Author: Kevin Drum

This week Republicans have:

• Loudly defended Donald Trump against charges of lawbreaking that he's obviously guilty of.¹ One of them even boasted that he would prevent extradition of Trump to New York, something that's clearly unconstitutional.
• Expelled a Democrat from the Tennessee legislature for bad behavior, with two more to come.
• Arrested the teenage son of a Ron DeSantis foe for using bad memes in a private conversation.

And there's still a couple of days left in the week.

¹They aren't especially important charges, but there's not much question that Trump is at least guilty of the misdemeanor of falsifying business records.

This is the Basilica of Sacré Coeur, overlooking Paris from 400 feet above the city on the hill of Montmarte. It amuses me that it was built as something of a middle finger from rich Catholics as payback for the imprisonment of the pope following the Franco-Prussian war. As it happens, the pope wasn't really imprisoned and, in any case, the French had nothing to do with it. But I guess that didn't really matter. The Catholic church had been getting the raw end of the stick in France ever since the French Revolution, and Paris's Catholic community was eager to show that they could afford to build a huge new basilica while France itself was more-or-less bankrupt following the war.

The top photo is Sacré Coeur. The bottom photo is a view of Paris from Montmarte.

Lindsey Graham, who once proposed a national 20-week limit on abortions, has now proposed a 15-week limit. However, this would only be a ceiling. The law would still allow states to pass more restrictive abortion laws, and this makes it obviously of no interest to liberals.

But what if it were just a straight nationwide rule of 15 weeks for every state? Post-Dobbs, this would give both liberals and conservatives a choice. Do they prefer a checkerboard of abortion bans in some states and no limits in others? Or a consistent 15-week rule in every state?

I myself would prefer to fight it out on a state-by-state basis, but that's based a bit selfishly on the fact that I live in California and the women in, say, Mississippi are fairly distant.

Hypothetically, then, suppose a nationwide 15-week rule were on the table. Suppose it contained reasonable safeguards for the physical health of the mother but very stringent rules for mental health. Suppose additionally that the Supreme Court would allow it.

How popular would such a bill be? Should liberals support it? Should conservatives support it? Or should we all accept that more-or-less forever we're going to have some states where abortion is unrestricted and others where it's completely banned?

Comments?

This is sort of an odd picture. It's the Washington Monument, of course, but it doesn't really look very tall. Is it because of the trees, which distort our sense of scale? Or about shooting it from slightly above its base? Or about the cropping of the photo? I'm not sure.

Via Alex Tabarrok, here's the racial and ethnic breakdown of inventors in the United States. The figures are from a new demographic study done by Ufuk Akcigit and Nathan Goldschlag:

Every nonwhite group is massively underrepresented except for Asians, who are massively overrepresented. Women are also enormously underrepresented:

In this study, "inventor" is anyone with a patent to their name. It's almost exclusively a white and Asian male domain right now.

The Chinese team that collected samples from the Huanan Seafood Market three years ago has finally published its report, and an advanced draft has been posted on the Nature website. Let the games begin:

A peer-reviewed paper that concludes there is no evidence for zoonotic spillover at the Huanan Seafood Market in #Wuhan has just been published @Nature. How will the #media, especially science journalists, deal with it? This is a test. #journalism https://t.co/kQwa95Pcz2

— @mbalter — investigations and commentary (@mbalter) April 5, 2023

Test accepted! First, here's the relevant discussion in the paper:

Another report [the international study reported a few weeks ago] hypothesized that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from animals to humans at least twice in November or December 2019, and the raccoon dog was hypothesized to be the intermediate host animal. The evidence provided in this study is not sufficient to support such a hypothesis. Our study confirmed the existence of raccoon dogs, and other hypothesized/potential SARS-CoV-2 susceptible animals, at the market, prior to its closure. However, these environmental samples cannot prove that the animals were infected.

And here's a table showing which animals the Chinese team tested:

There were no raccoon dogs tested because, as we already knew, there were no raccoon dogs left at the market by the time the testing started.

In other words, this report is literally neutral on the question raised in the international study that pinpointed raccoon dogs as the likely intermediary for a zoonotic spillover of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Both reports agree that no samples were collected directly from raccoon dogs because the Huanan market didn't have any raccoon dogs still there when the swabs were taken. However, the international study reported that there were lots of samples which contained both SARS-CoV-2 DNA and raccoon dog DNA. The Chinese study didn't address this at all. So when you say the Chinese study concluded there was "no evidence" for the raccoon dog hypothesis, that's literally true. It's just as true to say it didn't confirm that the virus arrived from Mars.

The raccoon dog hypothesis may or may not be true. The international study laid out its argument and it's now up to experts to hash it out. Today's Chinese study adds nothing to that debate one way or the other.

National Review's Jeffrey Blehar is unhappy about the victory of liberal Janet Protasiewicz in Wisconsin's supreme court race:

The rollback of the significant Tea Party-era gains made by the GOP in the state now seems, if not foreordained, then on the horizon. Democrats have seized control of the state Supreme Court — once held by conservative justices 5–2 during the Scott Walker era — and look set to undo the state’s abortion law and legislative map, and may even threaten Act 10, Walker’s signature legislative achievement.

The Wisconsin supreme court is now under 4-3 liberal control. This small change means that Wisconsin's wildly extreme Republican gerrymandering will probably be moderated, which in turn means there's at least a fighting chance that Democrats can someday win control of the legislature. It also means that Wisconsin is unlikely to overturn the 2024 election results in favor of Donald Trump, something that was a real possibility if the court had remained in conservative hands. Also, the court will probably now overturn Wisconsin's 1849 abortion ban and remain a state where abortion is freely available.

That's a lot riding on a single supreme court justice in one state.

I think I may have a trip to Los Angeles in my near future:

A battle is being waged at the Westlake/MacArthur Park Metro station near downtown Los Angeles. The weapon of choice? Loud classical music....L.A. Metro’s goal with the music and lights is to reduce crime and drive away unhoused people.

....The transit authority says the strategy has resulted in an “improvement in public safety,” citing a “75 percent reduction in calls for emergency service, an over 50 percent reduction in vandalism, graffiti and cleanups, and a nearly 20 percent drop in crime.”

....Yet the current alternative of elevated volume, coupled with repetition, is a way that music has been used as torture throughout history, says [musicologist Lily E. Hirsch]. Constant exposure to loud music can disrupt sleep and thought and eventually make people lose their connection to themselves.

The transit folks say the music is being played at a level of 72 db, which is quite reasonable. But Jessica Gelt, who wrote this story for the LA Times, visited with a decibel meter and says the music is playing at a level of 83 decibels—about the same as a leaf blower.

Which is it? I gotta hear this for myself.

Over at New York, John Herrman describes the TikTokification of everything—except worse:

You’re stuck in line at the grocery store, so you check your phone. Your brain shuts off, and your thumb takes over. Soon, a tall video plays. A man is tricking a baboon with some sleight of hand. He makes a lighter disappear and the baboon makes a weird expression. Laughter. The video starts again. The baboon is confused, and so are you. Who made this video? Nobody you’ve ever seen before. Why are you watching it? Because the app showed it to you....To the right, you see a vertical row of icons: hearts, a voice bubble, and a paper airplane that suggests you send the video to someone else (who? where?). Lots of big numbers. You swipe down. A thunking scroll produces another video, then another, then another.

We all know where this is going, don't we? Mike Judge showed us a couple of decades ago:

This is a guy walking his dog on the road up to Idyllwild. The man's politics may be suspect, but his dog was very sociable. I had my car door open and he almost jumped onto my lap.