Kevin Drum

Today's White House press briefing featured Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who spoke about an advisory on health misinformation that he recently published. After he left, press secretary Jen Psaki took questions:

Q: Has the administration been in touch with any of these companies and are there any actions that the federal government can take to ensure their cooperation, because we’ve seen, from the start, there’s not a lot of action on some of these platforms.

PSAKI: In terms of actions, Alex, that we have taken — or we’re working to take, I should say — from the federal government: We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s office. We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We’re working with doctors and medical professionals to connect — to connect medical experts with popular — with popular — who are popular with their audiences with — with accurate information and boost trusted content. So we’re helping get trusted content out there.

This prompted a huge outcry from conservatives. For example, here is David Harsanyi at National Review:

A state can regulate speech in numerous ways. If, for instance, the corporate CEOs and cultural elites collude with the government — explicitly or implicitly — to decide how people interact, they engage, functionally speaking, in censorship. And that is exactly what the Biden administration does when it, as Jen Psaki explained to reporters today, “flag[s] problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”

Anyone who argues for free-association rights of private companies — as I do — should view such a relationship as authoritarian.

Am I missing something here? The White House provides information to news outlets all the time. They also complain about coverage all the time. It's routine.

There's no evidence here of the government abusing its power to force anyone to toe the White House line. They're just passing along information about the COVID-19 vaccine, and social media companies are free to use it or not. In what universe is this either censorship or authoritarianism?

Marian curated today's selection, a pair of photos of a big black carpenter bee in our front yard. It turns out that this bee is easier to photograph than a regular bee because it's a lot slower. He doesn't show up very often, but when he does he makes a great subject.

Today my old friend Ezra Klein writes a column about climate change with this headline:

It Seems Odd That We Would Just Let the World Burn

When you put it that way, it does seem odd, doesn't it? Except that it's not. In fact, this kind of thing has happened so frequently throughout human history that it would be odd if it didn't happen. Consider a few examples.

The early settlers of Easter Island deforested their entire island over the course of just a few centuries. Today, successive leaders of Brazil are in the process of doing the same thing to the Amazon rainforest in a few decades.

Midwestern farmers in the 1920s used farming techniques that eroded the soil, leading to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Today those same farmers are draining the Ogallala Aquifer.

Ancient hunters hunted big game to extinction in North America. In the 19th century we hunted the plains bison nearly to extinction. Today we hunt whales to extinction.

I could go on in this vein forever. Humans have a long habit of doing whatever suits them best in the present, regardless of what damage it will do in the future. And none of this is from ignorance. In nearly every case we knew exactly what we were doing.

So it's perfectly natural that we would let the world burn as long as it meant a few more years of air conditioning and two-car garages. In fact, it's something of a miracle that climate change has gotten as much attention as it has.

So what's to be done? First off, here are the Four Commandments of Climate Change:

1. If you aren't talking about the whole world, you're just jerking off.
2. If you assume human nature will change, ...
3. If you think current technology can solve the problem, ...
4. If you think facts and analysis will win the fight, ...

This leads us to four requirements for action:

1. Any solution worth wasting ink on has to be global.
2. Human nature will not change. Don't try to guilt people into giving up their comforts.
3. Current technology (primarily electrification) should be rolled out in emergency fashion, but it can solve only about half the problem. The other half we don't really know how to solve yet.
4. Nobody cares about facts. The facts have been clear for a long time.

Got it? Now let's hear your plan!

POSTSCRIPT: What's my plan? In a nutshell, we should spend huge boatloads of money in a desperate attempt to invent new technology. The longer version is here.

Hum de hum. The Guardian says it's gotten hold of a secret Russian report written before the 2016 election. The report says that Donald Trump is the candidate best positioned to wreck the United States:

There is a brief psychological assessment of Trump, who is described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”.

There is also apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat, or potentially compromising material, on the future president, collected — the document says — from Trump’s earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory”.

The paper refers to “certain events” that happened during Trump’s trips to Moscow. Security council members are invited to find details in appendix five, at paragraph five, the document states. It is unclear what the appendix contains. “It is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate his [Trump’s] election to the post of US president,” the paper says.

I have my doubts about all this, mainly because the report is a bit too perfect. It was supposedly written in January 2016, but it sure sounds as if it could have been written a few weeks ago. It's just a little too spot on.

But who knows? Maybe appendix five, paragraph five will become the new rallying cry for the anti-Trump forces. Weirder things have happened.

A "moderate" Republican throws out a warning:

GOP Sen. Rob Portman, a lead negotiator on the infrastructure deal, responds to Schumer’s Wednesday deadline. Says he will vote NO next week if the bill isn’t finalized. “I’m not gonna vote yes if we don’t have a product. We’re gonna get it right,” Portman told me

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) July 15, 2021

Spare me. How long do these folks need to tie up the loose ends on this bill? It would have been finished three weeks ago if Republicans truly wanted it to pass. Hell, they've finalized bills in a matter of hours when they really cared.

I get that Joe Biden wants to give Republicans every possible chance to pass a bipartisan bill. And who knows? Maybe it will work out in the end. But you can put me firmly in the skeptical camp that thinks Republicans are, once again, just trying to run out the clock on this bill. Leopards don't change their spots.

As you can see, the death rate in the United States has been spiking upward for over a week now. This is mostly due to the spread of the delta variant combined with low vaccination rates in states that watch a lot of Fox News.

God knows that Fox News has plenty on its conscience already, but its contribution to vaccine resistance is truly a low point. I'm not sure how they live with themselves in that building.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through July 14. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Bob Somerby keeps asking for an understandable explanation of the theory of relativity. In this post, I shall try to oblige him in less than 500 words. Note, however, that I am taking an, um, nontraditional approach.

Special Relativity

1. Until 1905, everyone thought that velocities added up. That is, if you're walking at 2 mph and you get on an escalator that's moving 2 mph, your total velocity is 4 mph. Simple.
2. Simple but wrong. In fact, your total velocity is a little less than 4 mph. It turns out that our intuitive sense of how the universe works is incorrect. Here is the actual formula for adding up velocities, where c is the speed of light:
   
3. Once you have this, the rest is just arithmetic. If you take this formula and apply it to objects in motion, all the weird predictions of relativity pop out: lengths get shorter as velocities increase; time slows down; nothing can go faster than the speed of light; and e=mc².

General Relativity (Gravity)

1. Until 1916, everyone thought that normal Euclidean geometry described how the universe worked.
2. It doesn't. Once again, our intuitive sense of how the universe works was wrong.
3. In fact, in the presence of mass (the earth, for example), geometry becomes non-Euclidean, or slightly "warped." Here is the Einstein field equation that describes the shape of space and time in the presence of mass:
   
4. This equation is even more complicated than it looks, but it basically says the curvature of spacetime (the curvature tensor G_αβ) equals the distribution of mass/energy (the metric tensor T_αβ).
5. The rest, as Einstein himself said, is just (very advanced) arithmetic. When you work through the consequences of warped spacetime, it turns out that time slows down in the presence of mass. Another way of saying this is that motion through time decreases.
6. Another consequence is that objects accelerate toward the mass. In other words, motion through space increases.
7. This is gravity: in the presence of mass, motion through time decreases (slightly) and is converted into motion through space.

You will notice that both cases have two things in common. First, the rules of how the universe works turn out to be a little more complicated than we thought. The old rules of Isaac Newton are almost right, but not quite.

Second, once you have the rules the rest is just working through the math. This might seem a bit like cheating, but it's nothing new. An ordinary freshman physics textbook spends hundreds and hundreds of pages working through the consequences of a few rules set down by Isaac Newton. But if you discover new rules, then you have to work through the math all over again and you'll come up with different results. That's what college textbooks on special and general relativity do for hundreds and hundreds of pages.

You're disappointed, aren't you? You really want to know what it all means. Sorry. There's really no deep philosophy here. For reasons no one entirely understands, we live in a universe ruled by the iron fist of mathematics.

In other words, once you know the rules, it's all just math, baby.

Today is crash day, so all you get is an occasional short post when I happen to be awake. Here's another one:

Do the anti-CRT folks have any examples of what our kids are being taught in public schools? Note that I'm backing down from my request for some kind of semi-rigorous research. That's obviously not available, so now I'll be satisfied with anecdata. All I want is maybe a dozen examples of kids being taught that white people are oppressors, America is a horrible racist nation, etc.

We at least have that, don't we?

In today's photo my camera is peering into the heart of an iris growing in our backyard. Very Georgia O'Keefe-ish, no?

I've said this before to no effect, so let's try again:

DON'T bother criticizing the actual voting provisions of Republican voting laws. They're mostly popular and mostly have close to zero effect on actual voting.

DO criticize the provisions that allow Republican legislatures to overturn results or replace election officials. Even most Republicans find these shocking when they hear about them.

That's about it. Why is this so hard?