Month: January 2022

Dana Milbank writes today about the latest Fox News lie, the Biden-says-parents-are-terrorists claim:

It would be easy to overlook this one drizzle of disinformation in the torrent of falsehood the GOP-Fox axis produces. The network, which “informs” the majority of Republican voters, has painstakingly constructed a parallel universe in which vaccines kill you, Biden stole the election, Biden is senile, grade schoolers are being force-fed critical race theory, the FBI orchestrated the Jan. 6 insurrection, and the country is in an apocalyptic spiral of open borders, rampant crime and runaway inflation.

This is exactly right. We can and should treat the founders, shareholders, employees, advertisers, and boosters of Fox News with nothing but shame and contempt. They know the harm they're causing, but the money is good so they keep on doing it.

But it's a different story for the rank-and-file viewers of Fox News. They're victims as much as the rest of us. It's hard to say that they should be treated with empathy—I guess I'm just not a good enough person to go that far—but at the very least they should be recognized for what they are: marks in a con game run by Rupert Murdoch. They don't deserve the contempt that the folks helping to run the con so richly deserve.

There's a fundamental problem with our campaign to get people to wear masks. It's pretty obvious, but here it is:

Socrates: Our greatest healers and physicians are united in urging us to wear masks in order to fight the plague that runs rampant among us. Do you believe their advice to be sound?

Glaucon: Why yes.

Socrates: And what evidence do they offer that you find so persuasive?

Glaucon: It is obvious that masks reduce the expulsion of bad airs from breathing and coughing. If I am suffering from the plague—but still out in the agora because I am not yet feeling any ill effects—it diminishes the number of malignant corpuscles that I introduce into the world.

Socrates: So when you wear a mask, you do it to help other people, not yourself?

Glaucon: That is so. It is not perfect, but it is still beneficent to the good health of Athens.

Socrates: And you consider this a virtuous act.

Glaucon: Indeed I do. A respect for the good of society is one of the highest virtues.

Socrates: Quite so. But you'll admit that not everyone thinks as you do.

Glaucon: Unhappily, all my experience among men teaches me that you are right.

Socrates: So on the one side, we have your fellow citizens of virtue. They are the most likely to heed the advice of our physicians, are they not?

Glaucon: I cannot disagree.

Socrates: And being virtuous, they have probably already visited a physician and procured for themselves a potion that protects against the plague?

Glaucon: Indeed, I myself have done so. I believe it was called a "vaccine."

Socrates: And what does this "vaccine" accomplish?

Glaucon: It greatly reduces the chance of catching the plague.

Socrates: And therefore reduces the chance of expelling plague particles into the world.

Glaucon: I would think so. It seems a matter of simple logic.

Socrates: Now let us attend to those who are less virtuous than Glaucon. Have they procured this vaccine?

Glaucon: Lamentably, many have not. They are known as anti-vaxxers.

Socrates: And how do they feel about masks?

Glaucon: They hate them with a holy passion.

Socrates: Allow me to summarize. On the one hand, we have the virtuous, who are vaccinated and pose little threat. They are also the ones most likely to heed warnings to wear masks.

Glaucon: Yes.

Socrates: On the other hand, we have the non-virtuous, who are unvaccinated and pose a great threat. Yet they are the ones least likely to heed mask warnings.

Glaucon: It is sadly so.

Socrates: And what does this tell us about the effectiveness of our great oratory in favor of mask wearing?

Glaucon: That it is most effective among those who need it least, and least effective among those who need it most.

Socrates: Quite so. As Aristotle taught us, persuasion is an emotional appeal, not a logical one.

Glaucon: Aristotle has not been born yet.

Socrates: Ah, you are right, my young apprentice. My apologies.

Glaucon: But this puts me in mind of something.

Socrates: I thought it might. Go on.

Glaucon: Surely persuasion is not our only possible tool?

Socrates: Of course not. What other means are commonly used in a democratic polis?

Glaucon: Why, the underlying authority of any state is based on the use of force. Indeed, the legitimate use of force is normally restricted to the state.

Socrates: And is this applicable to our present predicament?

Glaucon: Of course. It has long been agreed that a pandemic justifies the most vigorous application of state power. The ekklesia could, in perfect justice, simply mandate both vaccines and masks.

Socrates: And yet they don't.

Glaucon: There are some limited mandates. But I concede the point. Without mandates, mere campaigns to increase mask wearing are probably close to useless.

Socrates: As the Byzantines learned to their regret.

Glaucon: Another anachronism.

Socrates: Sorry.

Here's a headline from the Washington Post today:

"Some say" indeed. But I suppose that some do indeed say this. The problem, as usual with stories like this, is that there's no suggestion of what more they'd like Biden to do. The closest we get is this, from Fletcher Smith, a former South Carolina state legislator and one of a group of informal and mostly Black Biden advisers who call themselves “the Bidenites”:

“You’re in the 21st century, and you mean to tell me you can’t convince two Democrats to do a carveout on the filibuster in order to pass voting rights,” Smith said, speaking of Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W. V.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who have both said they will not support filibuster reform, even for voting rights.

“Black folks, they’re too sophisticated in the 21st century to fall for that,” Smith added. “We don’t want platitudes and people and appealing to us because we just happen to be black. We want results.”

This is nuts. Sinema is something of a mystery to me, but Biden had zero leverage over Manchin and both men knew it. It's a miracle that a Democrat represents West Virginia, and that makes any threat against Manchin laughable. So if Manchin is dead set against killing the filibuster, then that's that.

Beyond that, there's a distinctly limited number of things a president can do that are directed concretely at the Black community. Partly this is for legal reasons. Partly it's for political reasons. And partly it's because the most salient issue right now—police violence against people of color—is almost entirely a local issue.

So what can Biden do? The American Prospect, in its "Day One Agenda," identified dozens of executive actions Biden could take, a few of which are directly targeted at helping the Black community:

1. Restart the Obama-era “pattern or practice” investigations into police departments, and broaden the practice to look at prosecutors and other criminal justice actors. DONE.
2. Restore the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule. DONE.
3. Re-elevate the CFPB's Office of Fair Lending back into the bureau’s enforcement division. IN PROGRESS.
4. Reverse Donald Trump's ban on worker training around systemic racism for federal contract workers. DONE.
5. Direct the Department of Justice to collect public data on police use of force.

The Biden administration has done all of these except the last, which has been a problem ever since it was mandated in the 1994 crime bill. The problem is that it relies on voluntary reporting from local police agencies, and most of them don't feel like volunteering. It's unclear what Biden can do about that.

What else? At the risk of opening an age-old wound, the best answer is probably means-tested social welfare programs. Here is the Urban Institute's estimate of where safety net spending goes:

General safety net programs are aimed not at racial minorities, but at low-income workers. However, the reality is that they help three times more Black families than white families. That's a real difference.

I have long supported class-based rather than race-based affirmative action. This is not because class-based affirmative action is just as good. It isn't. But it's close, and it has enormous benefits. First, it's entirely legal. Second, it has much greater public support. And third, it's politically superior because it brings together lots of constituencies who can help get things passed.

None of this means the end of programs aimed at specific nonwhite groups. Native Americans will continue to have specific issues based on treaty rights. Hispanic groups will watch immigration policies carefully. The Black community will continue to be disproportionately affected by voter suppression laws.

And then there's the biggest racial issue of all: education. As regular readers know, I consider this to be the most potent form of racial discrimination in America today. It's primarily a local issue, which means Joe Biden has a limited scope to deal with it, but there's nothing else that comes close to the damage it does. Until we decide to educate Black kids as well as we educate white kids, we will never make more than halting and modest improvements in racial oppression.

It's a lovely day today in Southern California, and that means Hilbert wants to go outside and roll around on the nice, warm concrete. And there's an added bonus: since Charlie isn't allowed outside, it means Hilbert gets some much needed me time without having to worry about being tackled by a ridiculous kitten. ’Tis bliss indeed.

According to Politico, Donald Trump considered issuing an order shortly after the 2020 election that would have directed the Secretary of Defense to “seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records required for retention under” a U.S. law that relates to preservation of election records.

In other words, the order would have authorized the Pentagon to seize voting machines. But it was never issued.

It's good to see this stuff get leaked, but it won't change any minds. Remember, all the "Big Lie" folks believe that Democrats routinely steal elections, so they're going to think this was a perfectly justifiable plan. Their only regret is that Trump never did it.

The Wall Street Journal reports that SPAC mania is winding down:

Now, the hype is giving way to reality. Like so many investment fads, what at first seemed like a way to earn easy money has revealed itself to be full of potential perils. The threat of tighter regulation is looming, and high-profile stumbles by some companies that went public via SPACs have taught investors some harsh lessons. It turns out investing in unproven upstarts isn’t for everyone, and with interest rates looking likely to rise in coming months, all sorts of speculative investments from technology stocks to bitcoin are getting hit.

Imagine that. SPACs are essentially a way for companies to go public without all the annoying rules the SEC puts in place to ensure everyone is being honest. Who needs all that bureaucratic nonsense, anyway? We can read a balance sheet, amirite?

So, yet again, we learn that there's no such thing as easy money. If you think there is, it's only because you haven't looked hard enough. But don't worry: we've been learning that lesson since the invention of money, and it still hasn't stuck. Your chance is still out there.

Over at National Review, Jim Geraghty bemoans the world spanning power of Vladimir Putin:

No Matter Who’s President, Putin Always Seems to Get Away With It

This stuff just makes me shake my head. I mean, what Putin wants is to put the USSR back together again. So far he's managed to reacquire Crimea—which was probably inevitable given its immense strategic value to Russia—and . . .

That's about it. Oh, Putin also has effective control over South Ossetia these days, which has gotten him nothing much except increased fear from all his neighbors, who are even more dedicated to European integration than before.

What else has this mastermind accomplished? There's Syria, but what has that done for him? Nothing. It was just a stupid attempt to poke America in the eye, and it didn't even work at doing that.

And of course, there's Ukraine. But we all remember more about Ukraine than just the past few months, don't we? Putin has been meddling in Ukraine for the past two decades, and he keeps botching it. He put his guy in power and poisoned the opposition leader, which led to the Orange Revolution and closer ties to the West. He did it again and got the Maidan protests—which led to closer ties to the West. Since then, the government of Ukraine has been steadfastly dedicated to pushing away Russia and joining trade agreements with Europe. So now, having failed at literally every attempt to bring Ukraine into his orbit, Putin is left with no options except a military attack.

So what will Putin do? Media reports say he has about 100,000 troops massed on the border of Ukraine, and it's likely that this is about as many as he can put there. About half of them are raw conscripts and the other half are contractors. This might well be enough to occupy Eastern Ukraine, which is generally sympathetic to Russia, but that's about it.

And then what? Keep 100,000 troops there forever? Spend decades fighting a low-intensity conflict with Ukraine? And for what? It's a military rat hole, like Afghanistan or Vietnam.

In a nutshell, over the past couple of decades this supposed geopolitical mastermind has managed to provoke virtually all his neighbors while his ham-handed meddling in elections has annoyed everyone else. Even Sweden and Finland (!) are rethinking their neutrality. What's more, all this has come at the cost of flatlining his economy:

Add to this inflation that's bounced all over the place over the past decade, averaging about 10% per year, and you have an economy that's not likely to make your citizens very happy.

And did I mention Russia's shrinking population? Consider it mentioned.

Look: Putin has had some successes to go along with his failures. He's certainly something of a PR genius. And the truth is that he's working from a weak hand, running a ramshackle country that's way too dependent on resource extraction. You could make an argument that given the degree of difficulty involved, Putin hasn't done badly.

But the geopolitical genius stuff needs to die a well-deserved death. Putin just ain't it.

A brief Twitter exchange this afternoon got me curious about our recent spike in the murder rate. As you'll recall, the basic mystery is this:

Whatever reason we come up with for the homicide spike, it needs to be something exclusive to murder, not to violent crime in general. What else? I took a look at the FBI's National Incident Based Reporting System to get more details:

NIBRS has increased its coverage over the past few years, which means you have to adjust all the numbers for population, and that makes this whole exercise a little sketchy. That said, it's almost certainly in the right ballpark. What it tells us is this:

• Murder went up more in Black communities than in white communities.
• Both domestic dispute murder and other kinds of murder increased significantly.
• Virtually all of the increase in murder was carried out with guns.
• Every age group was affected about equally.

So what does this tell us about various theories for the rise in murder?

• The policing theory—namely that police have decided to stop patrolling the streets aggressively—strikes me as unlikely. If the spike were due to a police pullback you'd see an increase in violent crime and you wouldn't see an increase in domestic disputes ending in murder.
• The COVID-19 theory is plausible, but I'm not sure it's persuasive. The idea here is that COVID just generally made everyone frustrated and angry, and this led to more homicide. But it's pretty well known that murders driven by anger are much more prevalent among the young, while the murder spike had almost identical effects on all age groups.
• The gun theory looks pretty good. There's been a huge spike in gun ownership over the past couple of years, and sure enough, the murder spike is almost entirely gun driven.
• The George Floyd effect suggests that the events of summer 2020 increased anger in the Black community, and that's where most of the increase in homicide has taken place. There might be something to this, since murder did increase more in Black communities than white communities.

None of this is remotely definitive and I'd say the jury is still out on the cause of the homicide spike. Nonetheless, any good theory has to fit the evidence, so be sure to take all this into consideration if you have a theory of your own.

POSTSCRIPT: For what it's worth, I find the age data especially mystifying. What would cause the murder rate to go up at about the same rate among both teenagers—who are emotional and crime prone—and 40-year-olds—who are neither?

Here's a rough estimate of the share of schools open for in-person instruction over the past year of the COVID-19 pandemic:

The early data is from surveys by the Department of Education. The recent data is from Burbio, which tracks school reopenings. It's all a bit approximate due to the way the data is presented, but it's roughly correct. Basically, virtually all schools had reopened by the start of the school year. Then there was a dip caused by Omicron, and now we're on the upswing again.

The airplane is just an airplane, but I love the sunset colors in this photo. It was taken out the window as my plane taxied for takeoff at Houston Intercontinental Airport.