Month: October 2023

No more Kevin McCarthy. For now, at least. Eight Republicans voted to toss him out of the speakership, and along with 208 Democrats that produced a vote of 216-210 in favor of "vacating the chair."

Of course, now comes the hard part: finding an alternate Speaker who can command virtually unanimous support within the Republican caucus. That seems all but impossible, but I suppose there has to be someone.

For what it's worth, I continue to think this someone could be Kevin McCarthy, risen from the dead. We'll see.

These are the San Jacinto mountains at the start of spring. I took this picture near the middle of a loop off I10 that goes from Banning to Idyllwild and then out to Palm Desert.

I just finished reading Number Go Up, Zeke Faux's tale of the rise and fall of crypto. For the most part it's an engaging book but not a surprising one. Basically, crypto is a scam, and every crypto company is running pretty much the same scam. Details aside, the book didn't change my view of crypto much.

Except for one thing: pig butchering. This refers to an online scam where people contact you via text message and slowly lure you into buying and selling crypto. After a few small trades they talk you into a big trade—and then they steal the money and you never hear from them again.

So far that's nothing especially unique. But it turns out that pig butchering is mostly conducted by people in Cambodia who are kidnapped and forced into it. They're kept locked up and beaten if they don't make their quotas.

That's shocking, but still not too surprising, perhaps. What's really flabbergasting is this:

This is a picture from the book. It's a view of "Chinatown," a section of Sihanoukville in southern Cambodia. This entire compound is filled with kidnapped slaves who are forced to perform pig butchering on an industrial scale.

There are about 6,000 slaves toiling away in Chinatown producing something like $600 million in illicit proceeds. And that's just one compound. Put them all together and God only knows how many people are involved in this. Hundreds of thousands, probably, generating tens of billions of dollars.

This is the kind of thing that would probably sound like a dumb conspiracy theory if you heard it from a friend. But it's real.

Persistent inflation is killing the Democratic Party:

But here's a question: Why is inflation such an intense issue? In round numbers, prices have gone up 20% since the start of the pandemic and wages have also gone up 20%. For most of us it's a wash.

But that's not how most people see it. They react sharply to higher prices but seem to practically forget about wage increases. Why? I'm honestly not sure, but I can toss out a few possibilities:

• Prices are in people's faces all the time. The price to fill up a tank of gas, for example, hits you every week or so. Wage increases come once a year and are buried in a pay stub.
• People overreact to the small number of items that have gone up the most. So they vaguely think that prices have doubled because they were shocked at the price of eggs.
• Wage increases are viewed as a reward for hard work, not as something designed to keep up with inflation. So they "don't count."
• For some reason, people remember prices but don't remember their own earnings. My grandfather once complained that roasting chickens were really expensive these days. They used to cost a dollar. "Sure," my mother told him, "and back then you earned $3,000 a year." He'd sort of forgotten that.
• Price inflation, even if on average it's the same as wage inflation, still forces you to cut back on certain items. This is a pain in the ass and probably a source of family irritation.
• The media reports price inflation constantly. They never report wage inflation.

What else?

New JOLTS hiring and quits data was released today, and August was about the same as the previous month. Here's total hiring minus total separations:

This represents the net number of new workers. It's been heading steadily down for two years and is getting dangerously close to zero. Then again, it almost did get to zero in March and then rebounded. So who knows what it will do over the next few months?

Job openings were up, but the trend has been steadily down for over a year. Still, openings remain an impressive 2 million above their pre-pandemic level. Maybe companies could fill more of those openings if they tried raising their pay a bit.

Hey, does anyone remember this?

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) indicated the IRS whistleblowers testifying in the investigation into Hunter Biden...are willing to hand over foreign transactions paperwork that could prove President Joe Biden was involved in a criminal bribery scheme.

...."We suspect that the Bidens had offshore bank accounts and that today was a huge development that will open up a new door for us to move forward in our investigation," the Kentucky Republican added, saying he believes there’s "easily" $25 million to $30 million or more tied to the Biden family in foreign business dealings.

This was on July 19th. A week later Jesse Watters excitedly announced on Fox News that he had "just discovered that the Biden family, possibly Joe Biden himself, has offshore bank accounts." Watters careened right past the fact that even Comer only said he "suspected" there were foreign bank accounts, and then plunged into a furious narrative about bribery and treason that became ever more divorced from reality with every minute it continued:

Once you start zeroing in on foreign, foreign bank accounts, foreign lobbying, foreign agents, foreign business partners, foreign policy, foreign deals...this looks more and more like a bribery ring, and remember, bribery is specifically named as an impeachable offense in the Constitution.

I hardly need to say that there was zero evidence for this, right? Even the IRS whistleblowers—whose credibility has taken a beating recently—said only that they had evidence related to "foreign transactions." The rest of the story is literally invented out of nothing.

Anyway, it's now been more than two months since these damning documents were supposedly going to be handed over. So far: nada. The documents were supposed to be given to the Ways and Means Committee, but last week its Republican chairman struggled to answer any questions about Joe Biden's alleged misdeeds, never mind a blockbuster revelation about foreign bank accounts.

As usual, there's nothing here. The whistleblowers have handed over nothing. Hunter Biden's collection of companies are all boringly legitimate. They are registered in Delaware. His money was mostly deposited in a Wells Fargo account. And queries to Hong Kong and the Cayman Islands, the most likely locations of foreign accounts, have turned up nothing.

There are no offshore shell companies. There are no foreign bank accounts. Joe Biden has not taken $30 million in bribes. But you knew that already, didn't you?

Why are so many Republicans opposing further aid to Ukraine? Paul Krugman says it's not about the money:

The answer is, unfortunately, obvious. Whatever Republican hard-liners may say, they want Putin to win. They view the Putin regime’s cruelty and repression as admirable features that America should emulate. They support a wannabe dictator at home and are sympathetic to actual dictators abroad.

I think the answer is simpler than this: Over the past 40 years, Democrats have generally opposed Republican wars (Grenada, Nicaragua, Gulf War, Iraq) and Republicans have generally opposed Democratic wars (Kosovo, Libya, Ukraine). The only big exception has been the bipartisan support for the Afghanistan War, though even there Democrats lost enthusiasm for it sooner than Republicans did.

Note that "opposed" doesn't mean "unanimously opposed." Rather, the party in power has typically supported its president while the opposition has been split. That's exactly what's now happening with Ukraine, which makes it very normal. There's not much reason to look any further.

Get out the popcorn. Rep. Matt Gaetz—archenemy of Speaker Kevin McCarthy for some reason—has finally followed up on his threat to file a motion to remove McCarthy from the speakership. A vote will be held later this week.

Gaetz needs 217 votes to oust McCarthy.¹ Obviously he won't get anywhere near that number from Republicans, but traditionally the opposing party votes unanimously against the majority party's candidate. So all Gaetz needs are the 212 Democrats in the House plus five Republicans. But Democrats have options:

If Democrats were to vote against Mr. McCarthy — as is almost always the case when a speaker of the opposing party is being elected — Mr. Gaetz would need only a handful of Republicans to join the opposition to remove him, which requires a simple majority vote. But Mr. McCarthy could hang onto his gavel if Democrats vote to support him, simply skip the vote altogether or vote “present.” In that situation, Democrats who did not register a vote would lower the threshold for a majority and make it easier to defeat Mr. Gaetz’s motion.

So there are two big questions. First, will Democrats help McCarthy? Second, if they don't, does Gaetz have the votes he needs?

As near as I can tell, there's no consensus on either question. Democrats have mostly kept their cards close to the chest. On the one hand, McCarthy averted a government shutdown over the weekend by working with Democrats, so maybe they owe him. On the other hand, they're pretty pissed off at McCarthy for opening an impeachment inquiry against President Biden. So who knows? This question also hinges on whether McCarthy can offer Democrats something in return for their support.

As to the second question, no one knows. It doesn't seem like five votes is a high hurdle, but so far we haven't heard from four more Republicans (in addition to Gaetz himself) who have said unequivocally that they'll vote to remove McCarthy.

In the meantime the two sides are mostly engaging in trash talk. Stay tuned.

¹I think so, anyway. The House currently has two vacancies, so Gaetz only needs a majority of 433 members, not the usual 435.

CNN asked John Kelly, chief of staff to Donald Trump in 2017-18, if he wanted to say anything more about his former boss in light of recent developments. He did:

What can I add that has not already been said? A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family — for all Gold Star families — on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women. A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason — in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.

There is nothing more that can be said. God help us.

I wonder why more of Trump's opponents don't focus on this? Trump's casual contempt for those who serve and die in war isn't just revolting even for him, it's the kind of thing that might—might—influence the opinions of Trump's fans. At the very least, highlighting this stuff would force Trump to deny it. Even that's worth something.

Harry Brighouse provides a summary of "Sold a Story," a documentary podcast from Emily Hanford. The topic is reading instruction:

Very brief synopsis: the methods routinely used to teach children to read in the US don’t work well for large numbers of children, and the science of reading has been clear about this for decades. Three academics in particular — Lucy Calkins of Teachers College, and Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell of the Ohio State University — are responsible for promoting these bad practices (which are pervasive), and persisted in doing so long after the research was clear.

Harry ponders what this means for the integrity of university research in general:

The way universities work mean that a substantial amount of Fountas and Pinnell’s work will have been looked at, at least formally, by colleagues in other, but related, disciplines, deans, etc, over many many years. It’s hard to believe — or at least its hard for me to believe — that nobody thought to themselves “the research designs here look very weak”/”the methods by which these results have been found look very dodgy”/”what the hell kind of research is supporting these recommendations which are, on their face, obviously bad?”. It’s easy to believe — or at least it's easy for me to believe — that people would have thought those things and not taken action.

Why did so few people fight back against this stuff? Harry hypothesizes that it's a sort of academic omertà that prevents both experts and non-experts from going after their colleagues. That may have its place, but in this case it caused a lot of damage for a very long time—and continues to do so. So he asks: "What obligations do academics have to scrutinize the actions of colleagues who are operating outside of their immediate areas of expertise?"

Good question. Usually this sort of thing doesn't end well, since experts are, among other things, expert at dismissing challenges from outside their field. But should they be?