Cats, charts, and politics
This is a scraggly tree/bush of some kind out in the desert. I took it at sunrise a couple of years ago after a dex-fueled night of pre-telescope astrophotography. At that time all I could do was photograph the Milky Way, since there isn't much else you can do with just an ordinary camera on a tripod.
What precisely is the national security concern with TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company? There's this:
Both the FBI and officials at the Federal Communications Commission have warned that ByteDance could share TikTok user data — such as browsing history, location and biometric identifiers — with China’s authoritarian government.
We cannot allow the Chinese Communist Party, our chief adversary and an organization notoriously devoted to propaganda and censorship, to control the platform that America’s youth overwhelmingly relies on for news. To do so would be akin to allowing Soviet control of several major American newspapers and TV channels during the Cold War.
I won't pretend to have a settled opinion about this. Maybe I lack imagination. But on the surveillance concern, is even the worst case that big a deal? Suppose the CCP is harvesting every bit of user data from every teenager in America. What could they do with it that's a genuine national security threat?
And on the propaganda front, does it really matter if TikTok is Chinese? Countries like Russia have no problem producing tons of bot-driven propaganda on American-owned social media like Facebook and Twitter. China does the same.
Has some reasonable person set out the case against TikTok? Lots of countries have banned TikTok from government-owned phones, so it's not just the US that has concerns. But we seem to be alone in our broader fears. Why? I've read lots of panicked opinions based mostly on fuzzy speculation, but not a sober analysis. What am I missing?
Oh look, another high quality poll is out today:
The crosstabs for this poll are a little hard to make sense of, but they seem to show that Joe Biden has 80% support among Black voters and 63% support among Hispanic voters. Among independents, he trails Trump 46%-54%. These seem relatively reasonable, which provides reason to think the poll is fairly accurate.
10% of voters were undecided. When they were pushed to say who they leaned toward, Biden came out ahead of Trump 51%-49%.
Once again, this is a poll of registered voters. Later in the campaign pollsters will start including their likely voter screens, which will help provide somewhat more accurate numbers.
Also, a standard caveat: this is a national poll. It says nothing about how Biden and Trump are doing in specific states.
More news on humanitarian aid to Gaza:
The U.S. military will build a temporary port and pier on Gaza’s coastline to provide a new route for humanitarian aid, President Biden is set to announce in his State of the Union address Thursday evening, according to senior administration officials. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House, said the plan is part of Biden’s orders to “flood the zone” with assistance arriving by air, land and sea.
This is late, but better late than never.
I realize the "free Palestine" crowd will never buy this, but I think it shows yet again Biden's basic human decency. He's obviously a longtime supporter of Israel and, regardless of the politics, feels strongly that Hamas needs to be destroyed. At the same time, he has slowly but inevitably come around to the view that Israel is deliberately starving the Gazans and the US can't allow that to happen.
He'll get credit from no one for this plan. Progressives will deride it as a token gesture against genocide while hawks will condemn it as weakness in the face of terrorism. In reality, it's just Biden being Biden in a no-win situation.
But in the end, it will be important. It will ramp up steadily, just like other aid programs always have, but it will prevent mass starvation in Gaza. Finally.
The New York City subway is getting a show of force:
Hundreds of National Guard soldiers and State Police officers will patrol the New York City subway platforms and check riders’ bags beginning this week, Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Wednesday.
....Subway safety is a constant concern in New York City, where the system’s recovery is critical to the city’s rebound from the pandemic, and public officials can be as sensitive to the perception that mass transit is dangerous as they are to an actual rise in crime.
I don't live in New York City or use its transit system, but naturally I got curious about this. Is there an actual rise in crime on the subway or only the perception of one?
It turns out that transit crime has been flat over the past two years while ridership has increased about 20%. Here's what that looks like:
The trendline of transit crime is down 13% over the past two years, and the most recent week had nearly the lowest crime rate of the entire period. Two felonies per million rides seems pretty safe to me!
Note that these figures are for all transit, including subways and buses, because that's the way New York City reports things. But it's very likely that crime trends are pretty similar for both.
Two weeks ago the Alabama Supreme Court blew up IVF treatments in the state by ruling that frozen embryos are human life. This made IVF too risky and forced hospitals and clinics to stop providing it. But everybody loves IVF—even Republicans—so the Alabama legislature moved like lightning to pass a bill giving IVF clinics absolute immunity from any criminal or civil action.
Whew. Crisis averted. Or was it? It turns out the pro-life movement is decidedly not on board with this, and on Tuesday they sent an open letter to the governor begging her not to sign the bill. It was signed by some of the biggest anti-abortion groups in the country:
The Live Action coalition points out that the Alabama legislation includes civil and criminal immunity for a doctor who:
I don't know how likely any of this is, but they're quite correct about the bill. It provides blanket immunity for anything as long as you're an IVF provider.
Anyway, I love it when conservatives are feuding among themselves about something that virtually nobody, even conservatives themselves, thinks is wrong or should be illegal:
Anti-abortion politicos have tried desperately for a long time to avoid alarming normies about the logical consequences of their position: frozen embryos as human beings, jailing women who get abortions, banning travel for abortions, etc. But guess what? Now that hardline conservatives have a free hand, it turns out that a lot of them want to do precisely the stuff they've been pretending they would never do.
So may their feuding be long and very, very public. Let's make it clear to everyone what they really think, and then see how many people still support them.
POSTSCRIPT: Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed the IVF legislation on Wednesday. In the end, no one cared about the pro-life groups.
Steve Benen writes today about Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's upcoming retirement:
Sinema’s retirement puts the future of the filibuster in doubt
This reminds me of something I've been meaning to mention: the filibuster is already dead.
This isn't a controversial point. In 2013 Democrats used the "point of order" procedure to end the filibuster for lower court nominations. In 2017 Republicans used it to end the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees.
It may seem as if these are limited examples that apply only to nominations, not legislation. But that's not so. The key point is much broader: both parties now explicitly accept that the majority party can override a filibuster at any time with 51 votes.
The fact that neither party has yet done this for legislation is immaterial. It's clearly legal and can be set in motion at any time. Both sides may still be pretending the filibuster exists, but that's mere habit. For all practical purposes, it's dead.
A few months ago the House took the 12 annual appropriations bills and split them into two packages. The first of those packages finally passed today, after several small disagreements were finally resolved. Here's how they went:
Speaker Mike Johnson also pointed to the following Republican "victories":
Johnson highlighted a 7% reduction of $122 million for the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives division and a 6% reduction of $654 million for the Federal Bureau of Investigation when compared with the prior fiscal year’s allocated amount. He also touted a 10% reduction to the Environmental Protection Agency, mostly attributable to a $745 million drop in money for its Superfund cleanup sites.
So Republicans got a small reduction in BATF funding because they hate enforcing gun laws; a small reduction in FBI funding because the FBI has been mean to Donald Trump; and a small reduction in superfund cleanup money because.......they hate cleaning up toxic waste dumps?
Overall, the appropriations followed the funding guidelines set out last year in the debt ceiling deal. Republicans won almost none of their culture war battles and failed to make any significant cuts. They could have easily done this six months ago.
Here are EV sales through January:
Despite some gloomy headlines, sales of EVs have actually kept up their trend growth lately. This becomes clear when you use a 3-month rolling average to smooth out the monthly volatility.
However, there was a big drop in January, which was down 35% from December. A January decline is normal, but it's usually in the neighborhood of 10% or so. This is probably a blip, but we won't know for sure until summer.
This is the Isle of Wight off the south coast of Great Britain. "It is known for its mild climate, coastal scenery, and verdant landscape of fields, downland, and chines."
