Month: September 2023

Here's yet more evidence of what happens to people who marinate in Fox News, Donald Trump, talk radio, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. They go cuckoo:

Republican voters are increasingly anxious about COVID amid a swirl of unfounded claims on the right that the federal government is preparing a mass reimposition of restrictions. At a New Hampshire focus group of Republicans commissioned by the political podcast Breaking Points and reviewed by Semafor, five of the eight participants said they believed there was some connection between the recent rise of COVID cases and associated restrictions and the upcoming election being “rigged” for Democrats.

“With the ‘plandemic,’ we see it coming again, and there’s a lot of writing on the wall,” one voter said.

Five out of eight! But how does this make sense, even to an unhinged mind? The theory here is—what? There's an election coming up, so Democrats are seeding the air with COVID and secretly planning to impose a big batch of wildly unpopular restrictions? This does not strike me as a campaign strategy bound for success.

God help me, I also googled "plandemic" and discovered it's a viral video released a few weeks after COVID hit American shores in 2020. It says that the virus was deliberately created in order to enrich the—oh, forget it. It's just a hodgepodge of miscellaneous conspiracy theories. You can google it yourself if you just have to know the grim details.

This is a mosaic on the ceiling of Sacré Coeur Basilica in Paris.

Good news for workers in California:

Fast-food companies agreed over the weekend to pull a California referendum off next year’s ballot that sought to reverse a landmark worker-protections law, forgoing a costly political fight with labor unions over employee pay.

The deal will result in an increase in the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 per hour in April and form a new council of representatives for workers and companies to consider pay bumps in the future, according to sources involved in the negotiations.

Since I'm a bug about inflation, it's worth noting that the $15 minimum wage movement started in 2012. Adjusted for inflation, that comes to.......$20 in 2023.

In other words, it took a while but in California fast food workers finally have the minimum wage they were fighting for a decade ago.

*In 2012 dollars, that is.

Over at National Review, John Noonan condemns the fact that we have failed to evacuate every last Afghan who ever worked for the United States:

In our hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan — perhaps the most cynical display of national treachery I have witnessed in my lifetime — we left behind multitudes of innocent Afghans who trusted America, who worked with Americans, who risked their lives as interpreters assigned to U.S. rifle companies, who braved the Taliban by teaching little girls how to read, and who were betrayed.

We gave them our word and we broke it. To this day, no one has apologized to them. Few have offered to help. The president still claims his evacuation was a success, if and when he talks about Afghanistan at all.

National treachery? We were in Afghanistan for more than 20 years and we accomplished virtually nothing. How long should we have stayed? The military recommended that we keep 2,500 soldiers there, but that's a joke. It takes 100,000 troops or more to have any real effect on the country, and no one, Democrat or Republican, was in favor of that. The Taliban was ascendant whether we liked it or not, and withdrawal was our only choice.

As for the Afghans, we evacuated about 120,000 of them. That's a helluva lot. As painful as it is to say this, I don't think we ever promised to evacuate every single Afghan who ever helped us, and I don't think that would have been feasible anyway. It's just not something we could have done.

If you want to argue that we should have stayed in Afghanistan in force forever, fine. Make that case. But be prepared for not having many people on your side. In the real world, withdrawal was the only real option in 2021; the operation went about as smoothly as anyone could hope; and we rescued lots of Afghans from the Taliban. It's a tragedy that the Taliban is back in power, and it's a tragedy that we couldn't evacuate everyone who might be a Taliban target. But the truth is there was very little we could do about that. In light of that reality, the Afghanistan withdrawal was as much of a success as it possibly could have been.

Tyler Cowen points to a chart from Ted Gioia and Chris Dalla Riva that shows the share of popular songs written in a minor key:

"Why is music getting sadder?" asks Gioia, but I'm not sure I agree with the premise. It's true that minor keys are associated with sadness, but they shouldn't be. I find minor key tunes tunes, both classical and popular, to be more soulful and more interesting than major key tunes, perhaps, but not necessarily sad.

Gioia tries to associate this trend with recent news showing that teens have become sadder in recent years, but the timing doesn't fit. Minor keys have been rising since the '60s—before the whole teen depression thing started—and have been flat since 2011, which is exactly when you'd expect it to rise most steeply.

Key signatures aside, there's still the question of whether modern pop music is, in fact, sadder than usual, and on that I have no opinion since I don't listen to modern pop music. But that's because I mostly find it boring, not sad.

Ross Douthat joins a cast of millions today to ask:

Why Is Joe Biden So Unpopular?

The answer is: he's not. How often do I have to post this chart before the message gets through? Here are our last four presidents at week 133 of their first terms:¹

¹Excluding George W. Bush, as usual, because of his 9/11 bump.

A new poll says that only 28% of Californians support cash reparations for Black residents. But this number is fairly meaningless because it masks partisan differences that are even bigger than usual:

• Democrats: 43% support
• Republicans: 3% support

I myself have long believed that cash reparations are a misguided idea. I have four primary reasons:

1. Equal treatment: The goal of civil rights is equal treatment for all. This is by far the biggest problem facing Black people in America and cash reparations do nothing to advance this goal. It could even make things worse if white people decide that paying reparations ends their obligation to improve treatment of the Black community.
2. Details matter: Who get reparations? Adults? Children? Only those who can prove they're descended from slaves? Former presidents of the United States? Half pay for those of mixed race? You can't just hand wave this away. Get it wrong and it will tear the Black community apart.
3. Education: I've long believed that education is the single biggest key to equal treatment. On average, Black kids leave high school two or three grade levels behind white kids, and equal treatment is all but impossible until we fix this. If we're going to spend large sums of money, this is where it should go.
   .
   
4. Do the math: The California reparations task force recommended payments of at least $1.4 million per person. If you extend this to the entire country it comes to $63 trillion. This is ten times the federal budget and is obviously a nonstarter even if you spread payments out over a decade.
   .
   So what would be affordable? If we settled on $100,000—which comes nowhere near making Black people whole—it would cost about $4.5 trillion. That's $450 billion annually over ten years, which is just barely in the realm of the plausible.
   .
   In other words, the outside maximum would be a fairly piddling amount ($10,000 per year for a decade) that wouldn't do much to change people's lives. It would almost certainly be spent fairly quickly on ordinary, day-to-day necessities and that would be that.

In summary: Cash reparations probably wouldn't solve any problems; might make things worse; and are unaffordable except in paltry amounts. In the end, Black people would get a small amount of money but would still be poorly educated and treated like crap. Absolutely no one, Black or white, would be satisfied with this. That's why I don't support them.

COVID is back:

Fauci: We ‘need to be prepared’ for likely Covid uptick this winter https://t.co/NSJP0NqjUz

— POLITICO (@politico) September 10, 2023

The good news is that after three years, at least we know how to handle it. We'll be OK as long as no one wears a mask; we stick close to each other; everything stays open; we huddle together in crowded bars; and everyone avoids unsafe booster shots.

Freedom!

Marjorie Taylor Greene says Joe Biden is obviously guilty of.......something, but that's small potatoes. We need to move slowly and deliberately on impeachment in order to unearth the real crimes:

It has become evident that there is a vast amount of people in previous administrations, this administration, and federal agencies that all worked diligently to cover up unbelievable corruption and crimes committed by the Biden’s and Joe himself.

We need a very tedious impeachment inquiry that allows us to take a deep dive to uncover the traitors within that conspired together, not only to keep a criminal VP in office, but then work to propel him to highest office in the land....

Patience will be the virtue that will lead us to the traitors within.

I know, I know: it's just MTG being her usual crackpot self. Why bother spotlighting it?

I don't know. I guess the whole Hunter Biden thing is nagging at me more than it should. It's this whole Republican playbook of releasing an endless fog of "findings" that have nothing behind them but sound faintly suspicious. They did it with the IRS. They did it with Benghazi. They did it with Hillary's email. Now they're doing it with Hunter Biden.

And we keep falling for it. Even lots of liberals think there's something vaguely wrong with Joe Biden's conduct, even though various people have been investigating this for years and they've come up with virtually nothing about Hunter, let alone Joe. The reason is obvious: Hunter was kind of sleazy, but the sleaze was all out in the open. There's nothing much to dig up.

As for Joe, there's no evidence of anything. Evidence. That is: bank accounts, recordings of conversations, messages (to or from Joe himself), living beyond his means, eyewitness testimony, documents, and so forth. All these years of investigation and there's not a scrap of any concrete evidence that he did anything wrong. The obvious conclusion is that he did nothing wrong.

And this is consistent with everything we know about Joe Biden. He's been in national politics for 50 years, and in all that time there's never been even a hint that Biden is money hungry.

But no matter. The Republican playbook works. Even after all these years of doing the exact same thing and never having their investigations pan out beyond uncovering minor embarrassments, we still pay attention to them. Apparently there's nothing to be done about this.

Ron DeSantis is edging toward being a full-on vaccine denier:

Lashing out at what he called the “medical authoritarianism” of mask mandates and other anti-Covid measures, DeSantis accused federal health agencies of being “basically an arm of Big Pharma” as they mulled authorizing [new] vaccines as early as next week.

“Pharma will make more money if this thing is approved and they start pushing it on everybody,” said DeSantis, touting Florida’s “freedom” from vaccine mandates.

This is all based on the advice of DeSantis's surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, a guy who has manipulated data and lied about vaccine side effects in the past. His latest claim is that the newest vaccine variant isn't safe because it hasn't been tested on humans. That's more or less true, but it's true of annual flu shots too. We have enough experience with different versions of the COVID vaccine that we no longer have to spend nine months on a full-blown human trial for every minor new variant.

It's quite the turnaround, isn't it? Two years ago the big gripe was that the FDA was too cautious and hundreds of thousands of people died unnecessarily because it didn't approve the first vaccines soon enough. Now the gripe is that they're moving too quickly.

It kinda makes you think this isn't about COVID at all. People just want to take shots at the big, bad bureaucrats of the FDA, and coming up with a reason is secondary. There's always some reason you can dig up, after all.