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Just sayin'.

In case you're curious, real GDP per capita for the US increased at an annual rate of 0.84% during Donald Trump's four years in office. It has increased in California at an annual rate of 2.8% during the five years Gavin Newsom has been governor.

This is by no means exhaustive. It's just a short collection of some of the extremely presidential things Donald Trump has said recently. Needless to say, none of it is even remotely true.

  • "The transgender thing is an incredible thing. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation."
  • "Hard to believe, they have some states passing legislation where you can execute the baby after birth. It’s crazy."
  • "Look at Kamala ... every place she has touched has turned to shit!"
  • "Over the past 4 years, Kamala and Crooked Joe Biden have presided over an economic reign of terror, committing one economic atrocity after another."
  • "There will be no future under Comrade Kamala Harris, because she will take us into a Nuclear World War III!"
  • "The USA is not ready for a Communist President."
  • "MASSIVE SCANDAL! The Harris-Biden Administration has been caught fraudulently manipulating Job Statistics to hide the true extent of the Economic Ruin they have inflicted upon America."
  • Barack Obama should be hauled in front of a military tribunal:

Things Trump has tried to sell recently:

  • Gold sneakers: "People were going crazy for these sneakers. You probably were, too. Everybody was. Every friend I have had called me for a pair of sneakers."
  • NFTs: "Back by popular demand, my TRUMP DIGITAL TRADING CARDS, Series 4: The America First Collection, is available RIGHT NOW, and I think you’ll love it!"
  • Picture book: "My new Book, SAVE AMERICA, is out next week, and is already a Best Seller! I hand-selected each photo, and wrote the captions - It is a MUST HAVE for every America First Patriot."
  • Bible: "I'm proud to endorse and encourage you to get this Bible... You all should get a copy of 'God Bless the USA Bible' now."
  • Bitcoin sneakers: "Just spoke at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennessee on Saturday. It was GREAT! Get your Bitcoin Sneakers now."

The New York Times has an astonishing story today about the amount of money college football players are paid these days in NIL (name image and likeness) fees. Here are averages for the Power 4 conferences:

The SEC now pays its players three times more than any other conference. SEC quarterbacks are paid an average of $1 million per year.

It's unclear how any kind of competitive balance can be maintained with differences this big. There's still some attraction for kids to stay close to home and play for teams they grew up watching, but even that's been reduced by the transfer portal. Top players may still stay close to home as freshman commits, but by the time they're juniors and making serious contributions, the combination of the portal and big money will be too much to resist.

How does the rest of college football compete when the SEC can outbid them 3:1? Beats me.

Why have we mostly given up on ornamentation in architecture? Ross Douthat correctly says today (based on an essay by Samuel Hughes) that it's not because ornamentation got too expensive. Just the opposite: we can mass produce high-quality ornamentation today far more cheaply than any previous era—both in absolute and relative terms.

So what is it? Douthat has a suggestion:

From my perspective, the decline of beauty, grace and ornament in public architecture reflects a collapse of humanist confidence and religious faith, an abandonment of the assumption that human artifice is tapping into some deeper cosmic order, a fatal surrender to bad ideas about aesthetics and human life itself.

This is sort of typical of Douthat, but even putting my personal perspectives aside I think it's plainly misguided. To see why, let's dive down a little bit into what kinds of buildings we're talking about.

Houses. The typical house of yesteryear is clearly no more beautiful than even the dreariest tract house of today.

Mansions. That is, houses of the rich. Some of these were quite beautiful in prior times. But the same is true today. Fallingwater is unornamented but Instagrammable in a whole different way. Take a helicopter tour of the Malibu coast and you'll see hundreds of stunning mansions in all kinds of architectural styles.

The Sandcastle House and the Wave House on the Malibu coast.

Cathedrals. This is a matter of taste, to be sure, but modern cathedrals are often quite spectacular and ancient ones are sometimes nothing much.

Retail shops. These have never been anything special.

Factories. Again, using this in the broadest sense (everything from granaries to steel mills), these have never been anything more than functional boxes.

Apartment houses: As far as I know, these have always been ordinary rectangular boxes subdivided into rooms, usually built as cheaply as possible in order to maximize rental income.

So far, I don't see a case for much difference at all between prior eras and today. But there are two more categories:

Civic buildings. This is a tricky one. Were city halls in the past uniformly beautiful? Hardly. Some were, while others were fairly ordinary. The same is true of modern city halls. Ditto for concert halls, museums, arenas, and schools. Government buildings are probably uglier on average today. Overall, I might score this one in favor of previous eras, but it's a close call.

The Crescent Tower in Qatar.

Large commercial buildings. Now we're cooking. When people talk about ugly buildings, this is what they almost always mean: skyscrapers. The Chrysler building is beautiful while the World Trade Center is mundane. But keep in mind that skyscrapers have been around for little more than a century, so we're only comparing the early 20th century and the postwar 20th century.

It's true that modern skyscrapers are often plain glass and steel towers, but this is mostly for reasons of cost and modern taste, not because of a fatal surrender to bad ideas about aesthetics and human life itself. Those prewar buildings tended toward art deco and rococo, but it wasn't because they were built in the Middle Ages when large buildings were monuments to God. It's because that was the style of the time.

Long story short, complaints about modern architecture almost always revolve around big skyscrapers, and these are commercial buildings, not pieces of art.

There's also a recency bias at work here. We tend to remember only the old buildings that were spectacular and therefore are still around. We've forgotten the thousands and thousands of mediocre ones. The Pantheon in Rome, which started off Douthat's essay, is a case study in this. Most old Roman buildings didn't survive to the present day, but the Pantheon did because it was lucky enough to be transformed into a Christian church before looters got to it. What's more, it's not even that beautiful. It's just a big dome and a fairly pedestrian portico. It's impressive, and we tend not to build very many big domes these days outside of football stadiums, but especially viewed from the outside it's pretty ordinary.

The Sphere in Las Vegas. It's a very different kind of dome than the Pantheon, but is it really any less beautiful or impressive?

Long story short, I'm skeptical that architecture in general is any less beautiful than it ever was. Sure, downtown Peoria is probably pretty humdrum, though I'll bet downtown Feronia was too. And you'll never convince me that brutalist architecture is anything but a huge mistake. But if we could compare the entire corpus of ancient and Renaissance buildings with the entire corpus of modern buildings, I'm not sure I'd put my money on the old guys.

I went down a little rabbit hole this afternoon, so I'm going to drag you all down with me. You're welcome. It started with this:

Democrat authoritarians! I knew it was clickbait, but I clicked anyway. To Hemingway's credit her article was full of links, so I started clicking to find out what it was based on. Here's what I discovered.

Last year J.D. Vance bought a house in the liberal enclave of Del Ray, a neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia. According to Hemingway, this led to a campaign of hate and authoritarian tactics designed to intimidate Vance and his children. The story is full of filler, but when you plow through it this campaign turns out to have consisted of three things:

  • Several residents have posted mildly disparaging comments about Vance on Twitter.
  • A local activist, "along with their knitting community," put up some knitted protest signs near Vance's home. See picture for an example.
  • Last week, when the Secret Service asked to shut down a tiny park next to Vance's house, residents were sad. A local newspaper described what they did about it:
    .
    On Saturday afternoon, neighbors gathered for an impromptu celebratory wake for the park. Decorations left over from a Bachelorette party were hung from trees, neighbors brought hot dogs and donuts to share, and the park was filled with Taylor Swift and Chappell Roan music.
    .
    ....Several attendees wore shirts or buttons supporting Vice President Kamala Harris and the yards near Vance’s home featured multiple signs supporting Harris including one labeled “Cat People for Harris Walz” — a reference to Vance’s comments about Democrats being childless cat ladies.
    .
    ....“It’s no surprise that Del Ray would come out in the most optimistic and celebratory way,” said Sandy Marks, a co-host of local politics podcast Liberally Social and chair of the Alexandria Democratic Committee. “It’s sad to lose the park, but it’s good to keep it safe for JD Vance’s kids. We look forward to getting the park back.”

Like me, you are welcome to read the story, click the links, and decide for yourself if I'm describing things fairly. I am. When you take out both the incendiary language—the knitted signs are likened to the KKK's burning crosses—and the irrelevant filler—in 2017 a guy from Illinois shot a bunch of Republicans at a baseball practice held in Del Ray—there's nothing left. In fact, the folks in Del Ray seem remarkably mild and easygoing about having Vance as a neighbor.

But that's the Federalist for you. I wonder how long it will take Hemingway's interpretation to enter the canon of Republican grievance?

Donald Trump keeps digging himself into an ever deeper hole in the Cemeterygate scandal:

Trump claimed that he didn’t know “anything about” the use of the images on his campaign social media. “We have a lot of people, we have TikTok people,” he said. “You know, we’re leading the internet.”

Pressed on it again, Trump suggested the parents of the deceased service members he had accompanied may have been responsible for distributing the videos and photos. “I don’t know what the rules and regulations are. I don’t know who did it,” Trump said. “It could have been them — it could have been the parents.

No, it couldn't have been. It was his own campaign that did it. But now he's trying to blame it on grieving families.

What a contemptible low-life.

I see that Donald Trump has finally decided how he's going to vote on an initiative that would repeal Florida's six week abortion ban. He doesn't like six weeks, but he's voting No anyway. Why? Because Democrats in other states are crazy.

OK, sure, whatever. In reality, the Florida initiative would allow abortion until viability, which is roughly around 24 weeks. So Trump, who prefers 15 weeks, had to decide between 24 weeks and 6 weeks. I have to admit, that's a knife edge for the poor guy.

In any case, Trump must have felt that he had finally pushed his anti-abortion fans too hard and needed to throw them a bone. This was it.

Today brings another edition of Wall Street Journal Watch™. The topic this morning was people who have to work two jobs to stay afloat:

Sam Lalevee was scraping by in his job at a call center in Raleigh, N.C., when his rent jumped to $1,000 a month from $800. So he got a second job doing light and sound at a comedy club, joining a growing number of people who need more than one job to make ends meet in the postpandemic economy.

....The comeback of multiple-job holders speaks to some of the mixed currents in an economy that still boasts a growing job market, but has come with higher prices on a broad variety of goods and services, and essentials like rent and insurance.

The article is accompanied by this chart:

This is a badly designed graphic because they've insisted on starting the y-axis at zero. But put that aside. Technically speaking, nothing so far is actually wrong. The number of multiple jobholders has gone up since the start of the pandemic.

But in this case context is everything. Here's what things really look like:

The number of people with multiple jobs plummeted at the start of the pandemic and has now recovered to its old value. Over the long term, the number of multiple jobholders has declined steadily for the past 30 years.

Now, once you have this context you can decide for yourself what's really happening. You can correctly say (a) multiple jobholding has gone down substantially since 1994, (b) multiple jobholding flattened out around 2015, or (c) multiple jobholding dropped at the start of the pandemic and has now recovered.

What I think you can't do, if you're honest, is show just the last four years of this chart and then imply that the gig economy (or work from home or high unemployment or Bidenomics or...) is causing an unprecedented flurry of people getting second jobs in order to survive. That's just not the case.

I've finally gotten around to watching the entire CNN interview with Kamala Harris. For the record, it was half an hour long. It struck me as fairly ordinary, with Harris performing just fine. She didn't make any waves, but neither did she stumble or have trouble with any of the questions. Nor did she filibuster.

As usual among us political junkies, I was sort of stupefied that Dana Bash ended up asking about a grand total of four (4) actual policy issues: inflation, fracking, the border, and Israel. That's it.

However, I want to highlight one question in particular. Very early on Bash stated as fact that we have a "crisis of affordability." (There's that word crisis again!) This is flatly untrue. Since the start of the pandemic, wages have grown more than prices. It's common to believe that things are relatively more expensive than they used to be, but journalists should be in the business of telling the truth, not parroting mistaken perceptions.

Also worth a note: Bash seemed a bit incredulous when she asked Harris, "You maintain that Bidenomics is a success?" For the record, here are the most recent major economic readings in the US:

  • Real GDP: Up 3.0%.
  • Inflation: 1.9%.
  • Unemployment: 4.3%
  • Real wages: up 0.7% annualized since start of year.
  • Stock market: up 18% since start of year.

Every one of these is either good or excellent. What's not to like?

Here are the 27 questions Bash asked:

  1. What would you do on Day 1?
  2. There's a crisis of affordability.... What do you say to voters who want to go back on the economy, when groceries were less expensive and housing was more affordable when Donald Trump was president?
  3. The steps that you're talking about now, why haven't you done them already?
  4. You maintain that Bidenomics is a success?
  5. Do you still want to ban fracking?
  6. In 2019 you said "There's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking." So it changed in that campaign?
  7. What made you change that position at the time?
  8. Was there some policy or scientific data that you saw that you said, "Oh, I get it now"?
  9. You were tasked with addressing the root causes of migration.... Why did the Biden-Harris administration wait three and a half years to implement sweeping asylum restrictions?
  10. About bipartisan border bill: You would push that legislation again?
  11. In 2019, you raised your hand when asked whether or not border should be decriminalized. Do you still believe that?
  12. How should voters look at some of the changes that you've made?... Is it because you have more experience now and you've learned more about the information? Is it because you were running for president in a Democratic primary? Should they feel comfortable and confident that what you're saying now is going to be your policy moving forward?
  13. Will you appoint a Republican to your cabinet?
  14. Anyone in mind?
  15. Donald Trump suggested that you happened to turn Black recently for political purposes.
  16. Would you withhold some US weapons shipments from Israel? That's what a lot of people on the progressive left want you to do.
  17. No change in policy in terms of arms and so forth?
  18. To Walz: You said you carried weapons in war.... A campaign official said you misspoke. Did you?
  19. Did you misspeak?
  20. You didn't use IVF.... Your campaign made false statements in 2006 about an arrest for drunk and reckless driving. What do you say to voters who aren't sure whether they can take you at your word?
  21. To Harris: You were a very staunch defender of President Biden's capacity to serve another four years.... Do you have any regrets about what you told the American people?
  22. When Biden called you and said he was pulling out of the race, what was that like? And did he offer to endorse you right away or did you ask for it?
  23. And what about the endorsement? Did you ask for it?
  24. So when he called to tell you, he said "I'm pulling out of the race and I'm going to support you"?
  25. To Walz: I just have to ask you both about two standout moments.... Gus Walz saying, "That's my dad."
  26. To Harris: Viral photo of your grand-niece watching your speech.... What does it mean to you?
  27. Did she talk to you about it afterward?