Month: September 2023

The Washington Post reports that Black churches in Florida are now teaching history themselves because they no longer trust schools to do it fairly. The Rev. Rhonda Thomas, leader of "Faith in Florida," explains:

Thomas said she took particular issue with one of the provisions in last year’s legislation: That instruction should be tailored so no student would feel guilt or “psychological distress” over past actions by members of the same race.

“If you want to look at who feels bad, I was born into this world as if it was designed for me to live feeling bad,” she said with an exasperated laugh. “I don’t think any lesson should be taught to make anyone feel angry, but if it’s history, it’s history, right?”

This is a myth that won't die. Florida law only bars teachers from telling students they must feel guilt over historical events. But as Thomas says, history is history. The law says nothing about "tailoring" history instruction to make sure that no one is ever uncomfortable.

I wonder: What do Florida schools actually teach about African American history? What do parents and students report? I've seen lots of press accounts of AP classes and new laws, but nothing about what happens in real-life classrooms. Maybe someone should get on that.

Were you wondering what's on Donald Trump's mind these days?

There you have it. If elected, Trump promises to try and destroy NBC News for treason.

He won't do it, of course. He's mostly just throwing red meat to the base. Or maybe NBC has a big story coming out and Trump wants to get ahead of it. Who knows? But no matter the reason, no one running for president of the United States should ever say something like this. It's a temper tantrum worthy of a five year old. It continues to baffle me that any Republican politician would support a man who says things like this.

I'm sure this New York Times headline is offered in good faith, but it's just wrong:

This is your periodic reminder that it's Kevin McCarthy who has sown "mass dysfunction," not the small and powerless House Freedom Caucus. McCarthy can sideline them anytime he wants by following the Senate's lead and working on a bipartisan basis in the House. If he did that, he'd get 300 votes instantly for a continuing resolution to keep the government open and probably the same number of votes for a budget based on the deal he made during the debt ceiling showdown.

But he doesn't want to. He wants to work exclusively within the Republican caucus, where he has a razor-thin majority, and this is what gives hardliners their power even though their numbers are tiny.

In the Senate, Chuck Schumer worked with Republicans to pass a budget. If McCarthy worked with Democrats in the House he'd quickly leave the Freedom Caucus howling fruitlessly into the wind as everyone else ignores their antics and gets some work done. He can do it anytime he wants.

The Washington Post today highlights the jihad by conservatives to shut down any and all efforts to combat disinformation:

The escalating campaign — led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans in Congress and state government — has cast a pall over programs that study not just political falsehoods but also the quality of medical information online.

....Jordan has issued subpoenas and demands for researchers’ communications with the government and social media platforms as part of a larger congressional probe into the Biden administration’s alleged collusion with Big Tech.

“This effort is clearly intended to deter researchers from pursuing these studies and penalize them for their findings,” Jen Jones, the program director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group that promotes scientific research, said in a statement.

Lawsuits, congressional investigations, subpoenas for email, and personal harassment. This is the same game plan conservatives have used to intimidate climate scientists over the past few years.

Republicans want nothing and nobody to interfere with a conservative movement that can only exist amid a huge web of lies. Vaccinations are unsafe. Trump won the election. Climate change is a hoax. Joe Biden is a crook. Voter fraud in Democratic cities is endemic. January 6 was a peaceful demonstration. COVID originated with a Chinese lab leak. The FBI has been weaponized against Republicans. Social media is a liberal cesspool.

The reason that disinformation fighters spend a lot of time on Republican lies is because Republicans lie a lot. It's that simple.

Fuckity fuck fuck fuck:

My multiple myeloma is still hanging around. It turns out I was right to be skeptical of the "no report means no M-protein" claim from my doctor yesterday. Today I suddenly received revised test results and this time they did include an M-protein report. It wasn't zero. It was 0.12. As usual lower is still better, but by no means does this indicate a complete remission. The cancer is reduced but far from gone.

So I guess this was just a screwup from the lab combined with a casual brushoff from my doctor. I remain part of the 20% who didn't get a complete response from Carvykti.

This is completely nuts:

Only 52% of Republicans think the COVID vaccine is safe. The conservative politicians and conservative media that created this situation should be utterly ashamed of themselves.

And to what end? It isn't even a partisan issue. It's not as if Joe Biden would get a surge in the polls if Republicans got themselves vaccinated, after all. It's just a completely craven attempt to spread a dangerous conspiracy theory in service of undermining support for government services of any kind. I hope it was worth it, guys.

I am once again confused:

"Accuses"? Who else would attack Sevastopol? And why shouldn't they? Russia keeps raining missiles on Kyiv, after all. It only seems fair.

UPDATE: This turns out to be a lab screwup. Ignore it. Actual results here.

Today brings some very good news indeed—I think:

According to my latest lab tests, I no longer have any detectable level of M-protein. This is unexpected, since in June it seemed as if my CAR-T response had plateaued. But no. I'm just a slowpoke. Instead of the usual six weeks to a complete cure, it took me five months.

But I'm not quite ready to celebrate yet. When the test results came back, there was no report of M-protein at all. After some annoying back-and-forth with my doctor's office, I finally got a note saying that the lab doesn't return a result if no M-protein is detected. I'm just a little bit dubious of this, so I'm going to wait for next month's results before I feel absolutely sure that the cancer is gone.

That said: I'm apparently cancer free! No more multiple myeloma. I've had a "complete" response to the CAR-T, and further tests down the road related to something called kappa and lambda light free chains will tell me if I've had a "stringent complete" response—the best possible.

This is not likely to be a permanent remission, since "undetectable" doesn't actually mean zero, but it should keep me free of multiple myeloma for at least two or three years without chemotherapy. Hooray!

The Border Patrol has finally deigned to release its August numbers, waiting until about 5 pm on a Friday to do it. I can only assume that's because the numbers, once again, were bad:

Border encounters were up 27% to 233,000 in August. About 50,000 of these were legal asylum requests while the rest were illegal crossings between ports of entry.

CBP is very bad at releasing the statistics people might actually be interested in. For example, the theory behind President Biden's border policy is that if you apply legally for asylum, well and good. But if you cross the border illegally and then ask for asylum you will be put on a fast track for deportation. So how many illegal immigrants are being quickly sent back to Mexico? Here's what CBP has to say:

Since May 2023, DHS has repatriated over 250,000 individuals, including more than 36,000 individual family members. DHS has removed or returned more individual family members in the last four months than in any previous full fiscal year.

That sounds nice, but would it kill them to provide numbers for this going back a few years? That would give us a better idea of the net number of people who are entering the country and staying, versus those who are merely "encountered" and then sent back.

But they don't do that, so I have no idea whether Biden's policy is working. CBP is certainly implying that it works, but concrete numbers just aren't there.

Why has the number of people getting married collapsed over the past 60 or so years?

Advice to conservatives who want to convince liberals to talk up marriage:

The key persuasion (if you do actually want to persuade) strategy here is to clarify that you’re talking about hectoring *men* not women.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) September 22, 2023

This is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but worth responding to. There are two hypotheses here. Hypothesis #1 is that the decline of marriage has something to do with men, who have gotten worse and more feckless over the years. But that's not really so:

This is no great shakes—it averages to less than 1% growth per year—but neither does it suggest that men have become unreliable sluggards. It's true that fewer men are working these days than in 1950, but even so about 90% of all prime-age men participate in the labor force. That's nowhere near a big enough drop to explain the collapse of marriage.

But might the decline in marriage be the consequence of some non-financial failing among men? Sure, anything is possible. But all the evidence suggests that, overall, both men and women have gotten generally better over the years, not worse. The idea that modern men are uniquely unmarriageable is mostly just a historically blinkered view that plays down how crappy men have always been.

No, the answer is almost certainly Hypothesis #2: it has something to do with women. Does it ever:

Starting in the '50s for Black women—and then really taking off around 1963—incomes skyrocketed. This same thing happened among white women, but it started later and their incomes didn't increase as much. This is consistent with (a) women rejecting marriage when they started to make enough money to get along on their own, and (b) Black women rejecting marriage earlier and more strongly than white women.

Were social pressures also involved? Did marriage start to decline only when society started to accept single motherhood?

Probably. But it's worth noting that this started among Black women in the '50s, before the counterculture revolution of the '60s but after they started earning more money. So it may be that causality worked the other way: as women made more money they ditched men in greater numbers, and as that happened society slowly adapted.

In any case, I'd guess that the conventional wisdom is correct on this: marriage declined because women became self-supporting and could raise children on their own if they wanted to. And many of them wanted to.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, did you know that Black women caught up to white women years ago and today earn as much as they do?

On average, Black men still earn 25% less than white men.