For no particular reason I got interested today in our long decline of trust in major institutions. Which party has seen the biggest decline in trust, Democrats or Republicans?
That depends on the institution. But what if you took the average level of confidence in all institutions? Here it is for the forty years between 1978-2018:
Surprise! Overall confidence is the same for both parties and the trendline is quite stable. But now let's tack on a few years at the beginning and end:
Average confidence has dropped from 35% to 15%, but all of the decline is concentrated in the post-Watergate era and the Trump era—and about equally for both parties. In other words, our decline in confidence isn't just a general malaise that's played out over the years. It takes specific events to trigger it.
NOTE: The charts show average trust in all institutions surveyed by the GSS. These include big business, organized religion, the military, education, all three branches of government, banks, organized labor, medicine, the press, the scientific community, and television.
This morning I read a piece in the New York Times about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. I had never heard of it before. In a nutshell, a group of scientists announced in 2007 that they had discovered evidence of a group of meteor impacts dating to about 12,900 years ago. They believed these impacts explained the sudden cooling period known as the Younger Dryas, which lasted for a little over a thousand years.
Stone age humans and their pet sabre-tooth tigers stare in awe at a mountain being pummeled by meteors in this GPT-4 reconstruction of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.
It was an intriguing hypothesis, but the geological community fairly quickly poked a whole bunch of holes in it, and it's not widely accepted these days.
But that's not what interests me. The YDIH is an extremely complex theory that involves detailed knowledge of obscure fields. What's more, it obviously has no political valence. It is neither liberal nor conservative.
But about a year ago a guy named Graham Hancock promoted the theory in a Netflix documentary series called “Ancient Apocalypse.” The Times reports what happened next:
Articles rebutting (or ridiculing) the show appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The Nation and a host of other left-leaning publications. Conservative media outlets ran glowing reviews. “The propaganda press may not care about science, but they do care about controlling the public discourse for the benefit of the political left,” a reporter wrote in The Federalist, in an article titled “The Lying Media Told Me Not to Watch Netflix’s ‘Ancient Apocalypse,’ So I Did.” The Daily Caller, the conservative website co-founded by Tucker Carlson, declared the Society for American Archaeologists an “elitist, closed-minded cabal,” linking its unchecked power to the “collapse of the American idea.” The debate over the show focused largely on Hancock’s lost civilization, including his discussion of Atlantis, which was wiped out, he said, during the Younger Dryas.
It's flatly inconceivable that a layman could have an independent opinion about the YDIH. It's vastly too arcane. The only thing you can do is accept the conclusions of people who are experts.
And on that score, liberals generally accepted establishment science while conservatives widely insisted the establishment was corrupt and in service to the left. This despite the fact that there's no plausible way in which a meteor impact thirteen millennia ago could possibly be left coded.
So why the popularity of the YDIH among conservatives? Just a general fondness for conspiracy theories, I suppose. If the establishment is corrupt, then everything the establishment says is corrupt, even if it's just about a flock of meteors thousands of years ago.
These are the cliffs off the Dana Point headlands. The headlands are home to a nature preserve plus a few very expensive homes. The cliffs themselves aren't normally ruddy red except for a few minutes near sunset, which just happened to be exactly when I was there.
Large swaths of voters appear to have little awareness of some of Trump’s clearest statements of hostility to democracy and intent to impose authoritarian rule in a second term, from his vow to be “dictator for one day” to his vague threat to enact “termination” of provisions in the Constitution.
....The poll asked them about 10 of Trump’s most authoritarian statements, including: the two mentioned above, Trump’s claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” his vow to pardon rioters who attacked the Capitol, his promise to prosecute the Biden family without cause, his threat to inflict mass persecution on the “vermin” opposition, and a few more. Result? “Only 31 percent of respondents said they previously had heard a lot about these statements by Trump.”
Only 31%? Compare that to various questions asked in recent YouGov polls:
Hell, only 34% had heard about the Hur report. Only 24% knew we were striking back against the Houthis. And the fact that a star witness had lied about bribes paid to Hunter and Joe Biden? Only 22%.
Most people don't know anything about anything. In fact, I'll bet that even these numbers are inflated, with lots of respondents saying they've heard a lot about these things because they watched a segment on the evening news or got pointed to a Facebook post.
This is why I think Biden has a fair amount of upside in the presidential race. In September, when people start paying attention, what are they going to learn? Mostly bad stuff about Trump and good stuff about Biden's little-known positive accomplishments. That's where the greatest ignorance is right now, so it's also where there's the greatest potential for change.
Is Bitcoin the longest lasting true bubble in history? By "true bubble" I mean one based on something that's essentially valueless. Not homes or dotcom companies. Think tulips or meme stocks.
The Bitcoin bubble is now going into its fourth year, outpacing the South Sea bubble, the Mississippi bubble, and the tulip bubble. Its latest rise began a year ago and was supercharged at the beginning of January when the SEC approved the first spot Bitcoin ETF. Since then, Bitcoin ETFs have accumulated more than $50 billion in assets.
The total value of all Bitcoin in circulation is over $1 trillion. That's nothing compared to, say, the Japanese property bubble or the dotcom bubble. But it's still pretty impressive for a commodity that literally has no value except as a collectible.
A few days ago I wrote about Donald Trump's plan to take his Truth Social network public. But one crucial point was a little buried, so I want to repeat it on its own. To start, you have to understand that even after three years of operation Truth Social is still essentially worthless:
It's not just that these numbers are negative. They're also tiny. Truth Social has total revenues of a few million dollars, about the size of a smallish dental practice.
Everybody involved in taking Truth Social public knows this. It's right in their S-4 filing. So why is anyone sinking money into this loser? Because of this:
Trump and his investors are counting on his mom-and-pop fans to buy stock in the company acquiring Truth Social. As long as they keep the stock price high, Trump will be able to slowly cash out his holdings and make a few billion dollars. With luck, by the time the bubble bursts Trump and his investors will be fully divested at a huge profit. The only losers will be the moms and pops who bought the stock.
In other words, the whole thing is a shabby scheme designed to extract billions of dollars from Trump's MAGA fans, who will be left holding the bag when Truth Social collapses. The whole thing is pretty sickening.
One of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's proudest achievements is the Stop WOKE Act. Among other things, it bars employers from holding mandatory DEI training sessions. Four months after the law was signed a district court issued a preliminary injunction against enforcement on First Amendment grounds, and today DeSantis unanimously lost his appeal in the 11th Circuit Court:
Florida’s law, the Individual Freedom Act, bans certain mandatory workplace trainings.... Discussion of these topics, however, is not completely barred—the law prohibits requiring attendance only for sessions endorsing them. Employers can still require employees to attend sessions that reject these ideas or present them in an “objective manner without endorsement of the concepts.”
....By limiting its restrictions to a list of ideas designated as offensive, the Act targets speech based on its content. And by barring only speech that endorses any of those ideas, it penalizes certain viewpoints—the greatest First Amendment sin.
Florida tried to argue that the law prohibited only conduct—i.e., meetings—not speech itself. The court had no patience for this obvious sophistry:
The fact that only mandatory meetings that convey a particular message and viewpoint are prohibited makes quick work of Florida’s conduct-not-speech defense.... If Florida disapproves of the message, the meeting cannot be required.
....Under Florida’s proposed standard, a government could ban riding on a parade float if it did not agree with the message on the banner. The government could ban pulling chairs into a circle for book clubs discussing disfavored books. And so on. The First Amendment is not so easily neutered.
There's more, but it's just the legalistic superstructure required in modern judicial opinions. For all practical purposes, the opinion can be boiled down to two sentences: Florida is trying to ban the private expression of certain viewpoints it dislikes. That is absolutely, positively not allowed by the First Amendment.
The three-judge panel that issued this opinion included two Trump appointees and one Clinton appointee.
POSTSCRIPT: The Stop WOKE Act also prohibits similar DEI instruction in schools. That was not at issue in this case and the court said nothing about it. However, a district court has already issued an injunction against the law as it relates to higher education.
Trend data suggests that antidepressant use is rising at similar rates among adults of all ages—in fact, perhaps at a higher rate among older adults. So, as a rough approximation, we can extrapolate growth among young adults to growth among all adults. If we use CDC figures from 2015-18 as a baseline, here's what we get:
If this is anywhere near accurate, it means that a third of white women are taking antidepressants. That's far higher than it is for any other race or gender. This has been true for some time, but the gap is widening and the sheer numbers are continuing to increase. What's going on?
Between the ages of 20-50, the number of people having frequent sex has declined by 7-10 percentage points. Burge is interested in whether this has anything to do with religion, but I have a different theory.
The early comparison period is 1989-1993. This was before the Prozac revolution really took off.
The later comparison period is 2016-2022. During this period, something like 12% of adults aged 20-50 took antidepressants.
A great many of these antidepressants are SSRIs or related meds, which have a well known effect on sex. That effect is to make it all but impossible. It's telling that Burge finds that sex hasn't changed much among Black protestants, which matches data showing that Black people use antidepressants at a far lower rate than white people.
This is speculative for now. A proper study would compare frequency of sex among different races and genders, which have substantially different rates of antidepressant use. Has anyone done that?
I spent yesterday at the Los Angeles Zoo, but before we get to that it's time to finally finish up my photos from the San Diego Zoo three years ago. This is a black-billed magpie, a handsome bird that's common in western North America. And with that, we're done with the San Diego Zoo.
October 9, 2020 — San Diego Zoo, San Diego, California
Surprise! Overall confidence is the same for both parties and the trendline is quite stable. But now let's tack on a few years at the beginning and end:
Average confidence has dropped from 35% to 15%, but all of the decline is concentrated in the post-Watergate era and the Trump era—and about equally for both parties. In other words, our decline in confidence isn't just a general malaise that's played out over the years. It takes specific events to trigger it.
