Greg Spaniolo

Spartan, Tar Heel, Statistician, Sigma Chi, Spring Break historian, mustache on request

[Thomas Sowell Quotes @ThomasSowell]

President Trump: “If we go up, they want to kill it. There’s no reason we should stop at 4%. We should be at 12% and 13% GDP. And I hate what happens where in the old days we would be, that’s how we built the country.”

[Coddled Affluent Professional @feelsdesperate]

I find a lot of the leftist technocratic discourse on taxation so frustrating because it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter whether taxation strategy is optimized or even whether more money goes into the public sector.

Who cares?

The problem is that an extraordinary amount of revenue (particularly on the state and municipal level) is wasted: it goes to corruption or stupid projects that have no public benefit or fraud or bloated, unnecessary bureaucracies that operate as captive jobs programs.

You have huge inputs and nothing comes out.

The ‘technocrats’ have no ability to do anything to remedy any of this. They don’t build anything, they turn a blind eye to NGOs that are a black hole for revenue, they won’t bound public unions to keep costs constrained, they get bullied by activists, and frankly they’re just not as smart or capable as they were a generation or two ago (and they’re unlikeable).

I don’t want to give them anything and will support basically any political project that will starve them. They end up bleeding productive economic activity and they have no internal bounds on what they will take. The entire progressive technocratic enterprise (from education to ‘climate’ to public grocery stores) is largely a scam that should be either starved (eg, education spending doesn’t improve outcomes) or shut down until it can prove that it can produce meaningful deliverables for the public.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you're illiberal.

If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you're a fundamentalist.

If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you're a totalitarian.

If you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you're a terrorist.

[Greg Spaniolo @SpanioloGreg]

You Have Been Loved
by George Michael

She takes the back road and the lane
Past the school that has not changed
In all this time
She thinks of when the boy was young
All the battles she had won
Just to give him life
That man, she loved that man for all his life
But now we meet to take him flowers
And only God knows why

For what's the use in pressing palms
When children fade in mothers' arms?
It's a cruel world, we've so much to lose
And what we have to learn, we rarely choose
So if it's God who took her son
He cannot be the one living in her mind

"Take care, my love", she said
"Don't think that God is dead"
"Take care, my love", she said
"You have been loved"

If I was weak, forgive me
But I was terrified
You brushed my eyes with angels' wings, full of love
The kind that makes devils cry
So these days my life has changed
And I'll be fine (and I'll be fine)
But she just sits and counts the hours
Searching for her crime

So what's the use in pressing palms
If you won't keep such love from harm?
It's a cruel world, you've so much to prove
And Heaven helps the ones who wait for you?

I've no daughters, I've no sons
Guess I'm the only one
Living in my life

"Take care, my love", he said
"Don't think that God is dead"
"Take care, my love", he said
"You have been loved"

[Greg Spaniolo @SpanioloGreg]

@DuvalShoemaker @TheCinesthetic The themes of mortality, both for individuals and for the human species (heavy stuff!). The speech by the guy in overalls at the party really stuck w me.

[Brad Briner @brad_briner]

As a member of the State Board of Education, I have been consistently appalled at the opposition to school choice and charter schools that has been apparent since my first meeting in January. Families need to be able to choose an education that best meets their child's needs, and an independent Charter School Review Board is best equipped to oversee these schools. I hope the legislature will override the Governor's veto of SB254.

[Greg Spaniolo @SpanioloGreg]

@ThomasSowell I believe this is in Basel, Switzerland and is part of their annual Fasnacht holiday celebration, which is a version of Carnival celebrated everywhere else. Offensive costumes and strong political commentary like this are common in the parade! So this is nothing unusual

[Eitan Fischberger @EFischberger]

Great piece by @aniwilc in @tabletmag. Favorite bits:

UNC wasn’t the only school where the frat community rose to its defense—at Arizona State, frat boys helped the police dismantle a pro-Hamas encampment, ushering in calls to “bring back the frats” and online celebrations of Greek life as “one of the few remaining bulwarks of sanity on campus.”

But there’s a certain irony in the outpouring of appreciation for the bros. Especially at elite schools where the encampments have been most persistent, fraternities have faced university-driven witch hunts aimed at eliminating their presence on campuses. The anti-frat crusade, which features a questionable judicial process led by antagonistic university bureaucrats hired to promote DEI initiatives, is troubling enough before you consider its glaring hypocrisy in the face of the ongoing protests.

There is absolutely no problem with giving spaces to campus affinity groups or reasonably penalizing moronic fraternity brothers who violate rules. What is a problem is the way the same university officials who are terrified to offend or restrict the rule-shattering minority of politically active progressive students are nevertheless perfectly happy to trample all over the college experience of the students who just want to partake in normal campus activities and traditions.

Why willingly enroll at an institution where you can receive disciplinary consequences for sipping warm Keystone Light in a frat backyard while kaffiyeh-clad students are free to call for intifada?

There are likely many students on these campuses, from freshmen trying to enjoy their first sunny campus spring to graduating seniors who had their first year derailed by COVID, who are annoyed with the hijacking of their semester and would love nothing more than to go to class or attend a party without walking through NYPD officers or tent villages with Hezbollah flags.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

I don't mind letting NPR or the ACLU or the New York Times decline into irrelevance, but we should probably fight for the universities.

[Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright]

@AlecStapp The most important thing we could do is to stop gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens (the useless and reckless research that almost certainly caused the pandemic).

[Greg Spaniolo @SpanioloGreg]

@madeformarch Fantastic experience if you were a big fan of two of those teams though, trust me. Go Green! Go Heels!

[Greg Spaniolo @SpanioloGreg]

You can only hope to contain Steven Izzo (after the buzzer)!!!

[Santiago @svpino]

In 1973, UC Berkeley was on the brink of getting sued for gender bias.

Their graduate school had admitted 44% of their male applicants but only 35% of women.

They hired a statistician to review their admission data, and nobody expected what they found.

Their process was slightly biased, yes, but it favored women applicants, not men.

After digging into the data, they realized that the admission rates for women were higher than for men in 4 out of 6 departments.

Women preferred departments C, D, E, and F, which were more competitive. Very few women applied to departments A and B.

This is another example of Simpson's Paradox, a phenomenon in which a trend appears in several data groups but disappears or reverses when the groups are combined.

People hide behind phenomena like this daily to manipulate data to support any story they want. If you aren't careful, you can arrive at the wrong conclusions even when the data is staring you in the face.

Every school in the world should stop teaching people useless crap and teach them how to analyze data.

[North Carolina Federation of College Republicans @NCFCRofficial]

Congratulations to Brad Briner on winning our party’s nomination for State Treasurer! 🇺🇸

[Greg Spaniolo @SpanioloGreg]

@SpartanHoops_DK And this is exactly why Purdue won’t get past the Sweet 16 again this year. As soon as they run into competent refs, they’ll be lost…

[Greg Spaniolo @SpanioloGreg]

@MargoinWNC I'm voting for Briner -- he's got the experience to actually fix NC's pension mess! But I suppose if you want NC's taxes to go up or its teachers not to get paid, you could always vote for someone else...

[Greg Spaniolo @SpanioloGreg]

Vote Brad Briner for NC State Treasurer in next week's primary! Briner's disciplined and experienced approach will help NC gets its fiscal house back in order!

https://t.co/DydpDVNIdb

[Greg Spaniolo @SpanioloGreg]

@stoolpresidente You had me at scumbag…

[Greg Spaniolo @SpanioloGreg]

@msucontent While they were cheating too!