Month: September 2023

You may recall that a couple of months ago a right-wing federal judge ruled that the Biden administration had been engaging in a "regime of mass censorship" straight out of 1984. This was all about the government's effort to fight social media disinformation in the areas of public health and election administration, and the judge's displeasure was largely triggered by his finding that "Flagged content was almost entirely from political figures [etc.]...associated with right-wing or conservative political views." As a result, he banned multiple agencies from any contact with social media companies that was intended to affect their moderation of deceitful content.

The 5th Circuit Court is also famously right wing, but on appeal even they couldn't stomach most of this, as the Washington Post reports:

Doughty’s decision had affected a wide range of government departments and agencies and imposed 10 specific prohibitions on government officials. The appeals court threw out nine of those and modified the 10th to limit it to efforts to “coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”

The 5th Circuit panel also limited the government institutions affected by its ruling to the White House, the surgeon general’s office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI. It removed restrictions Doughty had imposed on the departments of State, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services and on agencies including the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

The circuit court killed nine out ten prohibitions and six out of ten agencies from the original ruling. Still, the 5th Circuit is gonna do what the 5th Circuit is gonna do, so it found a way to uphold part of one prohibition on a few agencies who, they said, had adopted a "persistent and angry" tone in certain cases and had sent "intimidating" messages.

That's about it. And yet, the Post opined that this was "likely to be seen as victory for conservatives." I'm not sure where that comes from. A conservative court demolished a conservative ruling, keeping only a small part where they managed to divine coercion. And even that's pretty meaningless since it will be appealed to the Supreme Court.

But the right is louder than the left, and I imagine that "Biden censored conservatives!" will quickly make their Top Ten list. So I guess that makes it a victory for their side after all.

What false things do Republicans routinely believe these days? I'm not talking about wild-ass conspiracy theories like QAnon, or matters of opinion, like whether tax cuts produce higher revenue or CRT is wrecking our schools. No, I'm talking about simple, factual matters that are 100% contrary to expert opinion but are accepted routinely by most Republicans. Here are a few:

1. Trump won the election.
2. COVID came from a lab leak.
3. Climate change is a hoax.
4. Joe Biden took bribes from Hunter's clients.
5. Masks don't affect COVID transmission.
6. The FBI is engaged in a partisan war against Republicans.

Anything else?

The 14th Amendment, passed after the Civil War, says this:

No person shall...hold any office...who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States...shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

After the Civil War this was a pretty easy provision to interpret: it applied to anyone on the Confederate side of the war.

But what about now? Did Donald Trump give "aid and comfort" to the January 6 insurrectionists? Does that disqualify him from the presidency? Can a state election officer remove him from the ballot upon a finding of disqualification?

It's a popular notion these days, but it belongs in approximately the same category of bullshit as the trillion-dollar coin. The insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment is no different from any other law that declares something illegal. That is, it's not self-enforcing by any old citizen who happens to feel strongly about it. It requires a finding of guilt by a court of law.

This really ought to be pretty obvious to everyone. But even if it's not, it's still true in practice. If, say, the New Hampshire secretary of state decides to remove Trump from the ballot, Trump will sue and the case will.......end up in court. Eventually it gets to the Supreme Court, where I'd say there's about a zero percent chance of a ruling that allows any old state election officer to remove Trump from the ballot in the absence of conviction by a court.

In other words, this ends up in court one way or the other. Got it?

Here's the latest FDA POWER GRAB OVER YOUR DRUGSTORE:

Americans have been wasting billions a year on cold medicines like Sudafed & Benadryl with the active ingredient phenylephrine, despite conclusive evidence they don't work. But a report published yesterday may finally lead to the removal of these drugs from pharmacy shelves. 1/6 pic.twitter.com/eCv7UlR1dZ

— John Arnold (@JohnArnoldFndtn) September 8, 2023

Ahem. Sorry about that. What I meant to say is that the FDA is close to removing a drug for sale that has been shown in multiple studies to be worthless as a nasal decongestant. Here's a typical result from one of the studies, showing no difference between the drug and a placebo:

This whole episode is an unfortunate side effect of the meth panic from the early aughts. You see, the drugs at issue use phenylephrine as their active ingredient. But why use a worthless ingredient? Because the ingredient that works, pseudoephedrine, can be used in meth labs and was put behind locked pharmacy shelves many years ago. This was enough to significantly reduce (legitimate) consumer demand, so pharma companies shrugged and switched to phenylephrine products that could be put out on open shelves for everyone to see and buy. In 2022, worthless phenylephrine products sold at 5x the rate of pseudoephedrine products that actually work but are a little harder to buy.

By the way, one thing that's interesting is that every one of the recent studies shows that phenylephrine actually does have a positive effect. But so does a sugar pill. The power of taking a pill, any pill, is remarkable. But what the FDA cares about is whether phenylephrine is any better than a sugar pill, and sadly it's not.

So that's the end of the road for phenylephrine unless (a) the FDA caves in to corporate lobbying, or (b) Donald Trump convinces his army of fans that this is yet another example of Deep State corruption erasing your rights—and the FDA caves in to that. Stay tuned.

This is Hilbert investigating the camera while I'm taking pictures of him. I did this with the flash on, and as usual it turned Hilbert's eyes almost entirely black. It's really weird, as if his eyes just don't reflect the spectrum produced by the flash unit. I had to do some massive photoshopping to bring them up, but it worked out OK. There's even a good reflection of the dining room wall in the left eye.

Most polls on abortion break up responses into three categories:

• Should always be illegal.
• Should always be legal.
• Should sometimes be legal.

The first two are obviously clear enough, but the third encompasses a very wide range of views. For example:

• Should be illegal except in cases of rape and incest.
• Should be legal early in a pregnancy but illegal after 13 weeks.
• Should be generally legal but not in the third trimester.

These are very different things, and it doesn't help much to mush them all together into the broad category of "sometimes." For example, here are the figures from Gallup presented in the traditional way:

The "sometimes legal" category is the biggest by far, but this presentation gives you no idea of whether these people are mostly for or mostly against abortion. The answer, it turns out, is that by a wide margin they're mostly opposed to abortion. Here's the same chart, but with the middle category broken into "legal under most circumstances" and "legal only in a few circumstances":

This provides a better picture in at least three ways. First, it tells us that conservative abortion sentiment has generally been ascendant over the past two decades. Second, it tells us that abortion views truly started trending more liberal after 2019. Third, it tells us that abortion views got more conservative in 2023, the first poll taken after the Dobbs decision was handed down. This is very much not the conventional wisdom, and it should give us pause about the notion that Dobbs prompted a backlash against abortion restrictions.

I'm not thrilled with this since I liked the conventional wisdom—and in truth there's still some scattered evidence that national opinion became a little more pro-choice in the wake of Dobbs. However, most of the responses to abortion polling showed the opposite, and I'd rather know that than continue kidding myself that my side has made big gains over the past year.

POSTSCRIPT: It's worth noting that the Dobbs decision certainly prompted stronger feelings about abortion on both sides. How much stronger? I don't think anyone knows for sure. But if it prompted more change in intensity on the pro-choice side it might still be true that, in practice, views on abortion have pushed reproductive politics in a more liberal direction over the past year.

It's also the case that, thanks to the early leak of the Dobbs decision at about the time Gallup was in the field in 2022, we should compare 2023 to 2021 to get a clean presentation. If you do that, the liberal position gained a couple of points and the conservative position lost a couple.

In any case, it's clear that Dobbs either helped the conservative position or, at most, helped the liberal position very slightly. There was certainly no big backlash.

Ron DeSantis thinks the Proud Boy leaders of the January 6 insurrection have received unfairly harsh sentences. I agree with him. However, we have very different reasons for thinking the sentences should be shorter.

DeSantis says that BLM protesters who broke the law got lenient sentences, so the Proud Boys should too. But this doesn't account for the fact that BLM protesters weren't explicitly trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a presidential election. Of course the Proud Boys got longer sentences than the BLM folks.

By contrast, I believe that all American criminal sentencing is far harsher than makes sense. I'd cut every single state and federal sentencing guideline in half—and some maybe more. This would reduce prison populations; cut human suffering; and have no effect on deterrence.

So DeSantis and I are on the same side. But we could hardly have more different reasons.

Here is Elon Musk's version of the story about how and why Starlink satellite coverage around Crimea was inactive when the Ukrainian government wanted to use it to guide a drone attack on the Russian navy:

There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol.

The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor.

If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 7, 2023

And here is Walter Isaacson's version:

Although he had readily supported Ukraine, he believed it was reckless for Ukraine to launch an attack on Crimea, which Russia had annexed in 2014....The [Russian] ambassador had explicitly told him that a Ukrainian attack on Crimea would lead to a nuclear response. Musk explained to me in great detail, as I stood behind the bleachers, the Russian laws and doctrines that decreed such a response.

Throughout the evening and into the night, he personally took charge of the situation. Allowing the use of Starlink for the attack, he concluded, could be a disaster for the world. So he secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast. As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.

In Musk's version, he was asked to activate coverage around Crimea to support an "obvious" Ukrainian attack. In Isaacson's version, he deactivated coverage that already existed and didn't tell anyone. The attack went forward and failed.

There's a big difference between the two. Isaacson's version seems most likely to be the true one, which means Musk is lying to make himself look better. I'm surprised that more people haven't commented on this difference in their stories.

UPDATE: Walter Isaacson has changed his story:

To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a…

— Walter Isaacson (@WalterIsaacson) September 9, 2023

This puts a different spin on things. It's one thing to secretly shut down existing coverage, but quite another to do no more than deny a request for additional service. If this is really how things went down, there's little reason to condemn Musk's actions.

Bob Somerby is annoyed that liberals continue to say that Florida's Stop WOKE Act bans any classroom discussion that "could prompt students to feel discomfort" because of their race. In fairness, early drafts of the law did use that word, and it was only dropped in the final bill. Nonetheless, he's right that the bill as passed says nothing about discomfort.

But it does make several pronouncements about what can and can't be taught, and it words them in different ways in different places. Here's the most understandable version:

Instruction and supporting materials on the topics enumerated in this section¹ must be consistent with the following principles of individual freedom:

• No person is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously, solely by virtue of his or her race or sex.
• No race is inherently superior to another race.
• No person should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, disability, or sex.
• Meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are not racist but fundamental to the right to pursue happiness and be rewarded for industry.
• A person, by virtue of his or her race or sex, does not bear responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.
• A person should not be instructed that he or she must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress for actions, in which he or she played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.

The Florida law bans any instruction suggesting that students "must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress" for actions in the historical past, which is not at all the same thing as "prompting discomfort." But it's also not entirely different. The upshot, I suppose, is that a little bit of classroom discomfort over our past might be OK as long as it doesn't edge into instruction that students should feel anguish or distress?

It's also worth noting that this isn't the only law ever passed by the Florida legislature. For example, they also passed a law that bans instruction in both Critical Race Theory and systemic racism. That's why they aren't mentioned here.

¹These include American history; the founding of the republic; the Holocaust; slavery, racism, and African American history; principles of agriculture; kindness to animals; state history; and a few other odds and ends.

Cactus photographed against the sky along Laguna Canyon Road.