For some reason it occurred to me a couple of days ago to think about the sheer number of cranks and crackpots who roamed the White House and bent Donald Trump's ear about election fraud in late 2020 and early 2021. I don't mean people who are just a little conspiracy minded; I mean out-and-out loons like these:
Michael Flynn
Rudy Giuliani
Sidney Powell
Mike Lindell (aka "pillow guy")
John Eastman
That's off the top of my head. Who am I missing?
This is why I've always wondered: Was Trump lying when he said the election was stolen? Or did he really believe it? Trump is capable of talking himself into almost anything, and after marinating in this crackpot circus for a while I wouldn't be surprised if Trump's id had truly convinced him that Democrats had schemed (successfully!) to steal the vote in thousands of precincts nationwide.
So maybe Trump isn't a congenital liar. But if he isn't, he's a mentally deranged lunatic. Take your pick.
Here's the latest Gallup polling on abortion, conducted "mostly" after the recent leak of the Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade:
Gallup reports that pro-choice sentiment is the highest it's been since 1995. But be careful! It turns out that this is due almost solely to changes among Democrats:
Democrats are now more fired up about abortion than they have been for a long time, which is good. They should be. And this will help with turnout in the November midterms.
But we still have a lot of work to do persuading everyone else to become friendlier to abortion rights. The imminent end of Roe v. Wade hasn't had much impact on them yet.
The answer is #1, of course. The second description sounds obviously wrong even though it just changes the order of the adjectives. Native English speakers understand this intuitively even if nobody ever taught it to them. I certainly don't remember this ever being a topic in any of my English classes.
But is this an actual rule? It turns out the answer is yes. The Cambridge Dictionary provides this handy table:
Some of you know this already, but I only found out about it a year ago. I happened to be reading a piece about teaching ESL and it turns out this adjective order stuff is a huge pain for English learners. Now you know.
A week ago I predicted that the Senate would do nothing on gun regulation. But over the weekend negotiators announced they'd reached a deal. So was I too cynical?
Maybe! But keep two things in mind:
Nothing has passed yet. There's plenty of time for things to fall apart.
Even if it passes, the "framework" announced on Sunday contains only two (2) provisions that actually regulate guns. One would slightly strengthen background checks for gun buyers under 21. The other would prevent domestic violence offenders from owning a gun even if they aren't married to their victim (the so-called "boyfriend loophole").
The rest of the Senate agreement deals with mental health, red flag laws, and so forth. So count me as still cynical. This bit of legislative trivia will probably get watered down even further and, even then, may well not pass. The conservative noise machine has plenty of time to convince their followers that no true friend of liberty would restrict the Second Amendment rights of unmarried domestic abusers.
POSTSCRIPT: Is the success of "framework" negotiations a historic win just for showing that Republicans are finally open to gun regulation, even if things are starting off small? A lot of pundits seem to think so, but I'd say this is wishful thinking on a grand scale. Republicans are just playing for time, not showing any real interest in stopping gun massacres.
A couple of months ago the chatterati could talk about nothing but supply chain problems causing shortages of consumer goods. Now, with whip snapping speed, everything has changed. Suddenly the conversation is all about gluts:
The big-box retailer Target said Tuesday that it’s having inventory troubles. Target has a lot of stuff, including furniture and appliances, that nobody seems to want to buy. And it’s not the only company sitting on too much of the wrong goods.
Damn. That was a fast turnaround:
B of A writes about the “End of All Shortages. .. Every AUTO OEM expects semi supply to improve in 2H22 .. Housing inventory is picking up .. the labor shortage will ease; $UBER has reported accelerating ‘driver supply’ .. Here’s a chart showing Retail Inventories surging ..” pic.twitter.com/DMkT0L5FVk
WTF? The usual metric for this is the inventory/sales ratio, and as of March it was still well below its pre-pandemic level:
Has the IS ratio really surged since March not just to 1.20 or so, but so far beyond it that retailers are now complaining about bulging warehouses? All in eight weeks?
As for autos, we don't need to bother with ratios or anything else. The drop in inventories is so stark that we can just look at units:
If Target says they have too much inventory, I believe them. If auto suppliers and dealers expect inventories to recover from historic depths within a couple of months, they must have good reason for thinking so. But this is sure the mother of all dizzying turnarounds.
I didn't check the COVID-19 stats at all while I was on vacation, so I figured I should take a look now that I'm back. This time around, I was interested in death rates by vaccination status. Here it is:
The CDC provides death rates by vax status through the start of April. The more recent numbers are extrapolated from overall death rates provided by Our World in Data.
At the peak of the Omicron surge in January, the death rate for the unvaccinated was about 160 per million. Today it's 2.5 per million. For the vaccinated it's about 0.5 per million.
Of course, if you look at age you get a different picture. The Omicron surge primarily affected the unvaccinated elderly over the age of 65. The death rate for those under 50 has been low for a long time and is tiny today. It's especially minuscule for those who are vaccinated: 0.2 per million vs. 0.9 for the unvaccinated in the 30-49 age group. (Click the chart to embiggen.)
The difference in death rates between races and ethnic groups has largely disappeared too. In fact, the CDC reports that the white death rate is now higher than both the Black and Hispanic death rates.
Case rates have also fallen to low levels, which is a very good thing. Even if COVID isn't killing a lot of people anymore, long COVID is nothing to sneer at. It's still well worth your time to get vaccinated and to practice at least basic pandemic hygiene.
The price of gasoline continues to skyrocket. This got me curious about how closely it's following the price of oil these days, so I went back and did a more careful job with the regression chart I've posted a few times already. Here it is:
Gasoline is now selling for 61¢ more than the current price of oil would suggest it should. Here's what that delta looks like over the past few years:
The delta between the actual price of gasoline and the projected price has averaged around zero since 1991—which it has to if your regression is done correctly—and it's also been zero since 2000. Since 2018 it's averaged a few cents above zero.¹
But then it took off when the Ukraine war started and is now 61¢ above its projected price. Keep in mind that the projected price already takes into account the rise in the price of oil. The 61¢ delta is over and above that.
Why has this happened? It's not because of a difference between WTI and Brent crude prices, which have been consistently within a few dollars of each other this year. Is it an uncertainty premium based on fear of oil stocks being depleted later in the year as sanctions against Russia bite harder? Is there some kind of hoarding going on? Are refining and delivery costs skyrocketing, which would add to the pump price of gasoline even if crude oil prices didn't change?
I don't know. But at the moment the delta shows no sign of reverting back to its mean. It just keeps going up
¹Technical note: I calculated average delta through the end of 2021 so that it wouldn't be affected by its current runup in 2022.
Over at New York, Sam Adler-Bell says that he doesn't care about the word "woke." If you don't like it, fine. But if you believe in the principles behind the word, you need to quit using its pseudo-academic language with anyone other than your own circle of true believers:
This idiom — or perhaps communicative register — replaces the obligation of persuading others to adopt our values with the satisfaction of signaling our allegiance and literacy to those who already agree. In some cases, this means we speak in an insular language that alienates those who haven’t stewed in the same activist cultural milieu.
....When college-educated radicals speak for the left, they tend to speak in the language of “wokeness” — precisely as I have defined it — with distorting and destructive effects. This is due, in part, to the peculiar history of 20th-century campus radicalism. The victories of student activists in the 1970s onward — in creating departments and new curricula through which radical thought could be studied and taught — were pyrrhic. Conceived as beachheads in a broader war against capitalist society, radical departments became sepulchers for radical thought: places where wild ideas could be quarantined from the challenge of convincing anyone outside to believe them.
Ironically, this is an argument that conservatives have been making for decades. They say—correctly, I think—that the overwhelming dominance of the left on university campuses weakens progressives because they're never forced to learn how to persuade non-progressives. Conservatives, by contrast, who face a stewing cauldron of students and faculty who all disagree with them, learn fast that they'd better figure out how to make convincing arguments.
Conservatives probably overstate this point, but there's not much question that there's something to it. This is why it drives me nuts whenever some progressive says "It's not my job to teach you ______ ." Of course it is. Not only that, it's your job to teach others constantly, patiently, sociably, and in language they can understand. If you aren't willing to do this, you don't really care about winning support for progressive ideas.
Politics is all about persuasion, and right now progressives are doing a lousy job of it. We need to up our game.
Did you watch the 1/6 hearings last night? I did, but thanks to lingering jet lag I dozed through bits and pieces of it. I think I mostly got the gist, but there were some things I probably missed.
Anyway, it seemed pretty effective, though as usual it's all but impossible for me to judge how it went over with ordinary people who aren't political junkies and didn't know all this stuff already. The biggest problem facing the hearings, I think, is that for an awful lot of people the evidence about Trump and 1/6 doesn't matter in the first place. They already believe that Trump tried to overturn the election results and they think that was a good thing. I mean, Democrats were the ones who originally tried to steal the election, right? So why shouldn't Trump fight them on the same level?
So we have (1) people who believe Trump tried to overturn the election and don't care, and (2) people who believe Trump tried to overturn the election and think it was an attempted coup. But I suppose there must still be some folks in the middle who don't realize what Trump did and would be outraged if they finally figured it out. That's the audience for these hearings.
Is it big enough to matter? Polling suggests that two-thirds of Republicans are in group (1) and pretty much all Democrats are in group (2). Independents split about half and half. A back-of-the-envelope guess, then, is that about a quarter of the electorate doesn't fully realize what Trump did and might be swayed if they found out.
Maybe. This is just the roughest kind of guess. I suppose we'll find out for sure after we see if the polls move much after a summer's worth of hearings.
We return you now to our regular Friday programming featuring fully American cats. In today's photo, Charlie is showing off his hunting skills by leaping onto a painted ping pong ball. He mainly likes it because it rolls around nicely and makes a great sound when it bounces off walls. He never quite brings it to heel, though. It just keeps rolling around.
