Month: May 2024

From the Washington Post:

The top U.S. general in Afghanistan during the American military’s 2021 withdrawal repeatedly warned Washington that security would get “very bad, very fast” after troops departed, but the Biden administration still failed to grasp the danger in keeping its embassy open with only nominal protection, he told lawmakers investigating the war’s deadly endgame.

Again? Aside from a lone suicide bomber, the withdrawal proceeded remarkably smoothly after a single half (½) day of chaos at the start. The embassy, in particular, was fine, and performed heroically throughout the entire time—something the State Department has long deserved more credit for. In the end, we evacuated more than 100,000 people under the most stressful conditions imaginable.

The Biden administration deserves credit for staying the course and finally getting us out of Afghanistan. The military deserves credit for implementing a massive evacuation plan and executing it well. The State Department deserves credit for staying open at the airport and risking their lives to process papers for a huge number of evacuees.

Republicans in Congress, by contrast, deserve nothing but jeers for continuing to try to find somebody to blame for those CNN pictures on August 16 that lasted for a grand total of about four hours. As usual, they should be ashamed of themselves, but they aren't.

The Washington Post reports today that consumer sentiment softened this month. That's true enough. But they also say this:

That pessimism is altering consumers’ spending habits. McDonald’s, Home Depot, Under Armour and Starbucks all recently reported disappointing earnings, as people cut back on fast food, kitchen renovations, sneakers and afternoon lattes.

....Employers are adding fewer jobs, wage growth has decelerated, and Americans are holding off on big purchases like homes, cars and washing machines.

Come on, folks. Do we have to keep doing this? Nobody has to guess at consumer buying habits by looking at fast food, kitchen renovations, sneakers or afternoon lattes. Why? Because every month the government publishes a nice, tidy summary of all consumer spending. Here it is through March:

Whatever else you can say about the economy, consumers are not pulling back on spending.

And guess what? The government also publishes lots of other handy statistics! I'll spare you the charts, but real wage growth has been up steadily; home sales are down from their 2021 boom year but have increased lately; auto sales are up and have been steady lately; and durable goods consumption is up. Inflation has been hovering around 3% for an entire year, which is not especially dire. Hell, even consumer sentiment, which sparked this article in the first place, has been steadily up except for the single month of May—so it's a little early to be pretending there's some kind of downward trend.

It's hard not to feel like giving up sometimes. This is not arcane information. It's all easily available in a matter of minutes from FRED or the agency websites. So why does the Post publish a jumble of misleading or outright incorrect economic statistics instead of just looking them up first? I will never figure this out.

I've taken many pictures of Vienna, most of which will never get their day in the sun in the coveted competition to be named Lunchtime Photo. So here's a whole bunch of them: some that just amused me, others that are interesting but not photographically exceptional.

For example, parking in Vienna can be tight:

Sometimes this is because parking is really, really forbidden:

The best part of this festival of no parking signs is that every one of them has a slightly different set of regulations underneath it. I have no idea how anyone can figure out what they are and aren't allowed to do here.

Karlskirche has the following high above the altar:

These are the Hebrew letters for YHWH, or Jehovah. Is this common in Christian churches? I've never noticed it before.

Here's a painting at the Belvedere Museum (left). Compare and contrast it with the Haunted Mansion stretching picture from Disneyland (right).

One thing I noticed at the Belvedere—which is an art museum—is that a few of the descriptions included charts. My kind of art museum! But then I visited the newly opened (and free) Wien Museum and their exhibits were loaded with charts. For example:

The Wien Museum had tons of stuff like. Some were better than others, though. This one breaks a whole bunch of chart laws:

On the bright side, this is a welcome change from historical claims that Jews controlled all the money. This time Protestants are the villains.

The Wien Museum was recommended to us by our waiter at dinner one night, and it was pretty interesting. But also very eclectic and, for my taste, a little heavy handed on the wokeness. One display, for example, was titled "Architecture in the Service of Power," which perhaps was hardly necessary for an exhibit about buildings constructed during the 18th century height of empire. The best example, however, was for a reconstruction of playwright Franz Grillparzer's home:

First off, there's the earnest question, "Is the room original though?" Answer #1: this is a purely linguistic question that depends on how you define "original." Answer #2: Who cares?

At the very end, though, we get the coup de grâce: Today, we're told, we view this reconstruction not merely as a glimpse into the life of a famous person, but "through a lens of Biedermeier-period social relations and gender roles." Sure we do. In any case, here's the room:

But speaking of gender roles, another exhibit at the Wien Museum informed me that at 19th century Viennese balls the women were often given miniature reproductions to wear. Just think! You could have been the lucky gal who got to dance all night with a miniature Bessemer converter pinned to your gown:

Here's the Prater amusement park from high in they sky. It looks a wee bit different these days than it did in The Third Man—which, by the way, shows several times a week at the Burg Kino. We caught a screening on Saturday.

Finally, here's a picture of the Vienna subways—in this case the U4 picking us up at Schwedenplatz, our local hub for all things transit. According to Wikipedia, "It was previously called Ferdinandplatz, but was renamed after World War I to thank Sweden for sending aid to Austria."

President Biden really really needs to meet with the press and make a casual remark that he thinks Donald Trump will decline to testify at his trial because he has a loose mouth and it would be too dangerous for him. Nothing overdone, mind you. Not "He's too much of a coward to testify." Just a brief remark that Trump probably won't testify, and that's fine since it's his constitutional right.

Needless to say, this will almost guarantee that Trump testifies, which I would like to see because (a) I don't like Trump and (b) it would be entertaining as hell.

A couple of days ago at lunch I bought a Coke Zero and really struggled to remove the cap. One of the pieces that holds it on hadn't been perforated and it took a serious yank to finally pull it loose.

Meh. Bad luck. But later in the day I bought a carton of milk. When I opened it the next morning the same thing happened, and I yanked the cap so hard I splashed milk all over the room.

The next day I bought a bottle of water and it happened again. This time I was finally savvy enough to realize it was intentional—though I couldn't fathom the reason. Then, by chance, the Wall Street Journal explained everything:

In 2021, [Coca-Cola] introduced a design that connected some of its plastic bottles to their caps as a test in Germany and Spain and subsequently expanded it to other European markets. The change helps more caps get recycled with their bottles rather than thrown in the trash or on the ground, the company said. It also complies with a European Union directive set to take effect this summer, which has pushed Coke’s rivals to follow suit.

So that's the answer. Apparently people were tossing empty plastic bottles in the recycle bin but throwing away the caps in the trash. The new EU rules keep the caps attached, so the whole thing goes into the recycling bin.

Is it worth it? I suppose, though it really is a bit of a pain at first. After a few days, though, you get used to the cap brushing your cheek as you drink. Nevertheless, in America I'm sure it would provoke a whole series of congressional hearings from Republicans opposed to woke water bottles or something.

Our trip has been completely cat free. Not even a glimpse. But I still have some catblogging for you.

On the top is "Katzen und Fische," which I assume needs no translation. It's a 1781 painting by Martin Ferdinand Quadal in the Belvedere Museum. At the bottom, courtesy of my sister, is a picture of Charlie in the new cat scratching thingie we bought as a going away present.

Tyler Cowen points today to a new paper that investigates whether economists tend to talk their own book. That is, do they generally come to conclusions that fit their political leanings?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is yes, and I doubt that we need to bother with any more research on this subject. Tyler particularly directs our attention to this:

For example, we find that going from the most left-wing authored estimate of the taxable top income elasticity to the most right-wing authored estimate decreases the optimal tax rate from 84% to 58%.

That's a big difference. But it's notable that even the furthest-right economists can't manage to twist the evidence any further than a 58% optimal tax rate. That's a very high top tax rate by their standards.

Now, I assume that "optimal" in this context means "the rate that raises the most money"—not the rate that's fairest or most efficient. Still, this indicates that in terms of revenue raising, top rates should be at least 58% and probably closer to 70%. In other words, about what we had before Ronald Reagan wrecked the public fisc for good.

Today we went out to visit some museums and we had to wait two minutes for our subway train to show up. Two minutes! It's outrageous. Yesterday there was a three-minute wait for our tram and then a four-minute wait on the way home. Do they think we have nothing but time on our hands?

On a more serious note, the Vienna subway is fast. From our hotel to the museums is about 10-15 minutes on the tram and about 3-4 minutes on the subway. The subway doesn't have a lot of stops; doesn't stay in stations very long; and accelerates to pretty high speeds on long straightaways. Very impressive.

President Biden has already turned over to Congress the transcript of his interview with special counsel Robert Hur. But he's claimed executive privilege to hold on to the tape recordings. The Wall Street Journal is outraged:

The privilege claim is bogus on two grounds....

Oh for chrissake. There's no need to read any further. Of course his claim is bogus. But so is the claim from Republicans in Congress that the recordings play some legitimate role in their oversight function. They've already got a 400 page report from Hur himself; congressional testimony from Hur; and a transcript of the interview—all of which make it clear that Biden did nothing wrong.

Everyone knows perfectly well why Republicans want the audio: so they can find some excerpt where Biden stutters or slips a bit. Then they can gleefully release it amidst earnest claims that it shows Biden was hesitant or untruthful or confused or no longer remembers his own name.

Republicans have honed the art of the congressional investigation into a fine art, and I admit I'm a little puzzled that Democrats haven't done the same. They ran the January 6 investigation a couple of years ago, but that's about it—and Republican Liz Cheney was the driving force behind it anyway. Beyond that, they can't quite seem to bring themselves to bash away at Republicans in the same scorched-earth style that Republicans do to Democrats.

In a way, I'm thankful for that. The Republican style is obscene. Still, unilateral disarmament hardly seems right either.

You remember Daniel Perry, don't you? He's the guy in Texas who developed a hatred of Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 and wrote to friends about how he planned to kill a few of them. Eventually he did. He deliberately drove his car into a crowd of BLM protesters, claimed that one of them had maybe raised a rifle in his direction, and then gunned him down before plowing through the rest of the crowd to make his escape.

A jury—in Texas—unanimously convicted him of murder and sentenced him to 25 years in prison, but right wingers were outraged and Gov. Greg Abbott promised to pardon him just as soon as he could.

That turned out to be yesterday, and Abbott has followed through. Perry is a free man because, apparently, it's now legal in Texas to kill protesters if they annoy you a lot. This is disgusting beyond words. Perry's act was a brutal, cold-blooded, violent crime motivated by a long history of outspoken racism, but because he was acting out a conservative anti-BLM fantasy Abbott set him free. I'd say it's unbelievable, but these days that's not true. It's all too believable from a modern Republican.