You all know of my love for long-exposure shots of waterfalls, and what better place to do a long-exposure shot than Rome's beloved Trevi Fountain? So naturally I went there.
I got to the fountain around 2 am and had a stroke of luck: police were clearing the area so that the steps could be cleaned. That meant I could set up my tripod and take pictures with no one in my way.
On the less lucky side, there was only so far back I could go and I couldn't get the whole fountain in a single shot. So I took a series of shots to turn into a panorama, which worked fine except that the resulting image was massively warped. It took me forever to massage it into decent shape, which you can see below. It's not too bad, but it's not perfect either. However, by the time I got it to this point I was sick of the whole thing and called it a day.
So here it is, ladies and gentlemen: a lovely, velvety picture of the Trevi Fountain. If you throw a crypto coin over your digital shoulder in the general direction of this picture, it means you will return to this blog tomorrow.
James Stimson of the University of North Carolina has been tracking the public mood for decades. Here are his findings up through the final quarter of 2020:
The public normally becomes more liberal when the president is conservative (and vice versa) but the turnaround under Donald Trump was unusually strong. If these preliminary results hold up, the national mood today is more liberal than it's been in over 50 years.
Will this get transformed into liberal action? So far, it seems to have done just that. President Biden is overseeing a surprisingly robust liberal agenda and there's been very little backlash to it. The public may not be rallying in the streets to support him, but most people outside the Fox News bubble seem to be OK with what he's doing. I predict that eventually the same will be true of his decision to pull out of Afghanistan.
If it bleeds, it leads. It's only natural that coverage is going to be more intense when an airport is overrun and people are toppling off airplanes and dying. That said, coverage should also be fair. If it turns out that the American withdrawal is basically moving along competently with the exception of a few hours on a single day, reporters have an obligation to say so clearly. So far they haven't.
And maybe it's too early for that. Fair enough. But eventually they should be willing to critique the own performance if things continue to play out the way they have so far.
We've always had a few parrots around here, but usually only in ones and twos. Yesterday, though, we had a whole tree full of them making a huge racket. I went out near sunset to take pictures and got a shot of this parrot, who seems like a very happy parrot. We need more happy parrots, I think.
Joseph Bernstein writes in Harper's that the average middle-class news consumer in the '50s and '60s was blissfully unaware of what some of his fellow Americans were hearing and reading:
Over frequencies our American never tuned in to, red-baiting, ultra-right-wing radio preachers hyperventilated to millions. In magazines and books he didn’t read, elites fretted at great length about the dislocating effects of television. And for people who didn’t look like him, the media had hardly anything to say at all.
....Today, we are lapsed. We understand the media through a metaphor—“the information ecosystem”—which suggests to the American subject that she occupies a hopelessly denatured habitat. Every time she logs on to Facebook or YouTube or Twitter, she encounters the toxic byproducts of modernity as fast as her fingers can scroll. Here is hate speech, foreign interference, and trolling; there are lies about the sizes of inauguration crowds, the origins of pandemics, and the outcomes of elections.
Extremist nutballs have been with us for a very long time. At first they communicated via mimeographed newsletters and low-power AM radio stations. Later they turned to database-driven direct mail and email chains. Today they use Facebook.
As Bernstein suggests, the big difference here is not that we have more nutballs today than in the past—though we might. The difference is that they mostly flew under the radar until a few years ago. Then they made the move to social media where everyone could see them. In particular, everyone in the mainstream media could see them. And they were shocked. Since they had barely ever encountered this stuff before, they had always figured it was just a tiny fringe. But now it was everywhere. Surely that meant social media had caused a huge increase in extremist nutballism.
But probably not. More likely, it simply exposed us all to reality. These folks had always been around, accusing Ike of being a communist and Bill Clinton of running drugs out of Mena airport. That stuff had an audience of millions but rarely surfaced beyond short blurbs or occasional feature pieces in national dailies. Today it's on the surface to begin with and the mainstream media is entranced with it. They are literally unable to ignore social media storms in a teacup, so today everyone knows all about these folks.
It's possible that social media has made this problem worse. As Bernstein says later in his piece, there's just not a lot of good research here. However, the research we have tentatively suggests that crackpots on social media mostly talk to each other, rather than pulling in new recruits.
Interestingly, Bernstein makes another argument that I haven't seen before. He suggests that one reason we think social media is so powerful is because social media companies encourage us to think so. Facebook spends a huge amount of time and money trying to convince people that it has a secret sauce that makes its advertising far more effective than anywhere else. That argument is a lot easier to make if the entire country is yelping about how powerful Facebook is. So while it might seem like Facebook is trying to appease Congress by cracking down on the nutballs, in reality they love the attention they're getting for supposedly being so powerful that they have to be reined in.
The issue of social media's power and influence is still an open question. There's some evidence to suggest its power has been overblown, but it's pretty tentative. It will probably be several years before we really have a good idea of how influential it is.
Does anyone truly believe that this self-inflicted blow to our national honor will improve our standing in the world? The signal sent to Taiwan — and China — is that we can’t be counted on. That message, heard around the world, is an unforced strategic blunder. It’s also a moral one.
The whole "national honor" schtick is one of my pet peeves, but I'll spare everyone a long screed about it. Instead I'll just answer Goldberg's question:
The message it sends is Do not piss off these guys. They will spend decades continuing to fight even in an obviously hopeless cause.
For what it's worth, this was also the message of Vietnam. We spent more than a decade there, sacrificing 58,000 American lives and over a trillion dollars in a war that was pretty clearly hopeless by 1968, if not earlier. There was no other country in the world that showed that kind of dedication to the Cold War.
Everyone in the world knows that the United States is slightly barmy about its wars. We'll either win or else we'll stick around longer than anyone in their right mind thinks makes sense. Occasionally our insanity lags a bit and we admit a war is unwinnable—usually long after everyone else has figured it out and only after we've killed about 1% of your population—but insanity lurks barely below the surface at all times. Vietnam proved it. Afghanistan proved it.
Jake Vigdor, a professor of public policy at the University of Washington, has updated a measure of residential segregation he co-created with David Cutler and Ed Glaeser back in 1999. Here's the latest, based on 2020 census results:
These are both measures of racial concentration, which Vigdor explains here. The main point, however, is that both measures have continued to decline, which means that overall racial segregation is also declining. But why? The end of legal segregation in the 1960s is one reason, but Vigdor also says this:
In more recent decades, demographic change and gentrification (often spurred by government action) have transformed what had been predominantly black neighborhoods. In 1960, 70% of black metro area residents lived in a majority-black neighborhood. In 2020, that's fallen to 35%.
As is so often the case, the lesson here is that things are getting better and we have a lot more work to do.
Here's what's happened in Afghanistan over the past 24 hours:
Order has been restored at Kabul airport.
Evacuation flights are operating.
The Taliban has announced a "general amnesty" for government officials.
The US embassy in Kabul is still operating, coordinating the evacuation of US citizens and "vulnerable Afghans."
Kabul remains calm, and the Taliban is not targeting American citizens or diplomatic personnel.
President Biden authorized an additional $500 million in aid to Afghan refugees.
He also announced that in addition to the Afghan refugees authorized earlier this month, he planned to expand refugee access to Afghans who worked for US NGOs and news agencies.
Some of this could change by tomorrow, of course, and in the long term it's almost certain that Taliban rule will be brutal and medieval, especially for women. Still, this is an example of how dangerous it is to panic over a single day's images. Yesterday the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan was a world-historical disaster and a sign of America's imminent collapse on the international stage. Today, 24 hours later, everything is running fairly smoothly.
And tomorrow? Nobody knows. But instead of guessing, why not wait until tomorrow dawns and find out?
Retail sales fell 1.1% in July due to "signs of some pullback in consumer demand as U.S. Covid-19 cases tied to the Delta variant rose," according to the Wall Street Journal. Maybe:
In March retail sales increased a whopping 10%. We could hardly expect to sustain that level, and sure enough, retail sales have spent the past four months dropping slowly back toward the trendline.
But they haven't gotten there yet. Even with a few months of declines, retail spending is still 5% above where we'd normally expect it to be and 16% above last year. This is the metric to look at, and it suggests that the economy is still running pretty hot.
Just a quick little note. Whether or not you agree with me about our withdrawal from Afghanistan being less disastrous than the media is playing it, one thing is certain: it would be a good idea to hold off on any categorical pronouncements for at least a few days. It's easy to look at some grim pictures that are on a 24/7 loop on CNN and go all to pieces, but we don't know yet how things are going to turn out. If the Taliban is smart, they'll take this time to consolidate their control and allow American forces to evacuate anyone they want to. The last thing they want is to give us a reason to stay, and a direct attack on US forces would do just that.
But we don't know. Maybe the Taliban is stupid. So far, though, no diplomats have been killed; no soldiers have been killed; Kabul is relatively peaceful; and evacuations are taking place. So how about if we wait and see how this plays out?
As an example of how quickly things change, here's the picture of Kabul airport that dominated the airwaves Monday morning:
