Month: May 2024

Another headline this morning:

It turns out that "historians confirm" means two (2) historians say there's a lot of stuff going on right now.

So far I've heroically ignored the ongoing saga of Kristi Noem shooting her 14-month old dog, but seriously, what the hell is going on with her?

Noem really, really needs to STFU about this. How many dogs does she have her sights on?

Young people are TIRED!

Just stop it. Joe Biden ended the Afghanistan war and cut American drone strikes nearly to zero. The US is not currently fighting any major wars and in 2022, for the first time in decades, reported no civilian deaths due to US combat.

Health insurance coverage has steadily increased among the young for the past decade:

And infrastructure is not "crumbling" by any stretch of rhetoric. Even the always dour American Society of Civil Engineers says as much: its most recent report gives US infrastructure its highest grade in more than a quarter of a century.¹ Spending on infrastructure has increased by a quarter since 2000:

There is a relentless drumbeat of claims on both sides of the aisle that America is falling apart at the seams and _________ has it worse than ever in living memory. But it's just not true. Wages are high for every demographic group you can name; life satisfaction is steady; unemployment is low; drug abuse overall is down; our educational system is good; poverty is declining; we have more entrepreneurs than any country in the world by a wide margin; democracy is alive and well; our economy is the envy of the world; social welfare spending is generous; and a future of driverless cars, artificial intelligence, medical revolutions, and abundant energy is practically on our doorsteps. Even our demographic problems are about the least bad of any advanced economy—thanks, in part, to our supposed problem of too much illegal immigration.

Everyone has personal problems. Every country has national problems. The fact that we have problems is completely normal. But honestly, our problems right now are about as mild as they've been in our entire history.

¹Their 2021 report gave infrastructure a grade of C-. By ACSE standards this is roughly an A+.

A reader comments on generational views of Israel:

I see three generational views. My parents, who see Israel as it was in the 1960s and 1970s: constantly at risk of annihilation. Then there's my generation, that sees Israel as a strong democratic island in a sea of totalitarian neighbors. And the younger generation, that sees Israel as an oppressor.

This is probably more accurate than my young-old division.

What makes the Israel-Palestinian conflict so intractable is that both sides view themselves as besieged minorities fighting for their lives against implacable foes. And they're both right. Israel has fought since its beginning against the entire Arab world, which surrounds them and is massively larger. But in the specific fight of Palestinians against Israel, it's the Palestinians who are overwhelmed by a larger and far more powerful enemy.

Even in theory, I'm no longer able to conceive of a plausible resolution. The West Bank is now too carved up to support a Palestinian state, which means a two-state solution is effectively impossible. And a one-state solution is intolerable to both sides. The status quo is abhorrent—one of the few things everyone agrees on—but it's all we have.

The number of cases decided by the Supreme Court has plummeted over the past 50 years:

LA Times culture critic Mary McNamara is oddly angry about the fact that Ozempic can sometimes make women more fertile. I say "oddly" because this is just one of the hundreds of side effects of popular drugs and no one even knows if it's very common. Most of the evidence so far is from TikTok, and research is ongoing.

Anyway, this quickly turns into a more general complaint:

Conditions that predominantly affect men also receive more attention and funding than those that affect women: Despite ranking fifth in lethality among cancers, for instance, ovarian cancer comes 12th in terms of the resources devoted to it.

I get a little tired of this stuff. Ovarian cancer has a high death rate, but it's also uncommon and thus has only a small number of deaths. It ranks around 14th in actual deaths, so 12th in resources is about what you'd expect.

Besides, why cherry pick ovarian cancer when there's a far more obvious comparison available? The two most common cancers, prostate cancer and breast cancer, are nearly identical. They both produce about 300,000 new cases and 40,000 deaths per year. But breast cancer receives more than twice the funding of prostate cancer and about a thousand times more publicity.

The other evidence of bias against women is equally thin. McNamara links to a study suggesting that illnesses that mostly affect women get less funding, but this turns out to be based largely on things like mental illness and migraines, which affect women only modestly more than men. In any case, six of the eight most burdensome diseases affect mostly women, while five of the eight most funded diseases affect mostly women. That's not a big difference.

I wouldn't bring this up except that it's all too common. We've become far too insistent that the medical industry must be unfair to women and minorities just because it has been historically. So writers keep lazily googling and linking to the same few studies, most of which are either low quality or don't say what activists think they say. Biases surely remain in health care, but they're nowhere near as widespread as a lot of people seem to believe. Tuskegee ended more than 50 years ago. Black maternal mortality is unlikely to be a result of racism. Women are not excluded from clinical research studies. Medical students don't have lots of false racial misconceptions. Depression, breast cancer, and other "women's diseases" get tons of funding. Medicare doesn't cover Viagra.

I understand the desire to stay focused on bias and mistreatment in health care, but we shouldn't do it at the expense of promoting outdated and discredited narratives that have long since become little more than urban legends.

Opinion about the Gaza protests at college campuses obviously differs between Muslims and Jews and between Republicans and Democrats. But the key difference is this one:

The experience of older Americans was shaped by an era in which Israel was repeatedly attacked by Arab states (and nonstates) and was forced to defend itself against relentless Palestinian terrorism. It may have since become a brutal, paranoid country, but oldsters understand why it's become that way and therefore retain some sympathy for Israel.

Younger Americans have experienced none of that. They've grown up almost exclusively in the Netanyahu era, during which Israel blockaded Gaza; built up the West Bank in a way deliberately intended to eliminate any possibility of a Palestinian state; and kept Palestinians under harsh military occupation. Palestinians have been (relatively) peaceful over the past 20 years but Israel has nonetheless treated them viciously and oppressively for seemingly little reason.

Of course, old people eventually die, and Israel shows no signs of changing its ways. In another 20 years there will be almost no one left who remembers anything good about the country.

Charlie has been under the weather a bit, so we finally took him to the vet and shot him up with antibiotics. He perked up immediately and, as you can see, is looking fine now.

However, the whole affair was traumatic for Hilbert. As soon as he saw us put Charlie in the cat carrier he ran away and hid.

The American economy gained 175,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 85,000 jobs. Yuck. The headline unemployment rate ticked up to 3.9%.

Average weekly earnings dropped 1.1% in April on an annualized basis. Adjusted for inflation, that's a decline of nearly 6%. That's a big drop. The Fed certainly shouldn't have any further illusions about the economy overheating or worker pay increases driving inflation.

Things that are fake according to Donald Trump:

Crime statistics from the FBI.

Job figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

2020 election results from half a dozen different state officials.

Reports that he continually falls asleep during his hush money trial, confirmed by numerous eyewitnesses.

The trial itself, being conducted by the state of New York.

News that he said Alvin Bragg should be prosecuted, recorded on video.