Category Archives: Newsroom
Ecigarette maker NJOY is calling it quits:
The company filed for bankruptcy protection on Sept. 16 in Delaware federal court, burning some high-powered Silicon Valley investors, including Sean Parker, co-founder of the now-defunct Napster, and PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who were part of a $70 million capital round that valued NJOY at $1 billion in 2013. Singer Bruno Mars is also an investor in NJOY and a fan of the e-cigarettes, which heat nicotine-laced liquid into vapor.
Parker, who ponied up $10 million to put into the company, said at the time that electronic cigarettes had the potential to make regular cigarettes “and all the harm they cause obsolete.”
The filing comes just five months after new federal regulations from Food and Drug Administration threaten the fast-growing multibillion-dollar industry that includes tobacco giants Altria and Reynolds, which own MarkTen and Vuse, respectively.
Photo by lindsay-fox 
That being said, as a first order of effect it’s hard to blame NJOY’s fall on the FDA’s Deeming regulations. Their sales fell to a tenth of their high mark in an industry that’s growing. They failed because they had a shoddy product. Where the FDA comes in is that it turned off the light at the end of the tunnel. Without the FDA regulations, they might have been able to pivot into different products, change their focus, or any number of other things. Instead, they are going to be required to spend millions of dollars just to keep their current lackluster product on the market. And unlike Big Tobacco, they just don’t have the resources to do so.
When I talk about their product, I should clarify. Though they sell different things, NJOY focused primarily on cigalikes and closed systems. They’re not bad products exactly. I quit smoking with Blu, which was a similar product. Others, though, have found their product not remotely satisfactory as a cigarette replacement and I myself would have had a much smoother transition if I’d gone straight to vape pens or some other more efficient device. Blu is still around, though they have gone from being front-and-center at the cigarette counter to something you see down at the bottom right tucked out of the way. There may be a market for items that give a poor vape but retain the look and feel of cigarettes, but it’s likely pretty limited, and NJOY’s model seemed built around it.
Some public health advocates seem to be celebrating this development, while some pro-vape people say it portends bad things. I believe it’s mostly irrelevant. I’m not worried about NJOY. I’m worried about vape shops, independent dealers, and the like. The main thing I will miss about NJOY is that they had a good media presence and were one of the better known brands that had never been associated with tobacco companies. They were an easy company to cite when someone said that the whole thing is a front for Big Tobacco.
After this, I plan to shift back to less partisan/political posts I swear. But here we are, just a few days after Hillary Clinton’s speech and Mike Pence declined to refer to David Duke as deplorable. At first blanch, that looks really bad, and harkens back to Donald Trump’s refusal to disavow Duke.
The problem is that Pence did disavow Duke. Right before he declined to call him deplorable. So the narrative that there’s no extremist too extreme for Team Trump doesn’t especially hold. We can talk about how Of Course they’re willing to ditch Duke because even in Louisiana he’s polling really badly and how this doesn’t absolve Trump of anything. And that’s all true. The frustrating thing for me, though, is that it leaves me defending Trump again because that’s not how the media is covering it. They’re suggesting that he’s down with Duke.
The question is, though, why didn’t Pence simply say that yes of course Duke is deplorable? Especially given his actual willingness to disavow? I mean, this is easy spit and unlike Trump, Pence is a professional?
I think the answer is this:
Outside Donald Trump's rally in Asheville, NC: A "Deplorable Lives Matter" sign: pic.twitter.com/Fn1YbHFIm9
— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) September 12, 2016
And this:
At KSU for Newt's townhall for Trump are three "deplorables" complete with basket. #gapol pic.twitter.com/uvBPbrXxQE
— Aaron Gould Sheinin (@asheinin) September 12, 2016
Which is to say, Team Trump has decided to own the sneer. They’re not worried about offending Duke, they’re worried about tarnishing their rally cry. Which makes sense. Is it a good move? I’m really not sure. It seems more of a batting down the hatches move for a campaign that needs to get to 51%. (It’s also dishonest, since it is reasonably clear that Clinton was talking about half but not all of Trump supporters, but nobody cares cares about that.) But there aren’t a lot of good paths for him, and this is one. It capitalizes on what even the Clinton campaign seems to concede is a mistake.
I can’t imagine such a move would garner my support for a campaign that otherwise wouldn’t have it, but if it were my candidate I could dig The Deplorables as a rallying cry. It could work.
(Of course, me being me, I’d want to work in a Les Deplorables in the spirit of Les Miserables. Classing up the meme and all that. But that might be the style of a candidate I might support. It obviously wouldn’t work for Trump.)
His full name is Enrique Peña Nieto.
You can shorten it to Peña Nieto.
You can further shorten it to Peña.
A lot of people, however, are defaulting to Nieto. Which makes sense, since Nieto is the last of the three names presented. Even before she dropped the Rodham, nobody referred to Hillary Rodham Clinton by that name. It was the middle name.
Where it gets tricky is that in Mexico, the last name isn’t always the surname. It is typically the mother’s maiden name. It is part of the full name, and appears last, but not the “last name” as we think of it. And often it’s skipped entirely. Former President Vincente Fox is actually Vicente Fox Quesada. He just never uses the last last name. In between the two was President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa. Usually referred to as Calderón.
In the same way that Hillary Clinton incorporated Rodham into her formal name, Peña has incorporated “Nieto” into his formal name, and so it appears a lot more often than did Quesada or Hinojosa. So frequently you hear Peña Nieto. But when there’s only one, it’ll be Peña. As indicated by the English-language Mexican newspaper linked to at the beginning of this piece.
Despite knowing this, I nonetheless feel the urge to go with “Nieto” for a separate reason. Specifically, the “n” with the tilde (~) is not easily accessible on this keyboard. It can be typed, but it’s actually easier to go to the Wikipedia page and copy and paste (which is what I did here). Historically, it has been regular to drop the tilde and go with “Pena” but this tends to irk a lot of Spanish-speakers because it’s actually a different letter with a different sound.
If it were accepted, I’d simply adjust the spelling to meet the sound, by calling him (in this instance) Enrique Penia Nieto. This is not unheard of with names from other languages, such as Former German president Gerhard Schröder, or as we sometimes liked to call him, Gerhard Schroeder. (To further complicate things in that case, pronunciation of his name varies here from Shrohder, Shrewder, and Shrayder.)
Long story short, in addition to recognizing the importance of the middle (surname) name in Mexico, we do need new keyboards. Maybe another shift-style key or something that adds tildes, accents, and umlauts without resorting to ASCII jujitsu or copy-and-paste.
Well this is pretty awesome. It you haven’t seen it, watch some Louisianians save a woman (and her dog!) from a sinking car:
NPR’s article has some really good pictures. You may remember a previous post with pictures of flooding in Texas. I had some song lyrics attached. Someone has posted the song itself (from a now-defunct band) on Youtube and is shown to the right.
There is a lot not to like about the south, but they do come together in times like this. The Cajun Navy came together in Katrina, and was sort of recommissioned during this flooding. It’s one of the positive aspects of the “Hold my beer and watch this s**t” culture that so often gets people in the region in trouble. You have a boat, of course roaming the floods and looking for people is what you do.
This isn’t unique to the south. There is a communitarianism in the west as well, even among those alleged rugged individualists. Out there, you often really can’t count on help because it’s so far away. But because it’s such a constant problem, it’s sort of always there. In the South it just comes up during freak weather, and with the exception of things like the Cajun Navy there isn’t any real formality to it. It’s just that you’re driving in flooding and you see some joe excited to use his F-150 to pull someone out of the water.
Rod Dreher has a really nice post on the subject.
Over There, JL Wall also has a post with links to ever more stuff.
So sayeth conservative radio personality Charlie Sykes:
We’ve basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers. There’s nobody. Let’s say Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it’s a falsehood. The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that, “By the way, you know it’s false.” and they’ll say “Why? I saw it on Allen B West.” Or they’ll say “I saw it on a Facebook page.” And I’ll say “The New York Times did a fact check.” And they’ll say “Oh, that’s The New York Times. That’s bullshit.” There’s nobody – you can’t go to anybody and say, “Look, here are the facts.” And I have to say that’s one of the more disorienting realities of this political year. You can be in this alternative media reality and there’s no way to break through it. And I swam upstream because if I don’t say these things from some of these websites, then suddenly I have sold out. Then they’ll ask what’s wrong with me for not repeating these stories that I know not to be true.
When this is all over, we have to go back. There’s got to be a reckoning on all this. We’ve created this monster. And look, I’m a conservative talk show host. All conservative talk hosts have basically established their brand as being contrasted to the mainstream media. We have spent 20 years demonizing the liberal mainstream media. And by the way, a lot of it has been justifiable. There is real bias. But, at a certain point you realize you have destroyed the credibility of any credible outlet out there. And I am feeling, to a certain extent, that we are reaping the whirlwind at that. And I have to look at the mirror and ask myself, “To what extent did I contribute?” I’ll be honest, the bias of our mainstream media has been a staple for every conservative talk show host, every conservative pundit, for as long as I can remember. Going way back to the 1960s with William F Buckley, Jr.
This is almost a metaphor for larger issues. In the same way that the anti-Trump conservative entertainment weak tore apart the trust in the media they’d need this year, they also tore down the institutional protections and respect that might have prevented his rise to begin with. I’ve previously likened Trump to a virus that succeeded in large part due to a compromised immune system. Among other things, the bullspit detecting antibodies had been obliterated after wave on wave of previous infections.
And so when the media was needed, it wasn’t there in a meaningful extent. It couldn’t penetrate the minds of those who needed to hear it. Their credibility had been destroyed. When “the establishment” sought to stop him, they couldn’t. Their credibility had been destroyed. And the conservative news personalities were disinclined to rain on anybody’s parade.
I’ve been rather hard on Erick Erickson lately, because up until earlier this year he has been among the worst offenders. So it’s a bit rich for him to act as the “principled opposition.” On the other hand, at least he did flip. And when Republican voters needed to hear a particular thing, he tried to tell it.
What I still haven’t seen, except from Sykes above, is any indication that 2016 followed 2015, which followed 2014 and especially 2013. And that these things are related.
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!
Government ruins everything.
Maybe I ought not be so critical of the police.
You know, if some people spent as much time, energy, and ingenuity earnin’ as they do scammin’ and thievin’, they’d be in a lot better shape.
You do your think, Creepy Clown.
Here’s an interesting look inside at Facebook’s thought processes in confronting clickbait.
Student protests may be hitting their university bank accounts, as alumni donors feel alienated.
Wight ghettos are the worst.
It’s raining bibles in Daeshian Iraq.
Wow, this Damon Linker piece on Angela Merkel is just brutal.
This reminds me of our dog Lisby, wanting nothing to do with my wife when she was pregnant with Lain but not responding to when she was pregnant with Marvin.
Well, babies certainly are manipulative. Starting before they are born.
Hillary Clinton doesn’t sweat. That seems like a design error, though, because sweating is actually really important.
It looks like it’s finally starting to happen. The groundwork is being laid for superhero and supervillain origins.
It may have been critical humanity’s advance and a pillar to civilization, but I’m sorry to tell you that fire is problematic.
This really was a weird thing. I commented on it a while back. I do feel sorry for those parents whose kids actually do say precocious things, because a lot of people probably don’t believe them.
This ad for Hillary is making the rounds:
Video of @realDonaldTrump flinching and #Hillary keeping cool when their podium is rushed now has 600,000 FB views. pic.twitter.com/GwQViMOV8i
— Peter Daou (@peterdaou) August 6, 2016
I agree with the central criticism of the ad, that Trump is (likely) panic-prone in a way that Cold Fish Hillary Clinton isn’t. The ad itself seems like a bit of a cheap shot, though. Donald Trump’s reaction is likely the far more normal of the two. When it’s a first time, being alarmed is a reasonable reaction. There are exceptions of course, such as would-be Senator Stillson to the right. But for the most part, I would be spooked, wouldn’t you?
Its also the case that Hillary Clinton has been dealing with the Secret Service for approaching a decade. Her poise is impressive, but its not her first rodeo. She knows that most of the time when they surround you, its nothing. Trump has no real way of knowing that.
The other thing is that it can encouraging baiting, which is good for precisely nobody. What I mean by that is that while Trump is prone to fly off his handle, there are things that his opponents have done to try and often succeed) to bait him into it. And when its something like the size of his hands and other parts) or whatever, well okay. But what you really don’t want is a situation where some nut gets it into his mind that maybe via a threat he throw Trump off, tilt the election, and Make a Difference.
That… would not be a good thing.
So to Team Hillary and Trump critics, I’d suggest they find another example.
Hanley charts out Gary Johnson’s path to the presidency! Well, to a likely loss in the US House of Representatives, but close enough.
Hillary Clinton is going all out on immigration. Good chance this will never backfire…
Ryan Briggs talks about gentrification, and how rather than being a tool of integration may just be a shifting of segregated racial boundaries.
I am a fan of revenue-caps on traffic courts, though I can see why you wouldn’t want to to place the caps differently in different places. Also, please don’t do this.
As France comes to grips with the terrorism spike, some Muslims are showing solidarity by attending Catholic Mass and refusing to bury the perpetrator.
After School Satan. If I lived in Deseret, this would have an appeal! I do wish they would separate the trolly aspect from the more positive ones, though.
Lyman Stone’s piece on migrations and oil booms is worth a read.
Stop trying to get me to like Tim Kaine, it isn’t going to work.
It turns out, Republicans also go and watch movies.
Sexless millennials, there are more than one might think! Well, at least young people being unable to move out of their parents’ house is having some benefit.
When football and immigration law collide.
CapX looks at attempts to disrupt poverty by moving people around.
Akshat Rathi cheated sleep for a year.
Noah Feldman argues that law schools should not try to limit admittance to people that will be able to pass the bar.
Porky dumped me because I didn’t properly understand one of her poems. At least, that’s what she said. I thought I understood it well enough. I was even complimentary. But I shared my thoughts, and she explained that I didn’t understand it at all and ended with “You know what? This isn’t working.”
I once had a living situation that was blown up by my two roommates and an argument they got involving Mighty Ducks 3. Dennis wanted to watch the movie, Karl thought it was a dumb movie. They got into a fight, and never spoke to one another again.
When I was working at Falstaff, we (the managers and team leaders) could tell when someone was planning to leave, or at least actively looking for a way out. There would be a 20-30% drop in measured productivity, lunch breaks would take about ten minutes longer, and so on. You’d be surprised the stupid things that can compel one to look for a new job.
Once, Sally was considering leaving a boyfriend over a particular problem they were having. One of her holdups was the problem that of the top 25 ways in which she had wronged him, this was not even on that list. It was small. She was trying to justify leaving despite that.
My advice to Sally (biased though it may have been) was relatively simple: It’s rarely the biggest straw that breaks the camels back. It wasn’t really about this trifling thing anyway. This was the accumulation of all things. How she was feeling at that moment was really the realization, however come to, that things simply weren’t going to get better. He’d left town for a weekend without telling her or anyone his plans. But for a guy that had physically threatened her (with a knife in his hand, at one point), cheated on her more than once, threatened to hurt her friends, it was odd to her that a weekend getaway would be the last straw. But that’s just it, it was the last of many, many straws. Sally didn’t actually leave him. He left her. Well, I guess technically she left him, but only after he’d stopped calling her, and after he’d demanded (and received) a unilaterally open relationship. She’d basically rode with him to the bitter, bitter end.
The last year or so, she had been looking for the right and justified thing to leave over. The thing that was worse than all of the other things. She was measuring the straws for length and girth to determine that this was the most reasonable straw on which the back shall finally give way. If you’re doing that, it means two things. First, it means that your back is pretty strong. That you can take it, but are choosing whether to or not to. It also means that you’re likely already deeply in sunk cost territory.
But sometimes, the back just breaks. A small thing becomes a clarifying moment. A realization that all past things were truly indicative of all future things, and all future things are likely represented by all past things. Often, it’s realizing that the other person isn’t trying, that it may suit them to become even worse, and there is no reason for it to get better.
Porky had reasons for dumping me, but the poem wasn’t really the one.
I mention all of this in conjunction with the Election 2016 news of the day, which is that allegedly a number of Republicans have finally had enough. I’m seeing a lot of commentary talking about how the Republicans put up with so much odiousness from Donald Trump but the one thing they couldn’t abide was his refusal to endorse Paul Ryan and John McCain. This narrative ignores a lot of the underlying dynamics. I don’t know if this will be the straw that does break the elephants’ back or not. I do know that this isn’t the only straw, and we should be wary about judging the broken back by the last straw that fell upon it.
There is some natural bafflement over the length and girth of the straw here. I think Trump’s refusal to do so is actually kind of justifiable. It’s a primary and not a general election, and neither McCain nor Ryan endorsed Trump during his primary and Ryan made a point of doing so only reluctantly after he did win it. Further, just a couple of weeks ago he was talking about donating money to defeat John Kasich and Ted Cruz in the future, and he didn’t even specify in the primary. Everything he does going forward is going to be debatably less bad than something he’s done before. It would be folly for the GOP to wait until they finally have that one thing that is worse than everything else.
For formatting purposes, I’m not going to put this paragraph in bold but I almost want to so that I may underscore its importance, but none of this is a defense of the RNC or any particular individual. Dumping Trump now, if it happened (and I don’t think it will), or pulling endorsements if that happens (it might, but even there I wouldn’t bet on it), doesn’t rectify much. I’ll view any who bail now with less male malevolence than I view any who don’t, but that’s only comparative. I don’t want to valorize them. I want them honestly humiliated. They deserve to be. (That may be the only thing both Trumpers and I agree on, albeit for different reasons.)
Beyond that, though, it’s a matter of individual assessment. If Porky had never said word one about being unhappy in our relationship, then I would be able to attach great importance to The Poem. Had she always seemed unhappy and tentative (which she did), then I would assign less. With politicians and public personalities, we only know the public face they put on and will only find out later how disturbed they were or weren’t about the events leading up to this week. Newt Gingrich has loved it, and Rudy Giuliani has gotten into it, so I’m not sure they can credibly scale back. Paul Ryan, on the other hand, has demonstrated a discomfort throughout the process. My inclination has been to say that Reince Priebus, for example, had been somewhat indifferent until now, though maybe that’s an unfair characterization. Time will tell.
To be honest, I am myself at a bit of a loss as to why this could be the thing that tips it over. There’s not even a cynical interpretation. There is nothing clear to me now that wasn’t clear when he got the nomination to begin with. Except that now it’s too late to deny him the nomination, even if they were so inclined. I think that the Khan story really got to some people. I also do think that the endorsement thing matters for a lot of the wrong reasons, but also because it touches on the one thing they had been using all along to rationalize their support: party loyalty. I find these explanations lacking, but I’m in my own head and not theirs.
My guess is that they’re going to go the Sally route anyway. It would be one thing if it were a Corbyn situation where something will continue indefinitely without intervention. In this case, though, there is a stamped end-date, and what I can only assume is an incredible temptation to wait it out for lack of any better option. Trump happened in part due to a lack in leadership. There were a hundred earlier interventions that would have had an enormous impact. If you’re too squeamish to cut off your finger that has gangrene, you’re probably not going to cut off your arm.