruit told on you. Let me explain something to you. Christians, followers of Christ, believers in Christ cannot be deceived. Number one, they know the word of God. Number two, they have the Holy Spirit. True believers, it takes them all of 20 seconds to figure out someone is a false teacher or not because they know the word of God. They know when someone is saying something that goes against the Bible. Even unbelievers know that it is abnormal for someone to claim to be a Christian and have koala parading around in their There is no such thing as saying, I vote Democrat, but I don't believe in everything they do or say or believe. Yes, you do. And when you stand before God, you're going to have to answer for it. Being a conservative or Trump supporter does not automatically make you a Christian. But being a Democrat automatically disqualifies you as one. So yes, the moral of this story is, I can judge you. I can judge your fruit. And the fact that a people remained in that building they call a church, with Koala Harris standing in the pulpit, is proof that these people are not Christians. Blank point blank. I don't care if you have the sweetest little granny that anybody could ever have. She went, she goes to every church service. She never misses church. If she votes for Koala, she ain't no believer.  Is violent crime increasing or decreasing in the country? I don't know. A couple weeks ago I made a video replying to some people who claimed that the FBI was faking crime data. I thought, and I still think, that those arguments that the FBI was faking data were poor. But today I came across a news story which said that the FBI has revised its estimates of violent crime in 2022. The FBI Originally, the FBI reported a decrease in violent crime of about 2 percent in 2022, but after the revision, violent crime increased by about 5%. In other words, originally the FBI said crime decreased by a small amount in 2022. And then a while later, they revised their data to said, actually, crime increased by a not quite so small amount. And this is a problem for a couple reasons. First, it's a big change. That's over six percentage points different. And second, it reverses the direction. You thought violent crime was slightly decreasing, but the reality is that it's actually increasing. Well, okay, that's just for 2022. Violent crime was still decreasing by about three percent, as I said in the previous video, right? Well, actually, I don't know about 2023 either. The FBI has at least two ways to look at their violent crime data. The first is the data discovery tool. You can put in a query for a specific type of crime and get back numbers of crimes reported per year. If you look at the data through this tool, then yeah, violent crime decreased in 2023 by about 3%. That matches the FBI's recent headline report that violent crime was down by about 3%. However, the FBI also has the Crime Data Explorer, which gives you monthly counts of violent crime. And if you just sum up the monthly counts for 22 and 23, then you see that actually violent crime doesn't seem to have decreased by about 3%. It seems to have slightly increased. By about 4%. Previously, I said, so absent better data, I tend to believe that the FBI numbers are roughly accurate and represent a decline in violent crime, but I'm going to amend that now because I don't know that I can actually trust the FBI's data or trust myself to interpret it. And there are two basic reasons for that one. If the FBI's data can change years after the fact so that a reported small decrease in crime becomes a larger increase in crime, then I don't know what confidence we can have in their 2023 numbers. Who's to say that won't dramatically change in a couple of years either. And two, I can't figure out the difference in reporting between their two methods of presenting data. I don't know which number is accurate or which one I should trust. And it's not clearly explained on their website, at least not as far as I could tell. So is violent crime increasing or decreasing? Well, I don't know. And I actually think it's somewhat concerning that this basic question isn't well addressed by the FBI. Thanks for your time. Mhm.