Month: May 2024

Atrios is deeply angry about Joe Biden rejecting an order from the International Criminal Court for Israel to halt their offensive in Rafah:

I wish some good faith people (many people are not) would UPDATE THEIR PRIORS, as the kids say, a bit about Biden and recognize that they spent months running interference for him on this while his critics, who they attacked, were completely correct about how Biden's every fake criticism of Israel was indeed fake!

....I don't like what is happening and I also don't like being lied to by people who can barely pretend that their lies even have to be convincing. Bring back Ari Fleischer if that's the governing style you are embracing! He was at least good at this shit!

I continue to be puzzled not by the difference of opinion, but by the level of outrage. If you were already opposed to Israel, then of course everything Biden has done is appalling. But if, like Biden himself, you have long supported Israel and hated Hamas, then things look a whole lot more complicated.

Biden supports the offensive in Gaza and always has. Naturally that means he also gives Israel every benefit of the doubt, as we all do for people and causes we support. Nor is it just Biden. Democrats recently voted all but unanimously to transfer more lethal aid to Israel—the vote was 176-37 in the House and 46-2 in the Senate.

Biden deeply supports Israel, deeply hates Hamas, and has increasing doubts about how Israel is fighting the war. He's pushed Netanyahu on this, but there's a clear limit to how far he's willing to push. There's nothing fake about any of this, and Biden has been pretty clear about his position from the start. He might be wrong, but he's not lying about anything.

There's a very peculiar article making the rounds from the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news site. The gist of the piece is that ever since 2020, when Jennifer Lucero took over as dean of admissions for the UCLA Medical School, diversity has ruled the day and standards have plummeted:

Race-based admissions have turned UCLA into a "failed medical school," said one former member of the admissions staff. "We want racial diversity so badly, we're willing to cut corners to get it."

....In some of the cohorts [Lucero] admitted, more than 50 percent of students failed standardized tests on emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics.... That uptick coincided with a steep drop in the number of Asian matriculants and tracks the subjective impressions of faculty who say that students have never been more poorly prepared.

.... "UCLA still produces some very good graduates," one professor said. "But a third to a half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified."

Needless to say, I know nothing about UCLA and nothing about medical school. But I can read. First off, here's a chart from the article itself showing admission demographics at UCLA med school:

Sorry about the fuzziness. But the bottom line is pretty clear: between 2019 and 2022, the number of non-white and non-Asian students increased by 30. Even in the worst case, if every single one of these students was woefully unqualified, that's about 17% of the class. How do you get from there to "a third to a half"?

Then there's this:

The average MCAT score of UCLA's incoming classes has gone up. Average GPA has also gone up, as has selectivity. Those are very strange stats for a bunch of kids who are supposedly barely functional.

And there's this about the admissions process:

Race is rarely mentioned outright, and unlike the committee for anesthesiology residents, the committee for students does not see the race or ethnicity of applicants.

If the admissions committee doesn't see the race of applicants, how can Lucero and her allies be badgering everyone into admitting fewer Asians and more Hispanics?

Nothing about this adds up. As it happens, though, the article also notes something else: UCLA recently changed its curriculum so that students start doing clinical rounds in their second year, instead of their third. It's certainly possible—inevitable, even—that this would lead to students being considerably less prepared for rounds. And it might be responsible for lower grades on the "shelf exams" that follow rotations. Who knows? Maybe this new curriculum is a failure. But even if it is, it has nothing to do with race.

The article itself is entirely blind: not a single critic of the school is named. Nor is there any acknowledgement of rising admission standards. There's just a complaint that one of the first year classes is "Structural Racism and Health Equity." I'd take this piece with a very large grain of salt.

Isn't this a cute Viennese kitten? So adorable.

What's that? It doesn't look quite real to you? Fine. But I never came across any cats in Vienna, and now that I'm home my sister still has custody of Hilbert and Charlie. So this is the best I can do. I promise real live catblogging next week.

Here's an interesting thing. A recent Emerson College poll asked voters what their most important issue was. Very standard stuff. But here are the replies from Trump supporters:

Trump supporters literally care about only two things: immigration and the economy. Every other issue is background noise. By contrast, here are Biden supporters:

The economy is #1 again—I think there's a national law that the economy always has to be #1—but after that there's a much more normal distribution. Democracy, abortion, health care, and immigration all rank higher than the #3 issue from Trump supporters.

Aside from the economy, then—which is always with us—it appears that Republicans are essentially single-issue voters on immigration these days.

Matt Yglesias had a long rumination about Israel and Zionism yesterday that matches a lot of my thinking. My shorter version is more or less this:

Zionism was solely a movement of the first half of the 20th century. In 1948, when the UN created Israel, Zionism won—and thereby wrote itself out of existence. There is now nothing more to Zionism than the belief that Israel was legitimately created and has a right to exist. Arabs initially refused to accept this and declared war on Israel, but they lost in 1949 and that was that—or should have been. Instead they kept on starting wars and losing even more territory to Israel every time they were defeated. That's hardly exceptional: Gaining territory by war is mankind's oldest way of creating states, and peace treaties after losing a war are a close second—from the Congress of Vienna to Versailles to Yalta to Camp David and beyond.

Even the PLO finally accepted this in the '90s. Ditto for Jordan and Egypt. On the other hand, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, a bunch of dead-ender Arab states—and, apparently, a lot of US college students—still don't accept Israel's right to exist. It's kind of ridiculous, like not accepting the right of the US to exist even though, obviously, it does and has no intention of stopping.

The short version of all this is that the question "Are you a Zionist" is no more sensible than "Do you support independence for the United States?"¹ It's a question that made sense once upon a time, but no longer. All that's left is whether you refuse to accept something that even the PLO has accepted for more than three decades.

¹A country created by war from 1776-1781 and confirmed by peace treaty in Paris in 1783.

With literally only a few minutes of work, I recently booked (a) high-speed phone data for a month outside the US, (b) travel insurance, (c) a car to LAX, (d) a flight to Prague via Helsinki, (e) an Uber to the hotel, (f) a cruise down the Danube, (g) a hotel in Vienna, (h) transit passes for the city, (i) an Uber to the airport, (j) a flight back to LAX via London, and (k) a car back home.

Every one of these things was precisely on time, went off without a hitch, and took only a few clicks to buy. It is worth stopping occasionally to boggle at the fact that this is now so completely routine.

As you read this, Marian and I are over the Atlantic Ocean on the way home. It's goodbye to Austria.

This is a gelateria store at Schwedenplatz on Sunday night. It's crowded because it was Pentecost and everyone had Monday off. It also happened to be the night I worked up the energy to haul my camera around for a few hours to take some nighttime pictures of the city.

Bob Somerby summarizes the hush money case against Donald Trump this way:

To convict Donald Trump of a felony, the jury must find that he falsified business records (or directed that they be falsified) with “the intent to commit another crime.”

But what is that "other crime"? Bob is unhappy that our press corps remains fuzzy on this topic, but it's not really their fault. The fault lies with the prosecution team, which has itself been fuzzy on the topic.

Presumably, they'll have to finally sharpen up their case when they make their closing arguments to the jury next week. But until they do, the rest of us can only make educated guesses.¹

¹My guess is that they'll say the records were falsified in order to cover up the fact that the hush money was effectively an unreported campaign contribution. But that didn't convince a jury in the John Edwards case, so maybe they'll end up emphasizing something else.

Behold the latest deep dive from Axios about Joe Biden's economic troubles:

Credit where it's due: the numbers are correct. But come on. Is it really plausible that Biden's big problem is that fast food prices are up 3.8% compared to wages?

Biden has three problems, ranked from biggest to smallest:

• Fox News etc. have run a scorched earth campaign of lies about how the economy has collapsed since Biden's inauguration. This is displayed pretty obviously by polls showing huge differences in economic outlook between Democrats and Republicans.
• The left has joined with the right because their very existence seems to hinge on convincing everyone that poor people are worse off than ever.
• The press is biased against good news—which is admittedly boring—and seems to be really reluctant to report on our current favorable economic climate. I'm not sure why.

That's about it. Slight real increases in Big Mac prices are not the problem.

From the Washington Post:

Long before Key Bridge collapse, Baltimore mariners warned of ‘ship strikes’

I wish news outlets would quit with this stuff. Every time a disaster of some kind takes place they manage to dredge up someone who warned about it. You know why? Because someone, somewhere has warned about every conceivable disaster known to the imagination of man.

In this case, it appears that a guy named Joe Smith repeatedly brought up the risk of a large ship hitting the Key Bridge at meetings of the Baltimore Harbor Safety and Coordination Committee. Then Smith retired in 2014 and no one else took up the cause. This is apparently because the committee mostly agreed that adding protection would cost nearly $100 million and the benefit was very hard to quantify.

In retrospect, you can always find something like this. But did the Post ever notice it before the bridge collapsed? That's the only time it counts.