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Month: October 2023

Published on 36 Comments on Trump fined yet again for violating gag order

The judge in Donald Trump's business fraud trial called Trump to the witness stand today to ask about something he'd said during a recess:

The dispute began during a break in the testimony Wednesday morning. Speaking to reporters in a hallway, Trump complained that Engoron, a Democrat, is “a very partisan judge, with a person who’s very partisan sitting alongside of him, perhaps even much more partisan than he is.”

....On the witness stand, Trump said his remark outside court was a reference not to the judge’s law clerk, who sits next to Engoron in the courtroom on the bench, but to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who had been on the witness stand earlier in the day testifying against his former boss.

The judge, for obvious reasons, didn't believe Trump and fined him $10,000, the second time he's fined Trump for disparaging members of the court.

It's probably pointless to ask, but I wonder what goes on in Trump's mind when he does this stuff. Does he:

  • Not care about the gag order?
  • Forget about it in the heat of the moment?
  • Not believe the judge will enforce it?
  • Figure the money is peanuts and he can afford it?

Beats me.

Published on 37 Comments on Mike Johnson is right-wing, but not as extreme as Jim Jordan

According to Voteview, here's the skinny on Mike Johnson, our new Speaker of the House:

He's pretty conservative, but a little less conservative than Jim Jordan. According to their ideology rankings, he's the 82nd most conservative member of the House, compared to 9th for Marjorie Taylor-Greene and 20th for Jordan.

Published on 14 Comments on New home sales just keep on rising

The number of new one-family homes purchased ticked up at an annualized rate of 83,000 in September:

It's remarkable that new home sales have stayed so robust in face of massively higher prices:

The last time prices increased like this, during the high-interest Volcker regime of 1979-82, new home sales were cut in half and didn't recover until rates came down. This time, sales dropped from the pandemic bubble high, but then increased when the Fed raised rates and have continued to increase even as the Fed has held rates high.

People just want to buy houses and apparently nothing will stop them.

Published on 30 Comments on Meta sued by 41 states for turning kids into addicts

Meta is being sued by 41 states for knowingly putting teens in danger. There are two big complaints.

The first is that Facebook and Instagram recruit users under 13 in violation of the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. This is plausible and easy to understand.

But the other, bigger complaint is that Facebook and Instagram are dangerous for teens—and Meta knows it. Nevertheless, they actively try to get teens addicted to their platforms. This one is much trickier to evaluate, not least because about half the complaint is redacted. But having read the entire court filing, the states' basic case goes like this:

  1. Facebook and Instagram try hard to get teens to use their platform.
  2. They have also adopted features that keep teens coming back for more.
  3. There is landslide evidence that use of these platforms is bad for teen mental health.
  4. Facebook and Instagram publicly deny all of this.
  5. This is a violation of the business codes in the various states.

This sounds like a big stretch. It's obviously not illegal to market social media to teens. It's also not illegal to make a product they like a lot. Nor is it at all clear that Facebook and Instagram are broadly dangerous. A mere deterioration of teen mental health over the past decade doesn't prove anything. Instagram's infamous internal "body image" study really doesn't prove anything. The Frances Haugen whistleblower roadshow ended up mostly a bust. And the evidence of serious mental health effects is very, very thin.

Given all this, it's going to be tough to make a case that Meta's repeated denials of being the online equivalent of a heroin pusher constitute misleading representations under the law. But of course, you never know what a jury will think, do you? I wouldn't be surprised if this eventually ends in a "no admission of guilt" settlement.

Published on 22 Comments on Iran proxies have entered the Mideast war

The Wall Street Journal reports that militia groups allied with Iran have started targeting American forces:

Iran in recent days has unleashed the regional militias it has spent years arming.

....Though Pentagon spokesman Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said Monday that the U.S. doesn’t have information that Iran “explicitly ordered” the recent militia attacks, Defense Department officials also say that Tehran is either actively encouraging the drone and missile strikes or is refraining from discouraging them. “When you see this uptick in activity and attacks by many of these groups,” a senior Defense official said, “there’s Iranian fingerprints all over it.”

This just gets worse and worse. But I don't have anything insightful to say about it. I'm just passing along the news.

Published on 8 Comments on Raw data: The number of abortions in the US

According to WeCount—not to be confused with WeCount! or We Count or Wecount—abortions declined in the five months following the Dobbs decision but then started rising. The abortion rate today is higher than it was before Dobbs:

The reason for this is obvious: abortions went down in states that banned them but went up in other states as women traveled out of state to obtain abortions:

The WeCount numbers include all abortions provided via the formal health care system, including telehealth and medication abortions.

The WeCount project is sponsored by the Society for Family Planning, which doesn't have a long track record of counting abortions. So I don't know how accurate it is. Their numbers match fairly well through June with those from Guttmacher, which has more experience in the counting business, but note that Guttmacher doesn't show any overall increase in 2023. So take this all with a grain of salt.