It’s another week with two featured posts: one I planned and one that just jumped out at the last minute.
The planned post is the obvious one: What’s up with these ridiculous appointments Trump is announcing? That post “Caligula’s Horse and other controversial appointments” should be out before 10 EST.
The other mainly calls your attention to a recent New Yorker article about “the ambience of information”. Trump won largely because voters believed a lot of things that weren’t true — crime is up, immigrants are dangerous, and boys are taking over girls sports, just to name the most significant ones. Harris’ message, on the other hand, never seemed to penetrate. For example, people would go on complaining that she had no policies, no matter how many she had or how she promoted them.
The New Yorker article points out something new in the information environment: voters who make up their minds based on information they “rub against” rather than read or absorb in any traditional fashion. I’ll summarize the point in “Harris lost the war of ambient information”. That should be out shortly.
That leaves a few things for the weekly summary to cover: the Musk “government efficiency” department, the exodus from X to BlueSky, The Onion buying InfoWars, Nazis marching in Columbus, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
Voters believing information they want to believe is not new – please watch PBS’ American Experience: Coup in America: Wilmington 1898
The real problem in youth sports, especially at the middle and high school levels, is parents holding back their kids a grade, and sometimes even two, so that they’re older and more physically dominant than the typical kids in that grade. That perceived dominance can lead to things like scholarships for college athletics, or, at the very least, unrealistic self-perceptions of what was actually accomplished. It also teaches those kids that fairness is for suckers and all systems exist to be gamed for personal advantage.
It doesn’t necessarily work as intended, of course. We had a kid on our junior high basketball team who was held back in 6th grade in an attempt to groom him to be the team star and be viewed as the next great high school player for that district. Not only was this clearly his parents’ scheme, as he couldn’t really play even with the year head-start on the rest of us, but we all knew what was going on because he was pretty smart, so it wasn’t because he failed 6th grade. As a result, he suffered the dual embarrassments of failing his parents expectations and grift, and us riding him for his obvious lack of talent.
Rather than blowing up something that is an extremely rare issue to begin with just so they can take their Faux Noise grievances out for another spin, parents who actually care about fair competition and injuries caused by players who are clearly more physically developed than most in the game should stop letting this gaming of the system happen. The vast majority of kids playing high school sports aren’t playing beyond them, and they shouldn’t have to have their youth sports experiences marred by having to compete against kids who should have already gone on to college.
I don’t think the people who want to ban transathletes are motivated by their deep concern for sports.