Let us investigate the vast history of lying by Gov. Tim Walz as alleged by the Trump campaign:
Retired from the National Guard as a command sergeant major.
He did rise to the rank of command sergeant major, but upon retirement his rank reverted to master sergeant.
Had children via IVF.
Walz almost always refers only to "fertility treatments," but a couple of times has used the term IVF. In fact he and his wife underwent IUI, commonly referred to as IVF but actually a different, more affordable fertility treatment.
Won an award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce (2006).
It was the Junior Chamber of Commerce,
Taught in China for a year through a program at Harvard University (2006).
It was a program affiliated with Harvard.
Earned the title of Nebraska Citizen-Soldier of the Year (1989).
He did indeed earn this award, but so did 51 other people. I'm not sure how this counts even under the strictest definition, but I'm including it for completeness.
Referred one time to "weapons of war, that I carried in war" (2018).
Has admitted this was a misstatement.
Denied he had been drinking when he was pulled over in 1995 for speeding (2006).
Possibly the only serious falsehood, from 18 years ago. However, he corrected the record himself six years ago when he ran for governor.
This is a pretty desperate list. Added up, it's maybe 10% as much as a single routine lie from Donald Trump. But YMMV.
Katy Y.Y. Tam, a postdoctoral psychology researcher and boredom expert....
Huh. And ironically, I imagine that studying boredom is pretty fascinating.
Anyway, this is from a story about mindless switching between TikTok videos. Tam says this is an attempt to relieve boredom that backfires: the more you do it, the more bored you get.
This doesn't really surprise me. The fact is that there's not much original content on TikTok. The vast majority of "creators" are just pushing out the same me-too stuff as everyone else. It's practically designed to be boring, which is why TikTok videos are so short. Their creators know perfectly well that nobody would watch one of these things if it went on for 30 minutes.
What's interesting, I think, is that this kind of mindless switching is exactly the opposite of highly mindful switching, aka "going down a rabbit hole." When you're switching quickly but doing it with a purpose, it's easy to get obsessed. This is where so many weirdo conspiracy theorists come from.
So: switch mindlessly and end up with unrelieved boredom. Switch with a purpose and end up a lunatic. Maybe we all just need to work on developing longer attention spans.
How do wars end? Lots of different ways. One of the most common is also the simplest: the losing side surrenders and sues for terms. Needless to say, these terms are often harsh.
Wars can also end via negotiated settlements, usually mediated by a third party. In these cases the losing side often avoids the harsh terms of formal surrender but nonetheless is forced to accept a small fraction of what it wants.
Surrender and negotiation have one thing in common: both sides, but especially the losing side, have to stop fighting.
The Arab-Israeli War¹ has been ongoing for 80 years or so. The Arab side that started the war has lost. They've lost over and over and over, and they have no chance of changing that. They are outmatched in conventional terms, and even if, somehow, they were able to turn this around, Israel has nuclear weapons available in the last extremity. Put simply, the Arab side literally has zero chance of ever winning.
But they refuse to surrender. So the war continues, and Israel's defense becomes steadily more brutal in an effort to finally force surrender. None of this is necessarily fair. It is, however, the way the world works and always has.
The Arab-Israeli War will end when the Arab side surrenders. So far, only Egypt and Jordan have effectively done this, and they've had peaceful relations with Israel ever since.
The same thing will happen with any other organization or state that recognizes reality and surrenders. The terms of this surrender have gotten worse over the years as the fighting has continued, but that's to be expected. They'll get worse still as long as the fight goes on.
Like it or not, this is the only endgame. Short of Carthage-like annihilation, the Arab side has lost as thoroughly as any side has ever lost in history. They need to surrender and then rely on the US and Europe to help them avoid the harshest possible terms from Israel. It's the only way this ever ends.
¹This should be "Arab plus Iranian," but there's no good word for that. Just assume that Iran is included in all references.
This is apropos of nothing in particular. It's mainly just for reference:
When tech companies hire people, they're hiring from the pool of STEM college graduates. So, for example, if you read that some Silicon Valley company is 20% Asian, you shouldn't compare that to Asians' 6% share of the population. You should compare it to their 15% share of STEM degrees. When you do that, it turns out Asians are only modestly overrepresented, not hugely overrepresented.
Likewise, if the same company is 6% Black, that's roughly proportionate, not a huge underrepresentation.
Use these numbers as rough baselines to evaluate hiring in tech companies. Someday we can hope that all these figures match shares of population, but until then companies have no choice but to work with what universities produce. That's what this is.
Every month the BLS publishes employment figures. These numbers are calculated from a survey and then adjusted based on estimated births and deaths of business enterprises.
That's a little iffy, so every year the figures are re-calibrated based on state unemployment data, which is more accurate. Here's what the revisions have looked like over the past couple of decades:
Even by my standards, this is a snoozer. The only reason to bother posting the chart is because of Donald Trump's tedious bellowing that it demonstrates CHEATING on the part of Joe Biden. And even that wouldn't have prompted me to put this up but for the opportunity it gives me to print this howler from Bloomberg:
It’s not the first time GOP members have accused a Democratic administration of cooking the books when it comes to the labor market. Under President Barack Obama, they argued the government was favoring an unemployment metric that made the economy look better. Democrats traded similar accusations when Republicans in Congress rewrote the way the economic effects of legislation are measured.
It's not usually my gig to complain about news outlets that bend over backwards to demonstrate "evenhandedness." But come on. According to Bloomberg, Republicans complain when the numbers are the same as they've always been. Democrats complain when Republicans rewrite the numbers.
These are not the same thing. Sometimes one side is just less honest than the other. Why not accept it?
I haven't written much about the lead-crime link lately because there hasn't been much to write about. Today there is. Beware: a righteous rant is coming.
Many years ago Steven Levitt and John Donohue—Levitt is one half of the Freakonomics duo—postulated that the crime decline of the '90s was due to Roe v. Wade. "Children who are unwanted at birth are at risk of a range of adverse life outcomes and commit much more crime later in life," they explain, so if there were fewer unwanted babies after 1973 they posit that there would be less crime 20 years later.
Though there is not complete acceptance of our hypothesis among academics, all agree that if our paper is not correct, then there is no viable explanation for the enormous drop in crime in America that started in the early 1990s. Indeed, there is not even an arguable theory to supplant the abortion-crime link. . .
Jesus Christ. Levitt and Donohue are well aware that violent crime dropped all over the world in the '90s but abortion was legalized only in the US. Their theory plainly explains nothing. What does, despite their cavalier dismissal, is lead.
Levitt and Donohue point to a simple correlation: abortion was legalized in the US in 1973 and crime started dropping about 18 years later. That's not much, but even at that their correlation doesn't hold up:
The abortion rate went up very suddenly over the space of five years, but crime didn't drop suddenly from 1990-95. It took 20 years. Furthermore, the abortion rate started decreasing sharply in 1990,¹ but crime didn't go back up starting in 2010.
This whole thing is just a coincidence that Levitt and Donohue stubbornly refuse to admit. 1973 is also right when lead use in gasoline started to drop. This is why their theory makes predictions that are mostly correct: because abortion increases happen to line up with lead reductions.
And there's more. Levitt and Donohue have a single nationwide correlation and a few differential state correlations. That's it. But so does lead, and as I've said many times before, if that's all there were I never would have written about it in the first place. But there's far more. There are global studies. There are neighborhood studies. There are studies from the early 20th century. There are prospective studies that track individuals from birth to adulthood. There are brain imaging studies that explain precisely what lead exposure does to developing brains.
In other words, not only is there an "arguable theory" for the crime drop of the '90s, there's a theory with absolutely mountains of evidence behind it. It was gasoline lead.
But wait. Are there any studies that suggest the lead hypothesis is wrong? Well, there are some dumb ones. For example, a study that looked only at homicide and only during the '80s. That's so stupid it beggars the imagination. Or there's one that uses a different measure of crime, but also shows a 96% correlation (!) between, for example, carjacking and assault. This also beggars the imagination.
To my knowledge, there's only one serious data point that pushes against the lead hypothesis: a meta-analysis that concluded (a) there was strong evidence for lead causing crime, but (b) there was also evidence of publication bias. That is, studies that found lead-crime links got published but studies that didn't were tossed out.
This has to be taken seriously, but I'm skeptical of it. Measures of publication bias are necessarily fairly crude, and there are lots of reasons to think that lead studies are unlikely to be rejected just because they showed small or no effects. That would be very publication worthy!
I'm usually a little more relaxed about this, but I'm pretty fed up with criminologists who steadfastly refuse to admit the obvious. No one thinks that lead is exclusively responsible for crime, but if you're looking for an explanation of the crime drop of the '90s and aughts, gasoline lead is it. The evidence by now has piled up so high it's all but irrefutable. What's more, aside from lead Levitt and Donohue are correct that there really aren't any other plausible theories.
The dead enders need to pull their heads out of the sand. Gasoline lead caused crime to go up in the '60s and '70s, and the end of gasoline lead allowed it go back down in the '90s and aughts. There's not much else to it.
¹Ironically, this was probably due to lead. The same mechanism that explains crime also explains less teen pregnancy and therefore fewer abortions.
Welp, here's something you probably didn't expect Donald Trump to say:
He's lying, of course, but that's not the point. The point is that abortion bans have proven to be such a disaster for conservatives that Trump now feels the need to effectively abandon his opposition to abortion altogether. Conservative Philip Klein calls it what it is:
The idea that his administration would be “great” for “reproductive rights” is hard to interpret in any other way than as an affirmatively pro-choice statement. By the common usage of the term, if you support reproductive rights it means you want broader access to abortion.
....In addition to being a moral abomination, it’s unclear what this does for him politically. With this post, Trump will further alienate pro-lifers and divide his own party while doing absolutely zero to win over anybody pro-choice.
This is all part and parcel of the obvious fact that Trump has never cared about abortion. Hell, I'd bet my big toe that he's paid for a few in his life. Abortion is and always has been a purely transactional issue for Trump: as long as pro-lifers help him get elected, he'll be pro-life. If they become baggage, he'll drop them.
That's always been the way it is. But it's only now that it's becoming too obvious to ignore.
New home sales increased by 71,000 in July, bringing the total number to an annualized rate of 739,000. Adjusted for population, this is 2.19 new houses sold per thousand people:
This looks pretty healthy: we're holding steady at the level from just before the pandemic. But if you zoom out and take a longer view, things don't look quite so sanguine:
With the exception of the tail end of the bursting of the housing bubble, new home sales are near all-time lows. And we're unquestionably at an all-time non-recessionary low. The only years with lower totals were 1981, 1991, and 2008-18.
Kamala Harris says we need to build more homes. That's true. We should get this number up to a steady rate of 3 per thousand, or about one million homes per year. Over a decade, this would amount to an additional 3 million single-family homes.
But—and say this quietly—all 3 million of those additional homes are needed in California. The rest of the country is mostly fine.
