Month: December 2023

Republicans are split in half these days. On one side you have the MAGA crowd. They cheer Donald Trump for saying that no will dare give us trouble if he's president—and if they do he'll rain down hellfire like no one has ever seen before. But in real life they're effectively antiwar because Joe Biden is president and they're against anything he's for.

Then you have the more conventional Republicans, whose bloodthirstiness is seemingly unlimited. Biden has put together a remarkable international coalition that's been resolutely on Ukraine's side for two years, but they're vitriolic over the fact that he didn't deliver a thousand F-16s the day after Russia invaded.  Biden has been all but adamantine in his support of Israel, but their ears start smoking if he so much as mentions that it's a shame so many people are dying. Houthi rebels are attacking shipping in the Red Sea and this is a huge black eye for the US, which should—

Well, something. It's never quite clear what.

I understand being on Israel's side. But as usual, Israel drives everyone nuts. I've read multiple times from conventional conservatives that—literally—Palestinians ought to be grateful that Netanyahu has gone so easy on them. It's just beyond belief. Their bloodlust is so all-consuming that they object to the mere idea of feeling any remorse over 20,000 civilian deaths and millions of displacements.

I'm 65 years old. None of this should surprise me. But it still does.

Stop it, stop it, stop it:

First off, it's not true that everyone expected a recession. What everyone expected was that inflation wouldn't go down unless we had a recession. And that was only because "everyone" is apparently an idiot who forgot all about the pandemic of [checks notes] two years previously.

Second, the Fed and the White House had nothing to do with anything. As usual, I invite you to take a look at economic growth:

The Fed began raising rates in the spring of 2022. Following that, nothing happened. Economic growth continued on its normal path.

So either the Fed hikes were small enough that they didn't really do anything or else they were big enough but the economy hasn't responded yet. You can't have it both ways.

Folks, this is just the most rudimentary common sense. You can't say the Fed got inflation down but had no effect on GDP. This is not how things work. Come on.

Last night I went out to the desert to take a picture of the Crab Nebula. My telescope is not really up to the task, but I've always wanted to do it anyway.

But I have no pictures of the Crab for you. I tried it two ways: with my narrowband filter and without. The filtered image was far superior. However, it was also out of focus due to some bad frames. But even with the bad frames removed the focus was still bad. Maybe I need to focus with the filter in, although I can't figure out why that would change things. Or maybe the focus was OK and, as suspected, the Crab is just too small for my telescope to capture well.

Anyway, I'll try again next month. In the meantime, here is the Pacman Nebula, aka NGC 281, which gets its name from the fact that it sorta looks like a Pacman muncher.

The reported death toll in Gaza has reached nearly 20,000. Here's an update of the daily death toll:

Whether by design or by chance, the daily fatality figures have dropped from about 300 per day to 200 per day over the past week. It's not much, but it's a slight improvement.

Apple is halting sales of its watch because of a finding that it violated some patents:

The case revolves around medical-technology company Masimo, which alleged in a 2021 complaint that Apple violated its patents related to measuring blood-oxygen levels. Apple has included a sensor, called a pulse oximeter, in most new models of the Apple Watch since 2020.

I'm not surprised. Apple's corporate philosophy seems to be that other people have violated their patents and gotten away with it, so by God they're going to do it too. Needless to say, this attitude carries some risks.

The Washington Post reports that AI has turned fake news into an industrial business:

Since May, websites hosting AI-created false articles have increased by more than 1,000 percent, ballooning from 49 sites to more than 600, according to NewsGuard, an organization that tracks misinformation.

I would take this with a grain of salt since NewsGuard is in the business of warning companies about fake news and protecting them from it. Still, even if there's a bit of exaggeration here the numbers are pretty startling—and fully expected. AI can automate a lot of things, and fake news propaganda is an obvious target.

One thing the article doesn't say is how extensive the readership is for these sites. However, if AI can create them, I imagine it can be trained to do SEO optimization too. Welcome to our brave new world.

One of the big sticking points in the negotiations for tighter border security revolves around the Biden administration's use of parole. Until about an hour ago, I had wondered what the big deal was. In January Biden unveiled a parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV parole) that allowed them to come into the country temporarily if they had a US sponsor. But it only applied to 30,000 immigrants, so it hardly seemed like a major issue.

But no! It's 30,000 immigrants per month. I had missed that. It's admitted more than 200,000 immigrants so far. But that's not all:

If you add up everything, including DACA, 3.6 million immigrants have entered the US under parole since Biden was inaugurated, and 2.3 million are still here. If we take out DACA, that comes to about 500,000 immigrants per year. This compares to roughly 1.9 million who have crossed the border illegally this year, so it's a significant number.

On the other hand, it's still only about a quarter of the total. Significant, but not overwhelming. I understand how this is an issue, but it hardly seems like an insurmountable one.

The New York Times writes today about the latest round of complaints from poor countries about the loans they get from the IMF and the World Bank, which were created shortly after World War II and haven't changed much since then. This time the pretext for reform is that loans are getting more complicated and climate change is costing poor countries a lot of money even though they aren't the ones responsible. The answer?

Those like Mr. Guzman and Ms. Mottley pushing for change argue that indebted countries need significantly more grants and low-interest loans with long repayment timelines, along with a slate of other reforms.

So countries that are serial offenders thanks to perpetual mismanagement should just be given the money instead of having to take out loans? And if they do take out loans, payments should be spread out over decades?

That doesn't really seem like very sound advice, does it? And yet, it might well be. Instead of playing the same old game for another century, maybe we should just give money to poor countries for deserving causes and ditch the loans altogether. It seems like they do little but create moral hazard among countries who know they can be endlessly bailed out even if their problems are entirely of their own devising.

So sure. You have an idea for a project that seems doable and is economically stimulating? Apply for a grant from the International Capital Building Fund. Global warming is producing huge floods? Apply for amelioration grants from the Climate Change Fund.

But you're bankrupt because you subsidize gasoline and the government is corrupt and the rich don't pay taxes? Then you're on your own. The World Charity Fund will try to take care of the humanitarian suffering, but bailout money will have to come from private markets if you can convince anyone that you're a good risk.

Beyond that, perhaps we should have an International Bankruptcy Court. Even if you've been reckless, if you're bankrupt you're bankrupt—and big lenders knew the risks going in. The court can oversee payments to creditors, if any, and then wipe the slate clean. It works in the US, even if it's galling that even feckless idiots are allowed to wipe out their debts.

So there you have it. Kill the IMF and the World Bank and replace them with the International Capital Building Fund, the Climate Change Fund, the World Charity Fund, and the International Bankruptcy Court, all funded by rich countries that can afford to help out and will work in a spirit of brotherhood and harmony. Piece of cake.

After a recommendation from a bipartisan congressional commission, the Army is finally about to take down a 32-foot memorial at Arlington cemetery dedicated to "our dead heroes" of the Confederacy. Naturally Republicans are angry:

This month, 44 Republican lawmakers cautioned Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the first African American to hold the post, that the Pentagon would overstep its authority by removing the memorial.... Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) is disappointed by the monument’s removal, said Macaulay Porter, a spokesperson. Youngkin plans to relocate it New Market Battlefield State Park, which would be a “fitting backdrop” for the memorial, Porter said.

What is with these guys and their endless devotion to the Confederacy? It was a fucking rebellion aimed at keeping Black southerners enslaved forever. It's now 2023. Even Southern Republicans ought to be willing to get rid of memorials dedicated to that. They should ram a few sticks of dynamite into this memorial, not spend $3 million to carefully relocate it.

But of course not. It will be treated reverently and moved to a site dedicated to a last gasp little victory over Union forces. And then they wonder why Black people keep voting for Democrats.

Michelle Goldberg asks today why so many progressives have been moving to the right recently. Among the famous—Russell Brand, Matt Taibbi, Naomi Wolf—I think she gets it right: They suffered some kind of indignity from lefties and then turned on them.

For the great masses, though, I think the answer is simpler: They haven't. In fact, according to two reliable pollsters the number of people who identify as liberals has gone up over the past two decades:

Conservative ID, by contrast, has stayed steady this entire time.

But there's more to it, I think. The plain fact is that being a liberal is hard. You have to care about poor people and homeless people and Palestinians and trans people and the environment and Black people and the disabled and Hispanics and the neurodivergent and fast food workers and animals and undocumented immigrants and indigenous people and plastic straws and public transit and mass incarceration and DEI and white privilege and child workers and wage theft and lead pipes and educational equality and systemic racism and bullying and climate change and screen time and maternal mortality and social justice and fat phobia and antisemitic tropes and voter suppression and bank fees and racial stereotyping and income inequality and safe spaces and unconscious bias and football concussions and Black Lives Matter and eugenics and atoning for the past and food deserts and gender affirming care and neoliberalism and health equity and flying and the unbanked and restorative justice and toxic masculinity and biodiversity and colonialism and intersectionality and the global south and malaria and sexual harassment and microaggressions and dolphin-safe tuna and power relations and factory farming and stereotype threat and Davos and cultural appropriation and habitat loss and #OscarsSoWhite and gender identity and pronouns and whale hunting and police brutality and prosecutorial misconduct and Twitter and ableism and deeply problematic and heteronormativity and colony collapse and forever chemicals and body shaming and white saviors and mansplaining and gentrification and hate speech and plastic water bottles and the Bechdel test.

It's pretty exhausting caring about all this stuff all the time, and I'm not even counting issues that everyone cares about, like abortion or gun control. If you get overloaded by it all—and especially if you find some of these items sort of ridiculous to begin with—it's pretty easy to drift right, even if you don't go full MAGA.