Month: October 2023

Since 2016 the number of threats against members of Congress has increased nearly 1,000%. However, it declined last year:

Threat levels are still historically high but are down 22% from their peak in 2021. Is this good news? Maybe the lunatic fringe is finally calming down slightly?

Ramesh Ponnuru says that discontent over the economy can probably be explained fairly simply. It's all about declining income:

Average wages are down in real terms — adjusted, that is, for inflation — since President Biden took office. They are roughly 3 percent lower than their peak in April 2020....Even when you compare wages today with the pre-pandemic trend, they are still about 2 percent lower than people had reason to expect.

Ponnuru doubles down on this today, but he's mistaken for a couple of reasons. The first has to do with his trend argument: Ponnuru's chart showing the trendline of wages is cherry picked to start during the period 2017-19, the strongest years for wage growth in recent memory. Instead let's take a longer-term look:

If you take a longer look, hourly wages are right on the trendline of the past decade.

The second mistake is that Ponnuru's "peak" in April 2020 is artificial, a result of lots of low-wage earners losing their jobs during the early months of the pandemic. This is technically known as a "composition" problem and it's well understood. But take a look at this chart:

Hourly earnings (brown line) show the April 2020 spike, but ECI (green line), which adjusts for composition differences, doesn't. If you use ECI, which was more accurate in the early days of the pandemic, real wages have been virtually flat since their peak and are up compared to 2019.

There's at least a kernel of truth in Ponnuru's argument: Wage growth hasn't been great since the start of the pandemic. And there are lots of legitimate ways to measure wages and inflation. That said, real wages are up by nearly every measure over both the past four years and over the past year:

Cherry picking the dates is really the only way to get any other result. As always, the real explanation for economic discontent is that Americans aren't unhappy about the economy. Only Republicans are.

UPDATE: Ponnuru's chart uses PCE as an inflation measure, not CPI as I thought. My mistake. I've corrected the text.

The start of Saturday's Cal-USC football game was delayed by a sit-down protest from a dozen or so Cal students. The announcers didn't know what the protest was about, and I just assumed it had something to do with Israel and never bothered to check it out.

But no! It turns out the students were protesting the suspension of Ivonne del Valle, a Spanish and Portuguese professor who's both a first-generation Mexican and an expert on colonial studies.

del Valle was suspended for harassing Joshua Clover, a professor at a different university, and then for continuing to harass him even after agreeing to have no further contact with him. And just so there's no confusion, she's admitted to almost everything:

In an interview with KQED, del Valle acknowledged some of the behavior described in the investigative reports, including keying Clover’s car, vandalizing the area outside his apartment door, contacting his friends, posting an image of his partner online and leaving messages outside the home of his mother. Those messages included one that said “I raised a psychopath,” according to the university’s investigative reports. She has also acknowledged in the report calling Clover’s office phone line at least ten times within 90 minutes.

....“I did write outside his door, ‘Here lives a pervert.’ I did that. And again, I’m not proud,” del Valle said. “If I had the opportunity to do things differently, I would do them differently.”....“I do understand it’s hard to side with me in that moment, and I was punished for that without salary and benefits,” del Valle said.

The obvious question here is: Why was del Valle harassing Clover? She says Clover hacked her phone, but a university investigation found no evidence of that. She provided hundreds of pages of documentation to back her case, but:

The documents include several dozen instances of why she believes she was hacked. For example, she cites writing a message to a relative in April 2019 mentioning trucks, and then a Twitter account she claimed belonged to Clover tweeted about “similar trucks” that same day.

This is not particularly convincing. Nor is there any indication of how Clover could have hacked her phone in the first place—or why. In any case, Cal has offered to settle the case by extending del Valle's supension to 18 months, but she won't take it. Many of her students are behind her:

Alejandra Decker, a Ph.D. candidate studying Mexican literature and culture and organizer with the campaign to reinstate del Valle, said the outcrying of support shows how missed del Valle is at UC Berkeley.

....“Those reports — anyone who reads them, I think we can all admit that they are difficult to read because they paint Professor Ivonne in a way that personally I’ve never seen,” Decker said. “It’s a woman’s actions in her biggest moments of survival.”

I don't think I'm exaggerating to say that Decker apparently doesn't care about del Valle's campaign of harassment because she herself wasn't a target. And anyway, del Valle was really upset so we should forgive her.

Unless the university investigations were wildly off the mark—which seems unlikely given del Valle's admissions—this is fucking nuts. del Valle is lucky to still have a job, let alone a mere 18-month suspension. But her students don't care. She's a minority woman in trouble, and that's enough.

I continue to think that excesses of wokeness on university campuses are not a huge deal. When it goes too far I'm happy to be on the side of common sense, but on a scale of one to ten, where ten is "the collapse of Western civilization," I'd probably give this stuff about a three.

Still, there's no denying that the individual cases sure can be creepy and unsettling.

Here is Mike Johnson's first substantive action as Speaker of the House:

NEWS w @bresreports -- HOUSE REPUBLICANS' Israel aid bill is out.

It offsets $14.3 billion in Israel aid with $14.3 bllion in cuts to IRS from the Inflation Reduction Act.

This offset will NEVER, EVER fly. Dems will reject it out of hand.

Here's the bill:…

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) October 30, 2023

It's truly impressive how dedicated Republicans are to protecting the interests of the rich. They have fought tooth and nail for over a year against efforts to get audits of wealthy taxpayers back up to a reasonable rate. And they haven't given up yet.

Just to add to the whole wtf nature of this, the official CBO score finds that funding the IRS will raise twice as much money as it spends. So not only do Republicans want to hang the albatross of IRS funding on Israel—who they claim to love more than anything in the world—they'd be increasing the deficit to do it. They are truly a sight to behold

Skyscrapers at La Défense in Paris.

Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX and bankrupt hedge fund Alameda Research, is back on the stand in his fraud trial today. This time, though, he's being questioned by prosecutors.

Things started slowly, so after lunch prosecutors tried to liven up the proceedings with questions about SBF's hair (really) and his use of private jets. But then we returned to more substantive issues:

Bankman-Fried acknowledges that Alameda was the only customer of FTX that had a $65 billion credit line. The second-largest credit line that FTX had with another market maker was $150 million.

Alameda had a credit line more than 4,000 times the size of FTX's biggest customer! And, as we all know, they were required to put up no collateral aside from worthless FTX crypto tokens. As usual, though, SBF is claiming a hazy memory about the whole arrangement.

Good luck with that. More tomorrow.

Ukraine is using ultra-cheap "First Person View" drones to destroy Russian tanks:

A typical FPV weighs up to one kilogram, has four small engines, a battery, a frame and a camera connected wirelessly to goggles worn by a pilot operating it remotely. It can carry up to 2.5 kilograms of explosives and strike a target at a speed of up to 150 kilometers per hour, explains Pavlo Tsybenko, acting director of the Dronarium military academy outside Kyiv.

“This drone costs up to $400 and can be made anywhere. We made ours using microchips imported from China and details we bought on AliExpress.”

Now add two things to this picture: (a) advanced artificial intelligence for targeting and (b) mass production by a large country like China or the US. You can shoot down drones, but can you shoot down a swarm of 10,000 or a million drones? Not a chance.

For naval battles the details change but not the big picture. Even a thousand tiny drones can't sink an aircraft carrier, but a few hundred bigger drones might. That's maybe $100 million to destroy a $10 billion carrier.

We aren't there yet, but how long do we have to wait before this becomes reality? A few years?

Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean argue in New York today that lockdowns were probably a miserable failure in the fight against COVID-19.¹ But they also say this in passing:

As the United States gains more and more distance from the COVID pandemic, the perspective on what worked, and what did not, becomes not only more clear, but more stark. Operation Warp Speed stands out as a remarkable policy success....

The more I hear this, the more I wonder where this automatic praise comes from. The vaccines themselves were developed in the private sector long before the federal government got involved. Money to guarantee production was authorized by Congress as part of the CARES Act, two months before Warp Speed was announced. Clinical trials proceeded on a normal expedited class. The FDA gave emergency approval based on protocols long in place. Vaccinations were then provided to 25% of the US population in three months, which is genuinely impressive but not that much more impressive than the 20% who got swine flu vaccinations during the same timeframe in 1976.

The development of the COVID vaccine was miraculous and the rollout was well executed. But it was nothing more than that aside from having a memorable name. It was competent, not remarkable.

¹Although they add that this is only "for any purpose other than keeping hospitals from being overrun," which is quite a caveat since that's precisely why lockdowns and other mitigation measures were adopted in the early days of the pandemic.

If you're interested in details of the UAW's new contract with Ford, here's their highlight page:

The two-tier pay system, where new hires are paid half the rate of veteran workers, has been all but eliminated, and will be gone completely in three years:

Overall wages will increase more than the 25% initially reported, although oddly, that's still the number highlighted by the UAW. The real increase is 27% by 2027 plus COLA, which is likely to add another 6% or so for a total increase of 33%.

There are no changes to the workweek, which was part of the original negotiating demands. It's still 40 hours. Juneteenth was added as a paid holiday.

Nick Kristof believes Israel is justified in going after Hamas remorselessly:

Israel has the right to defend itself and strike military targets in Gaza, and there should be strong international pressure on Hamas to release its hostages. My reporting in Gaza over the years convinces me that Gazans themselves would be much better off if Hamas could be removed: Some American liberals don’t appreciate how repressive, misogynistic, homophobic and economically incompetent Hamas is in Gaza, to say nothing of its long history of terror attacks on Israel. All this explains why many Gazans are fed up with Hamas.

The problem is that he doesn't think a ground invasion of Gaza will work:

When I hear backers of an invasion speak of removing Hamas I have the same sinking feeling as when I heard hawks in 2002 and 2003 cheerily promising to liberate Iraq. Just because it would be good to eliminate a brutal regime doesn’t mean it is readily achievable; the Taliban can confirm that.

That resonates with liberal critics of the Iraq War. Boy does it resonate. But the truth is that the lessons of the American war on terror are equivocal. Things did not run smoothly, to understate the case, but in the end we destroyed al-Qaeda and then destroyed ISIS. The only reason we failed to do the same against the Taliban is that we didn't vigorously prosecute the initial fight against them, preferring instead to keep troops available for the planned war against Iraq.

In other words, we successfully dismantled two terrorist groups and only failed against a third because we weren't violent enough. It can be done.

On the other hand, it took us 20 years; 15,000 American dead; and a (literally) uncountable number of non-American dead—ranging from 200,000 to several million depending on how the counting is performed. It can be done, yes, but only at enormous cost.

I'm trying to talk myself into something here, but I'm not sure what. On both moral and realistic levels, you can't do what Hamas did and not expect a ruthless response. But the toll in innocent life is unimaginable.

So: How do you justify doing nothing? How do you justify doing something? They're both offensive to any person with a working conscience. But what's in-between? What does common decency require of Israel in its implacable mission of destruction against Hamas?