Month: September 2024

We have generative AI that can write a PhD thesis or create a photorealistic video of a protein unfolding, but this is what we use it for:

Mike Braun, the MAGA candidate for governor of Indiana, took an old photo of his Democratic opponent at a small rally and replaced all the signs her supporters were holding. For some reason, he also gave everyone teal jackets, which seems unrelated. But what do I know? Maybe teal is the secret token of Bilderburg overlordship understood only by those in the know.

As it happens, this might violate Indiana law, but I find it hard to take seriously. It's a sign of the times, if you'll pardon the pun. I think every MAGA politico in the country has followed their leader into gibbering idiocy.

We've all been there: You check into Twitter, find some roiling meme in full fury, and say to yourself, "ffs, what now?" You shouldn't be forced to care, but because I'm bored; and it's the start of a long, dull dex night; and I'm just not a nice person, here's the latest:

Huh? But after a bit of cogitating, I got it: Trump is claiming that Kamala Harris's earphone isn't plugged into the phone on her desk.

The problem, I think, is that Trump is still stuck in the glorious years of his first presidential campaign, when smartphones had dedicated earphone jacks on the side. But Apple removed them and Android phones followed suit, and now earphones plug into the multiport at the bottom of the phone. In the photo above, you can see a bit of the cord exiting the phone, dropping under the desk, and then reappearing to the right. It looks just like the edge of the desk, and there's really no way to tell them apart, but there's no reason to think the cord isn't there.

Conclusion: Trump is a moron. Nonetheless, thousands of his MAGA fans are now convinced Harris staged a scene she had no reason to stage.

Don't worry, folks, I've got hours more mindless drivel like this on tap before I manage an hour of sleep. Don't say you haven't been warned.

"This is hard to watch," says Noah Rothman at National Review. Give me break. A reporter yelled out a question over a noisy tarmac that President Biden couldn't make out, hearing only the word "strike." So he said a few anodyne words about using collective bargaining to settle the looming port strike and then walked off.

As it happens, the question was about Israeli air strikes in Yemen. Biden misheard but that's all. Yet Rothman insists this is further evidence of mental collapse:

The president’s continued deterioration is more than a curiosity. Those near him knew his absence of mind could affect his performance in the event of a crisis — and a crisis is now upon us.

Hurricane Helene cut a 600-mile swath of devastation across the American southeast.... The stakes are high, and all eyes will be on the administration’s response to this disaster. The nimbleness of that response could weigh heavily on voters’ minds in impacted swing states like Georgia and North Carolina. Perhaps the president and his subordinates will earn high marks. But given Biden’s condition, that is a gamble.

Over-the-top stuff like this probably helped keep me a little too optimistic about Biden's condition over the summer. Can't give in to wackos, after all.

Beyond that, this happens to play into a longstanding pet peeve of mine: the president who rushes back to Washington when disaster hits so he can be photographed in the Situation Room looking stern and directing the response.

In reality, of course, the president has no more influence over disaster response than he does over a trip to rescue astronauts at the space station. It's all handled by FEMA and the Army and other agencies who have plans locked and loaded and ready to go. The president barely even has to give the order.¹

All the real presidential action is long over by the time a disaster actually strikes. The reason George Bush was eviscerated over his handling of Hurricane Katrina wasn't because of a silly dance he happened to be doing the day the levees breached. It was because he had spent the previous four years decimating and privatizing FEMA, eventually hiring the incompetent Michael "heckuva job" Brown to run it. When disaster hit New Orleans, it didn't matter if Bush was on the job or not. FEMA had fallen victim to ideological neglect and it was too late.

The same dynamic is true for every disaster. Either the president has long since put effective response teams in place or he hasn't. He could be on vacation on the far side of the moon and it wouldn't make a difference when disaster finally strikes. We should all grow up and stop pretending otherwise.

¹Although he can withhold the order, as Donald Trump was fond of doing to Democratic states hit by disasters.

As we all know, Elon Musk went nuts a few years ago. Nobody seems to know quite why, but it seems to have been brought on by frustration with California business rules; his dealings with unions; and liberals making fun of him. Since then he's become obsessed with the "woke mind virus," childbirth rates, and.......illegal immigrants voting for Democrats. The latter has produced a tsunami of tweets and retweets like this one:

This particular tweet is a sober-minded graduate thesis compared to most of them, but it lays out the argument in simple terms:

1. Democrats are deliberately opening the border to an army of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers.
2. ???
3. They will all vote for Democrats and democracy will be over.

The magic in the middle is that somehow all these illegal immigrants become citizens and start voting in large numbers. How? That's something of a mystery, since even the most liberal immigration legislation requires a waiting period of 10-20 years for citizenship. That might as well be the 30th century. The politician who risks his career over a possible advantage a decade away hasn't been born. Most of them think of the "long term" as next year.

Want more? Virtually all naturalized citizens have been in the country for many years and almost none of them arrived illegally. And anyway, of those who did most aren't even big fans of Democrats. A KFF poll suggests that among immigrants who are "likely undocumented," only 18% say the Democratic Party represents their views. This is not the stuff of landslides.

Musk seems like he's too smart to believe his own nonsense. Does he, really? Or is it all an act? But if it is, what's the endgame? Quicker FAA approval for his rocket launches? Starlink expansion into the hinterlands? Letters patent declaring him Emperor of Mars?

Or is he just nuts?

Here are two pictures of Karlskirche in Vienna. The top image is the usual panoramic view from ground level. But you're allowed to walk up and see the organ, and from there you get a different perspective, shown in the bottom photo. You can also see the illuminated glass installation hanging from the ceiling. I don't know if it's permanent or temporary.

Apparently it's becoming a thing on the right to claim that North Carolina is being ignored and Biden/Harris are slow rolling federal aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. This is nuts even from a cynical political perspective, since Democrats desperately want to win NC in November and this a great opportunity to show how much they care.

In any case, the reason you haven't yet seen huge convoys of trucks rolling into Asheville isn't because the trucks aren't ready. They're ready. But they can't get in until the water recedes and the roads are passable. Which will be soon.

The Army has been handling debris management and is gearing up to establish temporary power supplies near Asheville. FEMA is working with the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild washed out roads and bridges and connect cut-off communities. They are also working with the US Department of Defense to set up air bridge locations to airlift supplies into storm-damaged areas not accessible by roads. Initial staging has been set up at Ft. Liberty, and airplanes and helicopters will be used to bring supplies in by air.

FEMA officials say supplies for those stranded in western North Carolina have already been staged for delivery. According to the North Carolina Department of Transportation, those supplies have begun to be airlifted into place.

Three tractor-trailers full of water arrived in the county early Monday morning, enough to provide one day’s water supply for each resident.

Etc. etc. Private aid organizations are also starting to arrive in Asheville and elsewhere in western North Carolina. Before long, Asheville will be inundated with food, water, ice, blankets, tents, and insurance adjusters. It's all going perfectly normally.

Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, here's a map of every county in the US that relies on federal aid for more than 25% of its income:

The Journal's numbers show that over the past 20 years the number of Democratic counties feeding heavily at the federal trough has increased about 80%.

The number of Republican counties has increased more than 800%.

Note that this includes Social Security and Medicare, as well as all other federal aid programs. So part of the divergence is because Republican counties have generally aged more than Democratic ones.

I don't know. Do I care about this or not?

Former President Donald Trump on Sunday called for “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day” of police retaliation in order to eradicate crime “immediately.” The remarks — delivered by Trump at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, just 36 days before the election — did not amount to a new policy proposal, according to a Trump campaign official.

I happen to be reading Max Boot's biography of Ronald Reagan right now, and Trump's outburst reminds me of Reagan's hardline attitude toward protesters at Berkeley while he was governor of California: "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with." Echoing Trump, he said afterward that this was "just a figure of speech." In the end, the only major crackdown he initiated was the People's Park fiasco, which he mishandled badly, but he never backed down: "It should be obvious to every Californian that there are those in our midst who are bent on destroying our society," he said.

His poll numbers soared. People might not have approved of what he did, but they loved the tough rhetoric. It showed whose side he was on, and most people took it as little more than venting.

Both Trump and Reagan gave voice to one of the oldest and deepest conservative tropes: Show 'em who's boss and they'll back down. There's shockingly little evidence for this—just the opposite, in fact—but it retains an almost talismanic hold on the conservative mind. Lots of people love this kind of talk, even if they know it's mostly just talk.

Of course, there are two big differences between Reagan and Trump. In 1969 crime really was increasing and there really was a lot of campus unrest. Today crime is down and campuses are generally quiet.

Second, Reagan, for all his faults, wasn't insane. With Trump I'm not so sure.

From Donald Trump:

14,000 CONVICTED thugs and slimeballs who have committed MURDER have been allowed to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked, and roam free to KILL AGAIN…And they will kill again, over and over.

ZOMG. The thing is, he seems to have the receipts. This number comes directly from a letter written by the acting director of ICE, which lays things out in a table:

There's the number in black-and-white: 13,099 noncitizen convicted murderers who aren't detained by ICE. But you might be interested to know a couple of things:

• This number isn't for the past three years. It's for all time and goes back more than 40 years.
• "Non-detained" means they aren't detained by ICE. Many or most of them are instead detained in prison. ICE has no idea how many.
• The total non-detained docket for all crimes increased 10% under Trump and 5% under Joe Biden.
• Murderers who have served their sentences and been released—an unknown number—are generally deported. But some countries won't take them, and the Supreme Court says they have to be allowed out.

That puts things in a whole different perspective, doesn't it? The actual number for the Biden administration might be in the dozens or even zero. But I hardly even blame Trump for this. I blame Patrick Lechleitner, acting director of ICE, who very deliberately omitted this context in his letter. It's hard to believe he didn't know perfectly well what he was doing.

The Wall Street Journal today has yet another entry in the seemingly endless series of articles about the problems with young men in America. I've taken this on in great detail before (here and here), so I won't do it again. But I will say that at the simplest level I always come back to this:

Young men did take a hit during the aughts, most likely due to the China shock, but for more than a decade since then they've been doing pretty well. Today's 20-year-olds were in sixth grade the last time you could say they were doing poorly. Every one of them has grown up in a world where young men were doing quite well.

But then something occurred to me: the anecdotes in the Journal story all focus on a particular type, men who went to college but left after a semester or two. How are they doing?

Oddly enough, the BLS has a category just for this: "some college, no degree." It only goes back a few years and it's not broken down by age, but it might still tell us something. Maybe this demographic in particular is doing poorly? Let's look:

To my great surprise, "some college" is the highest performing group. I wouldn't take this too seriously since the growth rates are small and the data is limited. Still, it suggests at least that this particular group of men, who don't have their act together enough to figure out what to do in college, aren't doing any worse than anyone else.

The same is true of lots of other things too. When you dig into employment; living arrangements; education; loss of friends; drug use; and other things, it mostly turns out either that young men are doing OK or that their problems are generic ones that affect all age groups and both sexes. It's really hard to tease out any data pointing to serious problems.