Month: January 2023

This is a gorgeous great blue heron that I photographed during my vacation in Virginia. But this was the one that got away. As I approached it for the first time, it flew away before I could get my camera ready—and it was absolutely magnificent in flight. The best I've ever seen. So I moved along and tried a second time, but no dice. Then a third time, but no luck that time either. It flew away too soon and in the direction opposite me, so I never got a good shot.

What a shame.

WARNING! As you probably know, a few classified documents were found last year in Joe Biden's old office while it was being cleaned out. The National Archives was immediately informed and the documents were all turned over. For some reason, though, the story only broke yesterday.

Lots of Democrats are now in a panic over the possibility that the media will "bothsides" this, pretending that Biden's minor document mistake is equivalent to the hundreds of classified documents that Donald Trump stole and then refused to return until they were uncovered via search warrant and he was forced to turn them over.

DON'T PANIC! It's only been a day. So far the Biden story has merely been reported, as it ought to be, and as I write this it's already nothing more than a tiny blurb far below the fold in every major newspaper. By tomorrow it will probably be gone.

Why do I think this? (1) Every article I've read goes to great lengths to acknowledge that the Trump and Biden affairs have almost nothing in common. (2) There's no reason to think that any further documents will be found, which would have provided the drip-drip-drip that stories like this need to stay alive. (3) It's big news on CNN and Fox, but only because cable news is voracious for this kind of stuff. They'll both move on before long. (4) Even Republicans probably won't bother too much with it. It's not much of a story, and anyway, they've got bigger fish to fry (Hunter Biden's laptop, the Chinese lab origin of COVID-19, anti-Trump corruption in the FBI, the invasion of America by illegal immigrants, etc.).

NO WORRIES, MATE! Unless someone uncovers something truly damning—which is unlikely in the extreme—this story will die very soon. In the meantime, the best thing we can all do is ignore it.

Hey, lookie here:

California needs a warrior in the Senate—to stand up to special interests, fight the dangerous imbalance in our economy, and hold so-called leaders like Mitch McConnell accountable for rigging our democracy.

Today, I'm proud to announce my candidacy for the U.S. Senate in 2024. pic.twitter.com/X1CSE8T12B

— Katie Porter (@katieporteroc) January 10, 2023

If she wins, she'll be the first Democrat ever elected to the Senate from Orange County.

Just for the lulz, here are inflation expectations over the next 30 years as estimated by the Cleveland Fed:

Everything is fine. There is absolutely nothing worrisome in any of this.

FWIW, I think near-term inflation will be lower than this. Rates are already pretty low right now and are going to get lower as the official series catches up to housing prices. Underlying pressures are also going to continue easing, and then, in a few months, we're going to run into the buzzsaw of last year's interest rate hikes. I wouldn't be surprised if CPI is hovering around 1% during the second half of 2023.

There's no point in keeping this survey open any longer, and I'm afraid it's bad news for my letter writer this morning: "nothingburger" turns out to be a huge fan favorite, corralling more than 80% of the vote. That's almost as good as Putin.

I get letters:

It’s flabbergasting to me that such a thoughtful thinker and talented writer would use this imbecilic expression “nothingburger.”

Thanks! Thoughtful and talented are great things to be.

But what about nothingburger? Is it imbecilic? Or is it a great slang term? I think there's no way to resolve this except by polling the masses. Pick your poison.

A 34-year-old Navy lieutenant is currently serving a three-year term for manslaughter in a Japanese prison. Here is a Wall Street Journal editorial explaining how he got there:

Lt. Ridge Alkonis, assigned to the guided-missile destroyer the USS Benfold in Yokosuka, was driving his family back from a trip to Mt. Fuji in May 2021 when he fell unconscious. Two Japanese nationals died in the resulting wreck. No one alleges drugs or alcohol were involved. Lt. Alkonis is a Mormon and doesn’t drink, and his wife and young children were in the car in broad daylight. Jonathan Franks, a spokesman for the family, says a Navy neurologist said that Lt. Alkonis had suffered acute mountain sickness.

This is a standard Wall Street Journal editorial. Every sentence in it is true and it leaves you with a clear sense of outrage over Alkonis's treatment. Why would a Japanese judge hand down such a harsh sentence over something that was clearly a freak accident? More generally, should US service members be subject to the "whims of local justice"?

But the problem here isn't with what the Journal editorial said. The problem is what it left out:

• The three-judge panel in the case didn't believe Alkonis's claim of mountain sickness.
• Partly this was because of inconsistencies between his testimony and what he told the police during an earlier round of questioning.
• Partly it was because altitude sickness typically doesn't manifest below 8,000 feet and virtually never below 6,000 feet—and always while you're ascending. Alkonis was descending from, at most, around 7,000 feet, and the accident occurred in the Yamamiya district, which is around 1,000-2,000 feet.
  .
  
• And finally, it was partly because Alkonis passed out completely before losing control of his car. This is not normal behavior for altitude sickness.
• Instead, the court concluded that Alkonis fell asleep at the wheel and continued driving anyway. Then he fell asleep a second time and ended up killing two people.

This puts a different spin on things, doesn't it?

Please note: This post is not about taking sides on the Alkonis case nor about the fairness of his sentence. I wasn't there; I didn't attend the trial; and I'm not a doctor.

Rather, this post is an example of why you should never believe anything you read on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. If you're lucky, the words on the page will be tolerably correct. But lucky or not, the editorial will never, ever provide a complete and fairminded argument. That would put them out of business.

Here's the impact of the first bill that Republicans passed today:

I'm just kidding, of course. The real name of the bill is the Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act. Because why not? Republicans can call it anything they want regardless of what it actually does.

And what it does is simple: It repeals the Democratic bill from last year that gives the IRS more money for taxpayer services and high-income audits. By defunding taxpayer services it will keep people mad at the IRS. By defunding the IRS, audits on the rich will continue to go down and that will be a boon for wealthy Republican donors.

Luckily this is entirely symbolic. It won't pass the Senate and it will never even reach President Biden's desk. But it tells everyone where the Republican Party stands.

Over at National Review, Dan McLaughlin joins the throng of conservatives who are crowing today over a new study that owns the libs big time. Remember all that Russian influence that helped Donald Trump get elected in 2016? Never happened:

Today, however, the Post‘s own cybersecurity columnist Tim Starks offers a reality check: "Russian influence operations on Twitter in the 2016 presidential election reached relatively few users, most of whom were highly partisan Republicans, and the Russian accounts had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior, according to a study out this morning."

....This is common sense. The volume of campaign spending, coverage, and commentary in an American presidential election is colossal, most Americans are accustomed to being exposed to all manner of things that aren’t trustworthy or persuasive, and people are likeliest to fall for misinformation when it simply confirms their preexisting beliefs.

Hmmm. Note that this is solely an investigation of Twitter, not of Russian influence in general, which took many forms.

But let's see what the study says anyway. Here's the first set of charts showing exposure to Russian tweets:

Thanks to the huge y-axis, Russian exposure looks like it might as well be zero! But let's zoom in:

The average person was exposed to about five Russian tweets a day in the month before the election, and about 15 tweets on Election Day. Anyone who uses Twitter knows that this isn't trivial regardless of how many other tweets you're looking at.

Here's the estimated impact on voting under three different scenarios:

Oddly, these results suggest that exposure to Russian tweets drove people to vote for Hillary Clinton, not Trump. This is doubly odd since the authors also say that virtually all of the Russian tweets were directed at conservatives. But what kind of propaganda campaign manages to produce negative results even after successfully targeting the most receptive possible voters?

To summarize:

• This is a study solely of Twitter.
• It demonstrates that Twitter users were exposed to a meaningful number of Russian tweets.
• But the alleged effect of the tweets makes no sense. This ought to raise some skepticism about the methodology of the study.

I'm not aware of anyone who ever thought that the Russian Twitter campaign had a large effect all by itself, so this study doesn't really produce any unexpected results. It does show that the Russians were serious about trying to interfere with the election, but that's about all it possibly could have done. At the very least, you'd need to study the entire Russian hacking and disinformation campaign to produce any kind of evidence about how well it worked.¹

In other words, there's not much here.

¹For the record, my own view is that the effect was small even if you account for every single thing the Russians did. I would be surprised if it affected the vote by more than 1%.

This is about right:

GOP’s first week in majority under McCarthy:

-pass rules package with secret concessions to insurrectionists

-eliminate the House Ethics Committee

-create committee to attack investigations of Trump

-pass $168B bill to repeal IRS funding to investigate billionaire tax cheats

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) January 9, 2023

Why is defunding the IRS so high on their priority list? Because it's basically a tax cut for rich people, and it's the only one they have any chance of getting. It's the one thing you can absolutely, positively count on Republicans for.