Month: August 2023

The Hunter Biden case keeps getting weirder and weirder:

The lawyer who represented Hunter Biden in plea negotiations to end a five-year Justice Department investigation into tax and gun offenses stepped down early Tuesday, saying that he intends to testify as a witness on behalf of the president’s son.

....This week, Abbe Lowell, a veteran lawyer in Washington who has represented a wide range of clients, including Jared Kushner, filed court documents indicating he now represented Mr. Biden in the case.

How often does this happen? I can't remember a case like it. Lawyers step down all the time for various reasons, but stepping down so you can testify for your client? That's pretty unusual.

Here's a bonus chart from today's retail sales report. Sales of cars were up slightly, but still aren't close to their pre-pandemic level:

Vehicle purchases have been increasing since late 2021 but are still about 6% below their pre-pandemic level.

Retail sales increased slightly in July, but have remained basically flat for more than two years:

It's good news that retail sales aren't dropping, but that's about it. There's nothing much to see here.

We don't yet know the details, but apparently the shoe has finally dropped in the Georgia "find 11,780 votes" case. A grand jury has returned ten indictments against Donald Trump, but we won't know exactly what the charges are for another hour or two.

In any case, Trump has now been impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, indicted four times on felony conspiracy and obstruction charges, and forced to pay tens of millions of dollars in civil actions for fraud and sexual assault. That's quite a record.

TWO HOURS LATER: We have details. The grand jury indicted 19 people on 41 separate counts, including RICO conspiracy charges for some of them. Among the indicted are:

• Donald Trump, disgraced former US president
• Rudy Giuliani, demented former "America's Mayor"
• John Eastman, crackpot lawyer
• Mark Meadows, panicky former White House chief of staff
• Sidney Powell, another crackpot lawyer
• Kenneth Chesebro, unscrupulopus lawyer who conceived the whole fake electors scheme

Plus there are 13 others charged on various counts of mopery and dopery.

David Brooks has a question:

Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive.

At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. Same with gun sales. Social trust is plummeting. In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity; in 2018, fewer than half did. The words that define our age reek of menace: conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces.

The article is paywalled, so I can't read the rest of it. But you folks all know me pretty well, so you can probably guess what's next: Is it, in fact, true that we've become meaner over the last decade or so?

This is not an easy question to answer. We're interested in "mean" interpersonal interactions, not necessarily riots or murder rates. But who measures that? Who even decides what it is?

I thought about this for a short while and came up with some examples. Like Brooks, let's start at the extreme end:

Violent victimization has been dropping fairly steadily over the past 10+ years. In 2021 it was a third lower than in 2008.

Stepping down the scale a bit, here is red light running, which is the best proxy for aggressive driving I could find in the AAA's annual Traffic Safety Culture Index:

Like every other measure of aggressive driving in the AAA report, it's down substantially since 2008.

Here are incidents of unruly airline behavior reported to the FAA:

This has been going up—but not by a whole lot. The latest figures are only slightly higher than just before the pandemic, and are heading down.

And here, believe it or not, are a couple of results from the annual Customer Rage Survey, conducted by Customer Care Measurement & Consulting and Arizona State University:

The number of people reporting that they get "extremely" or "very" upset at things was 66% in 2003 and 66% in 2022. There's also this:

Compared to 2015, more people raised their voice when they were mad, but on every other metric bad behavior was down.

Here is school bullying:

None of this stuff is proof positive of anything. For one thing, almost all of it is self-reported, and maybe people are just kidding themselves. There's also no measure here of political polarization and anger, which has certainly increased over the past couple of decades. Still, almost all of these metrics point in the same direction: we're getting nicer, not meaner. The only exception is airline incidents, which have increased a little bit and are probably still suffering a hangover from the COVID era, when air passengers went completely bonkers.

If you can think of other examples, leave them in comments. Just remember, we're interested here in low-level rudeness and aggression, not wars or international terrorism.

This is a snail on Highway 70 in Louisiana just north of Morgan City. I suppose I must have been taking a picture of something else when this caught my eye, but I don't remember what.

Today's photo would have been a picture of a meteor, but I didn't get one this weekend. I put out my camera Saturday night, during the peak of the Pleiades meteor shower, and set it to take a picture every 20 seconds. I collected about 400 frames over the course of a couple of hours, but not a single one had a meteor streak.

National Review's jihad against electric cars continues today:

There’s nothing wrong with high-end cars or electric powerplants, per se. But the idea that the U.S. auto market is forced to accept a technology that is still underdeveloped and low-scale while the year quickly approaches that auto manufacturers will be required to produce EVs primarily is unacceptable.

Electric vehicles are for those with garage space for charging, multiple vehicles for different applications, and the ability to pay sticker prices. That list does not describe reality for most Americans.

The word primarily in the top paragraph is doing a lot of work here. The Biden administration is hardly banning gasoline cars, after all. Biden has a goal of increasing electric car sales by 2032 or so, but the actual rules he's enacted are all carrots: tax incentives, investment in charging infrastructure and battery manufacturing, and electrification of the federal fleet.

In addition, the EPA has proposed new tailpipe emission standards that would probably force about two-thirds of new cars to be electric by 2032. So far, though, it's just a proposal. It will be years before it's real.

So gasoline cars will continue to be available for a very long time. Even the aspirational 2032 goal is a decade away, and the whole point of this is to give auto manufacturers enough time to fully develop the technology. It may be underdeveloped and low-scale today, but the federal incentives will help ensure that it's robust and consumer-scale ten years from now. Is that really so scary?

Danielle Paquette has a piece today in the Washington Post about Tony Thurman, a home security dealer in Kansas City who says business is brisk:

But Thurman is troubled by what he senses is driving much of the demand: Americans’ growing preoccupation with the specter of deadly threats. They fear burglars, gangs and child predators. They believe crime is rising, even in places where it’s dropping, which tracks with what surveys have found nationwide. Over the last three years, the number of people who reported deteriorating safety in their area has spiked, especially among Republicans, though crime ebbed and flowed well below the bloodier levels of the 1990s. Gun purchases soared to record peaks. The home security industry boomed.

....[These] fears, he noticed, are often influenced by the news they watch, the social media they consume, the politicians they support.

Here is Kelli Cox, who is having a pool built in her backyard:

“I’d like to get the cameras up soon,” said Cox, handing Thurman the blueprint, “before the workers start.”

Not that she had a problem with the workers. They were simply people she didn’t know in a world where headlines like “Teenagers killed in double homicide” popped up on her news feed and someone had just posted on the neighborhood Facebook page about a “suspicious man” in a “white unmarked van.”

It's the Fox News effect, now expanded to the NextDoor effect and the MAGA effect. Fear of criminals, fear of the Deep State, fear of what schools are teaching, fear of trans people, fear of immigrants. Fear of everything, even though we have less to fear today than almost anytime in history. Thanks, Donald.

Thanks to TikTok and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez we are currently going through yet another micro-frenzy about why awesome European sunscreens aren't approved for sale in the US. This happens roughly every summer, and as usual there's nothing new to report. The active ingredients at issue could probably be approved easily in the US if their makers conducted clinical tests and submitted safety results to the FDA. But they haven't so they aren't.

The options for getting more sunscreen options on the market are limited:

• Manufacturers could submit the required safety data and get FDA approval. But for the past two decades they've been unwilling to bother doing this.
• The FDA could reduce its testing requirements. But this is probably not legal.
• Congress could decree that sunscreen is not a drug and therefore not subject to the FDA's pre-market approval. But Congress has shown no stomach for this.

But wait! Maybe there's a fourth option. The holdup is that sunscreens make medical claims—namely, that they can prevent sunburn, decrease the risk of skin cancer and mitigate early skin aging—and this is what brings them under the FDA's drug-testing umbrella. So why not just jettison those claims? In fact, label the awesome Euro-sunscreens as specifically not for those things. It would be a wink-and-nod sort of affair since everyone would understand that the things being ostentatiously disavowed are, in fact, precisely what they are avowing.

Would that work? Or is the FDA too smart to allow such a ploy?

There seem to be a lot of people who still don't understand how it is that researchers in 2020 concluded that a lab leak of the COVID virus was implausible just because they had discovered a particular bat virus. Surely the discovery of a bat virus similar to COVID makes a natural origin more plausible but says nothing one way or the other about a lab leak?

That's true. The catch is that the researchers already believed a lab leak was implausible. It went like this:

We believe the evidence is strongly for a natural origin and strongly against a lab leak....

EXCEPT

There's a furin cleavage site in the genome that nature can't explain. This gives us second thoughts about the lab leak.

When nature eventually confirmed that the furin site could indeed arise naturally, their doubts were alleviated and they returned to their initial belief: the lab leak hypothesis was implausible and there was no reason to think otherwise.¹

For most of the people who don't get this, it's because they don't want to get it. However, there are probably a few who don't get it in good faith. This post is for them.

¹This was based on the evidence available at the time. Since then, additional discoveries have made the lab leak hypothesis even less likely.