Kevin Drum

A 34-year-old Navy lieutenant is currently serving a three-year term for manslaughter in a Japanese prison. Here is a Wall Street Journal editorial explaining how he got there:

Lt. Ridge Alkonis, assigned to the guided-missile destroyer the USS Benfold in Yokosuka, was driving his family back from a trip to Mt. Fuji in May 2021 when he fell unconscious. Two Japanese nationals died in the resulting wreck. No one alleges drugs or alcohol were involved. Lt. Alkonis is a Mormon and doesn’t drink, and his wife and young children were in the car in broad daylight. Jonathan Franks, a spokesman for the family, says a Navy neurologist said that Lt. Alkonis had suffered acute mountain sickness.

This is a standard Wall Street Journal editorial. Every sentence in it is true and it leaves you with a clear sense of outrage over Alkonis's treatment. Why would a Japanese judge hand down such a harsh sentence over something that was clearly a freak accident? More generally, should US service members be subject to the "whims of local justice"?

But the problem here isn't with what the Journal editorial said. The problem is what it left out:

• The three-judge panel in the case didn't believe Alkonis's claim of mountain sickness.
• Partly this was because of inconsistencies between his testimony and what he told the police during an earlier round of questioning.
• Partly it was because altitude sickness typically doesn't manifest below 8,000 feet and virtually never below 6,000 feet—and always while you're ascending. Alkonis was descending from, at most, around 7,000 feet, and the accident occurred in the Yamamiya district, which is around 1,000-2,000 feet.
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• And finally, it was partly because Alkonis passed out completely before losing control of his car. This is not normal behavior for altitude sickness.
• Instead, the court concluded that Alkonis fell asleep at the wheel and continued driving anyway. Then he fell asleep a second time and ended up killing two people.

This puts a different spin on things, doesn't it?

Please note: This post is not about taking sides on the Alkonis case nor about the fairness of his sentence. I wasn't there; I didn't attend the trial; and I'm not a doctor.

Rather, this post is an example of why you should never believe anything you read on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. If you're lucky, the words on the page will be tolerably correct. But lucky or not, the editorial will never, ever provide a complete and fairminded argument. That would put them out of business.

Here's the impact of the first bill that Republicans passed today:

I'm just kidding, of course. The real name of the bill is the Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act. Because why not? Republicans can call it anything they want regardless of what it actually does.

And what it does is simple: It repeals the Democratic bill from last year that gives the IRS more money for taxpayer services and high-income audits. By defunding taxpayer services it will keep people mad at the IRS. By defunding the IRS, audits on the rich will continue to go down and that will be a boon for wealthy Republican donors.

Luckily this is entirely symbolic. It won't pass the Senate and it will never even reach President Biden's desk. But it tells everyone where the Republican Party stands.

Over at National Review, Dan McLaughlin joins the throng of conservatives who are crowing today over a new study that owns the libs big time. Remember all that Russian influence that helped Donald Trump get elected in 2016? Never happened:

Today, however, the Post‘s own cybersecurity columnist Tim Starks offers a reality check: "Russian influence operations on Twitter in the 2016 presidential election reached relatively few users, most of whom were highly partisan Republicans, and the Russian accounts had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior, according to a study out this morning."

....This is common sense. The volume of campaign spending, coverage, and commentary in an American presidential election is colossal, most Americans are accustomed to being exposed to all manner of things that aren’t trustworthy or persuasive, and people are likeliest to fall for misinformation when it simply confirms their preexisting beliefs.

Hmmm. Note that this is solely an investigation of Twitter, not of Russian influence in general, which took many forms.

But let's see what the study says anyway. Here's the first set of charts showing exposure to Russian tweets:

Thanks to the huge y-axis, Russian exposure looks like it might as well be zero! But let's zoom in:

The average person was exposed to about five Russian tweets a day in the month before the election, and about 15 tweets on Election Day. Anyone who uses Twitter knows that this isn't trivial regardless of how many other tweets you're looking at.

Here's the estimated impact on voting under three different scenarios:

Oddly, these results suggest that exposure to Russian tweets drove people to vote for Hillary Clinton, not Trump. This is doubly odd since the authors also say that virtually all of the Russian tweets were directed at conservatives. But what kind of propaganda campaign manages to produce negative results even after successfully targeting the most receptive possible voters?

To summarize:

• This is a study solely of Twitter.
• It demonstrates that Twitter users were exposed to a meaningful number of Russian tweets.
• But the alleged effect of the tweets makes no sense. This ought to raise some skepticism about the methodology of the study.

I'm not aware of anyone who ever thought that the Russian Twitter campaign had a large effect all by itself, so this study doesn't really produce any unexpected results. It does show that the Russians were serious about trying to interfere with the election, but that's about all it possibly could have done. At the very least, you'd need to study the entire Russian hacking and disinformation campaign to produce any kind of evidence about how well it worked.¹

In other words, there's not much here.

¹For the record, my own view is that the effect was small even if you account for every single thing the Russians did. I would be surprised if it affected the vote by more than 1%.

This is about right:

GOP’s first week in majority under McCarthy:

-pass rules package with secret concessions to insurrectionists

-eliminate the House Ethics Committee

-create committee to attack investigations of Trump

-pass $168B bill to repeal IRS funding to investigate billionaire tax cheats

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) January 9, 2023

Why is defunding the IRS so high on their priority list? Because it's basically a tax cut for rich people, and it's the only one they have any chance of getting. It's the one thing you can absolutely, positively count on Republicans for.

This is sunset on the Seine, shortly after we left from our pier near the Eiffel Tower. I think we were passing near La Defense (off to the left) at this point.

Kaiser Permanente has been really good lately about delivering all my test results quickly and efficiently. Little did I know that they have no choice:

Congress was full of good intentions when it directed the Department of Health and Human Services to make sure patients get their test results as soon as they’re available.

But the implementation of that directive has set off a battle between doctors on one side and HHS and patient advocates on the other....Doctors say that patients are now receiving news about potentially terminal disease, or other, less catastrophic but confusing, test results from patient portals before they have a chance to explain them. The American Medical Association is pressing the department to revise its rules, and the trade group for physicians is finding allies in state legislatures. But patient advocates, and HHS, say patients should, and can, decide when they want their results.

The doctors say they know how their patients feel. Patients “are extremely angry and have had harms they’re reporting from getting instant access,” AMA President Jack Resneck said. “We’re seeing a parent who finds out at nine o’clock on a Friday night when they can’t reach anybody that their child’s leukemia has recurred.”

I think the obvious answer to this dilemma is that different patients want different things. Speaking for myself, I want results as soon as they're available because I'm not the kind of person likely to panic if they're bad. And I don't feel like waiting around for them until my doctor happens to have the time to call me—or, worse, ask me to come in for a face-to-face, which will take God only knows how long to schedule.

Beyond that, if you're the kind of person who will panic if you get bad news on a Friday night, then don't check out your test results on a Friday night. Let's use a little common sense here, people.

Personally, I'm tired of all this anyway. Here's what I want: I want doctors to tell the truth. Period. I want the same truth they might provide if they were chatting about my case with a colleague in the hallway. Aside from that, I don't really care much how they present it.

Unfortunately, I've never yet found such a doctor. They all tell the truth most of the time, but when the chips are down you can't trust them. And if you press them, they get defensive and angry.

Am I exaggerating? It's possible. Maybe I'm the one who needs to act better so that doctors in turn will like me more and treat me better.

I dunno. But the truth, and nothing but the truth, is what I want.

Ezra Klein thinks J. Storrs Hall's Where Is My Flying Car? is simplistic and obtuse:

But Hall’s book is worth struggling with because he’s right about two big things. First, that the flattening of the energy curve was a moment of civilizational import and one worth revisiting. And second, that many in politics have abandoned any real vision of the long future. Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. The future exists in our politics mainly to give voice to our fears or urgency to our agendas. We’ve lost sight of the world that abundant, clean energy could make possible.

This is a good point, and one that's bothered me for a long time. If you ever wonder why so many people are in dismal spirits these days, this is part of the reason: both major factions of American political life are based on a diet of almost pure unhappiness. Modern conservatism is based on an endless sense of grievance and resentment, while liberalism is mostly based on outrage over the unfairness of modern society. Listening to Democrats and Republicans over the past couple of decades, you would barely know that life has gotten better by leaps and bounds for nearly everyone. And yet it's so.

On Ezra's second point, I'll make one addition: the real thing we've lost sight of is the world made possible by abundant energy and intelligence. Those are the only two things that progress requires, and we're not very far away from having them both. What's more, they're complementary: abundant intelligence helps to create new and abundant energy sources while abundant energy sources are required to power abundant intelligence.

Now, this is not everything. Energy and intelligence are necessary but not sufficient. Even if both were in almost infinite supply, we could still decide to kill ourselves in a nuclear war and we could still decide to indulge our prejudices and animosities even if we don't have anything to gain by it.

That said, the next 30 or 40 years will be the most important in the history of the human race. Large and growing amounts of clean energy and artificial intelligence will allow us to create just about anything permitted by the laws of physics—if we're able to overcome our own lizard brains and use them in tolerably fair and responsible ways. I'd say that's about a 50-50 proposition.

About a century ago, Willa and Charles Bruce were forced to sell a small strip of beach property that they had developed a few miles south of Los Angeles. The municipal authorities claimed they wanted to develop a park on the land, but the real reason they forced the sale is that the Bruces were Black and the white community didn't want them there—or the Black customers they catered to.

It took a while, but last year activists finally forced the county of Los Angeles to return the property to the Bruces' descendants. But then on Tuesday things changed:

Kavon Ward vividly remembers the sunny day in September of 2021 when she won. When Black people won....Ward didn’t know then what we all know now. That just six months after receiving the deed to the property, the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce would decide to sell Bruce’s Beach back to Los Angeles County for $20 million.

....“I am disappointed,” Ward told me after the family announced its decision last week....“The people worked together to help them get this land back, but the people weren’t included in the decision,” said Ward, who learned of it after getting off a flight and receiving a barrage of frantic texts. “So a lot of people feel slighted.”

I have a lot of reasons to be skeptical of the reparations movement, and someday maybe I'll write about it. But this is one of them: I can't help wondering if it would cause more discord and factionalism within the Black community than it's worth.¹

After all, this was practically an ideal case. There was no question that the land had been unfairly taken from two specific people. There was no question who the descendants were. The amount of money the descendants got was large compared to any plausible broad reparations settlement. And nobody lost anything, since the property will continue to be the same thing it's always been: a beach and a park open to the public.

And yet, all it takes is the most ordinary act in the world—selling a piece of property and splitting up the money—to cause a bitter backlash. When you read stuff like this it's hard to believe that a statewide or nationwide program of reparations could truly be made to work.

¹This is in addition to the obvious backlash it would create within the white community.

For some reason they waited until a couple of days after the anniversary of 1/6 to do it, but their inspiration is obvious. Thanks, Donald.

Alan Blinder, a Real Economist™, says that inflation is way down:

Over the past five months (June to November 2022), inflation has slowed to a crawl. Whether measured by the consumer-price index, or CPI, which most people watch, or the price index for personal consumption expenditures, or PCE, which the Federal Reserve prefers, the annualized inflation rate has been around 2.5% over these five months.

Yes, you read that right. Yet hardly anyone has noticed this stunning development because of the near-universal concentration on price changes measured over 12-month periods, which are still 7.1% for CPI inflation and 5.5% for PCE inflation.

This is a good opportunity to get something off my chest: Anyone who didn't notice this stunning development is an idiot. Or maybe a visceral inflation hawk who needs to be put out to pasture. If you spent the past year obsessed with year-over-year figures just because those are the ones we usually use in normal times, you should not be allowed anywhere near monetary policy. Please return to the 1970s where your brain is apparently stuck permanently.

And in case you're wondering if Blinder is cheating by using a five-month average, which is admittedly a mite unusual, here's a chart:

It so happens that inflation slowed very suddenly in July, so a five-month average that eliminates the June number is indeed a slight bit of cherry picking. But not much. The more traditional 6-month average shows about the same thing. For comparison, the dashed gray line is my usual least-squares regression, which I happen to think is the best of all.