Cats, charts, and politics
The Johns Hopkins dataset already has a new record (empty for now) that's set up for "2020 Olympic Games." I can't blame them, of course, but it's kind of discouraging to see.
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through June 25. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
Today the Pentagon released its long-awaited report on UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). Click here if you feel like reading it—it's only four pages long. Basically, the report says that nobody has any idea what's going on, which is honest but not especially satisfying. It also doesn't really leave any scope for comment from the hot take industry.
However, I will comment on this, from the Washington Post's reporting:
“I was first briefed on these unidentified aerial phenomena nearly three years ago,” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Since then, the frequency of these incidents only appears to be increasing. The United States must be able to understand and mitigate threats to our pilots, whether they’re from drones or weather balloons or adversary intelligence capabilities.”
....Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the ranking member of the intelligence committee, said...“This report is an important first step in cataloging these incidents, but it is just a first step. The Defense Department and Intelligence Community have a lot of work to do before we can actually understand whether these aerial threats present a serious national security concern.”
The report says that UAPs could be a national security problem if they "represent sophisticated collection against U.S. military activities by a foreign government or demonstrate a breakthrough aerospace technology by a potential adversary." But come on. I know it's fashionable to trash talk US intelligence these days, but it's not that incompetent. A lot of the stuff that gets reported by pilots would require technology light years ahead of our own on a whole bunch of different levels (stealth, propulsion, avionics, etc.). Hell, some of it would probably require anti-gravity. Human technology is by far the least likely explanation for any of it.
This poses a question. Do Warner and Rubio really believe what they're saying? Or is this going to become the latest Team B nonsense designed to justify ever higher defense spending? I'm just asking questions here.
"Yeah, he's right here . . . No, he's not happy . . . Why? Come on, Joe. A trillion dollars for infrastructure and nothing about cat food. What were you thinking? . . . Sure, sure, "when the timing is better." He's heard that before . . . Uh huh. And when is there going to be a cat in the White House, anyway? WE WANT THE CAT. WE WANT THE CAT."
Here's a question for you:
As you can probably guess, my answer is:
Go ahead, prove me wrong. I want to be proven wrong. I'll acknowledge up front that having a president not named Trump would help immensely, but that's not really a policy thing. I'm more interested in drilling down a little further. What would the CDC do differently? Would we speed up vaccine testing? Would we handle shortages better? Etc.
FWIW, I'm not asking for your personal hot buttons here. If you think we should vaccinate with half doses, that's fine, but the question is whether the CDC and FDA are likely to allow it based on our experience with COVID-19.
What, oh what, can President Biden do to rein in our skyrocketing crime rate? Does crime spell doom for Democrats in the 2022 midterms?
I'm tired of this. You're tired of me being tired of this. But one more time: there is no epidemic of crime:
There is an epidemic of homicide, but that's a very different thing. Violent crime rates have been essentially flat for the past five years and property crimes have continued their long-term decline.
OK, so what can Biden do about the outbreak of homicide? The answer is: Nothing. First off, crime is primarily a local problem, and there's very little the federal government can do about it. Second, nobody even knows why homicide spiked up last year, and there's no real way of addressing a problem like this until we have some idea of what caused it. If it was due to pandemic lockdowns, then it will take care of itself. If it was due to George Floyd protests, it will take care of itself. If it was due to poor policing—which is doubtful—then cities need to improve their police departments.¹
Politics being what it is, I suppose Biden has to look like he's taking action. But the truth is there's nothing he can do and everyone knows it. It's all kabuki.
¹I say it's doubtful because homicide went up all over the place. Did dozens of American police departments suddenly disintegrate all at once? And if they did, why didn't other kinds of crime skyrocket too?
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through June 24. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
We have a compromise infrastructure bill! Hooray! It comes to a modest $600 billion in new spending over ten years, focused on rail, road, water, and broadband. I'm OK with this, since I don't think American infrastructure is really in terrible shape and we don't need to spend boatloads of money on it. A little sprucing up should do the job.
However, I'm genuinely puzzled by the way it's being sold:
Both the president and top Democrats say the plan, which constitutes a fraction of the $4 trillion economic proposal Mr. Biden has put forth, can only move together with a much larger package of spending and tax increases that Democrats are planning to try to push through Congress unilaterally, over the opposition of Republicans.
“If this is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it,” Mr. Biden said during remarks in the East Room of the White House. “It’s in tandem.”
Shouldn't Biden be downplaying this as much as possible? Why on earth would any Republican agree to give him a $600 billion bipartisan win if Democrats have made it clear that they're going to turn right around and pass all the stuff they compromised away? That seems crazy to me. What am I missing?
Behold last night's moonrise. Out of a dozen quick shots, this was the only one in focus. Stupid camera.
FiveThirtyEight has a piece today that, among other things, ranks well-known politicians by their perceived ideology. The most liberal Democratic politician turns out to be . . . Kamala Harris:
This has some people shaking their heads. Harris is more liberal than Elizabeth Warren? Bernie Sanders?
By chance, I can explain. Aside from the fact that some of these rankings are just plain nuts (Dianne Feinstein more liberal than Dick Durbin?), Fox News and other conservative outlets have been busily building up Harris as the greatest liberal threat since George McGovern. The idea is that Joe Biden is old and frail and likely to die in office, at which point Harris will take over and start sending conservatives to socialist reeducation camps. This means that many impressionable conservatives are convinced that Harris is the most liberal politician in the country.
Any other questions?
Katrine Marçal has an interesting piece in the Guardian today about the history of the wheeled suitcase. Her contribution is to track its invention past the usual late-'80s starting point, past the 1972 "official" invention, all the way back to the early '50s. So why did it take so long to catch on?
Resistance to the rolling suitcase had everything to do with gender. Sadow, the “official” inventor, described how difficult it was to get any US department store chains to sell it: “At this time, there was this macho feeling. Men used to carry luggage for their wives. It was … the natural thing to do, I guess.”
Two assumptions about gender were at work here. The first was that no man would ever roll a suitcase because it was simply “unmanly” to do so. The second was about the mobility of women. There was nothing preventing a woman from rolling a suitcase — she had no masculinity to prove. But women didn’t travel alone, the industry assumed. If a woman travelled, she would travel with a man who would then carry her bag for her. This is why the industry couldn’t see any commercial potential in the rolling suitcase. It took more than 15 years for the invention to go mainstream, even after Sadow had patented it.
My first introduction to wheeled luggage came when I started traveling on business in the late '80s. One day, boarding a plane at Dulles, I noticed a flight attendant with a rollaboard and was intrigued. I asked her where I could buy one, and shortly after that I got one for myself. It wasn't a big deal, but few other people had them at the time and I did get a bit of ribbing for it from my fellow travelers. It was just jokey stuff, but there was no question that they considered it an admission of weakness or something.
In any case, this means that wheeled luggage isn't really one of those inventions that seems so obvious that you wonder why it took so long to come up with the idea. Ditto for cupholders, I suppose, which probably seemed downright counterproductive back in the era when eating in cars was discouraged.
No, the real invention that puzzles me, the one that I wonder why it took so damn long to catch on, is this one. Anyone have an explanation?
