Month: July 2023

Donald Trump wants Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis tossed off the investigation of Trump's attempt to change the presidential vote in Georgia. He also wants to quash the grand jury report into his actions. He has precisely no good argument to make in either case, but he nevertheless went straight to the state Supreme Court to get it done. It was typical Trump legal overreach, and even though eight of the nine justices are Republicans they were still annoyed by Trump's obvious attempt at an end run around the Superior Court. So they unanimously told him to fuck off with extreme prejudice:

The Court has made clear that a petitioner cannot invoke this Court’s original jurisdiction as a way to circumvent the ordinary channels for obtaining the relief he seeks without making some showing that he is being prevented fair access to those ordinary channels. Petitioner’s claim fails in the light of that precedent; he makes no showing that he has been prevented fair access to the ordinary channels.

....With regard to Petitioner’s request to disqualify Willis from representing any party in any and all proceedings involving him, we note only that Petitioner has not presented in his original petition either the facts or the law necessary to mandate Willis’s disqualification by this Court at this time on this record.

Too bad, Donald. Willis is going to indict you and then you'll have three separate court cases to fight—one for corporate corruption, one for national security violations, and one for election fraud. And maybe even a fourth for inciting the January 6 insurrection. That's quite the variety pack. It's not going to be pretty, but then, you should have thought of that before breaking the law so much. Now it's finally catching up.

This is a few months old, but it's nonetheless instructive. It shows the percentage of school classes that were closed at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. It turns out that administrators were far more willing to cancel classes outright in poor neighborhoods than in rich neighborhoods:

As you might expect, you get the same results for kids from less educated families, as well as for Black vs. white kids. If you're poor, Black, and your parents don't have a college degree, the odds are pretty good that your class was canceled during the early days of the pandemic and eventually replaced with remote instruction.

Rich kids also transitioned to remote learning sooner, and, of course, computers were more available to rich kids than poor kids.

Everyone suffered learning losses during the pandemic, but this research shows part of the reason that poor kids suffered the most. It's because we ignored them more than rich kids.

UPDATE: Actually, this probably happened because poor parents, Black parents, and non-college educated parents actively preferred school closures during the pandemic. More here.

It's hot. Death Valley is recording temps of 120°F at night. A town in central Spain set a European record of 140°F. Last week saw three days in a row of the hottest global temperatures in modern history. Phoenix has recorded 18 consecutive days over 110°F. Just west of the Gobi Desert, China's Flaming Mountain reached a surface temperature of 176°F.

Is this just one of those things? Hardly. Here's what NOAA has to say about the growth of US heat waves over the past half century:

In the 1960s, we could expect maybe two heat waves of three days each in a typical year. Today we can expect six heat waves of four days each. The overall summer heat wave season has tripled from 20 days to 70 days.

If you wish, you're welcome to pretend this is just the normal variability of climate. Sometimes it's hot, sometimes it's cold.

But that would make you an idiot. This is all due to global warming, and it's an excellent example of how a smallish change in average temperature can produce massive extremes at the edges. The same phenomenon is at work with sea level changes, where a modest change of just a few inches can produce killer storm surges.

A dozen years ago I wrote:

The fact of climate change will become undeniable [by 2024]. The effects of global warming, discernible today mostly in scary charts and mathematical models, will start to become obvious enough in the real world that even the rightest of right wingers will be forced to acknowledge what’s happening.

I got the first sentence dead on. But I'm still not sure about the second. Right wingers have turned out to be far more stubborn than anyone could have imagined.

Earlier today I was browsing through a Wall Street Journal piece headlined, "Europeans Are Becoming Poorer." The basic theme is that the US has recovered from the pandemic better than Europe, and that's true enough. But the more I read, the fishier things got. The numbers were all over the map and weren't adjusted for inflation, which is crazy during a time when inflation is running high and makes a real difference in cross-country comparisons. Some of the numbers seemed wildly too pessimistic. Finally, when I ran into the phrase, "the pauperization of Europe," I'd had enough. Here are five charts that show how Europe is really doing.

First up is consumption over the long term:

The US is higher than most of Europe, but the broad growth rates are similar. The Journal piece makes a point of claiming that European consumption has "stalled" since 2008, so here's that:

Over this timeframe, consumption growth in Europe has been better than the US. Now let's zoom in specifically on the period since the pandemic, which is the main focus of the Journal piece. Here is real GDP growth over the past three years:

The US is the strongest performer, but most of Europe is doing OK, not getting poorer. Only Germany and the UK are doing really badly—and in the case of Germany this is a minor adjustment after many years of extremely high growth. Here is consumption:

Again, the US is on top and much of Europe is down but hardly impoverished. The EU as a whole is up 0.2%, which is no great shakes but neither is it negative. Finally, here's household income:¹

The Journal seems to think the US has seen strong income growth lately, but nothing could be further from the truth. Adjusted for inflation, earnings are nearly flat since the beginning of the pandemic while earnings in Europe are up 1.6%.

Nickel summary: US growth has been considerably stronger than in Europe, but income growth has been weaker. For its part, European growth has been sluggish, but it hasn't gone down and the continent is a long way from being "pauperized." I mean, come on.

¹This is a smallish set of countries because I was limited to those that have reported 2022 income.

This is neither here nor there, just something that's been bugging me for a while. It's a timeline of vaccine development after the pandemic hit in 2020:

I've got no beef with Operation Warp Speed, which set up a pretty effective program to handle expedited development and manufacturing of COVID vaccines. That said, virtually everything of importance regarding vaccine development happened before Warp Speed was announced, and it was funded by grants from Congress, not Donald Trump. "Warp speed" was an effective marketing slogan, but beyond that it mostly just picked up a ball that was already in play.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but . . .

My M-protein number is continuing to drop. It's now at 0.21, quite a bit less than it was a couple of weeks ago.

Will it keep dropping? Was my response to the CAR-T better than I thought? Is it an unusual response that takes a long time to bottom out? Will it eventually hit zero?

My doctor doesn't know and neither do I. That said, lower is always better. At the very least, it suggests I'll have a longer period of low cancer load before I have to start up another round of chemotherapy. So it's good news.

This is a small pavilion in the Rose Garden on the grounds of the Huntington Library. The statuary inside is a classically draped woman with a winged cherub at her feet.

Business formation continues to grow like gangbusters:

New business applications are up 6% from last month and 15% from a year ago. I don't know what's going on with this, but it certainly suggests that the economy looks awfully good to a lot of people.

California's infamous CEQA—the California Environmental Quality Act—has been around for more than 50 years. It's a product of the late '60s, when environmental concerns over big corporate construction projects first emerged as a major issue and Californians decided they wanted to do something to rein them in.

Today it's much hated by housing advocates because it's routinely used to conduct scorched-earth resistance to practically any new housing development if even a few people oppose it. CEQA doesn't care about majorities, after all. It only takes one person with (a) money and (b) sufficient zealotry to go to court and grind things to a halt for years. Hell, even the judge hearing the case might think it's nuts, but it doesn't matter. Every single motion, deposition, and EIR has to be judged on its merits. This drives a lot of people crazy, including Gov. Gavin Newsom. Law professor Chris Elmendorf explains:

As Newsom noted, CEQA has been “weaponized” by “wealthy homeowners” (among others) to block housing — often in the urban and suburban areas where people have the least environmental impact.

And housing isn’t all that’s on the line. To meet the state’s greenhouse-gas emission targets — and secure its share of federal green-energy funding — California needs to quickly approve wind and solar energy projects, electricity transmission lines, car-charging networks and mass transit. To that end, in May, the governor unveiled an 11-bill infrastructure package to “assert a different paradigm.” No longer would we “screw it up” with “paralysis and process.” Going forward, the state would commit itself to “results.”

In the end, though, nothing much happened. Why, Elmendorf wonders, do we put up with this? CEQA's problems are so well known that surely the legislature is willing to reform it? Or perhaps the governor should be willing to issue new, looser regulatory guidelines? What's the holdup?

Hardly anyone likes to mention this for some reason, but it turns out the answer is simple: CEQA has two big fans. The first, obviously, is environmental groups who want to maintain the law's full authority in order to preserve wetlands, desert habitat, shorelines, old-growth forests, native chaparral, and so forth.

CEQA's second big fan is the social justice community. One of the original motivations for the law came from Black and Hispanic leaders who were sick of having every type of appalling blight imaginable—toxic dumps, rail yards, highways, landfills, refineries, smelters, chemical runoffs, and more—rammed into their neighborhoods because no one had the power to stop them. For them, CEQA has been a godsend, a law that finally provides them with the same power to halt development that rich people have always had.

And there you have your paradox. Is CEQA terrible because it allows rich homeowners to effectively ban local development? Yes indeed. Is CEQA a boon because it provides genuine protections against rapacious exploitation in poor communities of color? Yes indeed.

Finally, then: can you somehow have one without the other? Probably not. And so CEQA lives on. The plain fact is that for many people, the good outweighs the bad. Not everyone wants to get rid of it.

During the pandemic there was a lot of conversation about child care services and how badly they'd been affected. But the reality is a little different. Here is total revenue for the child care industry over the past decade:

Child care services briefly dropped by a third at the start of the pandemic, but had almost completely recovered within a year. Since then, child care revenue has been above its pre-pandemic level and only slightly below its trend level. This is not an industry that was ever in any special distress for more than a few months at most.