Month: October 2021

This is Angels Flight, a little funicular in the Bunker Hill neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles. It is a marvelous story of how engineering has advanced over the past century.

The railway was first built around 1900 or so and ran for 70 years without any real incidents. Then it was torn down. But everybody missed it, so a few decades later it was rebuilt in a slightly different location. It promptly slipped its brakes and killed a tourist.

It was shut down for a full decade before finally being reopened. It promptly derailed, though this time no one was killed. So it was shut down again. Four years later it was finally reopened.

To add insult to injury, the two cars, Sinai and Olivet, which are now 120 years old, have performed flawlessly the entire time. The failures have been solely due to the parts of the railway that were built by modern engineering firms. Progress!

The Democrats' latest voting rights bill failed again last night and activists think President Biden isn't pushing it hard enough:

So far, the Biden administration’s response to the GOP assault on voting rights hasn’t matched the president’s urgent rhetoric. This isn’t to say the president has done nothing, or that the attention he’s devoted to other matters—infrastructure, the climate crisis, the pandemic—is unwarranted. But has the administration acted like this is the existential threat to democracy that they say it is? “He’s made clear that he supports voting reform, but that is simply not enough,” Johnson told Politico. “We need him to bring this over the finish line.”

This is nuts. What do they expect Biden to do? Wave a magic wand?

There is not, and never has been, the slightest chance of passing this legislation. It doesn't have the 60 votes to pass under regular order and it doesn't have the 50 votes it would take to end the filibuster and pass it with Democratic votes alone. Like it or not, this is the simple reality.

It is—or should be—obvious that the urgency of a problem has little or nothing to do with the chances of doing anything about it. Climate change is Exhibit A. The Black-white test gap among high school students is Exhibit B. National healthcare is Exhibit C. I could go on forever, but why bother?

The Republican Party's decades-long war against Black people because they tend to vote for Democrats is shameful, vile, and disgusting. The lengths they're now willing to go to in the wake of Donald Trump's lunatic lies is almost beyond belief. Every single member of the Republican Party should be ashamed of themselves for supporting a party that does this.

But they aren't, and the plain reality is that there's nothing Joe Biden can do about it. He's got the bully pulpit, but that's all. This legislation will never pass and never had any chance of passing.

During the COVID-19 pandemic I've been sort of a middling defender of the CDC and the American public health community in general. Details aside, I've always figured that if they were really all that bad then the US should be doing a lot worse than our peer countries in Europe. But that hasn't really been the case. We've done better than some and worse than some, but the difference hasn't been huge.

Except during two periods: the summer of 2020 and right now:

During the periods when the politicians stayed out of things, we did OK. The only times we were noticeably worse than our peers were, first, when Donald Trump decided to declare the pandemic over just because he felt like it, and second, during the current period when Fox News and its comrades have been trashing vaccines and masks.

The American public health community may or may not have big problems, but it sure seems as if they did a decent job as long as they were left to run things. It's only been when right-wing politicos have gotten involved that the pandemic has surged out of control. I wish I could say there's a lesson learned there, but obviously there hasn't been.

Over at NRO, Jim Geraghty is crowing about a new poll showing that 52% of Americans think the country is worse off than a year ago. But as I mentioned a few days ago, this is meaningless:

When you break things out, 94% of Republicans think the country is worse off and 76% of Democrats think it's better off. What a surprise.

But I'll confess to puzzlement that so many independents think the country is worse off. Putting politics aside, isn't this kind of crazy? A year ago we were in the middle of a massive pandemic. Thousands of people were dying every day. The economy was at a standstill. Millions of people had been laid off or furloughed. Travel was virtually shut down. Schools were shut.

Today, the pandemic is under control. Anyone who wants to be vaccinated has been. The economy is strong and jobs are available to anyone who wants to work. Schools are mostly back in session and airlines are flying again.

In any concrete sense, what could possibly be viewed as worse than a year ago? Beats me. The only thing I can think of is pure politics. If you believe, for example, that anti-white racists have suddenly taken over local school boards all over the country, I guess you might think things are worse. Or if you believe that Democrats stole the election. Or that hundreds of Americans are still stuck in Afghanistan and are at the mercy of the Taliban.

In other words, if you happen to have been exposed to anything that Fox News says. That would explain it.

This is . . . interesting:

Has this been Sinema's position all along? That she won't tolerate any of the usual ways of paying for things? Nor, I assume, will she tolerate a bill that increases the deficit.

So how does she want to pay for it? Inquiring minds want to know.

What is this?

UPDATE: It's Beckman Auditorium at Caltech, looking straight down from my drone. I've added a more normal angle below.

A couple of days ago I wrote about wonks and hacks, mainly to point out that in the late stages of passing complex legislation it's the hacks who should be running things. But it's worth pointing out something I mentioned a while back but had since forgotten: the wonks didn't do a great job either.

In particular, both the childcare and long-term care provisions of Joe Biden's BBB bill are put together in ghastly ways. Both of these are, potentially, great programs for the middle class that would help the Democratic brand for decades to come. However, that would require them to be constructed in ways that allow people to understand that Democrats have passed a specific program with a specific name that helps specific people.

Instead, both programs are built around wonky but invisible foundations. The childcare provision puts most of its money into raising the pay of childcare workers and providing tax credits to parents to ensure they pay no more than 7% of their income for childcare. In other words, it practically goes out of its way to make the whole thing completely hidden from ordinary people.

Likewise, making long-term care more affordable is extremely popular. But the Biden bill creates a state partnership that boosts pay for home health workers and reduces the waiting list for home care. In other words, it mostly benefits workers and the poor and tops up state Medicaid coffers. I don't know how well that will work, but I do know that it's essentially invisible, just like the childcare program.

I swear, it sometimes seems as if Democrats go out of their way to make sure that no one understands they've done anything good for them. Hell, at least the ACA had a name and explicit subsidies that showed up every time you signed up for health coverage. The BBB programs are just a mishmash of higher pay, tax credits, and "partnerships." Hardly a person alive will ever realize that Democrats have done anything to help them.

A couple of weeks ago I watched "The Closer," Dave Chappelle's latest comedy show for Netflix, just to see what it was all about. It's basically Chappelle burbling semi-coherently about his views on trans people—again—and my main takeaway was that I still don't get Chappelle's appeal. As usual, I found it less offensive than just plain tedious. I know that everyone has different tastes, but the guy has just never struck me as very funny, let alone the greatest stand-up comedian of all time.

De gustibus. But now Netflix is in trouble with the trans community, which is hardly a surprise. In the same way that all labor unions are aggressive but police unions are really aggressive, the trans community is probably the most ruthless identity group out there. You really don't want to mess with them if you have a choice.

I've always wondered how well this works for them. On the one hand, a reputation for combativeness is an obvious asset. On the other hand, it can also put off people who would otherwise be allies. For example, I've never been comfortable with the ease with which they insist that even light criticism means you're teaming up with people who want to murder them. Likewise, in the workplace they've mastered the art of claiming to "feel unsafe" because that's a code phrase that gets HR involved and can cause real trouble for people. Emily VanDerWerff pulled this crap on Matt Yglesias a while back and I haven't read a word she's written since. It was a vile and baseless attack.

Beyond that, there's the trans community's problematic relationship with scientific and medical evidence about transitioning, especially among children and teens. Their attacks on working scientists who happen to produce inconvenient results are legendary.

As for the TERF community, I guess it's better not to even go there. Different TERFers have different views, and the ones who oppose trans rights obviously have to expect that they'll get attacked back. That's the public square for you. But there are also TERFs who just want to be left alone in safe spaces for people who were raised as women and have different experiences than people who transitioned later in life. What's the point in attacking them?

Looping back to Chappelle, the guy is a mystery to me. He's never explained—really explained—just what he's got against the trans community, but he sure can't shut up about it. I have no idea why. I suspect that maybe he doesn't know either, and I found his latest show to be more sad than offensive. He really needs to work out his issues in private, not in front of a hundred million people. That said, he's a wildly famous and popular comedian, and my take is that he crossed no boundaries that make him unfit for public consumption. Netflix was right to air his show because that's the business they're in. The critics are wrong to launch a nuclear war against Netflix over this.

Just think of all those poor, naive schmoes in the 1950s who were subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee and were forced to fly to Washington to testify about all their communist buddies. I suppose it never occurred to them that they could just say, "Meh, who's gonna make me?"

They really missed a bet. It's a good thing we have the modern Republican Party around to set things straight.

Our story so far: The Treasury Department wanted Congress to pass a bill that would require banks to report on all accounts with more than $600 in annual transactions. The idea was to collect data that would help catch high-end tax cheats, but Republicans cried foul. So the proposal is being changed:

Under the revised plan, which is backed by the Biden administration, banks would be required to provide data on accounts only with total annual deposits or withdrawals worth more than $10,000, rather than the $600 threshold that was initially proposed.

Fine. But Republicans aren't going to vote for it anyway, so why bother? I don't get it.

POSTSCRIPT: Why won't Republicans vote for it? Two reasons. First, it's a Democratic bill. Second, they will never do anything that might force rich people to pay all their taxes. They have demonstrated this endlessly over the years.