Month: July 2023

Remember that lunatic judge last week who decided the federal government was censoring right-wing views and banned them from talking to social media? His order was appealed and today the 5th Circuit issued, with no comment, an emergency stay. Routine cooperation about election security and other issues can now resume.

Although the 5th Circuit is notoriously conservative, the feds got a bit of a break in the random three-judge panel that heard the appeal. But this is far from the last word. A different three-judge panel will hear arguments on the merits in an expedited hearing, and after that there's always the possibility of appeal to the Supreme Court. For now, though, sanity reigns once again.

Moms for Liberty is a group of Republican women whose goal is to elect conservatives to school boards around the country. This is nothing new. Republican women did the same thing in the early '60s to fight communism in schools; again in the '80s after Anita Bryant inspired the Moral Majority to fight gays in school; then yet again in the early '90s to elect more conservative Christians to school boards. This is now at least their fourth go-around. Here is Robert Pondiscio in The Free Press:

Moms for Liberty is Teach For America’s dark opposite number. They won’t be talked out of their conviction that malign forces in public schools—gender ideology, critical race theory, Marxism, anti-Americanism—have come for their children, and they’re having exactly none of it.

....The group attracts and frequently abides a lunatic fringe, fueling its critics’ counternarrative that the movement is intolerant, racist even....Members of a local Tennessee chapter last year, for example, sued to remove an outstanding English curriculum, Wit & Wisdom, from their school district, on the grounds that its elementary school texts about civil rights icons Ruby Bridges and Martin Luther King Jr. are too dark and disturbing for children and violate state laws against teaching critical race theory. A New Hampshire chapter offered a $500 bounty “for the person that first successfully catches a public school teacher breaking this [state’s anti-critical race theory] law.” An Arkansas Mom was banned from school grounds after an audio recording captured her saying “if I had any mental issues, [school employees] would all be plowed down by a freaking gun right now.”

Neither are the group’s fanatical elements limited only to local chapters. On Saturday morning at the conference, Moms for Liberty fixture James Lindsay painted a picture of the organization as “war moms” fighting a “Maoist cultural revolution” engineered at the highest levels of government and elite institutions. When Mao came to power, Lindsay claimed, his first step was to close schools and reeducate teachers. “They shut down the schools for two years and came back with a whole new program. Does that sound familiar?”

This is fairly remarkable stuff coming from a basically sympathetic author. But Moms for Liberty is not some kind of brand new force never seen before among conservative women. It's all from a familiar playbook that reappears every decade or two when they suddenly decide that public schools have become too liberal and something must be done. And the result is always the same: a small group of fanatics are tolerated and eventually become the de facto leaders of the movement, inspiring the others with ominous, paranoid tales of what's really going on in their children's classes.

Moms for Liberty is walking a well-trodden path. They will, unfortunately, succeed, just like all the school movements before them. However, they will also fade out within a few years, just like all the school movements before them. Their Achilles heel isn't just fanaticism, it's lack of staying power.

Here are Hilbert and a watchful rabbit relaxing in the shade of the front porch. Hilbert likes to come out here so he can keep an eye on the world (from a safe distance).

One of the things that's helped bring inflation down is a sustained drop in the cost of imports. Take a look at the latest figures:

Starting in February, the supply chain pressure index went negative, indicating that supply chain issues were all but gone. At the same time, imports became deflationary. They didn't just flatten: stuff from overseas costs less today than it did a year ago. Import prices in June were 6.1% lower than last year, and even core imports were 1.5% lower.

And this has all happened without an especially strong dollar to help it along. What's happened is simple: when production cratered during the pandemic, supply declined and imports therefore cost more. Once everything recovered, however, there was no reason to think that goods would stay at high prices. Instead, with supply restored to normal, prices are falling back to their old levels.

This is different from what happens during a monetary inflation: Even when the inflationary episode ends, there's still way more money sloshing around in the system and prices remain at high levels. They just stop going up.

This is yet more evidence, as if any more were needed, that pandemic inflation was not normal inflation. It was not the '70s; it wasn't even the '50s. It was purely artificial, caused by a virus that killed off supply along with fiscal stimulus that maintained demand. When the virus and the stimulus went away, so did inflation.

In 2021, when inflation started to take off, there were two opposing sides: Team Transitory and Team Structural. In particular, Team Transitory believed that taming inflation didn't need a lot of help from the Fed because it was fundamentally the result of temporary pandemic supply shocks that would fade on their own.

I've been on Team Transitory consistently from the start because I think nearly every scrap of evidence points in that direction. But every single member of Team Transitory—including, ironically, me—made a big mistake. We forgot Kevin's Law: "Everything takes longer than you think."

This law holds for a startling range of seemingly unrelated human activity: house building; software development; World War I; housing bubbles; artificial intelligence; planning a party; and on and on and on. It's almost like some kind of cosmic law of nature meant to mock us.

In any case, our initial notion that the inflationary burst would last nine months or so was laughable. We all should have known better. There's absolutely no support in the historical record for such a short inflationary episode in the US:¹

Transitory or not, there was never any chance that the pandemic inflation episode would last nine months. It was always going to last a couple of years, and sure enough it has.

¹Episode lengths are measured over the time it takes to get above 4% and then back down below 4%. I fudged slightly to distinguish the 1974 and 1980 episodes.

Rep. Eli Crane, who looks and sounds disturbingly like a Batman villain, yesterday introduced an anti-woke amendment to the military funding bill that would prohibit "race, gender, religion, or political affiliations, or any other ideological concepts as the sole basis for recruitment, training education, promotion, or retention decisions." Then he dug himself a further hole by saying his amendment had nothing to do with "colored people."

Well, shit happens, I guess. But perhaps Crane would be interested in knowing just how diverse the Army is right now. It turns out that (a) it is 85% male, (b) white people have been leaving in droves, down from 62% of all active duty members in 2010 to only 54% today—replaced mostly by Hispanic and Asian recruits, and (c) the upper officer ranks remain pretty solidly white:

In case you're interested in the very upper ranks, there are 247 white generals, 36 Black generals, 4 Hispanic generals, and 4 Asian generals.

I was under the impression that Twitter had lost most of its ad revenue, but I guess it's using whatever's left to reward some of its star content creators:

On Thursday, Twitter announced that it would begin sharing ad revenue with content creators on its platform for the first time.....The first beneficiaries appear to be high-profile far-right influencers who tweeted before the announcement how much they’ve earned as part of the program. Ian Miles Cheong, Benny Johnson and Ashley St. Claire all touted their earnings.

....So far, the influencers who have publicly revealed that they’re part of the program are prominent figures on the right. Andrew Tate, for example, who was recently released from jail on rape and human trafficking charges, posted that he’d been paid over $20,000 by Twitter.

I'm sure this is a coincidence, just like Tucker Carlson's new Twitter-based venture and the launch of Ron DeSantis's campaign on Twitter—not to mention the whole Twitter Files fiasco. In any case, the program has apparently generated some fallout because there are still some right-wing cranks who aren't getting paid and aren't happy about it.

Twitter claims that payments are based on impressions and replies, but a former executive says this is bullshit:

One former Twitter executive who worked on creator partnerships and who asked to remain unnamed to avoid retaliation, said that, “any kind of content monetization we’ve done in the past was based on a revenue model. This just feels pulled out of thin air for a specific subset of creators that he wanted to placate.”

The former Twitter executive also cast doubt on Twitter’s revamped metrics, including impressions. “The numbers are totally and completely bogus,” she said. “It’s all completely made up. It really feels like they’re arbitrarily writing checks to people they like, which is not a sustainable creator strategy.”

There you have it. Andrew Tate is getting paid and you aren't. Take that, libtards.

Are you in the mood for some rare optimistic climate news? The Rocky Mountain Institute released a report today forecasting that solar and wind are growing so fast and getting so cheap that they're now on track to produce 30% of all electricity by 2030 and upwards of 70-85% by 2050:

If we can do this, we'd be at net zero emissions by 2050, and RMI thinks it's well within reason. That's still not enough to rein in global warming completely, since there's more to emissions than just electricity, but it would certainly be a helluva start.

Excess mortality is generally considered a better guide to COVID deaths than actual counts of COVID deaths themselves, which are subject to considerable interpretation and dispute. Here are the excess mortality rates for Scandinavia, the US, and a bunch of large European countries:

Sweden is at the very bottom. There's only one country that's noticeably lower. Whatever Sweden did, it seems to have worked tolerably well.

Last year Florida lobbed a tactical nuke at groups that register voters by dramatically raising the fines when they make mistakes—like delivering forms late or to the wrong county. Today the Guardian tells us that in less than nine months Florida has collected more than $100,000 in fines, 80% of which have come from three lefty groups: Hard Knocks, the Hispanic Federation, and Poder Latinx. Hard Knocks is suspicious:

“Are voter registration organizations on the right being targeted as aggressively and frequently in Florida as those seeking to register voters of color and other underrepresented communities? Given Governor DeSantis’ track record, that question may be rhetorical.”

In 2019, independent registration drives signed up more than 60,000 new voters. Halfway through this year the number is barely over 2,000. That's mission accomplished for Ron DeSantis, who knows perfectly well that voter registration has always been a strongly Democratic priority, especially among voters of color.