Kevin Drum

In its never-ending war against government interference with the perfect life, National Review recommends to us today an essay by Matthew Crawford about the indignity of motion-sensitive bathroom faucets. I'd normally try to provide you with an abridged excerpt, but it's really better if you read it in its full glory:

It is characteristic of the spirited man that...when he finds himself in public spaces that seem contrived to break the connection between his will and his environment, as though he had no hands, this brings out a certain hostility in him. Consider the angry feeling that bubbles up in this person when, in a public bathroom, he finds himself waving his hands under the faucet, trying to elicit a few seconds of water from it in a futile rain dance of guessed-at mudras. This man would like to know: Why should there not be a handle? Instead he is asked to supplicate invisible powers.

It’s true, some people fail to turn off a manual faucet. With its blanket presumption of irresponsibility, the infrared faucet doesn’t merely respond to this fact, it installs it, giving it the status of normalcy. There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality.

To maintain decorum, the angry bathroom user does one of two things. He may seethe silently, succumbing to that self- division between inner and outer that is the mark of the defeated. In that case, the ratchet of his self-respect makes one more click in the wrong direction. Alternatively, he makes an effort to reevaluate his own response as unreasonable. In either case, he is called upon to do a certain emotional work on himself. Often the murky fog of prescriptions that gets conveyed implicitly in our material culture would have us interpret as somehow more rational a state of being manually disengaged. More rational because more free.

I have to admit there's something epic about this rage against hands-free operation. And yes, when motion-sensitive faucets work poorly they can be annoying.

But the reason for their existence is far more prosaic than Crawford imagines. There's no infantilization at work, nor an ideological battle against hands. The benefits of motion-sensitive faucets are twofold: they are sanitary and they are ADA compliant. ADA doesn't require hands-free faucets, but it does require either hands-free or a handle with a light touch. For obvious reasons, handles with a light touch don't always fare well in commercial environments, so motion-sensitive faucets have become popular. That's really all there is to this.

As for Crawford's "few seconds of water" from "a futile rain dance of guessed-at mudras," ADA guidelines actually require 10 seconds of water. If you're getting less, don't blame either the disabled or a bureaucratic disdain for spirited men. Instead blame lousy maintenance, a scourge of cheap corporations and water faucets of all types.

This is an odd post from Atrios:

Remember Libya?

A funny forgotten war in which we destroyed a country most likely (whether we knew it or not) to cover up Sarkozy's crimes. No one can offer up a better explanation, anyway, other than the usual liberal humanitarian intervention nonsense which explodes as ridiculous as soon as you look at what actually happened.

There's no question that postwar planning following the 2011 NATO campaign against Libya was a failure. But aside from that it's an odd military intervention to condemn. NATO didn't destroy Libya. It was already engulfed in a brutal civil war at the time. The no-fly zone and naval blockade against Muammar Ghaddafi was approved unanimously by the UN—and by the US Senate. The military campaign was joined by more than a dozen countries and was supported by the Arab League as well as several individual Arab states. Civilian casualties remain a point of contention but were probably only a few hundred. Ghaddafi was killed after seven months and the NATO mission ended.

A couple of years later another civil war erupted, but it's hard to pin the blame for that on NATO. Libya was a volatile place with a lot of ethnic tensions, and by then both Al-Qaeda and ISIS were involved. This war lasted a long time and devastated the country before a ceasefire was finally agreed to in 2020.

Bottom line: War is destructive and cruel. But the NATO strikes of 2011 were, by all odds, the most widely supported and justified military intervention in recent history. Its objective was clear and its scope was limited. Almost literally no one wanted to see Ghaddafi remain in power, which would have surely ended in far more death and destruction than the air strikes caused. And when he was gone, NATO left. War is never perfect, but in the end there's little to criticize about this one.

Iowa has gotten about a foot of snow during the current storm. According to Research™ an inch of snow reduces voter turnout by 0.5%. Roughly speaking, then, we should expect that Monday's caucuses will see turnout about 5% lower than usual.

That's not much, really, and there's no telling what it means in an all-Republican caucus anyway. But I figured you'd want to know.

Charlie is still in the cone. We've made the mistake twice of releasing him too early, so this time it's staying on until his wound is genuinely better. As you can see, though, it doesn't keep him from a proper snooze.

It's a funny thing. Charlie doesn't usually sleep in the bed with us at night. He prefers the doorway or maybe under the bed. But when he's wearing the cone he spends the whole night in bed. Take it off and he's back to the floor. Put it on and he's back to the bed. I have no idea why this might be so.

The Wall Street Journal reports today about a new study on learning loss from the pandemic:

In kindergarten, students tested in 2023 were about 2 percentage points less likely to begin school at grade level in both math and reading, compared with 2019, data compiled by the testing company Curriculum Associates show. Scores also remained below prepandemic levels in the first and second grades.

Kindergarten students weren't even in school during the pandemic, so obviously their learning loss isn't due to remote learning. This is yet more evidence that remote learning wasn't the culprit for learning losses around the globe. But we still don't know what the cause was.

What a bizarre story we have today. According to the rules of the Sports Emmys, on-air talent is not eligible to win an overall award for a show. (They have their own category.) But ESPN wanted them to win anyway:

ESPN circumvented the rule by inserting fake names into the credit list it submitted to NATAS for “College GameDay.” The Athletic reviewed the credit lists for the years the show won: 2010, 2011, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018. In each one of those seven years, names similar to the names of on-air personalities — and with identical initials — were listed all under the title of “associate producers.”

Kirk Henry (Kirk Herbstreit), Lee Clark (Lee Corso), Dirk Howard (Desmond Howard), and Tim Richard (Tom Rinaldi) appeared in all seven years. Steven Ponder (Sam Ponder) and Gene Wilson (Gene Wojciechowski) appeared in five from 2014-18. Chris Fulton (Chris Fowler) appeared in 2010, 2011, 2014 and 2015. Shelley Saunders (Shelley Smith) appeared in the 2010 credit list.

When the statuettes were received, ESPN had them re-engraved and then delivered them to the hosts. By all accounts, the hosts had no idea this was happening.

What the hell gets into people, anyway?

This is a house out on the prairie near Towaoc, Colorado. I took the picture while I was scouting locations on the day before the eclipse.

The Wall Street Journal tells us today that more potent strains of marijuana are producing increased diagnosis of psychosis in teenage cannabis users:

Rates of diagnoses for cannabis-induced disorders were more than 50% higher at the end of November than in 2019, healthcare-analytics company Truveta said this week. The trend is contributing to the broader burden of caring for people who developed mental health and addiction problems during the pandemic.

....The average THC content of cannabis seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration was 15% in 2021, up from 4% in 1995. Many products advertise THC concentrations of up to 90%.

That sounds bad! But there are a couple of odd things. First, this data is for 2019-23 but the potency of cannabis hasn't changed much over that time period. All the increase came before 2019. Second, we've switched from "psychosis" to "cannabis-induced disorder." Third, there's no mention of teens here. Fourth, why no chart showing the actual data?

Truveta doesn't make this easy to find, but they do have a preprint article on their site with a nice chart. Here it is:

Hmmm. This shows cannabis ER visits as a share of all ER visits. That's a bit of an odd statistic. More to the point, though, it shows a sudden 75% increase over the space of two months at the start of the pandemic and then nothing since then.

There's obviously something weird going on here. A 75% increase in two months is not remotely credible. It has to be a statistical artifact of some kind, probably related to COVID since it happened precisely in March-April of 2020.

On the other hand, the rate has stayed high since then, compared to a steadily lower rate in 2019. So maybe it's real.

Bottom line: Something doesn't quite add up here. It's also worth noting that the raw rate of ER visits is minuscule: currently around 6 per 10,000 ER visits for all ages, or 0.06%. There's not a lot of this going on regardless of how you measure it. I'd take it all with a grain of salt for the time being.

Donald Trump decided at the last minute that he would deliver a closing statement at his trial after all. The judge allowed it on condition that Trump stick to the law and the facts, and Trump agreed. This naturally meant nothing. Jonah Bromwich reports in real time:

Trump, speaking into the microphone, says the case goes outside the law and the facts, and that the annual financial statements were perfect. “There wasn’t one witness against us,” Trump says, calling the case a “political witch hunt.”

....“This is a fraud on me,” he says of the case. Engoron is staring stonily at him. The only sound in the courtroom is Trump’s voice and furious typing.

Trump is full stream of consciousness, saying that the case is meant to ensure he does not win again. He is attacking Letitia James, saying she “hates Trump and uses Trump to get elected.” He says that James “found nothing.”

And Trump is now attacking the judge to his face, saying “You can’t listen for more than one minute.” Engoron asks Kise to “control your client.” Trump says “I did nothing wrong,” and says the attorney general “should pay me” for what he’s gone through.

This is standard Trump, but there's still something I don't get. This case has no jury, so Trump's diatribe was heard only by the judge. So what's point? Even Trump isn't deluded enough to think that attacking the judge to his face will help his case.

I suppose he's so far off the rails these days that he doesn't care. The pleasure of launching a rant with reporters around is greater than the pleasure of winning the case. Or maybe he figures it doesn't matter because his pals on the Supreme Court will eventually overturn the verdict—which is pretty clearly going to go against him based on the mountain of evidence and his almost complete lack of a defense.

Anyway, the moral of this story is twofold: (a) Trump is a liar, and (b) he's no longer able to control himself even the tiny bit he could a few years ago. He's losing it.

True crime author Ron Stodghill has a peculiar op-ed in the LA Times today. He's calling out the fact that true crime stories are mostly about white people:

Critics of the genre warn that the homogeneity of true crime stories not only reflects racial biases — it exacerbates them.... Journalist Elon Green puts it this way: “It’s hard to overstate how inaccurate and damaging the results and perceptions created by so much whiteness has been. Generations of readers have been led to believe that murder victims most often are women killed by men and that Black serial murderers are rare. Neither assertion is true.”

I'm not being a smartass here, but it's not clear to me how Black communities are damaged by a perception that serial killers are mostly white. It might be inaccurate, which is reason enough for change, but I'd think Black folks would be relieved that for once they aren't being portrayed as thugs and killers.

Then there's this:

Incorporating more stories of marginalized people wouldn’t just make the true crime genre more accurate. It could make it more responsible, too. Consider that some of the most important critiques of the Netflix show about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed primarily Black LGBTQ men in Milwaukee, came from queer Black people who had lived in that city commenting on how the production retraumatized their communities, failed to consult victims’ families and sensationalized tragic events.

Wait a second. Stodghill wants more Black representation in true crime stories, but then tells us how traumatic it was when they were included in the Jeffrey Dahmer show.

What am I missing here?