Month: August 2022

I didn't know this, but apparently there's a huge divide in our nation over the question of whether to use a flat top sheet as part of our bedding:

Ariel Kaye, 38, the founder and CEO of Los Angeles company Parachute, had never slept with a top sheet....Because of her business, the top-sheet discourse follows Ms. Kaye everywhere, even when she’s not in the mood to argue. “When people find out that I’m the founder of Parachute they want to go head-to-head on this issue in all sorts of circumstances,” she said. “There are very passionate people on both sides of this debate.”

These kinds of disputes are endless, and here's the part I don't get: Why do people love to argue over them? Why are we so addicted to arguing over everything instead of just accepting that different people have different tastes? I mean, listen to whatever kind of music you like. Why should I care? Drive whatever kind of car you like. Eat whatever food tastes good. Make your bed however you like. But why argue endlessly over it?

Very roughly, our knowledge of the search warrant debacle has proceeded like this:

FBI searches Mar-a-Lago and removes about a dozen boxes of documents.

Donald Trump immediately suggests the FBI planted evidence against him.

Republicans almost unanimously back Trump and accuse the FBI of a partisan fishing expedition.

Parts of the search warrant and the FBI property receipt are leaked, showing some of the boxes contained ultra-top-secret documents, including signals intelligence related to foreign leaders.

In fact, some of the documents contained "nuclear secrets."

Trump ridiculously claims that he had declassified everything in the boxes. This sets off another round of disingenuous Republican chin stroking that's mostly designed to distract the press.

It turns out that FBI counterintelligence had visited Mar-a-Lago in June and asked for the return of any classified documents.

Against the advice of his staff, Trump refused. His lawyers then signed an affidavit saying Trump no longer had possession of anything classified. This was obviously untrue.

Republicans begin arguing that these classified documents weren't really any big deal. Probably just keepsakes or some such. Not classified classified, you understand.

Also, they say the FBI hates Republicans and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party. They've increasingly felt this way ever since James Comey refused to indict Hillary Clinton for her handling of official emails. Rants about “defunding the FBI” finally confirm the death of irony.

Trump starts issuing a barrage of statements. Lots of other presidents took classified documents when they left the White House. He had a standing order to declassify anything he took with him to the residence. Barack Obama took millions of pages of classified documents, including nuclear secrets (a statement that prompted the National Archives to issue a statement denying this).

Aides start leaking stories about the chaotic last days of the Trump administration. Apparently everyone knew Trump was taking stuff he shouldn't, but nobody had the guts to stop him.

That's where we are now. By tomorrow, who knows? That depends on what kind of leaks our press corps is able to squeeze out of their sources.

Friday was an unusually clear night, so I hauled out my camera for a couple of quick photos. This is one of the sharpest pictures of the moon I've ever gotten.

FYI, my track record over the past week is: overcast skies at night, except when the moon is up and shining so brightly that clear skies don't matter. If Galileo had faced conditions like this he never would have discovered anything with his crummy little telescope.

Enough of this. Just stop:

The bill’s success shows how the politics of climate change have shifted profoundly since scientists began warning about global warming

On Friday, a dozen years after a sprawling climate bill passed the House but failed to move ahead in the Senate, Democrats successfully muscled the United States’ most ambitious climate change proposal ever past Congress, sending it to President Biden for his signature.

The bill’s success shows how the politics of climate change have shifted profoundly since scientists began warning about how human-caused emissions would warm the planet.

I've read other pieces about how, for example, environmental groups kept pushing and pushing and pushing, and that's why the bill passed. Or about the brilliance of Chuck Schumer's leadership. Or AOC and the squad mesmerizing America into supporting it. But it's all malarkey, as our president might say.

Oh, there were political differences between the previous climate bill in 2010 and now. The 2022 bill had to be weaker. It got fewer votes in the Senate. Republicans were unanimously opposed to the 2022 bill instead of just 98% against it. And Democrats had to bribe the fossil fuel industry to keep its mouth shut. The entire political climate has gotten worse since 2010.

But these are all trifles. The 2022 climate bill passed for one reason: Joe Manchin decided he was in favor of it. That's it. That was the difference between success and failure.

Not hurricanes or droughts or wildfires or floods. Not the Arctic melting faster than we thought. Not environmental groups suddenly pulling their heads out of their asses. And certainly not public opinion:

So let's stop with the tik-toks and thumbsuckers. Nothing much has changed politically. Nothing has changed in public opinion. Facts on the ground have so far not made a dent. Environmental groups have not suddenly become brilliant marketers.

If Joe Manchin had decided he wanted to spend $400 billion on the child tax credit, that's what would have passed. Instead he decided to support climate change. If you really want to write the story of how the 2022 climate bill passed, you need to figure out why Manchin changed his mind over the past dozen years. That's it.

Here's the rental vacancy rate since 2005 for the ten largest metro areas in the country:

The average vacancy rate for the top 75 metro areas has declined from 10.1% after the end of the Great Recession to 7.1% just before the pandemic to 5.7% in 2022.

The news of the day is that, among other things, the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago turned up boxes of documents that contained "nuclear" secrets classified at stratospherically high levels. But what kind of nuclear secrets? Nobody knows, of course, but I started getting curious about what the broad possibilities were. Here's a back-of-the-envelope list:

1. Engineering/design documents.
2. Intel about other countries' nuclear programs.
3. Old nuclear launch codes.
4. Nuclear protocols.
5. Defense plans for using nuclear weapons.
6. Budget information.
7. Storage and/or transportation plans.
8. Details about planned upgrades to nuclear weapons.
9. Wargame simulations.

Which of these is most likely? What broad categories am I missing? FWIW, I'd choose #2 if I were forced to guess. The others all seem like things that either wouldn't interest Trump or that he would never have access to in the first place.

Here are Charlie and Hilbert stretched out for a snooze on a warm day. Aren't they adorable?

Somebody at the Wall Street Journal got a peek at the list of stuff the FBI took from Mar-a-Lago on Monday:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation agents took around 20 boxes of items, binders of photos, a handwritten note and the executive grant of clemency for Mr. Trump’s ally Roger Stone, a list of items removed from the property shows....The list includes references to one set of documents marked as “Various classified/TS/SCI documents,” an abbreviation that refers to top-secret/sensitive compartmented information. It also says agents collected four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents, and three sets of confidential documents. The list didn’t provide any more details about the substance of the documents.

Huh. That sounds harmless, doesn't it? And anyway, as Trump said, “The government could have had whatever they wanted, if we had it.”

I've avoided commenting on this whole fiasco since we have so little real information about what's going on, but I have to admit it's fascinating. Did Trump just gather up random stuff and take it with him without looking at it? Did he consider nuclear protocols and whatnot to be great keepsakes? Beats me. Even by Trump standards this is really hard to make sense of.

I was puttering around this morning looking for non-Trump-search-warrant news, and noticed that the Census Bureau had just released its latest data on new business formation.

Business formation was up a bit in July, but basically it's been fairly flat for the past year.

But it's been flat at a rate about a third higher than before the pandemic. What's up with that? Why have we created about 300,000 more new businesses than we would have predicted back at the beginning of 2020?

The answer, of course, is that we haven't: a new business application isn't the same as actually starting a business. It just means someone is feeling optimistic. Plus you need to take into account the number of businesses that closed. The BLS does this using a survey, but it's way out of date because this information is slow to filter through:

What you see here is closer to the truth: During the pandemic a bunch of businesses closed and fewer new ones opened than usual. We made up for that in late 2020 with a surge of new businesses and fewer business closures. If you look at the net number compared to the pre-pandemic average, it was down by about 125,000 during the first quarter of the pandemic and up by 125,000 over the next three quarters.

And since then? Business births were healthy through the end of 2021, and applications for new businesses are still high. But we don't yet know about deaths, and the BLS forecasting model seems to have been wrecked by the pandemic. More than likely the net number of new businesses is still in good shape, but not as good as the Census data suggests.

This is a burning bush. It looks like one, anyway. But it's really just a desert tree with the rising sun behind it. As far as I know, anyway.