Month: December 2024

According to, um, everyone, the murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson has sent corporate executives into shock. After all, anyone could be next:

Those who advise companies on security issues say threats against executives are rising.... “The environment is explosive right now,” said former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis, who now consults with large companies on how to mitigate security risks. “The threats are evolving and getting more violent.”

....Corporate executives have been targets of violence in the past, including during social upheaval in the early 20th century. In the early 1990s, Exxon executive Sidney Reso was kidnapped outside his New Jersey home as part of what authorities called a ransom plot that led to his death. Theodore Kaczynski, dubbed the Unabomber, sent exploding packages to airline executives and others over two decades, killing three people and injuring more, before he was arrested in 1996.

Go to the website of any security firm and you'll find confirmation of this. Threats are rising. People hate corporate executives. Social media makes everything more dangerous. You and your family are at risk.

But I have a genuine question: Is there any evidence, even a shred, that this is true? Security firms have been widely quoted about threat levels in news articles over the past few days, but of course they say threats are rising. They're trying to sell protection. They've been saying this for as long as they've existed.

And virtually no corporate executives have been killed by terrorist-style violence in the past half century. In the Wall Street Journal article above, they came up with only two examples: one targeted by the Unabomber in 1994 and another who was kidnapped and accidentally killed in 1992. Neither was a CEO.

Now, maybe I'm missing a few instances. Maybe the murder rate of executives is low because lots of them hire bodyguards. And I have little doubt that social media has made random threats more common.

But are corporate executives in any more actual, physical danger than before? I'd like to see some evidence other than a sales pitch from a security company or a private poll saying people are more scared than they used to be. Is there any?

With Donald Trump back in office, there's a pretty good chance that he'll open up the ANWR refuge in Alaska to oil drilling. In particular, he'd open up what's known as the 1002 area, a parcel of 1.5 million acres near Prudhoe Bay:

ANWR totals 19 million acres, much of it wilderness, but the 1002 area is outside of the wilderness region. Generally speaking, drilling there wouldn't have a big impact on the wildlife of ANWR.

At the same time, it also wouldn't produce all that much oil:

For a place that isn't really an ecological gem and also wouldn't produce very much oil, it sure has produced more than its share of political strife.

Gallup reports today that Americans' rating of US health care quality is at its lowest point since they started keeping records. That's true, but as usual it doesn't tell the real story:

Among Democrats, satisfaction with the quality of health care has been dead flat for 20 years. Among Republicans, satisfaction dropped a bit when Obamacare passed but rebounded quickly. Then it took a permanent dive in 2021. So the real story is not that sentiment about quality has steadily reached an all-time low. The real story is very specific:

Media fueled anti-vax conspiracy theories and anger over medical advice during the COVID pandemic caused Republican satisfaction with the quality of American health care to plummet 26 points in three years.

Whenever you hear someone talk about how trust in our institutions has collapsed, keep in mind that in most cases this is solely Republican trust. And it's almost entirely driven by Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media ecosystem. They are bent on undermining the country, and it's working.

As for the general state of the health care system, it hasn't budged in 30 years:

We mostly think the health care system has some serious problems but isn't in crisis. Gallup says that partisan views on this measure are "nearly identical."

Now this is a chart:

This comes from a 2014 paper by Manuel Eisner called "From Swords to Words: Does Macro-Level Change in Self-Control Predict Long-Term Variation in Levels of Homicide?" Eisner's paper is stuffed with estimates of murder rates across Europe during the past millennium.

But I'm more fascinated by the estimate of regicides, mainly as a demonstration that there's a chart for everything. But also: why the big surge around 1050? Were kings being especially annoying back then? Eisner doesn't say, but he attributes the peaks and valleys in homicide rates to changes in alcohol consumption and, more generally, to periodic waves of civility and self-discipline.

Eh, maybe, but Eisner also teases me by taking a look at more recent murder rates:

Homicide rates in the United States have dropped by at least 40 percent since 1991, mirroring a much broader downturn of violent crime that includes assault, robbery, rape, bullying, and child abuse

Why yes. Do go on:

But while the US decline has long been known, experts only recently began to realize that something similar is happening across the Western world. Homicide rates in most European countries have declined considerably since the early 1990s and overall crime levels have been moving along a downward trend for the past 20 years. The phenomenon of a largely synchronized decline in violent crime
across the Western world has puzzled researchers.

Initial explanations had mainly focused on the United States, but as the evidence for the similarities mounts, scholars find that attention must be paid to mechanisms that account for the astonishing commonalities.

Yes, yes! Crime went down everywhere. What could be the cause?

One such approach interprets the past two decades as one of several extended historical periods during which interpersonal violence was in retreat.  They are believed to be part of a broader civilizing process—a long dynamic toward the growing concentration of the legitimate use of force in the hands of the state.... Communities began recivilizing their young men, the criminal justice system became more predictable, self-control became increasingly central to crime prevention programs, and society returned to glorifying the value of responsibility.

So close! But this isn't really an explanation. Why was interpersonal violence in retreat? Saying merely that we happen to live in one of several "extended historical periods" of calm isn't very satisfying, is it?

It was lead, Manuel, good ol' tetraethyl lead in gasoline. And for the big surge in the mid-1300s I'd guess bubonic plague. For the one in 1315 maybe the Great Famine. For the later ones, your guess is as good as mine.

This is a wild story. It's about Sameera Ali, a Virginia lawyer, and Thomas Cullen, a Virginia judge:

One of Cullen’s clerks repeatedly asked her to represent a youth charged with a felony and two misdemeanors when no other attorneys were available, according to a court filing from her attorney. Ali agreed, if a preliminary hearing set for Nov. 19, a Tuesday, could be rescheduled to accommodate a prior court commitment in Fairfax County.... The Alexandria prosecutor’s office filed court papers in support of Ali’s request. Ali told Cullen’s clerk twice, on Nov. 8 and Nov. 15, that she could not take the case otherwise, her attorney said.

When the judge took the bench Nov. 19, a prosecutor asked to delay the hearing. Cullen refused and instead issued an order calling on Ali to defend herself from a charge of civil contempt, court records show.

What the actual fuck? Judges can be pretty demanding about controlling their fiefdoms, but this Cullen dude sounds like someone who's let his emperorship over his court go to his head.

According to the story, other lawyers are either contemplating or have already removed themselves from the list of attorneys willing to take indigent cases. It's a thankless job and they don't want to risk a random jail sentence from a maniac judge. Nice work.

This is Hilbert looking at the camera from a spot on our (entirely unused) patio table. He looks menacing, but actually he spent most of his time up there twirling around and begging me to pet him. He was probably purring loudly when I took this picture.

As I've mentioned, I'm a little skeptical of any theory about why there was a big turn against Democrats in 2024 because, in fact, there wasn't a big turn. There was a normal, moderate turn.

But in one place there was a huge turn: Hispanic voters. Here's the Democratic winning margin among Hispanics going back to 1980:

Even if you assume that Democrats lose the overall vote in 2024 by two points, you'd still expect them to win the Hispanic vote by 33%. Instead they won it by only 5%. That's an enormous shift both generally and compared to Joe Biden in 2020.

Now, the 2024 vote isn't completely without precedent: George Bush did extraordinarily well among Hispanics in the 2004 election. But that was explainable: Bush actively courted Hispanics and received a surge in Hispanic support after the capture of Saddam Hussein. The 2024 election remains a little more mysterious.

In any case, the Hispanic drop represents a shift of nearly 5% of the total popular vote away from Kamala Harris. That's way more than enough to account for her loss.

This doesn't automatically mean that all the other theories are wrong. It could still be inflation or wokeness or immigration. But any theory worth considering needs to account for why it affected Hispanic voters differently than others. So far none of them really do that.

The American economy gained 227,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 137,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate rose to 4.2%.

This report is something of a mirage. The number of employed workers dropped by 355,000 and the ranks of the unemployed rose by 161,000. As a result, the share of employed people dropped from 60.0% to 59.8%.

Among the prime working age population, the share of employed people has dropped a full half point in just the past two months. The unemployment rate has gone up 0.3% in the past two months and nearly a full point over the past two years:

Some of this discrepancy between the jobs number and the unemployment rate is just the usual mismatch between the establishment survey (number of jobs) and the household survey (unemployment rate). Still, the jobs number is probably just a bit of bounceback from October's big drop. I wouldn't cheer too much for November's news overall.

Elon Musk has been blathering lately about cutting all spending for unauthorized federal programs. At first glance, that sounds great. Why are we spending money on unauthorized programs, anyway? How can that even happen?

The answer is a little hazy, but it boils down to this: Constitutionally, Congress doesn't need to "authorize" anything. All they have to do is appropriate. However, House rules require an authorization to be passed before any money can be appropriated for a program. This rule is generally followed for initial appropriations, but lots of laws are written with specific authorized amounts for their first few years and are never updated afterward even though Congress goes on merrily appropriating money. According to the Congressional Budget Office, there are 1,515 unauthorized programs currently being funded. Here's how they break down:

As you can see, the earliest one dates to 1980 (!). In 1975 Congress passed enabling legislation that created the Legal Services Corporation to provide legal aid to poor people. The bill authorized sums for 1975 through 1980, but since then nobody has ever bothered reauthorizing it. In FY24 it was appropriated $560 million.

I know this because CBO tracks it all in a state-of-the-art Excel spreadsheet as required by law. Congress, you see, is very concerned to keep count of all these programs even though they never get around to doing anything about them. Here are the biggest of the programs:

In theory, unauthorized spending can be stopped in its tracks very simply: any member of the House can raise a point of order against an unauthorized appropriation. However, this tactic can be closed off under suspension of the rules or under the terms of a special rule.

The bottom line is that this is not some weird form of Deep State corruption discovered by Elon Musk. Congress is well aware of it, and apparently there are norms of some kind that allow it to continue. I don't really understand that part, though. In any case, "unauthorized" spending isn't illegal in any sense. It's all normal, legit spending approved by majority vote under rules or norms that Congress can change anytime it wants. It can't be cut by executive order and there's no special reason to target it compared to any other spending.

After every election loss—among both Democrats and Republicans—we're treated to an argument about whether the loss was due to too much extremism or too much centrism. In the Washington Post today, Perry Bacon summarizes the lefty case for too much centrism in the 2024 race:

People who support defunding the police have almost no power in the Democratic Party. Centrists do. Center-left and establishment Democrats unified behind Joe Biden over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) during the 2020 primaries and were largely supportive of him running for a second term until his dreadful performance at a June debate with Trump. Once Harris became the party’s candidate, she heeded calls from the center-left to run a moderate campaign, emphasizing the importance of the United States maintaining the “most lethal” military in the world and appealing to the wealthy and big corporations.

This is absolutely right. But it absolutely misses the point.

The problem is not that Democratic politicians are too woke. The problem is that too many of them refuse to clearly repudiate extreme wokeness.

"Defund the police" is as good an example as any. It's absolutely true that very few congressional Democrats actively supported it. But it's equally true that very few were willing to clearly and publicly oppose it. So what happened? There were lots of loud progressive activists yelling about defunding the police and they were met mostly by a yawning establishment silence. (Joe Biden was a prominent exception.) The public concluded, perfectly reasonably, that if (a) "defund the police" was a big thing on the left, and (b) Democrats weren't objecting to it, then (c) it must be something Democrats approved of.

There are dozens of examples of similar things. Open borders. Ultra touchiness. Overuse of calling people racist. Electric car mandates. Paper straws. Weird academic speaking styles. They/them. Word policing, which is hard on people who aren't super verbal and educated. Land acknowledgements.

And of course, in 2024, transgender edge cases. Like puberty blockers for 12-year-olds. Trans surgery for prisoners. Biological males competing in girls' sports. Kamala Harris didn't actively run on this stuff, but neither did she oppose it or disown her 2019 views. And it was probably a good thing, too. If she had, it would have generated enormous blowback and dominated the news for days or weeks. Look what happened to Harris in Michigan just for being squishily pro-Israel. Or to Seth Moulton for his girls' sports transgression—and that was after the election was over.

So lefty defenders miss the point when they say centrists control most of the Democratic Party. Of course they do. Nor is there anything centrists can do to stop hardcore lefties from saying whatever they want. But unless they want to be tarred with the lefty brush, they have to loudly and clearly oppose them—and that they're afraid to do. They're frozen in fear of taking massive flak from the righteous and their interest groupd. As long as that remains the case, the ultra-woke end up speaking for the party simply by filling a vacuum.

So is this why Democrats lost the election? I think it's part of the reason. But even though this is my view, the race was so close that I'm not willing to push it very hard. I don't see much concrete evidence that anything caused a huge turn away from Democrats, for the simple reason that there was no huge turn.

POSTSCRIPT: The same thing is true of Republicans, and as a result the Republican Party is generally tarred with the MAGA brush. The difference is that this doesn't hurt them much. That might be unfair, but it's reality.