Month: June 2024

Our kids are at risk:

The U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, announced on Monday that he would push for a warning label on social media platforms advising parents that using the platforms might damage adolescents’ mental health.

Every surgeon general wants to replicate the greatest all-time success in the history of surgeon generalcy: the campaign against smoking that eventually produced warning labels on boxes of cigarettes. Murthy is just the latest.

Oddly enough, though, I don't really oppose this very much despite its being based on thin evidence. The reason is that it really can't do any harm to encourage parents to keep an eye out for overuse of smartphones and social media, and it might do some good. Just on general principles, it's probably wise to encourage moderation even if overall social media panic is probably unjustified.

For what it's worth, the more I think about this the less I think social media is really to blame for recent increases in teen anxiety and stress. I'm not even sure there's been much of an increase in teen anxiety and stress—different surveys produce different results. But to the extent there has been, my sense is that it's more likely due to how we raise our kids. By insisting on keeping adult eyes on them at all times, we transmit a sense of ever-present danger and fear. By organizing their every activity, they never learn to do things for themselves. By overprotecting them, they never learn how to solve touchy problems on their own. Is it any wonder that by adolescence, when they have a natural desire to break free of parental control, they might be more nervous about it than previous generations? And don't even get me started on active shooter drills in schools.

I won't pretend there's an awful lot of evidence to back any of this up. The truth is that this entire bundle of teen issues is a chaotic stew of fear and unease backed up almost entirely by vibes, not firm evidence. Still, there are enough warning signs to justify concern, if not panic, and skepticism of both social media and modern parenting might help.

Ryan Delk wondered over the weekend why modern safety tech, like blind spot detection and lane departure warnings, haven't had any effect on traffic death rates. Here's my guess using an annotated version of his chart:

The safety features that have worked are the ones that keep you safe even if you get into a crash. Shoulder harnesses were made mandatory in the early '70s, and after a few years people started using them and survived more crashes. Air bags became common in the '80s, and a few years later fatalities dropped again. Side air bags became widely used in the 2000s, and a few years later deaths dropped yet again.

Plus there were other safety features introduced along the way, like crumple zones and collapsible steering columns. Those all helped people stay alive.

But the more recent tech doesn't protect you at all. It just helps you drive more safely. As it turns out, though, most Americans either don't use the tech or don't become better drivers because of it. I don't know if I'm typical, but I turn off lane departure warnings because they're annoying and I often don't notice the blind spot warning light until after I've already seen a car in my side mirror.

In the US, at least, it appears there's virtually nothing anyone can do to persuade us to be safer drivers. We chatter, we text, we eat, we cut people off, we fiddle with the radio controls—we'll do practically anything other than keep our eyes consistently on the road at all times. So far there's been no tech capable of changing that.

POSTSCRIPT: Please don't say that deaths are up because of bigger cars and SUVs. The evidence says otherwise, and anyway, common sense tells you that bigger cars might cause more deaths in other cars but would reduce deaths in the big cars themselves. It evens out.

MAGA conspiracy theories are legion, and it's hard to find comparable things from progressives. But I found one over the weekend, and it's rare enough that I want to share it:

Every word of this is correct. Trump did have a phone call with Putin on July 31 (and in person a month earlier on the sidelines of a G20 meeting). Trump did ask for a list of top spies a few days later. A couple of years later the CIA did report problems with their informants. And Trump did retain classified documents related to "clandestine human sources" at Mar-a-Lago.

So what's wrong with the inference of treasonous behavior from Trump? Only one thing: the meaning of spies in the second sentence. According to several reports, Trump asked for a list of the top executives at ODNI, presumably as a prelude to firing the ones he felt weren't supportive enough of his policies. These are indeed "top spies" in one manner of speaking, but they aren't undercover field agents.

Trump never asked for the names of human sources, and the intelligence services would never have complied even if he had. If you don't know this, the sequence of events described above does indeed seem ominous. Without it, there's nothing there.

Now multiply this by a hundred and you have a rough idea of what things are like in Fox News land.

The New York Times writes today about Black farmers who are upset that they've seen few results from programs designed to help them:

The promise of the debt relief program was dashed after groups representing white farmers filed lawsuits to block it, arguing that the federal government was engaging in reverse discrimination by awarding money based on race. The lawsuits were initiated by America First Legal, an organization led by Stephen Miller, a former top Trump administration official.

....The fund for farmers who have faced discrimination, which could include any ethnic group, has yet to pay out anything. The U.S.D.A. has employed outside firms to vet more than 60,000 applications. The money is expected to start flowing in August.

....The lack of progress has convinced Mr. Boyd that he cannot support Mr. Biden’s re-election bid. While he did not say that he was ready to back Mr. Trump, he suggested that the Trump administration had worked harder to help white farmers than Mr. Biden had for Black farmers.

This has gotten pathological. Students won't support Biden because Republicans killed college loan relief. Palestine supporters won't support Biden even though everyone knows Trump would be worse for their cause. Black farmers are angry at Biden because MAGA racists scuttled debt relief. Climate change hawks are mad because they've never heard of IRA. Immigration worriers think Biden is doing nothing because Republicans cynically stopped immigration reform. And voters in general are skeptical of Democrats because of debt ceiling and budget chaos caused by Republicans.

Has there ever been a president in history who's gotten less credit for his accomplishments than Joe Biden? It's one thing to be disappointed in a president who doesn't fulfill campaign promises, but it's crazy to be mad at one who has, even if Trump acolytes in the media and the Supreme Court have killed some of them. Their success in demonizing Biden has been nothing short of a master class.

Give or take a bit, 10 million Americans currently use Ozempic or a similar drug to lose weight.

Donald Trump has recently mused about reviving mandatory military service; replacing the income tax with tariffs; and the relative merits of drowning vs. electrocution. This is nutty stuff but it doesn't seem to bother any of his supporters. Why?

My guess is that the answer is twofold: (a) they don't think he's serious, and (b) they've wondered about stuff like this too. So why shouldn't Trump?

Conventional wisdom says that presidents should be more careful about random musings than the average guy at a bar. But the average guy at a bar doesn't see it that way. Why shouldn't a president toss around some out-of-the-box ideas now and then? Eggheads aren't always as smart as they think they are, amirite?

Nick Kristof wants to know what's wrong with liberalism on the West Coast:

Centrist voters can reasonably ask: Why put liberals in charge nationally when the places where they have greatest control are plagued by homelessness, crime and dysfunction?

Without being too much of a Pollyanna, I think Kristof is being misled by the problems in his home state of Oregon—and the city of Portland in particular. Let's take these one by one.

First, homelessness. Yes, West Coast states have the highest homelessness rates in the country, but it's not because of liberal rule. Liberals run lots of states and nearly all big cities. It's because housing prices are super high on the West Coast:

West Coast states are right where you'd expect them to be. The exception is Oregon, which has a higher rate of homelessness than California even though housing is a third cheaper.

Second, crime. Oregon and Washington have lower violent crime rates than the US average. California's crime rate has always been higher, but it's reduced crime more than average since the 1992 peak:

Third, dysfunction. I don't quite know what this means, but I might as well just quote Kristof on this:

Democratic states enjoy a life expectancy two years longer than Republican states. Per capita G.D.P. in Democratic states is 29 percent higher than in G.O.P. states, and child poverty is lower. Education is generally better in blue states, with more kids graduating from high school and college. The gulf in well-being between blue states and red states is growing wider, not narrower.

That doesn't sound very dysfunctional.

Homelessness is a real problem here in California, but the source of the problem has nothing to do with liberal governance. It's the fact that the people of California are (a) extremely opposed to building dense new housing, and (b) extremely opposed to building homeless shelters anywhere near their own neighborhood. That's nothing to do with liberalism.

There's no question that lefty legislators can fall into purity traps that produce some ridiculous proposals. Most of them never become law, though, and the ones that do don't usually cause much trouble.

All of us have narrow views of things based on where we live and what we do, but I feel the same way about Kristof's lament as I do when conservatives try to paint California as a dystopian hellhole. I live here, and all you have to do is look around. Things are fine. Not perfect. Every state has some serious problems, and California is no exception. But overall we're fine, and nothing much has changed about that over the past half century.

Reuters has uncovered a rather remarkable story of American disinformation during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. It starts in 2019, when the Trump administration decided to free the Pentagon from its normal tedious restrictions on psyops. In the case of Russia and China, it ruled, the military no longer needed approval from local diplomats before conducting an operation.

So it became the Wild West against China. In early 2020 China suggested the COVID virus might have actually originated in the US, possibly via a lab leak at Fort Detrick, and this apparently annoyed military planners so much that they created a COVID disinformation campaign of their own. In particular, they started a social media campaign against Chinese vaccines, much of it aimed at the Philippines. A typical Twitter post read, "Vaccine from China might be a rat killer. #ChinaIsTheVirus."

In Arab countries the Twitter posts suggested that Chinese vaccines were made with pork gelatin.

The State Department objected violently to these programs for an obvious reason: a campaign to increase suspicion of Chinese vaccines also increased suspicion of all vaccines—in countries we weren't at war with. Filipinos, it turns out, were fertile ground because they were already highly skeptical of vaccines, so who knows how many of them this disinformation campaign killed?

The timing of the operation is a little vague. The Reuters article says it continued from early 2020 through "spring" of 2021, but vaccines didn't even show up in the Philippines until March 2021. I gather that the disinformation campaign started before vaccines were available, but that's unclear.

So what put a stop to it? Two things: Facebook and Joe Biden. Facebook learned about the pig gelatin posts early on:

Facebook executives had first approached the Pentagon in the summer of 2020, warning the military that Facebook workers had easily identified the military’s phony accounts.... The Pentagon pledged to stop spreading COVID-related propaganda.... Nonetheless, the anti-vax campaign continued into 2021 as Biden took office.

Angered that military officials had ignored their warning, Facebook officials arranged a Zoom meeting with Biden’s new National Security Council shortly after the inauguration, Reuters learned. The discussion quickly became tense.

“It was terrible,” said a senior administration official describing the reaction after learning of the campaign’s pig-related posts. “I was shocked. The administration was pro-vaccine and our concern was this could affect vaccine hesitancy, especially in developing countries.”

By spring 2021, the National Security Council ordered the military to stop all anti-vaccine messaging. “We were told we needed to be pro-vaccine, pro all vaccines,” said a former senior military officer who helped oversee the program.

And that's not all. A Pentagon investigation in late 2021 uncovered the Philippines operation and more:

The probe also turned up other social and political messaging that was “many, many leagues away” from any acceptable military objective.

You may let your imagination run wild about what this was. Of course, the military also learned other lessons:

The Pentagon’s audit concluded that the military’s primary contractor handling the campaign, General Dynamics IT, had employed sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts, said a person with direct knowledge of the review. The review also found that military leaders didn’t maintain enough control over its psyop contractors, the person said.

If it weren't for those idiots, they would have gotten away with it. They'll do better next time.

Here are some headlines in the New York Times from the past year:

• Beloved Ostrich Dies at Kansas Zoo After Swallowing Worker’s Keys
• Beloved ’90s TV Show Finally Comes to Streaming
• A Beloved Artist Supplants a Corporation on a Concert Hall Marquee
• London Bids Farewell, for Now, to a Beloved, Overstuffed Walrus
• ‘Oh No, They’re Both Gone’: Beloved Maine Fishing Shacks Tumble Into Bay
• The Pure, Earthy Richness of a Beloved Jamaican Fish Stew
• Germany’s Beloved Dachshund Could Be Threatened Under Breeding Bill
• A Beloved Copenhagen Cafe Gets Serious About Dinner
• A Beloved Chicken and Rice Dish, Streamlined for Weeknights
• Insooni Breaks Racial Barrier to Become Beloved Singer in South Korea
• On the Brazilian Coast, a Tropical Town Beloved by Artists and Makers
• The Instant Pot Was Beloved. Now Its Maker Has Filed for Bankruptcy.
• To Stop an Extinction, He’s Flying High, Followed by His Beloved Birds
• Margaret Grade, Whose California Inn Was Beloved by Stars, Dies at 72
• Columbus Letter Beloved by Thieves and Forgers Sells for $3.9 Million
• Her Choice: Love, or the Lease on a Beloved Studio. It Took Some Thought.
• A Beloved Comedian’s Film on Domestic Abuse Draws Italians, in Droves
• After 128 Years in a Pennsylvania Funeral Home, a Beloved Mummy Is Buried
• Beloved Banyan Tree That Burned in Lahaina Fires Shows Signs of Recovery
• Red-Crowned Parrots Are Beloved in L.A. County. Who’s Trapping Them?
• Quotation of the Day: Beloved Pine Trees Vanishing in Rome
• Labor Dispute Closes Berlin, the Beloved Chicago Gay Bar
• Amazon’s Most Beloved Features May Turn Out to Be Illegal
• Beloved Tree in England Is Felled in ‘Act of Vandalism’

Oddly, this love affair with "beloved" appears to be unique to the Times. This is based on admittedly sketchy research that was hampered by the book Beloved, but other news outlets don't seem to have this obsession. What's going on?

POSTSCRIPT: The only headline I have any personal experience with is the one about red-crowned parrots in Los Angeles, which I'm not sure are really all that beloved. However, the LA Times informs me that San Gabriel resident Ceidy Baker Cordova, 44, "said the birds — who have their detractors due to their halting early-morning squawking — are “beloved” in the area." So I guess they really are beloved, by some at least.

The Department of Justice, headed by Merrick B. Garland, has told House Republicans—who held Merrick B. Garland in contempt two days ago—that it will not be pursuing charges against Merrick B. Garland, who is their boss.

I'm glad that's all cleared up.