Monthly Archives: July 2025

Pirates of the Bermuda Triangle.

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The Bermuda Triangle is a mysterious area of the Caribbean that has managed to swallow ships, and airplanes without a trace. Boats and planes go in fully crewed, and show up weeks later, empty. It’s a running mystery that has spanned centuries, and I think I have an explanation; pirates.

One clue supporting my explanation is that there were spurts of Triangle disappearances: the 1920s were very big, as were the early 1700s as were the 1980s. These were all times of major smuggling, and the area of the Bermuda Triangle is a haven for smuggling too. The 1920s was a time of prohibition and thus of peak whiskey smuggling between the US between foreign ports. Liquor was legal in Bermuda and Cuba. It was a short hop to Miami. My theory is that this smuggling attracted pirates, as any smuggler that was boarded was unlikely to contact the coast guard for protection. Sometimes the pirates killed the crew and took the illegal goods, leaving the rest. The manifest showed noting unusual because the illegal liquor wasn’t in the manifest. Another similar theory, is that the crew might become pirates themselves, mutinying.

A fairly typical case: In 1921: January 31, the  Carroll A. Deering, a five-masted schooner, Captained by W. B. Wormell, left Barbados, then vanished. It was found January 28, aground and abandoned at Diamond Shoals, near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Some background: The First Mate McLellan got drunk in town and complained to Captain Hugh Norton of Snow that he could not discipline the crew without Wormell interfering, and that he had to do all the navigation owing to Wormell’s poor eyesight.[5] Later, Captain Norton, his first mate, and another captain were in the Continental Café and heard McLellan say, “I’ll get the captain before we get to Norfolk, I will.”[5] McLellan was arrested in a drunken state, but on January 9 Wormell forgave him, bailed him out of jail, and set sail for Hampton Roads.[6] It was found without the crew, without the two lifeboats, and without much of the crew personal items. My theory is mutiny, the demons who did this were human, IMHO.

Robert Buxbaum, August 22, 2025

Liberals are unhappy, every demographic less happy than conservatives.

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Liberals are less happy than conservatives, a finding that has been found consistently in every study since the first in 1972. It persists for Americans whether Democrats or Republicans are in control in Washington, and holds true for both sexes, and all sexualities, all ages, all races and incomes, all education levels. An example is the 2022 Cooperative Election Study from Tufts University. According to the survey, organized by Nate Silver for his silver bulletin, here, liberals of every demographic are significant less happy than conservatives in that demographic, with an average difference of 15 points on a 0 to 100 scale.

Graphic from Nate Silver’s “Silver bulletin,” based on data from the 2022 cooperative election survey.

I note that 2020-2022 was the height of the Biden administration, with Democrats in control of the entire government.

Some of this can be explained perhaps by self-selection: A liberal may considered a person who don’t like the current situation, and wants it changed, while a conservative, in some sense is someone happy with the status quo. Of course this isn’t the full story, since conservatives too generally want to see change — smaller government, less regulation and taxes, and the like. The real gap in happiness, then seems to come from a difference in perception of how important the change is, or how bad things are now. Liberals, on TV at least, claim that America is awful, among the worst countries ever: racist, sexist, colonialist, violent, stupid, fascist. They blame the US for warm temperatures and suffering Iranian women, finding half of their fellow Americans – those who don’t agree– “a basket of deplorables,” to quote Hillary Clinton, where half of these conservatives needed re-education, in her view, and the other half were beyond re-education. Conservatives are just not as unhappy. They still think that they can “Make America Great Again”, perhaps by capturing something of the good old days (1945, say).

Devyn Brandt (They/Them) orientation advisor for Washington University. My guess is liberal, and not very happy.

The happiness gap has increased with time and extends into mental health. In the 2022 Cooperative Election Study  found that, 16% of all Americans who voted for Joe Biden had depression in 2020. Going further, 45% of self-described liberals said their mental health was poor. By contrast 51% of conservatives said their mental health was excellent, and only 19% said it was poor. This might be self-delusion, still it is consistent year to year. A year later this 2023 depression study from Columbia University found only 20% of liberals who believed they had excellent mental health while 51% of conservatives believed their mental health was excellent. Presenting this another way, among voters who said their mental health was poor, 45% identified as liberal, and 19% as conservative. The remaining 36% were either independent, or decided not to answer the question.

Going back to an older Pew study 2008, 47% of Republicans said they were “very happy” compared to 28% of liberal Democrats. All of the advances since then, have not made liberals less unhappy, if this 2019 study is to be trusted, they keep looking for meaning in their lives, and things to be unhappy about.

Some things make liberals happy, though, and one of them is money. The highest income liberals (>$100k per household) are happier than poorer liberals, but only as happy as the lowest income conservatives (<$30k/ household), 60% in both cases. Education helps too, but not as much, and religion. Political activism only makes things worse, both for liberals and conservatives. My advice for the summer: try ice cream. It always works for me. And this song from the musical Iolanthe, where the guard outside the parliament confides that political stance is inborn, with particular opinions handed down by others, including a band of mischievous fairies.

Robert Buxbaum, June 24, 2025