Month: October 2024

The New York Times reports on a "torrent" of threats against election officials as Election Day approaches:

“Our polling places have become battlegrounds,” Isaac Cramer, executive director of South Carolina’s Charleston County Board of Voter Registration and Elections, said in congressional testimony this year. He described one particularly unnerving practice being employed against his poll workers — roving groups who show up at voting locations to threaten volunteers and staff with citizen arrests.

Sara Tindall Ghazal, a member of the Georgia state election board, said officials had faced an array of tactics, including death threats and hoax calls intended to elicit an armed police response.

They don't mention which party is responsible for the threats, but maybe you can take a guess?

We took Charlie to the vet last week and the diagnosis was that he had an infection. So Charlie got an antibiotic shot and we got a tube of goop that we spread daily on the sore spot on his leg. He has to wear the cone for an hour after we put on the goop, but that's it.

So Charlie is cone-free 23 hours a day, and he's mighty happy about that. Here he is rolling around on the floor while Hilbert, Marian, and I look on.

The LA Times won't be endorsing for president this year. Neither will the Washington Post. Bill Gates has "quietly" donated $50 million to Kamala Harris. Jamie Dimon "privately" supports Harris but won't say so publicly.

This is all because prominent billionaires are afraid of retribution from Donald Trump if he wins the election. Not social opprobrium or anything like that. Direct retribution from the president of the United States.

Think on that.

This is the aptly named red ape, having a bit of lunch at the LA Zoo.

Robert C. O’Brien, who served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser in 2019 and 2020, explains why things were so great under Trump:

When Iran got out of line, we eliminated an Iranian general of some note. We heard, “ISIS is an idea. It can’t be defeated,” but we sure as hell defeated them.

So we weren’t averse to using force, but we wanted to stop using force for nation building and for things that weren’t in American interest. We drew a red line in Ukraine, and Putin didn’t dare cross it. We gave the Ukrainians Javelin missiles, which are the only reason today that Ukraine is free.

We were tough on the Chinese. We let them know that it would be entirely unacceptable to invade Taiwan.

This is some serious revisionist history. The war against ISIS was more than halfway done by the time Trump took office and there was nobody saying victory was impossible. Trump beat ISIS merely by allowing the military to continue Obama's plan.

There was no red line in Ukraine. That's just fantasy. And yes, Trump gave Ukraine Javelin missiles, but only under heavy pressure. He didn't want to do it.

As for Taiwan, sure, a Chinese invasion was unacceptable under Trump—just as it was under every other US president going back to Jimmy Carter. Trump was happy to use Taiwan as leverage in his trade war with China, but more concretely his sales of arms to Taiwan were considerably lower than usual.

Later on, Colby concedes that the Afghanistan withdrawal was entirely planned by Trump, but insists Trump would have executed it far better:

He said the military will stay and be strong. We’re going to bring all the American equipment home. We’ll bring home those who helped us on the ground. And we’re not leaving unless the Taliban comes to a good-faith agreement with the Afghan government on a government of national unity that will keep up the fight against ISIS-K.

This is delusional. When Biden pushed out the withdrawal, Trump explicitly condemned it and said we should just get the hell out. It would have been an unqualified disaster.

These people, even the sober, sane sounding ones, are completely trapped in a bubble of Trump worship. I'm sure O'Brien believes every word he says here, but that hardly makes it any better than Trump's lies. Maybe worse.

Home sales were up very slightly in September. Existing home sales continued to decline, dropping by 20,000, but new home sales continued their recent upward march, increasing by 30,000. However, we're still more than a million homes below the pre-pandemic level and probably won't recover until the Fed lowers interest rates to their pre-pandemic level.

From the Wall Street Journal today:

There are 27 million paid content creators in the U.S., and 44% of them say social media is their full-time job, consultant The Keller Advisory Group found.

This is simple enough. It means there are about 12 million full-time social media content creators (FTSMCC) in the US.

But does this pass the laugh test? Do full-time social media content creators really make up 7% of the entire labor force? Let's take a look at how that pencils out:

These numbers suggest content creation is by far the biggest job category in the US. And social media content creators rank 7th, ahead of teachers, construction workers, truck drivers, IT workers, and admin workers.

There are only two possibilities here: (a) these numbers are bullshit, or (b) the business press should be paying way more attention to social media content creators since they're a massive part of the economy. Either way, the Journal needs to clean up its act.

Are Black drivers ticketed by police more than white drivers? A new study suggests they are. It compares tickets given via police vs. tickets given by speed cameras and finds that cameras treat everyone about the same while police decidedly don't. Here's the key chart:

The red and blue lines are for camera tickets. They're very close, suggesting that, objectively, Black and white drivers are driving about the same.

The green and magenta lines are for police tickets. Black drivers are ticketed at rates above speed cameras, but more notably, white drivers are ticketed at rates way under speed cameras. This gap is more noticeable the whiter an area is.

The study estimates the race of drivers based on where they live, which is obviously not 100% accurate. However, over the course of thousands of observations it probably averages out about right.

The best conclusion from this study is not that Black drivers are ticketed way more than they should be. It's that white drivers are routinely treated leniently in ways Black drivers aren't. You may be tired of the phrase "white privilege," but this is what it is.

This is an apartment building under construction near my mother's house. The framing used metal girders, not wood, and glowed in the light of the setting sun. It's long since finished and now looks like a boring old apartment complex.

The weekly YouGov poll shows the race tightening slightly, just like everybody else: