Month: July 2024

Did Joe Biden really appoint Kamala Harris as a "border czar"? Nope. Here's an AP dispatch reporting what happened:

Harris is tasked with overseeing diplomatic efforts to deal with issues spurring migration in the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as well as pressing them to strengthen enforcement on their own borders, administration officials said. She’s also tasked with developing and implementing a long-term strategy that gets at the root causes of migration from those countries.

At lunch today a friend urged me to revisit Biden's actual announcement. So I did. Here it is (cleaned up slightly):

I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that are going to need help in stemming the migration to our southern border.

....The Vice President has agreed to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders. We’re already talking with Mexico about that; she’s already done that.

This is about as clear as it could be. Biden was reinstituting an Obama-era program that addressed the "root causes" of migration from Central America: gang violence, drug trafficking, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and so forth. Harris was in charge of working with key countries on this and distributing $700 million in funding. Here's how it worked out:

Illegal migration from the three countries Harris targeted declined from 50% of the total to less than 20% today. In raw numbers, migration from those countries peaked at about 100,000 shortly after Harris took over and began declining after that. Total migration today is less than 30,000 per month.

If there was ever an actual border czar, it was and is Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security. Republicans know this very well. They even tried to impeach him for being a bad czar.

This is a sunbittern at the LA Zoo. After it flashed its tail at me I stuck around for quite a while hoping for a repeat, but this was the best I got. When it's fully spread out and up in the air it's pretty spectacular.

I grew up in the '70s, so naturally I like '70s music. I thought.

But a couple of days ago I had to take my car into the shop for some body work and I'm now driving a loaner vehicle. It has Sirius XM available, so I've been listening to their "70s on 7" channel on my drives to and from radiation treatment.

And.......boy, there's a lot of dreck! I'd consigned to the memory hole all the forgettable detritus the '70s left behind. I only remember the stuff I liked.

Oh well. At least the '60s are still great. Right?

Here's an interesting chart I ran into a couple of days ago:

The University of Michigan has long been the gold standard in consumer sentiment surveys, but Goldman Sachs has its own consumer sentiment index that it constructs by monitoring Twitter on a daily basis. As you can see, the two measures are usually pretty close.

But if I'm reading this chart right, the Goldman Sachs index suddenly skyrocketed in the month of June. The UMich index didn't.

What's going on? And if the Goldman Sachs index is correct, what on earth happened in June to cause a sudden bout of good cheer from consumers? Has the reality of a strong economy and low inflation finally had an impact?

I dunno. Stay tuned.

Conservatives sometimes say confusing things. I'm here to help with a short, and sadly incomplete, primer on conserva-speak.

What They Say	What They Mean
14th Amendment	Complete ban on abortion from the moment of conception. Usage: "We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights."
Bad apples	People we support shouldn't be criticized. Usage: "We can't condemn all police for the actions of a few bad apples."
Capital formation	Low taxes on investment income. Usage: "We need fiscal policies that encourage greater capital formation."
Consumer welfare	Leave big companies alone. Usage: "The goal of antitrust policy should be maximizing consumer welfare."
CRT	Acknowledgement of past or present racism. Usage: "Kids can be harmed when critical race theory is allowed in schools."
Death tax	Inheritance levies on heirs of millionaires. Usage: "Death taxes are un-American."
Deep state	The federal government. Usage: "The deep state is the enemy of all free men."
DEI hire	Dumb Black person. Usage: "Kamala Harris was obviously a DEI hire."
Dynamic scoring	Tax cuts are free. Usage: "Tax reduction actually improves the deficit if you properly account for the growth effects of dynamic scoring."
Energy independence	Oil drilling in national parks. Usage: "Our goal should be permanent energy independence."
Evidence-based medicine	Anti-vaccine. Usage: "I like RFK Jr. because he believes in evidence-based medicine."
Groomers	Gay people (or trans people). Usage: "Keep groomers away from our kids!"
Hoax	Any inconvenient scientific finding. Usage: "Climate change is a hoax."
MAGA	Nostalgia for the era when white men ran things and women were housewives. Usage: "Remember when America was a great country?"
Nanny state	Workplace safety rules. Usage: "The nanny state forces construction workers to wear expensive and complicated hard hats."
Originalism	A preference for the social values of 200 years ago. Usage: "An originalist interpretation clearly supports the belief that gay marriage is bad for society."
Premium support model	Higher payments for Medicare. Usage: "We propose replacing the current fee-for-service design of Medicare with one that incorporates a premium support model."
Red tape	Any regulations you don't like. Usage: "Red tape is strangling America."
Right to work	Non-unionized. Usage: "In the South we're committed to right-to-work workplaces."
Social discount rate	Climate change is no big deal. Usage: "If you use an appropriately modest social discount rate, the high cost of addressing climate change is plainly not warranted."
Social engineering	Improving things for minorities and the poor. Usage: "The military is no place for social engineering."
Virtue signaling	Opinions that make you feel guilty. Usage: "Liberals don't really care about racism. It's all just virtue signaling."
Waste fraud and abuse	I'm pretending to care about the deficit. Usage: "If we want to tackle skyrocketing spending, we need to start by reining in waste, fraud, and abuse."
Work disincentives	Welfare spending. Usage: "Payments to low-income individuals are disincentives to work."

On Sunday our planet broke its old temperature record, set just a year ago. We have about 450° to go before we set a record for the solar system, but this is still impressive performance.

Today I got test results for my other cancer. It turns out the news on the multiple myeloma front isn't especially good or bad:

After shooting up from zero to 0.31 last month, my M-protein level increased to 0.38 this month. Going up is obviously bad, but at least it slowed down a lot.

I'll probably be heading back to City of Hope again in a month or two for yet another multiple myeloma treatment. The most likely candidate is a new drug called a bispecific, which is sort of like CAR-T except that it attacks two antigens, not just one, and it requires no genetic engineering. It has a moderate success rate.

The Washington Post reports today on a new project to reduce the national debt. It comes from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which asked seven think tanks to propose detailed plans for cutting the deficit.

This sounds like typical think tank wankery, but I suppose the seven tanks should be praised for being willing to put concrete numbers on the table. I was especially interested in Peterson's own plan:

Set aside their proposal to raise the retirement age, which is a weird obsession of deficit hawks that will never go away. Instead, just look at the totals: they propose $3.2-3.8 trillion in tax increases compared to $0.2 trillion in benefit cuts. For a center-right organization, this is surprisingly sensible. In the real world there's zero support among the public for significant cuts to Social Security and Medicare. There's zero support for cuts to the defense budget. And despite big talk, the rest of the budget is too small to make much of a difference even if you slash it. That leaves only social welfare, and the truth is that even among the most hard-hearted MAGA jerks, there's hardly any stomach for balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.

Bottom line: You can raise taxes or you can run big deficits. That's it. There's no magic economy booster that will do the job and no sizeable amount of waste fraud 'n' abuse to cut painlessly. Outside of fantasyland, this is all there is.

From CBS News:

The number of migrants unlawfully crossing the U.S. southern border has continued to drop markedly in July, nearing a threshold that would require officials to lift a partial ban on asylum claims enacted by President Biden, according to internal government data obtained by CBS News.

For the record, this means the month of July will end up looking approximately like this:

But this isn't what I'm really interested in. What I want to know is why Camilo Montoya-Galvez is always given early access to these numbers. Is it a leak, and Border Patrol officials can't figure out who's the mole? Is Montoya-Galvez just the only person who asks? And if the figures are maintained on a daily basis, why not release them on a daily basis? Or monthly but, say, two days after the end of the month since they're apparently available then?

What's the deal with this?

Another year, another Surface. Microsoft introduces a new Surface Pro every year or so and I dutifully buy a new one every time. I've lost count of how many old ones I have stuffed into a filing cabinet in my study.

Why do I buy a new unit so often? In general, it's because I spend at least six or seven hours using it every day, so I want to have the latest and greatest. More specifically, it's because I get suckered endlessly into hoping that the latest model will finally have decent battery life.

They never do. Every new generation of Intel processors is slightly more efficient, but that only produces about 30 minutes of extra life per generation. Last year Microsoft switched to an ARM processor and I was hopeful that would finally do the trick. It didn't.

Ditto for the Surface Pro 11, the second generation to use an ARM processor. And while all of these small improvements have added up over the years, the Pro 11 still gets only 7-8 hours of real-life use.

But! Microsoft made another change in the newest Surface: it now has an OLED screen instead of the older LCD screen. As near as I can tell, the screen looks about the same but it's considerably brighter. That means I can turn down the screen brightness compared to the older models.

And that finally made the difference. Combined with years of incremental improvements, the lower screen brightness means I finally get about 9-10 hours of use on a single charge. That's almost always enough to get me through an entire day.

So that's that: After eleven iterations the Surface Pro is finally an all-day tablet. Huzzah!

POSTSCRIPT: Anything else to say, Kevin? Not really. I guess it still doesn't play games very well, but I wouldn't know. Aside from that, everything works fine aside from a few minor bugs in handling touch input. The new Snapdragon processor is noticeably faster than the Pro 10, which is nice. The screen looks good, as always. It's also still heavy, as always.