Cats, charts, and politics
This is a bright white clapboard house on the Eastern Shore of Virginia across the Chesapeake Bay from Richmond. It's on Highway 13 about an hour north of Norfolk. The setting sun provides a beautiful warm light, though only for a few minutes before everything sinks into shadows.
We're getting an early start to the silly season. Writers are getting bored because there's no interesting campaign news, so they're pulling out all the hoary cliches:
Give it up folks. RFK Jr. is a crackpot who will be soon forgotten. There will be no meaningful third-party competing in the general election. Republicans will not have a brokered convention. No one serious is going to primary Joe Biden. There will be no Democratic debates. The Electoral College will not end in a tie.
Sorry, I know it's boring. But in the end, Republicans will nominate someone who will then face off against Joe Biden for the White House. As usual, it will proceed perfectly normally and without any weird fanfare.
In the recent case 303 Creative v. Elenis, Lorie Smith asks the Supreme Court not to allow Colorado to force her to create websites for gay marriages. A day before the ruling was handed down, it was discovered that a customer request for just such a website, which was part of the judicial record, was fake.
This has prompted an outpouring of fury from liberals who believe the Court has been lied to—and since there's no longer evidence of specific harm the case should be summarily tossed out for lack of standing.
This needs to stop. This case never depended even slightly on the existence of an actual request for a website. All sides stipulated that standing to sue was based merely on a prospective "credible threat" that Colorado might force Smith to create a website that violated her deeply held convictions. That's it. This was accepted almost without discussion, and Sonia Sotomayor didn't breathe a single word of objection in her dissent.
Standing, for better or worse, is simply not an issue in this case. It was decided solely on the merits. The majority says it's a cut-and-dried First Amendment case: the state has no right to compel unwanted speech, even if its expression is related to the actions of a protected class (gay and lesbian customers). The dissent says that public accommodation laws do indeed force public businesses to provide "goods and services" to all customers equally, even if speech is incidentally involved:
Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class....The business argues, and a majority of the Court agrees, that because the business offers services that are customized and expressive, the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment shields the business from a generally applicable law that prohibits discrimination in the sale of publicly available goods and services. That is wrong....The law in question targets conduct, not speech, for regulation, and the act of discrimination has never constituted protected expression under the First Amendment.
....For as long as public accommodations laws have been around, businesses have sought exemptions from them....This Court was unwavering in its rejection of those claims, as invidious discrimination “has never been accorded affirmative constitutional protections.” In particular, the refusal to deal with or to serve a class of people is not an expressive interest protected by the First Amendment.
The majority bases its decision on a very thin distinction indeed: Smith, they say, is innocent of illegal discrimination because she has said she will happily serve LGBT customers; she just won't sell them what they want. Soyomayor is unimpressed with this sophistry:
LGBT people do not seek any special treatment. All they seek is to exist in public. To inhabit public spaces on the same terms and conditions as everyone else....The First Amendment does not entitle petitioners to a special exemption from a state law that simply requires them to serve all members of the public on equal terms.
This is what the case is about. Can a state compel a business open to the public to treat the entire public equally, even if speech is incidentally involved? Or is the speech in this case far beyond "incidental" and therefore outside the state's legitimate interest? That's it. Standing never even comes into it.
Construction spending increased in May across the board. Nonresidential construction continued to grow, while residential construction increased for the first time in over a year:
Nonresidential construction was up at an annualized rate of 4%. Residential construction spiked upward at a 17% rate, though it was still 13% lower than a year ago.
The nonresidential number is strongly affected by various government spending programs (CHIPS, IRA) but its continuing strength is still a good sign for the health of the economy. The residential number is a bit of a mystery, but possibly indicates that the bust in the housing market is starting to turn around.
What with summer here, I had forgotten all about Southern California's huge spike in natural gas prices during the winter. Whatever happened to that? Here's the answer:
The whole thing lasted two months. Daily spot prices shot up in December from 100¢ per therm to 500¢ per therm and were back to 100¢ by February. The price charged by SoCal Gas is a monthly average and trails spot prices by a few weeks. The peak was 350¢ per therm in January and was back down to 100¢ by March.
The current spot price is 30¢ per therm. The current SoCal Gas procurement price is 40¢. Both are considerably lower than they were at this time last year.
Why did the price shock last such a short time? Two reasons: Unexpected chilly winter temps started to abate and a closed pipeline from Arizona was re-opened in mid-February. By early March everything was back to normal.
For the past few months I've been more fatigued than usual thanks to the CAR-T treatment. So I've been drowsily watching lots of prestige TV on HBO, which I accidentally subscribed to just before I went to City of Hope.
First I watched five seasons of The Wire. Then three seasons of Deadwood. Then eight seasons of Game of Thrones. Then five seasons of Boardwalk Empire. And now, for some reason, I've started watching a series called Warrior.
For a while now I've been trying to figure out what annoying trait ties them all together, and I think I finally have. It's not violence. Sure, a whole lot of people suffer a whole lot of bloody deaths in all of them, but that's because I chose violent shows in the first place. It comes with the territory.
No, the answer is: whorehouses. Endless, constant whorehouses and endless, constant, meaningless fucking in whorehouses and like environs. It's tiresome as hell, and it doesn't come with the territory. There's no special reason that just because a show is edgy and brutal it needs to feature whorehouses at all, let alone three or four times an hour.
Am I just being naive? Obviously lots of people enjoy sex and nudity on TV, and whorehouses are a handy way of getting it on screen. But that doesn't seem like the whole story. The sheer volume of whorehouse-mongering belies it. The showrunners want ten times more of it than any reasonable script can handle.
So go ahead. School me. What's up with this?
Something peculiar occurred to me recently about the pandemic year of 2020. Obviously a lot of things changed: businesses shut down, office towers emptied out, product shortages were endemic, and so forth. But there were also a number of sharp changes that had no obvious connection to the pandemic. For example:
You can come up with individual explanations for some of these. Maybe auto thefts were up because new cars were in short supply. Overall, though, there are a whole bunch of these oddities that don't have any straightforward connection to COVID and lockdowns and working from home. Is there a common thread?
For 20 years the safety of US mass transit systems remained about the same. In the pandemic year of 2020 the injury rate went up by half and the death rate more than doubled.
The change in 2020 is explicable as related in some way to COVID. But why have death and injury rates stayed so high since? The number of transit journeys has fallen in half during this time, but the absolute number of deaths has increased by a quarter.¹ This makes no sense. What's going on?
¹The absolute number of injuries has gone down, but not as much as the number of journeys. Thus the rate has increased.
Here's a different look at the homeless in Los Angeles:
Over the course of more than a decade, LA has managed to add 6,000 shelter beds for the homeless. That's about 10% of the 55,000 needed. Last year they added 1,100, about 2% of what's needed.
Shortly after the 2020 election Donald Trump called the secretary of state of Georgia and begged him to "find" the extra votes to give Trump a victory there. We know this because Brad Raffensperger recorded the conversation.
Now it turns out Trump did the same thing with the governor of Arizona. Doug Ducey didn't record his conversation with Trump, but he described it to friends:
President Donald Trump tried to pressure Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) to overturn the state’s presidential election results, saying that if enough fraudulent votes could be found it would overcome Trump’s narrow loss in Arizona.
....Four people familiar with the call said Trump spoke specifically about his shortfall of more than 10,000 votes in Arizona and then espoused a range of false claims that would show he overwhelmingly won the election in the state and encouraged Ducey to study them. At the time, Trump’s attorneys and allies spread false claims to explain his loss, including that voters who had died and noncitizens had cast ballots.
....After learning that Ducey was not being supportive of his claims, Trump grew angry and publicly attacked him.
This is nothing new. It's just confirmation of what we all knew already. But confirmation is good.