Month: February 2023

From Chris Clarke of the National Parks Conservation Assn., about siting a commercial solar farm in the Mojave Desert just off Interstate 15:

We favor renewable energy but not here.

Roger that. After all, it's a "deceptively delicate and vital ecosystem rich in wildlife."

I'm being surly here, but it sure seems as if everyplace in the Mojave Desert is a delicate and vital ecosystem. Does anyone have a map of the areas that aren't delicate and vital? It would be handy to know beforehand.

In the Washington Monthly today, Keith Humphreys puts up this chart:

Keith probably doesn't know this, but one of my pet peeves is using homicide as a proxy for violent crime. So I redrew the chart with the same countries but using violent crime rates instead of murder rates:

Guatemala is now an ideal country, while Germany and Canada are lawless!

The United States is still part of the Disastrous group, which is fully deserved. Relative to similar countries our incarceration rate is stratospheric and our violent crime rate is one of the highest:

We overbuilt our prisons in the 1980s and then filled them up by increasing our sentencing guidelines beyond all reason. With violent crime already down by half since then, it's well past time to cut prison sentences in half, tear down half our prisons, and get serious about reducing violent crime by another half.

And keep in mind that while murder gets the headlines, assault and robbery represent the vast majority of violent crime incidents in the US (about 90%). That's what makes streets feel unsafe, and that's where we should be focusing most of our attention.

A new poll says that Americans don't think Joe Biden has accomplished much as president. That might seem surprising, but as usual it's meaningless. Here's the partisan breakdown:

Democrats think Biden has done a lot and Republicans think he's a failure. This is hardly news.

I recommend that you read Ryan Grim's piece in the Intercept today about The Villages. You will recall The Villages as the gigantic retirement community in Florida frequented by conservative political candidates, but it turns out to be more than that. Apparently it's run about like corrupt small Southern towns were run a hundred years ago: Don't cross the folks in charge unless you want to end up in some serious hurt.

Here's a little taste. It comes after three dissidents have gotten themselves elected to the county commission in order to kill a tax plan supported by the owners of The Villages. One of the three was a retiree named Gary Search:

A top official with The Villages made clear to the commissioners how rough a road they were about to go down, Search later told a meeting of the Property Owners’ Association. The day he was elected, he said, “I had a higher-up here at The Villages put his finger in my face and say, ‘Search, just remember one thing: I’m a big person, you’re a little person. I can squash you anytime I want.’”

....The higher-up was Gary Lester, vice president of community relations for The Villages, Search separately told at least four other Villagers. Lester has been appointed to numerous boards by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and served on the commission that vets judicial nominations....Lester told Search that he had the personal phone number for DeSantis, telling him he could get the governor on the horn at any moment.

One of the others, a 72-year old man named Oren Miller, ended up in jail. The whole piece is long but worth your time. Just don't read it if you have a sensitive stomach.

The Washington Post reports today on inflation:

“In the last few months, we’ve seen the shift away from trying to fight cost increases to pushing for [vendor] cost decreases,” said Bobby Gibbs, a partner in the retail and consumer goods division of the marketing consulting firm Oliver Wyman.

That's how it goes. When inflation is high, stores push their vendors for the smallest possible increases. When inflation has cooled off to nearly zero, they push for decreases. And wholesale inflation has actually been less than zero over the past six months:

That's a -0.3% annualized rate. Needless to say, this is an overall rate and it's different for different products. Food stores are still facing positive inflation rates, for example, while paint and hardware are down 4%.

Still, overall consumer inflation is at 1.9% over the past six months while wholesale inflation is at -0.3%. That negative wholesale inflation rate should feed into consumer inflation within a few months, pushing it even lower. What's more, rent is flat and those Fed interest rate hikes are going to start kicking in soon—both of which will also put downward pressure on inflation. At the moment, inflation is probably the least of our problems.

Here is economic growth in the G7 countries since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic:
Japan suffered the least from the pandemic: its GDP dropped only 7.6% at its lowest point. Great Britain did the worst, dropping 23.1%.

The US has had the best recovery by far: We've grown 5.1% since the final pre-pandemic quarter. Great Britain has done the worst.

Great Britain's dismal performance is most likely a combination of the pandemic and Brexit. If not for Brexit, they'd probably be one of the better performers.

On Friday I asked how often the Chinese send spy balloons our way. Today I get an answer:

Administration officials said Friday there have been other similar incidents of Chinese spy balloons, with one saying it happened twice during the Trump administration but was never made public.

....Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said Chinese surveillance balloons have been sighted on numerous occasions over the past five years in different parts of the Pacific, including near sensitive U.S. military installations in Hawaii. The high-altitude inflatables, he said, serve as low-cost platforms to collect intelligence and some can reportedly be used to detect hypersonic missiles.

As for maneuverability, balloon expert William Kim provides an explanation:

Modern [machine learning] algorithms allow balloons to control where they go using the wind. In the stratosphere there's always a wind going in the direction you want it's just a matter of adjusting altitude. Sounds simple but it wasn't possible until recently. It's pretty amazing what these algorithms can do. So now these balloons can create a C4ISR network that's far more resilient, persistent, and effective than a satellite constellation. Since modern warfare is all about information, this is a big deal especially as space assets grow more vulnerable.

But why not shoot down the balloon?

Shooting down a balloon is not as easy as it sounds, said Kim. "These balloons use helium... It's not the Hindenburg, you can't just shoot it and then it goes up in flames. If you do punch holes in it, it's just kind of going to leak out very slowly."

Kim recalled that in 1998 the Canadian air force sent up F-18 fighter jets to try and shoot down a rogue weather balloon. "They fired a thousand 20-millimeter cannon rounds into it. And it still took six days before it finally came down. These are not things that explode or pop when you shoot at them."

There you have it.

UPDATE: The Canadians weren't willing to shoot a missile at their rogue balloon, and it turns out that's all it would have taken. Once the Chinese spy balloon was out over the ocean, we sent an F-22 out and destroyed the balloon with one shot.

I didn't notice this last week, but here's the letter the College Board sent out after Gov. Ron DeSantis said he was banning the AP African American Studies course in Florida. His decision was based on the preliminary framework then being piloted, not the final framework:

To develop this official course framework, the AP Program consulted with more than 300 professors of African American Studies from more than 200 colleges nationwide, including dozens of Historically Black Colleges and Universities....This process was completed in December 2022.

To be clear, no states or districts have seen the official framework that will be released on February 1, much less provided feedback on it. This course has been shaped only by the input of experts and long-standing AP principles and practices.

What does it mean that "the process" was finished in December? Here's a clarification:

The College Board has time-stamped records of revisions from December 22, 2022....Core revisions were substantially complete — including the removal of all secondary sources — by December 22, weeks before Florida’s objections were shared.

Practically every article I've read about this affair frames it as DeSantis winning a victory over the College Board. Conservatives think this makes DeSantis a hero. Liberals think it makes the College Board cowards.

But unless the College Board is outright lying, it's neither. The final curriculum was finished a month ago and nothing DeSantis said or did had any effect on it.

I'm inclined to believe this, since DeSantis made his announcement on January 12 and three weeks is nowhere near enough time to make changes as substantial as the ones the College Board made. On the other hand, it would be nice for them to say explicitly that no changes were made after January 12. Why is that so difficult?

Spy whale, my favorite spy, is in danger of being replaced in my heart by spy balloon. But first I have some questions:

• If it really is a surveillance balloon, why would China send it over? It's not likely to go unnoticed, after all.
• Do they have much control over it? I assume not, or else we'd be demanding they send it somewhere else. This means China had no way of knowing exactly where it would go, right?
• Do we have spy balloons? Or is there a balloon gap?
• How often do the Chinese send spy balloons our way?
• Is it possible that the Chinese balloon was actually designed to spy on Uyghurs or something, but then escaped? That would fit China's general MO.
• If we can't shoot it down, can we launch paint balloons all over it so that its cameras become useless? That would be sort of an elegant solution.
• Midwesterners are always complaining that nobody pays attention to them. Now they're complaining because someone is paying attention to them. They need to make up their minds.

Just keep the balloon away from California, OK? We have enough crap in our skies already.

From the New York Post:

Republicans have demanded that Biden order the balloon shot down amid uncertainty about whether first son Hunter Biden still co-owns a company called BHR Partners with the Chinese government.

Forget the balloon. I have some other ideas in mind if we want to start shooting things down.