🌐🏗 אביב

I’m just a fellow standing athwart history yelling “meh”. Professional economist. Center right Neoliberal. BUILD MORE HOUSING.

[🌐🏗 אביב @neoclassicalguy]

Check out my latest for @AreoMagazine to see why (with respect to the great @thomaschattwill) I think him and others miss the importance of the “adversity score”.

[Areo @AreoMagazine]

"This solution to the twin issues of providing opportunity for those who need it, and addressing the pitfalls of the current gender and race-based affirmative action regimes seems to have satisfied almost no one" argues Travis Clark (@neoclassicalguy)
https://t.co/Ov6MNQYa9H

[Timothy Snyder @TimothyDSnyder]

Heartbreak in Springfield, Ohio. Please read this important reporting. It all begins with big lies and it ends with ethnic cleansing and deaths for which we must not only mourn but feel ashamed.
https://t.co/D0AiH8EP8P

[Jane Coaston 🏔️ @janecoaston]

lying. the whole. time. https://t.co/2O84qgcudj

[🌐🏗 אביב @neoclassicalguy]

@BrettKollmann As far as wagons go it’s top of the category but as a wiener haver, no not a fan.

[Trey Yingst @TreyYingst]

Here's what we know about the FlyDubai flight that was nearly hijacked after the co-pilot stabbed the captain. Heroic Israeli passengers stepped in to avert disaster.

[Phil Magness @PhilWMagness]

Seems like you're omitting something...

[Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1]

From 16,000 to 185 to Zero.

The Trump admin claimed as many as 16,000 noncitizens had been registered to vote in Nevada.

Then DHS came back and said the number was actually 185.

This week, Nevada told the admin every single person on the list was a lawful citizen.
https://t.co/DuATHvJQSY

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

Unfortunately for Republicans, the situation is very easy to describe:

1. Trump won a cost-of-living election

2. Then he publicly announced a plan to raise the price of imports

3. Then he even-more-publicly started a war that raised the price of gas

4. Meanwhile, he got rich on crypto scams, while engaging in downright Pynchonian misadventures with the reflecting pool and ballroom, which sent the unmistakeable signal that "I care more about random bullshit than America's money problems ... and also I'm not even good at executing on the random bullshit"

[🌐🏗 אביב @neoclassicalguy]

@scottlincicome I’m sure there is some one somewhere that’s kind of like the person he describes but in the whole it’s just such utter bullshit. The hate figure he constructs in his mind of a libertarian economist is so cartoonish it’s likely he never actually met one.

[AG @AGHamilton29]

A few key revelations related to Gaza coverage in last few days:

- Almost all of the media in Gaza were in a Hamas-run WhatsApp group that dictated and coordinated coverage. Including contributors to major western news organizations.

- Al Jazeera fired 24 of their media members from Gaza for direct ties to terror groups

- Admission that anyone in Gaza who reported anything contrary to Hamas claims was likely to be killed by Hamas.

Almost all of the information that came out of Gaza was part of a coordinated disinformation campaign by the very people who started the war.

[Bronson @rageBronsonYT]

I absolutely believe the Jews did “the Jews did 9/11”

This might by the funniest 9/11 bit I’ve ever seen.

[LonerBox 🇱🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇮🇱🕊️🇵🇸🇺🇦🇦🇱 @BoxLoner]

When I say being "anti-Zionist" doesn't necessarily make you pro-Palestine or even pro-Arab, this is what I mean.

Emma is backing a movement that most of Lebanon wants to see disarmed, that spent decades murdering their Lebanese opponents (including Communists), supported 30 years of Syrian occupation, and helped Assad murder hundreds of thousands of his own people just so he could hold on to power.

She's backing them because of their position on the only thing she cares about in the region which is - however fruitlessly - fighting with Israel. She and the "movement" she represents would happily see Lebanon remain an impoverished Iranian launchpad, regardless of the consequences, because a third of the country burning to the ground is worth it Israel gets slightly burnt in the process.

[Nancy Rommelmann @NancyRomm]

This is a scam account. Andrew has no brother named Robert. Whoever runs this account is looking to capitalize on the misery of others. He should be ashamed of himself but that ship sailed long long ago. Avoid. Block. Report.

[Kat Timpf @KatTimpf]

Seeing a lot of this, so hoping this will help!

[Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart]

I know these kinds of observations are trite, but just take a second to imagine the reaction in the finance world had someone in a Kamala Harris administration talked about "Bloomberg Terminal bros" amidst this big selloff in Treasuries.

[🌐🏗 אביב @neoclassicalguy]

@OzKaterji @JeremiahDJohns *good/fine. Also they tend to say those bad things aren’t actually happening. Those types reaction to Assad’s gassing and barrel bombing comes to mind for this phenomenon

[🌐🏗 אביב @neoclassicalguy]

@OzKaterji @JeremiahDJohns In the realm of foreign policy there seems to be this seemingly unavoidable slide from “US involvement will not make this bad thing better” to “bad guy doing bad awful thing is good fine actually”. This is super common among paleo/libertarian right and far left types.

[Oz Katerji @OzKaterji]

@JeremiahDJohns American leftists think everything is “capitulating to fascism” except actually capitulating to fascism, which is fine.

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

I've been thinking a lot about the far-left fury over James Talarico saying he might not support trans women in sports.

I think if you want to understand why this type of reaction exists, you need to understand Tetlock's concept of 'sacred values'. (a short thread)

[Matt Welch @MattWelch]

Remembering Andrew "Busty" Wimsatt, generous soul, accomplished transportation engineer, recorded musician, sci-fi nerd, all-around music freak, and the #1 fan of @wethefifth, @Gutfeldfox, @KatTimpf & so much more:
https://t.co/14pyVBYnmC

[Austin Justice @AustinJustice]

Andrew Wimsatt spent his life figuring out how to make things last longer.

Roads, bridges, tunnels, pavement, friendships.

He held three civil engineering degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, spent 18 years at TxDOT, ten of them as Fort Worth District Pavement Engineer, and in 2006 joined the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, where he eventually ran the Materials and Pavements Division and its $9 million annual research program. He worked on ground-penetrating radar, nondestructive testing, asset management.

Describing the work once, he said the real challenge wasn't building new things; it was making what we already have last longer.

Andrew made what we already have last longer.

He was an obsessive live-music fan who would fly across the country to see a band. He loved Slowdive. In 2023 he was recommending "Souvlaki" and "everything is alive" to anyone who'd listen, singled out their cover of Syd Barrett's "Golden Hair," and admitted that when he heard them play it at FYF in 2014, he teared up. In 2016, when bad weather killed Levitation and Slowdive threw together a surprise show at the Scoot Inn, Andrew happened to be sitting at his computer and grabbed two $7.50 tickets in the roughly two minutes before it sold out. Then he recorded the entire set on his iPhone for a friend.

He made music too. He'd been in bands with Karl Rehn since high school, engineered their home cassette recordings in the early 1980s, and in 1990 released "Reflections" under the name the Andrew Wimsatt Ensemble, cut at Sixth Street Studio. He and Rehn made music videos that ran for years on Austin's ACTV, and contributed to the score of a 1994 documentary about Barton Springs.

Then there was the archiving, which is maybe the most Andrew thing about him. He clipped television. Constantly, expertly, for free, for people he admired. The Fifth Column crew (@wethefifth) called him "Busty Wimsatt" and, in their newsletters, "ever-alert," "indefatigable," and at least once "American hero." @MattWelch called him their most devoted cliphawker. Andrew painstakingly uploaded old episodes of "The Independents" so they wouldn't disappear. He clipped @KatTimpf's Fox appearances for her Locals community. He sent @walterkirn clips of Kirn's own jokes.

"Boy did I feel special," Kirn wrote today. "Not many strangers will go out of their way to give another that kind of encouragement."

He was not, for the record, employed by any of these people.

He contributed old photographs to @iowahawkblog's Dave's Car ID Service. He was a fixture in Austin's science fiction community and once drove Howard Waldrop home from Worldcon. He was an executive producer of Penn Jillette and Adam Rifkin's "Director's Cut," and appears in it, briefly, as "Greeting Cop." He hosted a regular libertarian beer gathering at the Johnny Cash-themed bar Mean Eyed Cat. He was, per @JTLonsdale, one of University of Austin’s (@uaustinorg) original small donors. He bought a camouflage "No Step on Snek" hat at a Texas gun show this summer and his friends heard about it.

The man lived.

He lived in Cambridge Towers, a 1965 midcentury modern building near the Capitol. Punk rock, pop surrealism, midcentury furniture, a gentle Southern manner. He loved salt to a degree his friends used as a unit of measurement.

He was, by every single account, one of the kindest people anyone had met.

@greggutfeld: supremely gentle, willing to do just about anything for another person.

@PlanetTyrus: always positive, physically slight, with a monster laugh.

@NancyRomm says he once gave her the jacket off his back when she was getting hypothermic.

A friend of 13 years and dozens of concerts tells me he never once heard Andrew say an unpleasant thing about anyone.

Both his parents were English professors. His father, James, was a Chaucer scholar at UT Austin who died in 2023 at 96. His mother, Mary, took her doctorate at Duke, ran the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, held an endowed chair as McClintock Professor of Southern Letters at South Carolina, wrote the first full-length study of a nineteenth-century novelist almost nobody remembered, and spent five years on a public radio project designed to get ordinary people reading Faulkner and Welty.

His parents spent their careers recovering things other people had stopped reading. They taught their son to make things last longer.

His mother now has Alzheimer's and lives in a nursing home in Round Rock. Andrew helped care for his father at the end, and then her. His routine was to drive out, walk with her, and then take a second walk alone.

He photographed what he saw on his walks. His Instagram is herons -- wading, fishing, one caught mid-wingspan over the water -- plus hawks in bare branches, a squirrel wedged in a tree hollow, a snail on a brick wall, bluebonnets, and a lot of Texas sky at the second it went orange.

Two days before he died, he was at a friend's house for movie night, watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 do "The Crawling Hand."

He spent his whole life trying to make things last longer, and he was good at it, and he was doing it right up to the end -- the second walk of the morning, until he sat on a park bench in the morning sun.

He is survived by his siblings, Alison Ross and David Joseph Wimsatt. And by his mother, who he walked with that morning, and who does not know he isn't coming back next week.