Month: February 2024

Special Counsel Robert Hur has cleared President Biden of willfully keeping classified documents in his home after he left the vice presidency. As usual with these things, however, he also wrote a "damning" doorstop report to go along with it. Don't they all?

The whole case turns primarily on the word "willfully." Hur seems to personally believe Biden deliberately kept some classified documents after leaving office even though he admits there are several reasons this is unlikely:

The place where the Afghanistan documents were eventually found in Mr. Biden's Delaware garage—in a badly damaged box surrounded by household detritus—suggests the documents might have been forgotten.

....Most significantly, Mr. Biden self-reported to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage and consented to searches of his house to retrieve them and other classified materials. He also consented to searches of other locations, and later in the investigation, he participated in an interview with our office that lasted more than five hours and provided written answers to most of our additional written questions.

....Jurors will conclude that Mr. Biden—a powerful, sophisticated person with access to the best advice in the world—would not have handed the government classified documents from his own home on a silver platter if he had willfully retained those documents for years. Just as a person who destroys evidence and lies often proves his guilt, a person who produces evidence and cooperates will be seen by many to be innocent.

The events in question happened at the end of Biden's vice presidency, and even Hur admits they were small enough and routine enough that it would be natural not to remember them clearly ("finding classified documents at home less than a month after leaving office could have been an unremarkable and forgettable event"). Nevertheless, Hur inexplicably chose to suggest that Biden could be viewed as a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory"—based on a grand total of four times over two days of interviews that Biden was momentarily confused about some things.

This editorializing seems both gratuitous and wholly unrelated to the case itself. I have no idea what was running through Hur's mind when he decided to include it. I guess he figured he needed to sound tough, especially since he wasn't recommending charges and Republicans were likely to jump all over him for that. Gotta throw them some red meat.

For what it's worth, though, Hur did take the time to explain why Biden's case is nothing like Donald Trump's:

Several material distinctions between Mr. Trump's case and Mr. Biden's are clear.... Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview. and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.

Biden acted all along like an innocent man. Trump made it clear all along that he was guilty and was willing to commit additional crimes to hide his guilt. It's night and day and it always has been.

Tyler Cowen points today to a 2021 study that investigates whether liberals or conservatives are more likely to believe viral misinformation. The researchers removed their own bias by using a third-party service to track the 20 most viral news stories (ten true and ten false) on a biweekly basis. At the same time they surveyed Americans one week after the viral stories to see which ones they believed. The results were dramatically clear: liberals believed fewer of the viral lies (24% to 61%) and more of the viral truths (80% to 70%):

Part of the reason for this difference is simple: true statements were overwhelmingly associated with the left (65% to 10%) while false statements were more associated with the right (46% to 23%):

Liberals had an easier time accepting true statements because true statements generally benefit their side. Conversely, conservatives are more susceptible to lies because lies generally benefit their side. But there's more: liberals were considerably more likely to accept even inconvenient statements than conservatives. Conservatives had a much stronger tendency to judge truth and falsehood simply by how much a statement benefited or harmed them.

Here is the authors' conclusion:

This study provides the most rigorous evidence to date that U.S. conservatives are uniquely susceptible to political misperceptions in the current sociopolitical environment. Data were collected over 6 months in 2019 and reflect Americans’ beliefs about hundreds of political topics. The topics were selected on the basis of social media engagement, suggesting that these are the very issues that Americans were most likely to encounter online. Analyses suggest that conservatism is associated with a lesser ability to distinguish between true and false claims across a wide range of political issues and with a tendency to believe that all claims are true.

The results are consistent across the board: conservatives are simply less connected to reality than liberals. And keep in mind that this study was conducted in 2019, before Stop the Steal and COVID had turned conservative brains entirely into tapioca.

Pelicans hanging out at sunset on the jetty at Dana Point.

The only thing wrong with this Wall Street Journal headline is that it doesn't say "Investors Are Almost Always Wrong," full stop.

My keen observation about investors is that they think (a) whatever is happening now will keep happening, and (b) high things will come down and low things will go up.

Of course, they're not always wrong. Starting in 2009, for example, they predicted in every single quarter that the Fed would raise rates. In 2016 they were finally right! Stopped clocks and all that.

The February schedule for BLS releases includes something called "Occupational Requirements in the United States," and I've been waiting to find out just what this is. Today the 2023 edition was released and it turns out to be about.......occupational requirements.

But not just education or experience. Are you OK with heights? Is the job outdoors? Sitting or standing? And does it require people skills?

Apparently 61% of all jobs in the US require people skills beyond "OK, boss." It is remarkable the number of things the US keeps statistical track of.

The LA Times reports that California's Central Valley residents are excited that they'll soon have access to high speed rail. For example, here's Domaris Cid, a student at Fresno City College:

“It kind of sucks how I would have to move out of the valley to ... have an education that I want,” said Cid, 18. The high-speed rail, she said, could give her access to UC Merced or UC Berkeley to continue her political science studies. “I wouldn’t have to leave a place I really do like.”

This is nuts. It's less than 60 miles from Fresno to Merced on Highway 99. It's an hour by car or train. HSR will cut that down to.......45 minutes, and it won't get you anywhere near Berkeley.¹

The entire stretch of HSR from Bakersfield to Merced will cut a 3-hour trip to 90 minutes. Add in commuting time to and from the stations plus waiting time and it's barely better than driving.

This whole plan is nuts. HSR all the way from LA to San Francisco is a bad idea that's never likely to happen, but at least it's defensible with a few heroic assumptions. But the Central Valley leg all by itself? There's no credible justification for it at all. It's just a pointless money pit.

¹And for what it's worth, Fresno may not have a UC campus, but it is the home of CSU Fresno. It's not completely devoid of higher education.

Apropos of nothing in particular, here's a summary of how many people were deported in 2023 following a hearing in immigration court:

Nicaraguans are packed off nearly two-thirds of the time. Cubans are nearly never sent away. Overall, about a third of immigrants who get hearings are deported.

The balance of hearing outcomes fall mainly into three categories: (a) relief granted, an affirmative decision to allow someone to stay, (b) proceedings terminated, a dismissal of the government's case that implicitly allows a person to stay, or (c) "Notice to Appear" not filed, which is basically an administrative error that's become increasingly common. Other outcomes amount to about 14% of all cases.

Here's a great story about cybersecurity company Fortinet Inc.:

A widely reported story that 3 million electric toothbrushes were hacked with malware to conduct distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is likely a hypothetical scenario instead of an actual attack.

....Fortinet, who was attributed as the source of the article, has not published any information about this attack and has not responded to repeated requests for comment from BleepingComputer since the "toothbrush botnet" story went viral yesterday.

Respond? Why would they want to pour cold water on a great story like that?

Fortinet's stock closed up three points the day after the toothbrush story went viral. It's brilliant PR.

When Fortinet finally responded, they said that "due to translations" the original interviewer mistakenly thought a hypothetical scenario had actually happened. Maybe so! But then again, maybe not.

A CBO report published today says that economic growth over the next decade is likely to be higher than previous projections. Why? Mostly because of the surge in immigration over the past couple of years.

So hooray for immigration? Not really. I suspect CBO's estimates of net immigration are too high, but even if they're dead on here's what they say:

Greater immigration is projected to boost the growth rate of the nation’s real gross domestic product (GDP) by an average of 0.2 percentage points a year from 2024 to 2034, leaving real GDP roughly 2 percent larger in 2034 than it would be otherwise. Real GDP per person, however, would be 0.8 percent smaller in 2034 because of the increase in immigration than it would be otherwise, in CBO’s assessment.

GDP will indeed be higher ten years from now, but only because our population will be bigger. That's meaningless. If raw GDP mattered, tiny Denmark would be poverty stricken and China would be rich.

What matters is GDP per capita, and CBO says the immigration surge will reduce that by 0.8%. That's about $750 per person.

This is hardly something to get too worked up about, especially since the numbers are small and the estimates are rough. That said, CBO doesn't project that the immigration surge will make us richer. Just the opposite.¹

¹Though just for the record, GDP will likely be unchanged for most of us. The per capita number goes down only because a bunch of low wage earners are pulling down the average.

A friend of mine told me today that 60 Minutes ran an episode on Sunday about a gap in the border wall near Jacumba Hot Springs. Here's what it looked like:

The implicit question from the 60 Minutes piece is, why can't the government fill this four-foot gap "between the 30-foot steel border fence and rock"? How much can it cost to fill up four feet?

By an odd coincidence, I can explain. Four years ago I drove down to the border to take pictures at sunrise, and I noticed that very gap. It attracted my attention because it made the whole fence seem kind of pointless. To see why, here's the picture I took in 2020. It shows a wider view than 60 Minutes did:

As you can see, it's not a four-foot gap between "fence and rock." The fence stops where this hill starts. There's no fence over the entire hill, and it's pretty obvious that climbing up and down that hill would be easy even if the fence were extended. The only way to close it off is to complete the fence all the way up and over the hill.

Why haven't they done that? Beats me, but I assume that building the fence across steep, rocky terrain is challenging in some non-obvious way.

There are lots of rocky hills like this along the border, some them considerably bigger than this one—but still accessible to anyone willing to do a bit of climbing. With enough money I suppose you could still build a fence over any obstacle along the border, but it wouldn't be easy.