I'm out in the desert twiddling my thumbs while my telescope takes pictures, but I still have some internet access and I see that President Biden has pardoned his son Hunter. I'm not surprised. I'm only surprised that he didn't wait until January 19th.
I suppose I'm required to have a take on this. Fine. For starters, two things are clear. First, Biden shouldn't have done it because he said he wouldn't do it. That's simple enough. Second, however, all the talk about this creating a precedent is nonsense. Most presidents issue a few dodgy pardons at the end of their term, some of them for family members.¹ And God knows this will have no effect on Donald Trump, who has institutionalized favoritism and nepotism to a degree unmatched in history.
That said, there's one thing not getting enough attention: Is Biden right when he says Hunter's prosecution was entirely unfair? Or is this just a handy excuse?
This isn't an open-and-shut question, but I have to say the evidence suggests Biden is right. Hunter has been the target of an openly political jihad in Congress, and it's highly likely that this played a role in David Weiss's decision to change his mind and bring charges against Hunter he never thought were warranted in the first place. What's more, it's possible that the goons Trump is appointing to law enforcement positions could continue hounding Hunter out of sheer vindictiveness. This could well have factored into Biden's change of mind.
So that's my take. Biden is probably in the wrong here. But honestly, I doubt I could have mustered the purity of character to do differently if I'd been in the same position.
¹George Bush Sr. pardoned a bunch of Iran-Contra plotters who he was directly involved with. Bill Clinton, in addition to pardoning Marc Rich, pardoned his brother Roger. George Bush Jr. was mostly pretty good, but he did commute Scooter Libby's sentence. And Trump in his first term reduced the system to rubble, granting clemency of one kind or another to Rod Blagojevich, Michael Milken, Joe Arpaio, Dinesh D'Souza, Bernie Kerik, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, George Papadopoulos, and seven (!) Republican congressmen convicted of crimes: Chris Collins, Duncan Hunter, Steve Stockman, Rick Renzi, Robin Hayes, Mark Siljander, and Randall "Duke" Cunningham. And, of course, Charles Kushner, his daughter's father-in-law.
Joe Biden took a stage at the end of July [2021], CNN Town Hall, telling Americans that if you got the vaccine, you wouldn't get the virus. So we were lied to the entire time, and Dr. Fauci is corrupt and evil and was the person spearheading a lot of those lies.
My interest in this is a little different than Bob's. I'm increasingly perplexed by memories of the pandemic that don't gibe with what I remember happening at the time. Now, my memory is no great shakes, but I have the advantage of being able to use the internet to check myself.
So: Were we, in fact, lied to the whole time? The answer is plainly no. As early as December 2020, a few days before the vaccine was first distributed, Fauci said very clearly on CNN:
Just because you're protected, so-called protected, by the vaccine, you should need to remember that you could be prevented from getting clinical disease, and still have the virus that is in your nasopharynx because you could get infected.
We're not sure, at this point, that the vaccine protects you against getting infected. We know for sure it's very, very good, 94 percent, 95 percent in protecting you against clinically recognizable disease, and almost a 100 percent in protecting you for severe disease.
Fauci and others said this over and over and over. Eventually test results were available that allowed this question to be answered definitively, and it turned out the vaccine protects against severe disease but doesn't protect against infection or against spread of the virus (though it reduces it).
But even in the early days of vaccine distribution Fauci's comments were being deliberately misconstrued. A viral Instagram video in March 2021 went like this:
After Fauci says, “We're not sure, at this point, that the vaccine protects you against getting infected,” the edited Instagram clip plays a record scratch sound effect and a voiceover asks in disbelief, “We’re not sure? At this point? That the vaccine protects you against getting infected?”
This was all part of the anti-vax movement, and was meant to imply that Fauci had admitted we didn't know if the vaccine even worked. This, needless to say, was not at all what he said.
But three years later Boothe is still misconstruing Fauci. In her case, it's not clear if this is deliberate or if her MAGA sentiments have simply warped her memory and she really believes what she said.
(But how about Biden? Did he say that "if you got the vaccine, you wouldn't get the virus"? Yes he did. He was urging people to get vaccinated and generally sticking to the facts, but then blurted out, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” This was a typical Biden gaffe; he should have said "serious COVID." It was hardly a big deal, but years later it's still part of conservative mythology.)
More generally, my recollection is that the "experts misled us" crowd is almost always referring to things that were genuinely unknown at the time. Recommendations changed when the evidence changed, as it has to. For example:
The reason the CDC initially recommended against wearing masks was because they thought you could just avoid people who were sick, so it was best to reserve limited supplies for doctors, who couldn't avoid sick people. When researchers discovered that COVID could be asymptomatic—which meant you couldn't tell if someone was sick—they changed their advice.
The CDC never recommended that kids not be allowed to play outside due to the risk of infected playground surfaces. This was something put in place by local officials who were being urged by parents to be ultra cautious.
The CDC didn't recommend that schools remain closed. Quite the opposite. Closure decisions were made locally, usually with the strong support of parents.
In any case, it's unlikely that school closures caused much harm. Test scores generally fell about the same in states that kept schools open.
Businesses were not shut down for an entire year. Shutdowns were ordered in both red and blue states and generally lasted only about three months.
Nobody ever said the lab leak theory for the origin of the virus was impossible. Every scientist who looked at the question said we couldn't know for sure but the evidence pointed strongly to a natural origin. They said this because it was true.
A lot of public health experts did say it was OK to join the George Floyd protests because they were more important than stopping the spread of COVID. This was stupid.
That said, this is an example of health experts considering the social impacts of their recommendations. It's just not true that they never considered tradeoffs. They considered them constantly.
Epidemiologists initially said that COVID was spread by droplets. That's because the evidence pointed that way. When evidence piled up that aerosol transmission was also important, they changed their public statements. But their safety guidance didn't change, because in most cases it didn't matter how the virus was spread. Standard epidemic hygiene was mostly the same either way.
Dr. Fauci did not admit recently that the CDC just made up its social distancing rule. He said only that he wasn't sure where the specific six-foot guidance came from. As it turns out, six feet was probably too stringent, but at the time there was no research to provide a firm number and advice varied across the globe:
The World Health Organization recommends a distance of “at least one meter.” China, France, Denmark and Hong Kong went with one meter. South Korea opted for 1.4 meters; Germany, Italy and Australia for 1.5 meters. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended “at least six feet,” or 1.8 meters. [Britain, Canada, and Spain recommended two meters.]
Are there some I'm missing? Probably. I told you my memory was so-so. Feel free to add to this list in comments.
Marc Andreessen is the co-creator of Mosaic, the first commercial web browser, and one of the founders of Netscape, a pioneering dotcom company that was eventually sold to AOL for $4 billion. Then he became a legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist, investing in the likes of Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Lyft, Slack, Pinterest, and many others. He's currently worth a couple billion dollars.
Smart guy! But somewhere along the line, like Elon Musk, he went crackers. Last week I wrote about his recent appearance on the Joe Rogan show, where he claimed the Biden administration was leaning on banks to blacklist political enemies and prevent them from using the banking system.
Now, unless you're deeply into MAGA, this probably doesn't sound like the Joe Biden we've known for the past 50 years. However, I hadn't listened to the whole podcast—it's three hours long!—and today I ran across something else Andreessen said:
The AI thing was very alarming. We had meetings this spring that were the most alarming meetings I've ever been in, where they were taking us through their plans.... Basically just full government control. Like there will be a small number of large companies that will be completely regulated and controlled by the government. They told us, don't even start startups, like don't even bother. There's no way that they can succeed. There's no way that we're going to permit that to happen.
W-o-o-o-o-w.
They said this is already over, it's going to be two or three companies and we're going to control them and that's that. Like this is already finished.
Um . . . I don't think anyone said this. And I really don't think anyone said this in a meeting full of people like Andreessen. I mean, you'd keep this limited to a pretty tight circle if you were actually going to do it, right? You certainly wouldn't tell a guy who had been increasingly critical of the administration for years.
I dunno. Andreessen has been convinced for a while that the government—the Biden administration in particular—is deeply hostile toward startup companies. Regulatory agencies, he says, have been "green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain [and] Artificial Intelligence."
This doesn't make any sense. What is true is that Lina Khan has tightened up approvals for big company mergers and acquisitions, and the SEC and other regulators have cracked down on crypto fraud. Andreessen thinks this is terrible for startups, many of which hope to be acquired by large corporations. In fact, the result has been a reduction in big-dollar M&A but no change in the acquisition of seed-stage startups:
Regardless, Khan's pressure on mergers combined with tons of crypto fraud that was prosecuted seems to have been what turned Andreessen into a Trump acolyte. It's really kind of weird.
But it's all part of the strange dynamics of Silicon Valley politics over the past few years. I admit I don't entirely understand it, and I probably should. What's the best evenhanded account of recent Silicon Valley history out there?
Inflation in goods went to zero two years ago and has stayed there ever since. However, nominal wage growth continues to play catch-up with overall inflation—and since the price of services is driven largely by wages this has kept services inflation high. Eventually these two will come down in tandem and high inflation will be over for good.
How long will this take? Beats me. It took quite a while following the Reagan inflation, but that was a massively larger event than the pandemic. Maybe another year?
According to the Wall Street Journal, shoppers are "fighting back" against retailers who have put more stringent rules in place for returns. But the new rules are no surprise. During the pandemic we were all encouraged to stay home and shop online with the promise that returns would be no problem. And we responded! The overall return rate doubled, and only dropped a little way back to normal last year.
What's more the industry estimates that more than a tenth of returns are fraudulent in one way or another. Of those, the most common form of return fraud is "wardrobing," the practice of wearing something once and then returning it.
So now retailers are fighting back. And shoppers are fighting back against the fighting back. Merry Christmas.
I've been wondering where the preposterous Kash Patel would land, and now we know: He's going to be director of the FBI.
Aside from being a fanatic Trump loyalist, Patel naturally has precisely no qualifications for the job. He's worked as a trial attorney, and then as Devin Nunes' attack dog, and that's it. He's 44 years old and has never had the remotest connection to law enforcement. On the other hand, he's written a book explaining that he passionately hates the FBI. And he said this last year:
We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media.
We're going to come after you whether it's criminally or civilly. We'll figure that out.
The US is on top, followed by Canada and Italy. Germany and Japan bring up the rear. But the best measure of economic growth is real GDP per capita. Let's take a look at that:
The US is still in the lead, but now followed by Italy and Japan. Germany still looks grim, but Canada has done the worst of all. This is because Italy and Japan have kept GDP up or flat even though their populations have fallen. Canada drops to last place because their GDP growth has been powered solely by a rising population.
The United States is the only rich country that's had strong population growth and strong economic growth.
Congratulations, France, on Charles Kushner, your new ambassador from the United States. And don't think for a moment that this is nothing more than a bit of unusually rancid nepotism to benefit the father of Ivanka Trump's husband. He earned this.
As for all those "other crimes" Kushner committed, Trump pardoned him for that stuff in 2020. It doesn't count anymore.
Kushner hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, recorded their sexual encounter, and sent the tape to his sister, all in retaliation for his brother-in-law's cooperation with a federal investigation into other crimes Kushner had committed. https://t.co/6Sp8Ea6vYE
“The energy right now is just unbelievable,” said Greg Hardwick, president and owner of Hardwick General Contracting, a custom home builder in central Florida. “Among builders, among clients — anybody that is taking a risk in the housing market right now feels really good.”
....Interviews with builders across the South, Midwest and West Coast highlighted two regulations the industry hopes Trump could pare back as he tries to cut red tape. One prohibits building homes near water, or roadside drainage ditches that connect to creeks and streams, without first obtaining a federal wetlands permit. Another has to do with energy efficiency requirements for certain government-backed properties that were made stricter under the Biden administration. Generally, builders say both rules add costs and delays.
Well, you never know. But the water rule is part of federal law—the 1972 Clean Water Act—which explicitly requires a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers if you want build something that impacts recognized wetlands. And many states have complementary laws of their own. This would be no easy thing to repeal.
The energy efficiency standards are newer, but still outside the 60-day "lookback" period that would allow the incoming Congress to overturn them. They could only be repealed by going through the full rulemaking process all over again.
As for builders feeling great, the Post notes that "builder sentiment improved for the third straight month in November," which is true. But it's still not exactly sky high:
As for home sales themselves, they've been stuck in the doldrums ever since mortgage rates went up. Maybe they have nowhere to go but up, but that depends on the Fed way more than it does on Trump.
Oregon legalized assisted suicide in 1998. The number has grown ever since, reaching 367 last year, about 0.8% of all deaths. In the past decade the growth rate has been 18% per year.
Why the steady increase? The median age of assisted suicide was 75, and my guess is that it's an inevitable result of both rising life expectancies and, ironically, the ability of modern end-of-life care to keep people barely alive for longer and longer.
