Cats, charts, and politics
This is a example of Zephyranthes in our front yard. According to Wikipedia, there are now about 200 species of this flower "following the expansion of the genus in 2019." Also:
The name is derived from Ζέφυρος (Zephyrus), the Greek god of the west wind, and ἄνθος (anthos), meaning flower, referring to the slender stalks.
That's all very fine, but why is it named after the god of the west wind? And why was the genus expanded? Seems suspicious.
Did you know that Joe Biden held a cabinet meeting on Friday? Probably not. Why would you?
But wait. Did you know that Joe invited Jill Biden to speak to the cabinet about the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research? Probably not that either.
Did you know that Jill sat at the head of the table? No?
Then you missed out! For the past four days conservatives have been in a tizzy about how Jill "ran" the cabinet meeting and is now running the country because Joe is too feeble to do it. They apparently don't know that the president never sits at the head of the table. He sits at the center of the table, flanked by the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense. And that's not all. Here's the latest from the geniuses at National Review:
According to the official White House transcript of the cabinet meeting on Friday: President Joe Biden spoke 305 words and then turned it over to First Lady Jill Biden, who spoke 563 words. Biden then took three questions from the reporters in the room, where he offered answers of 85 words, two words, and 32 words. His total words spoken were 424, three-quarters as much as the First Lady spoke.
Jesus Christ. This was an ordinary cabinet meeting. It was open to the press for the first few minutes, which included Jill's presentation and a couple of shouted questions, and that's the part that was recorded. Then the press was herded out and the real cabinet meeting began. Needless to say, they don't post public transcripts of this part on the White House website.
What the hell is in the water at conservative HQ these days? Their conspiracy theories get stupider and more juvenile every day. Do they even know how the government works anymore?
My PSA score is now well into the normal, healthy range:
I was somehow expecting something even lower, but I don't know why. According to the Kaiser test portal, anything below 4.5 is normal, so this is a very good result. I'm now down to only one cancer, for which I'll be getting a new treatment later today. That means a week+ in the hospital so they can keep an eye on me just in case I have a bad reaction. Huzzah.
Melania Trump is hawking a $600 gold necklace these days while Donald is peddling a Trump commemorative coin—to go with his sneakers, his picture book, his NFT, his Bible, and pieces of the suit he was wearing during his debate with Joe Biden—to go with pieces of the suit he wore at his mug shot and pieces of the suit he wore at his indictment. Collect them all!
Serious question: Does anyone know why they do this? The Trumps may not be quite as rich as Donald claims, but he's still a billionaire and Melania shares in his wealth. None of this stuff amounts to more than a microscopic part of their net worth and surely doesn't raise their income more than a hair.
So what gives? Aside from the usual snark, does anyone have any idea?
This is a sad story in the Wall Street Journal today. Michael Bloomberg wanted to help bright but disadvantaged kids get into good colleges, so he teamed up with two outfits, CollegePoint and the American Talent Initiative:
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg has spent more than $140 million over the past decade to get tens of thousands more talented, lower-income students into top-flight colleges. Those big ambitions have so far fallen short.
....Bloomberg Philanthropies worked with researchers to study their work with CollegePoint. They found 51.4% of students with access to the program enrolled in high-graduation-rate colleges, compared with 50.1% for a control group.
....The American Talent Initiative launched in 2016 with about 30 schools that publicly committed to increasing the socioeconomic diversity of their student populations....In total, 18,100 more Pell grant recipients have enrolled at member schools since 2015.
The awkward but probable truth is that there just aren't a lot of poor but bright high school students falling through the cracks. We've done such a good job of sorting kids by ability over the past 80 years that by now there just aren't a lot of them left—and the ones who remain are mostly tracked into college already. That's not to say there's literally nothing left we can do, but we should probably accept that nothing we do will have a big effect.
I suppose this is both good news and bad news. In either case, it's most likely the truth.
This week 
New York magazine has a long profile of Ta-Nehisi Coates that reminds once again of why I'm puzzled that he's held in such extraordinary esteem. It all started with "The Case for Reparations," his first big hit, which struck me as sort of a bloated term paper mostly cribbed from Wikipedia—and which fizzled out at the end with no actual call for reparations. I know how harsh that sounds—I'm reluctant to say it in public—and I think I was approximately the only liberal in the country who felt this way.
At around the same time Coates began reading up on the Civil War, which produced in him a sudden burning anger over how Black people had been treated. I was perplexed. Not because of the anger, which is obviously more than justified, but because I'm hardly a savant on the Civil War and the things he was pointing out struck me as fairly common knowledge if you'd read even a little bit about American history. How could a Black writer who's so smart not have known this stuff?
Now Coates is at it again. He visited Israel for ten days last year and came back, once again, burning with anger. And once again I don't get it.
On the ground in the occupied territories, he saw the segregated roads, the soldiers with their American-made weapons, the surveillance cameras, and the whole archipelago of impoverished ghettos. “I felt a mix of astonishment, betrayal, and anger,” he writes. “The astonishment was for me — for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity … The betrayal was for my colleagues in journalism — betrayal for the way they reported, for the way they’d laundered ethnic cleansing, for the voices they’d erased.
It's not surprising that you might get angry when you see stuff in person that you've only read about before. But Coates apparently hadn't even read about it. How is that possible? Again: I'm no savant about the Middle East, but this is all pretty common knowledge unless you deliberately put yourself in a bubble (or simply pay little attention to the whole thing). Hell, Jimmy Carter wrote a bestseller about it two decades ago. How could Coates possibly not have known any of it?
Coates's message through all this is that Palestine is not a complicated situation. It's easy: Israelis treat Palestinians monstrously and that's that. But that's only true if you simply ignore the complexity, as he does:
The book is strongest when its aperture is narrow. There is no mention of the fact that Israel is bombarded by terrorist groups set on the state’s annihilation. There is no discussion of the intifadas and the failed negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders going back decades. There is even no mention of Gaza because Coates was unable to visit the region after the October 7 attack and he did not want to report on a place he hadn’t seen for himself.
This just flatly makes no sense. At the very least you have to ask yourself why Israel treats Palestinians so monstrously. I'd say the answer is fairly simple: Because they think it's the only way to keep from being constantly attacked by them. You might have a different take. Maybe you think it was all a land grab from the start. Or you might think Israel's fears don't justify their actions. That's fine. But you have to at least engage with it. How can you write a book about Israel without doing that?
What are Kamala Harris's economic plans? For that matter, what are Donald Trump's?
To start, we can assume Trump has ordinary Republican opinions and Harris has ordinary Democratic opinions. Beyond that, here are their specific major proposals:
| Trump | Harris |
|---|---|
| Taxes | |
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| Spending | |
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| Other | |
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For what it's worth, I don't see much difference between the two on the level of detail. We know the same amount about both of them.
Am I missing anything big?
The FBI released full-year crime figures for 2023 today, and officially they say murder was down 11.6%. However, if you look at the murder rate, it's down 12.3%. The Crime Data Explorer has also gotten a makeover and now shows crime figures monthly:
(The 2021 figures are grayed out because they're unreliable.) All the numbers in the chart are from the FBI's expanded homicide data, which differs considerably from the normal homicide data. And both of them differ from the official yearly figures. wtf?
I'm confused. But I'm pretty sure the expanded data is better since the normal data shows huge spikes each December, which is certainly not correct. The expanded data shows murder spiking in July.
In any case, we can safely say that murder was down 11-12% in 2023 and has continued to drop in 2024. By the end of 2023 it was down to pre-COVID levels and is below that by now.
Overall violent crime was down 3% and property crime was down 2.4%.
This is another sand dune at the Cadiz Dunes Wilderness in the Mojave Desert. I've got a bunch more, so don't worry that I'll be running out anytime soon.
Ben Dreyfuss tweeted last night about a study showing that Democrats and Republicans were equally likely to believe in conspiracy theories. This struck me as historically unsupported, but who knows? Maybe it's true today.
So I took a look at the study and discovered something odd. The top three conservative conspiracy theories are COVID, climate change, and the birther conspiracy (this was before January 6 and "Stop the Steal"). No problem there.
Meanwhile, two of the top five liberal conspiracy theories are exact opposites: Donald Trump faked COVID during the 2020 campaign (45% believed it) and Trump covered up the seriousness of his COVID infection (75% believed it).
Did half of Democrats really believe that Trump faked COVID? I don't remember that being a big thing at all. I had to Google just to remind myself about it and found barely anything at all. USA Today reported that the rumor was started by some guy named Richard Greene. The New York Times reported that overnight "hundreds of tweets" were posted in sympathy.
Anyone familiar with Twitter knows that hundreds of tweets is indistinguishable from zero. A meme is basically invisible until it gets to 100,000 or a million tweets. So is it really plausible that this caught on with half of all Democrats? Or that three-quarters believed the even more obscure theory that Trump was covering up his COVID?
There's something off here. Even assuming the polling is all correct, conservatives tend to believe in big, long-lasting conspiracy theories. Liberals, even if they believe in similar numbers of things, mostly believe in tiny, short-lived conspiracy theories. For the record, the top four among conservatives are:
(I added the last one since it would certainly make the list today.) The top four among liberals are:
These sure don't seem the same to me. None of them ever became widespread except maybe Republicans stealing the 2000 election and, perhaps, a belief that Trump was open to Russian campaign help. And none of these have spawned a whole subculture of politicians and pundits who obsess about them.
For now, anyway, I'm sticking with my belief that everyone believes in conspiracy theories but modern conservatives sure believe in way more serious and consequential ones. Is there anything even remotely similar to Pizzagate or QAnon on the liberal side?¹
¹And that's not even getting into hyper-contemporary stuff like Haitians eating pet cats, currently believed by half of all conservatives.
