Month: May 2021

Have I been reading my Twitter feed too much? Maybe! But I've gotten a little fatigued over the constant repetition from progressives about obvious political points. For example:

• Republicans will never compromise! Hasn't Biden learned this?
• Conservatives will call us socialists no matter what! Doesn't Biden get this?
• The only way forward is to ditch the filibuster! Why doesn't Biden understand this?
• Voters don't care about bipartisanship! They just want to get things done. Why does Biden keep talking about it?
• Etc.

I would just like to say that, in fact, Joe Biden and his political staff understand all of this. Trust me, they do. They might differ with you about how to handle it, but they get it. It's Politics 101.

My own guess is that Biden is pursuing a course designed to eventually persuade Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema that he's genuinely done his best and is unable to get Republican support for stuff they agree is necessary. At the least, this will allow a few things to pass on a partisan basis via reconciliation with their votes. At most, if Republicans overplay their hand, maybe they'll even agree to ditch the filibuster. You never know.

As long as I'm in the mood to gripe about incorrect financial perceptions, how about home prices these day? They're skyrocketing! Except not really:

Buyers don't care that much about home prices. They care about monthly payments, and since mortgage interest rates have been falling so have monthly payments. If you look at the 30-year fixed monthly payment on a median home, it's still lower than it was in 2018. There's nothing really surprising going on.

News accounts this morning inform us that consumer spending was up in April, but this isn't actually true. Reporters, as usual, aren't bothering to adjust for inflation. Once you do that, spending was flat:

Does this matter? Not a lot, but the nominal number makes it look like spending has finally reached its pre-pandemic trendline. Once you adjust for inflation, you can see that it didn't.

It's not a huge difference, especially since the inflation numbers are kind of bollixed for the next few months, but it is a difference. Always adjust for inflation!

The US mortality rate is showing a small blip upward, but it appears to be just an anomaly. Our case rate is still declining at its previous rate.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 27. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Here is part of the New York Times write-up of the PRRI poll that I posted about this morning:

The Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core found a strong correlation between where people get their news and how much they believe in QAnon’s ideas. Among those who said they most trusted far-right news outlets, such as One America News Network and Newsmax, two in five qualified as full-on QAnon believers. Fully 48 percent of these news consumers said they expected a storm to wipe away the elites soon.

That puts these news consumers far out of alignment with the rest of the country — even fans of the conservative-leaning Fox News. Among respondents who preferred Fox News above other sources, 18 percent were QAnon believers.

There you have it. Now that the world contains Newsmax, Fox News is merely "conservative leaning." The working of the refs is officially complete.

This started out as a Black-eyed Susan vine and ended up as an abstract design after I got done playing with it. Why did I do this? I just felt like it. The original picture was nothing special, so why not futz around and have some fun?

PRRI released a survey today about QAnon believers that mostly contains no surprises. Believers tend to be Republican, white, low-income, evangelical, etc. Here's a chart showing that if you believe in one conspiracy theory, you believe in all of them:

If this polling is correct, it shows the danger of our newfound belief that the coronavirus might have been released from the Wuhan lab. It's one thing to believe in an accidental release, but this poll suggests that 39 percent of Americans believe the virus was intentionally developed by Chinese scientists. This is a very different thing, and there's convincing genomic evidence that it's not true.

So let's be careful with the lab leak theory, OK? Reporters need to take extra care when they write about it to distinguish between an accidental release (possible) and some kind of engineered virus (very unlikely).

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 26. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

I have the peculiar ability to wake up anytime I want without an alarm clock, and apparently my unconscious mind can do this too. I had already decided not to bother with the lunar eclipse this morning, but at about 3:30 I woke up, allegedly to "go to the bathroom." But as my unconscious mind knew, once I was up I'd be sure to look out the window to check out the moon, and that was that. It took only a few seconds to decide that as long as I was up I might as well shoot a few pictures.

The sky here in Irvine was mostly clear near the horizon, with only wisps of clouds here and there. Here's a closeup of the moon a few minutes after the end of totality. As you can see, with the moon in eclipse stars are clearly visible—though I don't know what they are:

And here's a wider angle view right at the start of totality:

On Sunday 14 people died when a cable car in Italy crashed to the ground just a few feet from its destination. But why? One of the primary cables snapped, but the emergency brake should have held the car in place. Why didn't it?

Service had resumed on 25 April as Italy eased coronavirus lockdown restrictions. Technical checks were done, including a check on 3 May to “remedy inefficiencies”, but they had not been “decisive” in resolving issues, investigators said.

In order to avoid delays to the service, a device that deactivates the emergency brakes was kept in place. Had the emergency brakes activated, they would have held the cabin steady after the cable snapped. The move was made “in the belief that a cable breakage could never have happened”.

Unbelievable.