Month: April 2024

Over at the LA Times, Lorraine Ali selflessly spent a day on Truth Social and reports back:

Twenty-four hours of scrolling through posts from “Truthsayers” on the two-year-old platform explained why the site is tanking. In short, partisan echo chambers are stale, musty spaces that lack the sort of oppositional views needed to make social media tick. Truth Social feels like a MAGA town hall in a ventless conference room, where an endless line of folks step up to the mic to share how the world is out to get them.

The Truth Social feed I experienced was a mix of swaggering gun talk, typo-filled Bible scripture, violent Biden bashing, nonsensical conspiracy theories and more misguided memes about Jan. 6 “hostages,” trans satanists and murderous migrants than anyone should be subjected to in one day. Or ever.

This is supposedly worth $7 billion. Go figure.

A couple of weeks ago Aileen Cannon, the judge in Donald Trump's classified documents case, asked attorneys for both sides to write hypothetical jury instructions based on two scenarios. Scenario A: the jury gets to decide if any particular document is a "personal record." Scenario B: Trump gets to decide unilaterally.

This is based on a distinction in the Presidential Records Act between personal records, which outgoing presidents are allowed to keep, and official records, which they aren't. Today prosecutor Jack Smith refused to play along with the idea that the PRA has a role in this case at all:

That legal premise is wrong, and a jury instruction for Section 793 [the Espionage Act] that reflects that premise would distort the trial. The PRA’s distinction between personal and presidential records has no bearing on whether a former President’s possession of documents containing national defense information is authorized under the Espionage Act, and the PRA should play no role in the jury instructions on the elements of Section 793. Indeed, based on the current record, the PRA should not play any role at trial at all.

This is certainly correct as a matter of law, since the PRA doesn't cover classified documents. But Smith went further: Not only does the PRA not enter the case, he said, but Cannon needs to say if she intends to instruct the jury otherwise. If she does, he'll ask an appeals court to issue a writ of mandamus instructing her to follow the law.

Mandamus is very rare, sort of a "break glass" level of emergency. That makes Smith's brief essentially a shot across the bow, telling Cannon that if she goes ahead with something so completely wrong he'd have no choice but to ask a higher court to publicly spank her.

I'm sort of idly curious about what Cannon will do next. By now she must realize how badly she's screwed up, but does she admit it or does she just quietly accept the briefs from both sides and then never say another word about them? If the latter, will Smith let her get away with it? Or, does she have the gumption to stick with her plan and basically dare Smith to mandamus her? Stay tuned.

Peak snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is typically measured on April 1, so the numbers are in for 2024: we ended up about 9% above average.

The snowpack trendline is a little tricky because there are occasional super-years that make it sensitive to exactly when you start. But if you start with the earliest records, what you find is that average snowpack declined from 1950-90 but has been rock steady since then.

Still, that's rock steady at a level about three inches less than in the '50s. Any way you look at it, we're getting less rain and snow these days than we used to.

Next year the cannabis crowd will be celebrating their degenerate habit on April 20th. The same day as Easter! Can you believe these people? And just wait: If Joe Biden is still president, I'll bet the egg decorating contest will encourage kids to paint marijuana leaves on their eggs. This is what liberals have done to our country.

You heard it here first.

This is getting a lot of attention:

This is not quite what's happened. The Andrew Van Dam piece referenced here is great, but you really have to read the whole thing. Here's what he said:

• The "record number of bees" is almost entirely due to Texas. This is because Texas passed a law in 2012 giving tax breaks to farms that maintain a minimum number of beehives per acre.
• These are all domesticated honeybees. Basically livestock. They have nothing to do with wild pollinators, which are still in decline. Van Dam is pretty clear about this: "This does not mean we’ve defeated colony collapse. One major citizen-science project found that beekeepers lost almost half of their colonies in the year ending in April 2023, the second-highest loss rate on record.... The consensus holds that pollinators, like all insects, are in decline — losing probably 1 to 2 percent a year."

Bees. They're trickier than you'd think.

This is inside the palace of Versailles: the omnipresent fleur de lis surrounded by brightly finished goldwork. Does the decorating style of the Sun King remind you of anyone?

I have an update on judge shopping. Three weeks ago the Judicial Conference of the United States cracked down on the practice, but then they caved:

Following blowback from Senate Republicans and some conservative judges, judicial policymakers later clarified that the policy was discretionary, leaving it to each district court to decide how to implement it.

Discretionary. Hmmm. The Northern District of Texas is the most infamous destination for judge shoppers, so what are they going to do?

A federal court in Texas that has become a favored destination for conservatives suing to block President Joe Biden's agenda has decided not to follow a policy adopted by the judiciary's top policymaking body that aims to curtail the practice of "judge shopping."

Chief U.S. District Judge David Godbey of the Northern District of Texas announced the decision in a Friday letter.... In his letter, Godbey, an appointee of Republican former President George W. Bush, said the judges in his district met on Wednesday. "The consensus was not to make any change to our case assignment process at this time," he said.

So there you have it. In less than three weeks, Republicans were able to effectively destroy a years-long effort to solve a widely recognized problem. It's sort of remarkable. Even among conservatives there's no real justification for judge shopping and they don't even bother to offer one. They just want the outcome they want and that's that.

We've done it. We've now measured everything worth measuring, so we're moving on:

This comes from a paper about patents. The author believes he can identify "creative" patents by analyzing word pairs: if a word pair has never been used before, it's a sign that a patent is breaking new ground. However, old patents are digitized using OCR, which can produce lots of misspellings. This screws up the search for new and exciting word pairs.

So the author searched for misspellings in the entire corpus of US patents. After 1910 they become rare, so he limited his study to patents after that year. The chart above is perhaps TMI, but he included it in the appendix of the paper just to show that he'd done the work.

Benjamin Netanyahu on an air strike that killed seven aid workers delivering food to Gaza:

Unfortunately, in the last day there was a tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people in the Gaza Strip. It happens in war.

Is it just me or does Netanyahu sound slightly less than grief-stricken over these deaths?

We're still increasing the number of houses we build, but nonresidential construction declined in February for the second month in a row:

A couple of months isn't something to worry too much about, but it is a suggestion to keep your eyes on this.

The biggest drop was in health care construction, which surprises me since it feels like I can barely drive to the supermarket these days without seeing some gigantic new medical center breaking ground.