Month: April 2024

A few days ago Damon Linker wrote a piece for the New York Times claiming that America is broken, and this is why people are so unhappy right now.

Linker makes his case by cherry picking a laundry list of bad things that have happened recently, and he's certainly right about some of them. Iraq was a disaster and the 2008 banking crisis exposed some deep problems in our financial system. On the other hand, I don't think he's right that our response to COVID-19 was shambolic or that our withdrawal from Afghanistan was humiliating. And he's flat wrong about homelessness: it's declined over the past decade.

And I can make my own list. Wages are up, unemployment is down, inflation has subsided, GDP is the best in the world, crime is declining, teen pregnancy is down, the uninsured population is down, we created a COVID vaccine from scratch in only ten months, vacation travel is skyrocketing, and everyone loves playing pickleball.

Nor is Linker right to say that we've failed to even respond to our failures. We passed a huge financial reform bill after the financial crisis. We've withdrawn from Iraq and been cautious about committing troops to other wars ever since. The Fed responded to inflation and Congress kept people solvent during the pandemic. Obamacare has addressed the health care crisis. A thousand people have been tried and convicted of the January 6 insurrection and Donald Trump will soon be one of them.

But put that all aside. We can agree to disagree. Because none of this matters unless people are, in fact, deeply unhappy these days. Our old friend YouGov asks about this every week and tells us this:

Over the past four years, reported satisfaction has gone up, happiness has gone up, and sadness has gone down. In addition, boredom, stress, frustration, and loneliness are also down.

Every four years someone tells us that this time people are really fed up with Washington. Maybe so. It's certainly true that people are increasingly unhappy with politics. It's also true that both the far right and far left are united in a sense of catastrophism. But there's not really a lot of evidence that this has changed voting patterns in the middle, and there's definitely no evidence that people overall are less happy or less satisfied with their lives than they've ever been. What does it take to pound that message home?

Inflation slowed a bit in March from its February surge. On an annualized basis headline CPI inflation came in at 4.6%, down from 5.4% last month. Core CPI was unchanged at 4.4%.

Groceries continued to show zero inflation in March. Transportation and medical care were up sharply. As usual lately, inflation in services was high and inflation in goods was negative.

On a conventional year-over-year basis, headline CPI was 3.5% and core CPI was 3.8%.

Every newspaper in the world is reporting today that California has spent $24 billion on homeless programs over the past five years. This is because the state auditor released a report saying:

According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, the State allocated nearly $24 billion for homelessness and housing during the last five fiscal years, or from 2018–19 through 2022–23.

In other words, this isn't news. It's something the LAO tallied up months ago. What's more, it sure seems to be wrong. Here's the most recent LAO report on homeless spending:

This adds up to $17 billion, and even that total is hugely inflated by COVID-19 funding that has since ended.¹ On average, in normal years, California has been spending about $2.5 billion annually.

That's still a lot. If you just handed it over to our 181,000 homeless people you could give them each $1,200 per month. It's hard not to wonder if that would be more efficient in the end.

It's very hard to say, though, because California has a huge tangle of different homeless programs—and the tangle is even bigger if you count city and county programs. One way or another, though, we spend a tremendous amount on homelessness and seem to get awfully little in return. The reason is sadly obvious: homelessness is not really a money problem in the first place. It's a housing problem, and it will keep getting worse if California resists building more housing and bringing down rents.

This is common knowledge. Everyone knows it, but local resistance to more housing continues regardless. So instead we spend enormous amounts of money trying to fix an unfixable problem. There is, after all, no way to house the homeless if housing doesn't exist.

¹Which is a mystery in itself. In 2021 and 2022, COVID funding allowed California to spend an extra $9 billion or so, and the result was an additional 14,000 people in shelters and housing. That's about half a million dollars per person housed, which doesn't seem especially cost effective, does it?

Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, has written a buzzy article at the Free Press about how NPR has recently fallen apart. He attributes this to widespread changes following the murder of George Floyd in 2020:

There’s [now] an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.

I haven't listened to NPR in decades, but I don't doubt there's some truth to this. Oddly, though, it comes only in the second half of Berliner's piece. In the first half he offers three examples of stories where NPR "faltered," and not one of them has anything to do with racism, transphobia, and so forth. Nor is it clear the NPR actually faltered much. Here they are:

• NPR ran lots of stories about Donald Trump's collusion with Russia but never issued a mea culpa when special prosecutor Robert Mueller exonerated him.
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  Mueller specifically said he never even addressed "collusion" because it's not a legal term. However, he did document a large number of links between Trump and Russia. These links are the things everyone was reporting about, and Mueller mostly confirmed that they had happened. He just didn't think they rose to the level of indictment.

• NPR ignored the Hunter Biden laptop story during the tail end of the 2020 presidential campaign. But the laptop later turned out to be real.
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  "Later" is doing a lot of work here. At the time the laptop story was dodgy in the extreme. The narrative about a blind PC repair guy who just happened to contact Rudy Giuliani was bizarre. Multiple outlets passed on the story before the New York Post ran it, and even one of their reporters was so skeptical he refused to allow his byline to be used. Other reporters who followed up on the story found nothing. Giuliani refused to let anyone examine the hard drive. There was never any evidence implicating Joe Biden. The entire thing bore all the hallmarks of Republican ratfuckery and deserved to be treated skeptically by reputable journalists.

• NPR consistently reported that COVID-19 had a natural origin even though there was plenty of evidence that it might have been the result of a lab leak.
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  In this case NPR was entirely in the right. The authors of "Proximal Origins," which supported the natural origins theory very early on, didn't have any secret doubts about what they wrote. There's no serious evidence that Anthony Fauci or anyone else manipulated evidence in favor of natural origins. The lab leak theory was motivated from the start not by scientific evidence but by (admittedly legitimate) suspicion of China's behavior combined with the coincidence of the virus breaking out in a city that contained a major biolab. The lab leak hypothesis has always been unlikely, and over time has gotten ever more unlikely. It's all but completely discredited now.

In all three of these instances, Berliner has fallen prey to a sort of conventional centrist wisdom that requires liberal reporters to bend over backward in order to be "fair" to right-wing inventions. But at least in these three cases, conservatives don't have a leg to stand on. Berliner is accusing NPR of nothing more than exercising pretty good editorial judgment.

Today the Arizona Supreme Court ruled 4-2 that abortion in the state is completely illegal unless the mother's life is in danger. Because I like to torture myself, I read the opinion to find out what they based that on. If you also like to torture yourself, read on.

Arizona has long had a law on the books that bans abortion. It became inoperative in 1973 under Roe v. Wade, so in 2022 the Arizona legislature attempted to restrict abortion as much as they legally could by passing a law that banned abortion after 15 weeks.

Both common sense and the law recognize that if you specifically restrict something under certain circumstances, you are implicitly allowing it in all other circumstances.¹ This means the 2022 law implicitly allows abortion before 15 weeks, and since it was passed after the old law it takes precedence.

The court agreed entirely, so that's not at issue. However, the 2022 law also includes a "construction note" that says:

This act does not...repeal, by implication or otherwise, section 13-3603, Arizona Revised Statutes, or any other applicable state law regulating or restricting abortion.

Section 13-3603 is the old law that bans abortion completely, and the legislature explicitly said it was not repealing it. This changes things. It's true that, taken by itself, the 2022 provision banning abortion only after 15 weeks would mean it's allowed before 15 weeks. But that's merely an implication—a strong one, but still an implication, and it can be overridden by clear textual language. In this case, the text says the longstanding ban on abortion is still good law even though it was unenforceable at the time.

The dissenters say the language about not repealing the old ban reflects mere legislative intent because it's contained in a construction note, not the statutory text itself. Therefore it shouldn't be consulted as long as the statutory text is unambiguous. That's a stretch. It is part of the bill, and seems pretty clearly to apply.

Like it or not, the majority opinion appears to have the better of the argument here. In Arizona, anyway, abortion is completely illegal unless the mother is in danger of dying. The legislature can change this anytime it wants.

¹For example, if a sign says "No parking on Sundays," that implicitly means you can park on all the other days.

A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about going out to take a picture of a SpaceX launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base. Not all the way out to Vandenberg, but maybe to Palos Verdes where I could get a clear view. But then the launch was delayed, and I never did it.

On Saturday I drove out to the desert for a bit of stargazing, and as usual I stopped off at Chiriaco Summit for provisions. When I came out, there was a rocket in the sky, so I grabbed my camera and took a few pictures. I was lucky to get them, but if I been out one minute earlier I would have gotten a really great sunset shot of the launch.

In any case, it was a Falcon 9 delivering Starlink satellites to orbit. Here are three pictures. The first is a closeup of the rocket itself. The second is the rocket trail. The third is the rocket trail about half an hour later. The star at the top is Jupiter.

Sigh.

The prostate biopsy results came back this morning and I have prostate cancer. It's "large and aggressive," but still probably treatable via normal radiation therapy. We won't know for sure until I get a CT scan and a bone scan that tell us whether the cancer is limited to the prostate or has metastasized elsewhere.

I'm not especially worried since prostate cancer is generally not too dangerous. That said, mine is either Stage 3 or Stage 4 depending on what the CT scan shows. For those of you who are savvy about such things, my biopsy samples had a Gleason score of 8 (on a scale of 2-10).

Sadly, this means we'll probably have to cancel our Danube cruise next month. Even now, my doctors don't seem to feel any big sense of urgency about this, but it's still best to treat it sooner rather than later. Blah.

It's a miracle! Suddenly conservatives no longer believe in a national abortion ban. It should be up to each state:

If abortion is murder, you'd think conservatives would be opposed to permitting murder in half the country. And until yesterday, they were. But the maximum leader has spoken, and anyway, haven't we always been at war with Eurasia?

Sen. Lindsey Graham didn't like Donald Trump's abortion punt this morning and issued a statement saying so. Trump hit back with half a dozen vicious posts on Truth Social:

“Many Good Republicans lost Elections because of this Issue, and people like Lindsey Graham, that are unrelenting, are handing Democrats their dream of the House, Senate, and perhaps even the Presidency," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, shortly after Graham issued his statement.

It's hardly a big secret that politicians often abandon their principles in order to win votes. But it's unusual to be quite so open about it. Trump has made it crystal clear that he wants Republicans to shut up about abortion because it's turned out to be a losing issue for them, and he went after Graham hard as a warning to everyone else to toe the line on this. He doesn't want abortion to be a campaign issue and he doesn't want Republicans to be feuding over it for the next seven months.

Aside from Graham, it seems to have worked so far. But for how long?

Global sea temps should have passed their peak a couple of weeks ago. Somebody forgot to tell them: