Month: May 2021

Longtime readers know that I have little sympathy for either side in the never-ending conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. For decades both sides have acted abominably—and still do—and trying to decide which side has acted more abominably no longer has enough moral valence to interest me.

But I will say one thing: these periodic outbreaks of violence always end the same way. They end up with lots of dead people, most of them Palestinians, and with Israel in a stronger position than ever. This is just a fact, and it doesn't depend on which side you happen to support. Fighting Israel, regardless of "who started it," always turns out to be bad for Palestinians. Always.

The latest from CNN:

Michael Burry, one of the investors who became famous for predicting the epic collapse in the housing market in 2008 that was chronicled in the book and movie "The Big Short," has a new favorite stock to bet against: Tesla.

Burry's firm, Scion Asset Management, revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Monday that it held bearish put options on more than 800,000 Tesla (TSLA) shares, worth about $534 million...No reason was given in the filing for why Burry thinks Tesla's stock is due for a fall.

Oh come on. Maybe it has something to do with this:

For established companies you'd normally look at PE ratios, but in the case of Tesla it's better to look at the Price-Sales ratio. In the past year it's skyrocketed up to 20, which is 2-3x the level of even the hottest tech stocks and something like 20-30x that of other car companies. This is obviously nuts and isn't driven by fundamentals in any reasonable sense of the word.

So sure, of course you should short Tesla, as long as you have lots of spare cash and nerves of steel, since Tesla stock jumps around a lot depending on Elon Musk's latest tweets. This is hardly a mystery.

Yesterday FiveThirtyEight published a piece about the Republican push to restrict voting. It's a good roundup of all the latest research on voter suppression, but it also included an interesting chart that tracks the Republican Party's overall commitment to democracy as measured by V-Dem, a Swedish think tank. I've taken the liberty of replotting the chart and adding another line for comparison:

Within the Democratic Party, nothing has happened. Democrats remain about as committed to democracy as always.

The same was true of the Republican Party up through 1998. Then in 2000 anti-democratic sentiment started to rise and continued to rise through 2018. What could account for this?

I've given the game away with the black dashed line, which represents Fox News primetime viewership. In 1996 Fox News started up and for its first few years mostly toed a moderate conservative line. Then, starting around 2000, they adopted a much more right-wing format and their viewership rose as they became available on more cable channels. And guess what? As their viewership expanded, the Republican Party became less and less committed to democratic norms.

Correlation is not causation blah blah blah. By itself, this isn't proof of the baneful effects of Rupert Murdoch's media empire. However, there's plenty of other evidence and this is one more straw on the camel's back. Fox News is responsible more than any other single entity for the destruction of American politics over the past two decades.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 17. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

The Republican "audit" of presidential ballots in Arizona is proceeding apace. However, thanks to the rigorous approach they're taking the job is still only 10% done. So don't expect final results anytime soon.

But I'm curious about something. After they've finished X-raying the ballots; shoving them into a mass spectrometer; inspecting them with an electron microscope; conducting random MRI tests; performing ink analyses; checking for nanoparticles; examining them for radioactive trace elements; hydrolyzing a few samples to check for free radicals—after they've done all this, what happens if they still can't figure out a way to plausibly toss out enough ballots to give Trump a win? What then?

Will they say they were "just asking questions" and were never trying to overturn anything in the first place? Will they invent a whole bunch of "discrepancies" and then claim no one will ever know who really won? Or, when the end is obviously near, will they regretfully announce they've run out of money and can't complete the job?

Just wondering.

Charles Gaba tweeted out the following chart today:

States that voted for Donald Trump have the lowest COVID-19 vaccination rates. But be careful. Here's a similar chart:

States with the lowest population density also have the lowest vaccination rate. The problem is that population density is highly correlated with support for Trump. So which is the real underlying cause of low vaccination rates: support for Trump or the presence of lots of rural voters? Or maybe it's something else entirely.

It's not impossible to untangle effects like this, but it's hard. And once you've done it, you still don't know for sure that you've accounted for every possible confounder. This was the point of my post earlier today about the historical source of Republican vaccine skepticism, which goes back for decades. It might have something to do with conservatism. It might have something to do with Republicanism. But it almost certainly has very little to do with Trumpism.

I was out and about on Saturday and ended up dropping by the shopping mall formerly known as The City. (The name may be familiar to the few of you who managed to finish Philip K. Dick's quasi-novel VALIS, though it was miscapitalized there.) The City has gone through many rebirths and retcons and what have you, and is currently known as The Outlets at Orange, even though most of the stores don't appear to be outlets at all, just ordinary stores.

Anyway, I took a few pictures and this is what it looked like. It's kind of weird. Orange County is ground zero for a lot of anti-mask nutbaggery, but out in real life nearly everyone is masked up. Even after the CDC's latest announcement, most people continue to wear masks outdoors, let alone indoors. I'd say about 75% of the crowd at the mall was wearing masks.

I'm reposting this since a lot of people might not have seen it over the weekend.

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Not everyone wants to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Hesitance is highest among young people, the Black community, and, of course—Republicans.

This is nothing new. Here is the historical reaction of Americans to getting vaccines¹:

Overall response to the COVID-19 vaccine is right in line with historical averages. What's more, Republicans have always been more hesitant about vaccines than Democrats—though with a twist:

As you can see, Republicans have always been more wary of vaccines. That wariness has increased over time, but it's been stable since 2000 and obviously has nothing to do with Donald Trump. In fact, the especially big difference in the uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine isn't due to Republicans becoming more hesitant at all. It's due to Democrats becoming less hesitant. Democrats are about 20 points more enthusiastic about the COVID-19 vaccine than they have been about other vaccines.

There's an important point here: People are hesitant about vaccines for different reasons, and conservatives have historically been more hesitant than average about them. This means that loud snarking about Republicans being idiot zealots willing to kill themselves just for partisan satisfaction misses the point: their hesitance has little to do with Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson or the polarization of modern politics. Vaccine yahooism may have made things worse at the margins, but that's about it. Conservatives have always been this way.

I don't know why this is. Maybe it's due to natural conservative suspicion of the federal government. Jonathan Haidt might say it's due to conservative belief in the sanctity of the human body. Or, since a big part of the difference is due to rural residents, it might have something to do with longtime rural suspicion of new technology.

In any case, those are the sorts of things we should be looking at if we really and truly want to increase vaccination rates.² It's more fun to go after Tucker Carlson—and I encourage everyone to continue doing this—but the evidence says that's not really the primary underlying issue here. Something else unrelated to the present day is at fault. We should try to figure this out with the same empathy and understanding that we feel toward young people and Black doubters.

¹Historical data from Gallup. Annual flu data from the CDC. Current COVID-19 data from the Kaiser tracking poll.

²I do.

Why did the United States suffer such high fatalities from COVID-19? Was it:

1. CDC incompetence
2. FDA sluggishness
3. Donald Trump's mismanagement
4. Poor preparedness planning left over from the Obama administration

Now let's rephrase the question. Why did the the United States and all of Europe suffer such high fatalities from COVID-19? Was it:

1. CDC incompetence
2. FDA sluggishness
3. Donald Trump's mismanagement
4. Poor preparedness planning left over from the Obama administration

This rephrasing should make it evident that none of these answers—or anything else unique to the United States—makes sense. Europe had good quality tests earlier than us, but it did them no good. Europe responded sooner than we did, but it did them no good. Europe had shortages of PPE etc. just like we did. Europe had the opportunity to establish travel restrictions before the US, but didn't. European health agencies provided roughly the same masking advice we did. Etc.

In other words, everyone needs to stop the CDC/FDA/Trump blame game because it's wrong. It's obvious that the United States isn't unique among Western nations, and by definition that means the primary cause of our high mortality rate is also not something unique to the US. Our premature reopening in May of last year was responsible for a higher summer death rate, and Donald Trump can certainly be blamed for that, but that's about all.

This is the question you should ask anyone who insists on blaming the virulence of the pandemic on some specifically American screwup: "But what about Europe?" If their theory doesn't explain Europe too, you can just toss it out immediately.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 16. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.