Month: January 2022

I got curious about something yesterday: back on June 3, when Abbott shuttered a factory making home COVID test kits, did anyone raise a red flag? Did anyone yell and scream that we needed to keep producing them in case we had another COVID surge? Or is all the carping we hear today just 20/20 hindsight?

So I took a look. There was a White House press conference that day about COVID vaccines, but nobody mentioned home test kits. A bit of googling brought up nothing no matter what search terms I used. The front page of the New York Times said nothing about it during the following week. In fact, over the next month the Times ran only one article that even mentioned testing: a story about Germany using rapid testing as part of its strategy to beat the pandemic:

While rapid tests are available in other countries, they are not necessarily a cornerstone of the day-to-day reopening strategy.

In the United States, antigen tests are widely available, but they are not part of any national testing strategy. In New York City, a few cultural venues, like the Park Avenue Armory, offer rapid antigen testing on site as an alternative to proving vaccination status in order to gain entry, but that is uncommon. Widespread vaccination has also limited the demand for rapid tests.

That's pretty mild mannered, isn't it?

I have the same question about N95 masks, but I'm not going to bother searching for that. I'll bet nobody was screaming about masks either.

If there were lots of experts taking to the airwaves to warn that we needed more N95 masks and rapid tests in case COVID surged again, that would be one thing. Then it would be perfectly reasonable to slam the federal government for not doing its job.

But if nobody was warning about it, why would we expect the government to make it a priority? Complaining about it now is just a case of frustration looking for a scapegoat.

Six months or a year from now we'll probably find ourselves short of something else. So this is your chance: tell us what it will be. Unless you can do that—or, more to the point, unless our experts can do that—you should just shut up when the shortage finally emerges.

This is a picture of the San Gabriel Mountains this weekend, about half an hour after sunset. From left to right are Mt. Baldy, Telegraph Peak, and Cucamonga Peak.

If we get a little more rain this year the peaks should all be covered in snow. I'll probably have more photos of the San Gabriels over the next couple of months.

Last week a photographer posted pictures of debris along the railroad tracks running through downtown LA, along with the startling statistic that thieves steal the goods from something like 90 cargo containers a day. This went viral, and naturally I wondered if it was something new. It's not:

Dumping, trash and encampments around railroad tracks last year prompted Los Angeles Councilman Joe Buscaino to call for the city to declare them a public nuisance. But the effort was dropped after Union Pacific cleaned up a swath of tracks, said his spokesperson, Branimir Kvartuc.

Still, Buscaino said, Union Pacific needs to hire more agents to patrol the tracks. “It’s no surprise we are seeing the additional crimes,” he said in a text, adding that the problems had been “unabated for years.”

So this is all routine stuff. Apparently thieves have been targeting freight trains for years, and Union Pacific just considers it a cost of doing business.

Every other headline these days is about Joe Biden's disastrous approval rating and the chaotic shape of the Democratic Party. How could Democrats have done this? What's wrong with them?

Let's cut the crap and acknowledge the obvious answer. First off, the progressive wing of the party insisted on pushing voting rights laws that had zero chance of passing. Biden knew this from the start and said so. Then Bernie Sanders insisted on an insane BBB bill that would have been unprecedented in the history of the country—and doubly unprecedented with a 50-50 Senate. But he insisted, and every time it got cut back it gave progressives another chance to moan about how they were being betrayed. Eventually it died.

For some reason, after an election that was razor close, progressives managed to delude themselves into thinking we were on the cusp of a revolution. How they did this is as big a mystery as how millions of people deluded themselves into thinking that Donald Trump really won the election. It's inexplicable.

But that's what happened.

Please attend to the following chart. I have something I want to show you.

The red line is from a CNN poll asking people if they're angry about the way things are going. Unfortunately, it only goes back to 2008, so I've overlaid it with the blue line, which is a Gallup poll asking people if they're dissatisfied with the way things are going. From 2008-2021 they follow each other pretty closely, so it's reasonable to think they're measuring roughly the same thing.

I've also marked off economic recessions with the gray bars. During the first two recessions, in 1981 and 1989, the public response follows a similar path: people are angry as the economy gets worse, but then anger subsides as the economy improves.

That makes sense. But look at what happens in 2000: Anger starts to rise before the recession begins. And then it keeps going up, even though the recession was short and mild. It keeps going up through 2008 and then doesn't respond to the Great Recession at all. Nor does it respond to the 2020 recession—which began before the COVID pandemic—or even to the pandemic itself. In a nutshell, anger rises sharply all through the aughts and then stays at a seething, red-faced level for the next decade.

So what are we all so angry about? In the past, it was pretty easy to say: we got mad when the economy sucked.

But not anymore. We're just angry all the time. Do I have to explain why?

Sigh. I see that we're once again going through a "talking filibuster" phase. If only things were like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and senators had to actually talk in order to stave off a vote. That would solve all our problems!

First off: has anyone ever actually watched the movie? Mr. Smith talks for 25 hours and it doesn't do any good. The bad guys just cackle and move on with their plan to rob widows and orphans. In order to squeeze out a happy ending, Claude Rains has to burst onto the Senate floor and confess to everything.

Second: we used to have a talking filibuster. Remember? It didn't stop anyone from filibustering back then and it hasn't stopped anyone recently. Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, and Rand Paul have all launched into filibusters in recent years.

Third: Even the more excitable among you should be scratching your chin over this idea anyway. Are we seriously suggesting that giving a long speech can kill a bill? How? All you have to do is wait for the speech to be over and then vote. So what's the deal?

That's a good question! Every time liberals get frustrated about the 60-vote Senate, someone brings up the talking filibuster. And then someone has to explain why that won't do any good. And then everyone forgets until the next time.

So: a single person filibustering is a stunt, nothing more. It's designed solely to show your constituents how serious you are. That's what Strom Thurmond was doing when he spent 24 hours filibustering the 1957 Civil Rights Act—which passed two hours later, as he knew perfectly well it would.

In a real talking filibuster, the minority has to keep talking. That means talking for a few hours and then handing the floor to someone else. For example, Republicans might agree that everyone will talk for five hours. With 50 senators in the caucus, that's 250 hours of talk. Then, since members are allowed two speeches each, they do it again. That's 500 hours. Then, if there are any amendments, they do it again. That's 1,000 hours, or about six weeks.

None of this is painful in the least for the minority party. None of them have to stay on the floor to watch the show. They just have to be prepared to talk for five hours every week or so.

Conversely, the majority party (i.e., Democrats at the moment) is screwed. They have to maintain a quorum at all times. If for even a few minutes there are fewer than 50 senators around, the minority can suggest the lack of a quorum. If fewer than 50 senators show up after a quorum call, the minority can end business for the day and then the whole thing starts all over.

In other words, this is a cakewalk for the minority party, but literally every single member of the majority party has to remain in the Senate chambers, sleeping on cots at night, 24 hours a day for weeks on end.

Oh, and did I mention that the Senate is shut down this entire time? The minority doesn't care about this since they can't introduce any legislation anyway, but it means the majority party can't do anything either. No BBB. No John Lewis Act. No appropriations hearings. Etc.

Like it or not, the talking filibuster won't solve any problems unless you make a whole bunch of other procedural changes too. And Democrats don't have the votes for that any more than they have the votes for any other filibuster reform.

So just forget it, OK? The talking filibuster is not an answer to our problems. It would only make things worse.

This is a companion to last week's photo of Hilbert during his adventures outside. We're keeping Charlie inside until we think he can be trusted not to run into the street or jump the fence out of the backyard, and that day is quite a ways off. In the meantime, Charlie really wants to go outside. How come Hilbert gets all the fun?

Who spreads misinformation? A pair of researchers says it's not liberals in general and it's not conservatives in general. It's a very specific subset of conservatives:

Using statistical analysis, we found that the only reliable explanation was a general desire for chaos — that is, a motivation to disregard, disrupt, and take down existing social and political institutions as a means of asserting the dominance and superiority of one’s own group. Participants indicated their appetite for chaos by using a scale to express how much they agreed with statements like, “I think society should be burned to the ground.” For LCCs, we concluded, sharing false information is a vehicle for propagating chaos.

An LCC is a "low-conscientiousness conservative," and they were 2.5 times more likely to share misinformation than anyone else:

So there you have it: the problem is nihilistic reactionaries. Let's go get 'em.

David Brooks says that America is falling apart at the seams. His evidence for this is surprisingly thin. First, he cites the recent rise in obnoxious outbursts, which even he admits is just temporary frustration caused by the COVID pandemic. Second he cites a few negative trends, but ignores the dozens and dozens of positive trends that have informed American life over the past couple of decades. Taken as a whole, American life has improved significantly for practically everyone in recent years.

Still, Brooks is right that we all seem to hate each other more than usual. But why?

We can round up the usual suspects: social media, rotten politics....Some of our poisons must be sociological — the fraying of the social fabric....And some of the poisons must be cultural....But there must also be some spiritual or moral problem at the core of this.

I get that this is appealing to anyone interested in the deep roots of human behavior, but it's wrong. The answer is Fox News. That sounds reductive and simplistic—maybe even faintly ridiculous—but sometimes the simple answer is the right one. Fox News is dedicated to destroying our country because it's profitable to do so. That's it. Lob a cruise missile at 1211 Avenue of the Americas and I think you'd be surprised how quickly we might all return to our senses.

Lithuania is in trouble with China because it allowed Taiwan to open something called the "Taiwanese Representative Office" in Vilnius. The Washington Post talked to Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis about how this is shaking out:

Surely Lithuania knew China would respond forcefully to allowing Taiwan — which Beijing claims as part of China — to open a representative office under its own name, as opposed to using Chinese Taipei, a title other countries often use to get around this question.

We stand by the belief that people can have a name for their representative office of their liking if it’s agreed between the two sides and if it’s not infringing on any international obligations. So we stand by it. But the escalation level that China decided to choose is beyond anything that’s happened before against any other country in the world. This is like the Spanish Inquisition, which nobody had expected.

Kudos, sir. Well played. For our next trick, the defense minister of Estonia will discuss NATO preparedness while sneaking in references to Office Space.