Month: February 2023

This is the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial as seen from the Inlet Bridge across the Tidal Basin. It was a very quickly taken panorama since the bridge is narrow and there's nowhere to park nearby.

I arrived at City of Hope at 6 am this morning; got a catheter installed; and then went downstairs to the apheresis room. That's where I am currently, waiting patiently as a big machine pulls T-cells out of my blood. It looks like I've produced about a quarter of a bag so far.

When we're done, the bag o' cells will be shipped off to a Janssen lab in Seattle where the CAR-T magic will genetically transform them into killer T-cells. Sometime in May April they'll be returned to us and put back into my body.

And that's when the treatment begins for real. By summer we should know if it worked.

A surprising number of people are convinced that the College Board, which administers AP tests, caved in to Ron DeSantis and the Florida Department of Education over their demands to water down the new African American Studies AP course. And maybe they did. God knows the College Board isn't above such things.

But I doubt it—at least in any substantial sense. This whole affair smells mostly like empty political grandstanding from DeSantis, with the evidence for this interpretation coming from his own hand. A few days ago the Florida DOE wrote a letter explaining their side of the story, and it tells us a few things:

• Their first communication of any kind related to course content was in July.
• The first meeting to discuss content was in November. There was another in December. There's no indication that the College Board took any action based on these meetings, and the course was all but complete by then anyway.
• There might be a memo somewhere outlining Florida's objections. If there is, they should make it public.

None of this is proof of anything one way or another. But if there were any evidence on Florida's side, I'm pretty sure it would have been in the letter. It's not. And in the face of conflicting evidence, if I had to choose between believing the College Board and believing Ron DeSantis, well....

Here's an annotated version of the letter if you want to judge for yourself.

From Politico:

The Senate hit a major judicial milestone for President Joe Biden's administration by confirming his hundredth federal court nominee. The chamber voted 54-45 to confirm Gina Méndez-Miró to be U.S. district court judge for Puerto Rico.

The breakdown: The roster of confirmed nominees includes 69 district court judges, 30 circuit court judges and, of course, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

How does this compare to his predecessors? Biden's 100 confirmed picks outpaces the 85 notched by former President Donald Trump and the 67 from former President Barack Obama at this point of their tenures.

It's worth mentioning that figures about judicial appointments can be misleading. Presidents usually have an easier time replacing judges of their own party, so most of their appointments don't change the political balance of the courts much. I don't know how that works out for Biden's nominees, but I wouldn't be surprised if only a third of them represent a liberal taking over a conservative seat.

This is a picture of a man walking through the newly opened Orange County Museum of Art. Lots of subway tile! I'll let you judge its artistic merit.

A few weeks ago Florida schools started temporarily removing books from their libraries so they could check them individually to make sure they complied with a new bill that restricts content for kids. Among the one million titles that have been removed from shelves in Duval County is Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Here is Gov. Ron DeSantis answering a reporter's question about this:

DeSantis on a FL district removing a Roberto Clemente children's book because it talks about racism: "That's politics, though. To be honest with you. C'mon. I mean, we know. Roberto Clemente? I mean, seriously. That's politics. I think the school unions are involved with this." pic.twitter.com/s3zu8DGa8X

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 14, 2023

I wrote a whole post about how obnoxious this was, but then realized that I had misunderstood DeSantis. After listening to the full clip, I think he's saying that a kids book about Roberto Clemente is obviously fine and there's no way that Duval County should take months to figure this out. The manufactured fuss over it is ridiculous, and is probably the work of political actors, including school unions.

Agree or disagree, I think that was DeSantis's meaning—not that a book about Clemente was obviously a political manifesto. And since I would have published the post slamming DeSantis based on my incorrect initial interpretation, it's only fair that I publish a post that shows him in a better light.

Don't worry, I doubt that it will happen often.

POSTSCRIPT: All this said, DeSantis really does need to improve his extemporaneous speaking. It's often very unclear what he's referring to or what he means, and I don't think he'll get the pass on this that Donald Trump often does.

ANOTHER POSTSCRIPT: Just in case you're interested, here's the sole reference (aside from a single sentence a little later) to racism in the Clemente book.

There was no good news on inflation today. According to the latest BLS figures, headline CPI jumped to 6.4% in January while core CPI increased slightly to 5.1%.

As usual, monthly data is volatile, so the trendline is the better thing to look at. It's still moving in the right direction.

Measured year-over-year—which is the way it's usually reported—headline CPI dropped to 6.3% and core CPI dropped to 5.5%. This means that most news outlets will report that inflation "eased" in January, but that's not really true. In terms of what's happening right now, CPI was up.

The reason for the big change in headline CPI is higher energy prices. Compared to December, gasoline rose at an annualized rate of 33% and natural gas was up a whopping 118%. Overall, energy prices were up 27%.

We all know it's really aliens, right? And they're here to help Joe Biden win the election. Naturally I'm on Team Aliens myself, but I can hardly blame conservatives for being pissed about the whole thing.

Here's what it looked like one mile from my house yesterday about an hour before the Super Bowl started. The bottom photo is a panorama of the entire area. The San Diego Freeway is out there somewhere if you can find it.

Bad cold. Didn't sleep. Feel lousy. No blogging today.¹ Instead, everyone should spend the day feeling sorry for me.

¹Probably.