Author: Kevin Drum

Here's the line of the day:

As a scholar who researches the history of Western fears about human extinction....

That's quite a specialty. This essay grabbed my attention because I've lately been on an anti-doom kick, so I was intrigued by a piece recounting our long history of always thinking we live in uniquely frightening times. Check it out.

I got my sample ballot yesterday and it was about a hundred pages long. wtf? We're voting for a president, a senator, and a couple of other smaller offices. What's all this stuff for?

It turns we have a lot of people who want to be your next president:

I don't know who any of these people are, either. But it's nothing compared to the hordes of folks who want to become a senator:

If I were voting purely on occupation, I'm not sure who I'd go for. Maybe the social entrepreneur? Or the aviator/educator/entrepreneur?

Anyway, multiply this by a dozen or so, because every political party gets its own set of pages even though the primaries are identical for everything except president and party central committee. And that's only after you've waded through 20 or 30 pages of instructions, a bunch of candidate statements no one will read, and a local initiative to change the way Irvine elects councilmembers. Plus there's a postcard at the end to request a translation in Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Persian, Tagalog, Japanese, Hindi, Gujarati, and "accessible." But at least we're not Los Angeles, which is required to provide its election booklet in 20 different languages.

How smart were we back in the olden days?

You're probably familiar with the Flynn Effect, which suggests that people gained about 3 points of IQ per decade over a period of 50 years during the 20th century. That's about 15 points total. This suggests that before World War II we were all roaming around with average IQs of about 85—which doesn't really seem plausible, does it? That's a fairly dimwitted average.

But I was reminded of this watching Jeopardy last night, which had a question about Hercules and Atlas. You remember the story. Atlas has been condemned to hold up the earth for all eternity when Hercules drops by to ask for a favor: He'll hold up the earth for a while if Atlas will steal some golden apples for him. Atlas does, but then tells Hercules he's going to take off and let him handle the job of holding up the earth. Hercules, sly dog that he is, agrees, but asks Atlas to hold up the world for a moment so he can put some padding on his shoulders. Atlas stupidly agrees, and Hercules heads off with the golden apples.

Here's the thing: this is presented as a clever trick, but in fact it's not something that would fool a five year old. How dumb were the ancient Greeks to make up a story that was so obviously juvenile?

Then there's that whole Trojan horse thing. I mean, how dumb do you have to be to think that would work? And how gullible do you have to be to fall for it? Odysseus got quite a reputation for shrewdness for coming up with it.

The first time this question of historical doltishness occurred to me was a couple of decades ago, when I was reading The Three Musketeers. I don't remember the details, but I do remember that it featured some really dumb behavior that wasn't presented as especially dumb. What kind of people were these? I thought.

I have nothing to say to wrap this up. I just wonder. Obviously there were lots of smart people in days of yore. But on average, were people badly dimwitted compared to today?

I don't know. But I remember also reading once that since water wasn't especially healthy back before public sanitation, it was common to drink only beer or watered wine (the alcohol killed the germs). So everyone was sort of mildly tipsy all the time, which might also explain things. Maybe the Flynn effect is just because we don't drink as much as we used to right before taking intelligence tests?

The jury in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case against Donald Trump has been kept anonymous. This is to keep Trump's vengeful MAGA hordes from terrorizing them.

But now that the trial is over the jurors are free to do whatever they want. However, it's appropriate that on the 50th anniversary of Cher's "Dark Lady," the judge basically gave them this warning:

My advice is that you leave this place
Never come back and forget you ever saw my face

Don't worry about me. I'm just amusing myself.

But while we're on the subject, it's also sort of amusing to watch Trump in court. It's like an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. Trump's schtick is to act like an absolute monarch of old, the man who sets the rules and never, ever backs down. But courts are one of the few places in America that really do have absolute monarchs. Judges are allowed—nay expected—to rule their courtrooms with an iron fist, and that means even Trump has to bend the knee.

So who wins in this contest of wills? Inside the courtroom, the judge. Outside the courtroom, Trump. Time will tell which ends up being the most important.

I didn't quite realize this until Dean Baker pointed it out today, but US health care spending has been basically flat for over a decade:

Health care spending was 17.2% of GDP in 2009 and was slightly lower in 2022, coming in at 16.9%. We are more than 3 percentage points under the old pre-2009 trendline, which amounts to a savings of nearly a trillion dollars.

NOTE: My numbers are a little different from Dean's. I took mine straight from CMS and then subtracted COVID spending. This is a little tricky because CMS's explanation of COVID expenditures is confusing, but the unclear bits are relatively small. I chose the most conservative interpretation, which still puts current spending under 2009 spending.

On Twitter a couple of days ago Nate Silver pointed out that confidence in the press has plummeted. This is true, but I added that confidence in everything has plummeted. The press wasn't any kind of outlier.

But then I wondered if I was remembering that correctly. So I went off to the General Social Survey and checked over a long time period:

In fact, confidence in the press is an outlier. The share of people saying they have at least some confidence in the press has dropped from 75% to 48%.

But that's not the whole story. Here's confidence in the press by political party:

The drop in confidence is due almost entirely to Republicans, and the partisan gap started right around 2000—precisely when Fox News started to build an audience—and accelerated in 2016 when Donald Trump ran for president. This is no coincidence.

So it's not quite right to say that "Americans" have lost confidence in the press. Only Republicans have.

POSTSCRIPT: Why does the second chart go up only to 2018? That's an excellent question.

Until a couple of weeks ago all the GSS charts went up to 2022. But then, for some reason, all the recent data suddenly got dropped and the charts ended at 2018. This isn't because the data doesn't exist. I can search for variables individually, extract the raw data, and then calculate percentages manually. That's how I did the top chart. But in the trend charts that NORC provides—which include things like partisan breakdowns—2018 is the end.

I have no idea what happened. I tried to contact them via their form, but it wouldn't let me. I tried to send an email, but it bounced back. It is a mystery.

Last year, a jury found that Donald Trump had libeled E. Jean Carroll and ordered him to pay $5 million in damages. That made Trump mad, so he kept on libeling her. Today a jury ordered him to pay another $83 million—most of it just for being a malicious asshole. The Washington Post passes along some commentary:

What’s the point of ordering Donald Trump to pay $88 [sic] million to his accuser? “The whole point of this, this enormous damages — unprecedented damages now — is to tell Donald Trump to shut up,” John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general, said on Fox News.

Good luck with that! I wonder if Trump will go septendecuple-or-nothing again?

It is January 26 and the Border Patrol finally released its official apprehension figures for December. This is the latest it's ever been. Is it a traditional Friday night news dump for bad news?

Maybe! Because it was definitely bad news. As expected, CBP reported a whopping total of 302,000 encounters on the southern border:

As usual, about 50,000 of these were asylum seekers who made appointments via the mobile phone app, while the rest were apprehended trying to cross the border illegally.

Here's Charlie, cone free and hanging out in his favorite place now that we've let him outside. Whenever we call his name, he hops out of hiding in the bushes and races in.

I'm not sure if this is unexpected or not, but the International Court of Justice has basically ruled in Israel's favor in South Africa's genocide case against it:

In a series of near-unanimous votes, the world court on Friday ordered Israel to ensure that its military not violate the Genocide Convention, and that it punish incitement to genocide and report back to The Hague on its compliance. But the court stopped short of ordering the fundamental objective South Africa and its allies sought: an end to Israel’s military response to the Oct. 7 attacks Hamas launched from Gaza.

The court also called for the immediate and unconditional release of hostages Hamas took from Israel.

Basically, the court ruled that Israel wasn't committing genocide but it needs to be careful not to start. It also ruled that Israel has a right to defend itself; that it needs to reduce civilian casualties; and that it needs to allow more aid into Gaza.

This is not exactly a clean bill of health, but the basic ruling allows the Gaza war to continue.¹

¹Not that either side would have stopped regardless.