Month: April 2024

Over at National Review, Philip Klein comments on Mike Johnson's plan to force a vote on Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan aid:

It appears that House Speaker Mike Johnson is at his breaking point. Like prior Republican leaders in his position, most recently Kevin McCarthy, Johnson was willing to humor the pugilistic members of his caucus for a certain period of time, but he is now at the point where he no longer cares about their threats. He is willing to accept his fate.

The previous three Republican Speakers were John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy. Every one of them left in disgust with a roughly similar complaint: They were held hostage by extreme right wingers who cared only about getting hits on Fox News, not governing. Obviously nothing has changed.

This tweet was posted a few days ago:

Matt Darling reposted it but then added:

These numbers are also, fwiw, clearly wrong. 22% of Americans are not skipping meals to afford housing. That's massively above the USDA estimate of food insecurity.

This reminds me: the world is brimming with bad data from companies who use quickie surveys and clickbait toplines to get free PR. In this case, Redfin got Axios to bite, but they're hardly uniquely gullible. The Wall Street Journal publishes this junk all the time.

There's no hope of getting this to stop as long as media outlets remain eager consumers. So do yourself a favor and take a quick look at the source when you see charts like this. Reliability goes approximately in this order:

• National statistical agencies in reliable countries (i.e., not China).
• Well regarded international statistical agencies (OECD, World Bank, etc.)
• Academic research (but make sure you understand it).
• Well known pollsters (Gallup, YouGov).
• Commercial outfits that do consistent releases (Zillow, for example, or NAR).
• Commercial outfits that do research periodically on different subjects (McKinsey, for example, or Microsoft).
• Companies that sporadically release clickbait survey results.
• Dotcom companies.

The top five are mostly usable without a lot of skepticism. The bottom three should only be used if you dive deeper and decide the particular bit of research being touted seems to have been reasonably produced. One-off polls from people who aren't experienced with surveys very often suffer from poor design, bad question wording, and massive conflict of interest.

Sales of existing homes took a big tumble last month:

That's a 4.3% decline from February. However, even though these numbers are seasonally adjusted, it looks like every year sales peak in January or February and then drop off the following month. So this might just be normal seasonal behavior.

Donald Trump and a host of other scared Republicans would like Arizona to repeal its brutal 1864 ban on abortion. Here is the text of the legislation introduced in the state Senate:

Now that's a clean bill. However, while it has a chance of passing the Senate, it's already failed four attempts to pass the House—most recently today. Two Republicans need to vote Yes, but so far only one has come forward.

At the same time on the other side of the country, the Senate quickly dispatched the ridiculous Republican impeachment bill against Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Democrats voted to dismiss it without trial, robbing Republicans of their chance to grandstand about the border for a couple of weeks.

Long story short, this means abortion stays in the news and immigration stays out. Republicans are having a hard time getting control of the discourse these days.

CBP released border numbers last Friday and they were once again about the same as last month:

Total encounters in February came to 189,000, of which 44,000 were migrants who made appointments for asylum through CBP's mobile app. The number apprehended crossing illegally was 137,000.

The modern Trump empire is built mostly around licensing Trump's name to midrange Asian hotels and overpriced Bibles. So why not do the same in politics?

Just think of it as protection against being loudly smeared by.......Donald Trump. It's worth every penny.

Look at this cute little guy. It's a peninsular pronghorn, and he looks like he wants me to offer him a bit of kibble or something. Sadly, I don't know what pronghorns eat, peninsular or otherwise. Plus I didn't have any food anyway. And the zoo doesn't want you to feed the animals. The deck was seriously stacked against the poor guy.

It's remarkable how many of Donald Trump's policy positions are driven by personal pique:

• He opposes aid to Ukraine because they resisted his extortion attempts in 2019 and got him impeached.
• He hates wind turbines because they ruined the view from one of his Scottish golf courses.
• He wants to repeal Obamacare because President Obama made fun of him in 2011.
• He detests electric cars because GM once closed some plants in order to free up money for EV development. The plant closures infuriated Trump, who had promised to revive manufacturing jobs.
• He opposes the FISA anti-terrorism surveillance program because he's convinced the intelligence community has spied on him.
• He opposes shutting down TikTok because it would help Facebook, which took down some of his ads during the 2020 campaign and then suspended his account after the January 6 insurrection.
• He favors cuts to the FBI budget because they investigated his Russia ties and raided his Mar-a-Lago home.

I could go on and on. We all know about Trump's endless litany of grievances, which constitute most of his stump speeches, but not enough attention is paid to the way they affect concrete policy.

Part-time work has been steadily decreasing since the end of the Great Recession, but at the end of last year it suddenly started to spike:

I'm not sure what to make of this, if anything.

I've ignored this until now, but polyamory has been all over the discourse lately. Why? Is there any evidence that polyamory has increased?

I took a look around to find out. Scott Hocker pointed me to Bedbible.com, a site that publishes "product reviews of sex toys and personal lubricants that have been personally tested"—as well as some obviously bogus charts that we can ignore aside from their amusement value. Shadi Hamid points me to Google Trends, which shows no increase in interest at all except on Valentine's Day this year:

Dr. Russell Moul suggests it's because of a recent book, Why It's OK to Not Be Monogamous, by Justin Clardy, a professor of philosophy at Santa Clara University. But Clardy has been droning on about polyamory for years, with books and papers such as Love Hates Us; Polyamory in Black; Marriage and Black Polyamorous Non-being; and Monogamies, Non-Monogamies, and the Moral Impermissibility of Intimacy Confining Constraints. The book "situates ethical non-monogamy within the Black feminist tradition of progressive Black sexual politics [and] analyzes how marriage and monogamy are partially responsible for discrimination and social marginalization that African American polyamorists encounter across a range of social institutions in a post-civil rights era America."

Tyler Austin Harper points to another book: "At the center of the recent discussions is More: A Memoir of an Open Marriage, by Molly Roden Winter, an unsparing account of a polyamorous life." But that's all it is.

Jennifer Wilson at the New Yorker points me to yet another book, American Poly: A History, by Christopher Gleason, a lecturer at Georgia State University. The Amazon summary says "there has clearly been a growing interest" in polyamory—though it mentions no supporting evidence—and notes, "In the 1950s and 1960s it surprisingly emerged among libertarian science fiction writers." I think this is code for Robert Heinlein, but maybe there's more to it. In any case, this is a history of polyamory, and includes no evidence of growing popularity aside from the fact that people are chattering about it.

An article in Psychology Today from a couple of years ago says the US is now in its third wave of polyamory and "its current wave is the most socially significant and widespread by far." Young people, it says, use it as an adaptive strategy to deal with longer lifespans, the internet, climate change, poor job prospects, blah blah blah.

Anything else? The dating site Tinder, well known for its dedication to scholarly rigor, reports that 41% of Gen Z are "open" to non-monogamous relationships.

Are you bored yet? I am. As near as I can tell, there is precisely zero evidence of a rise in polyamory among the young or anyone else. It's getting talked about just because it's getting talked about. A self-licking ice cream cone, so to speak. Let me know if anyone has any actual evidence to the contrary.