Kevin Drum

From an Emerson poll a few days ago:

“Voters who made up their mind in the last month or week break for Harris, 60% to 36%,” Kimball said. “The three percent of voters who said they could still change their mind currently favor Harris, 48% to 43%.”

This gibes with my belief that most people who haven't already committed to Trump are likely to vote for Harris when they finally make a decision. We'll see.

One of the key questions about gender-affirming care among teenagers is: do they regret it later? A new study of both puberty blockers and hormone therapy shows that regret rates are extremely low a few years after the treatment has begun:

The data analyzed survey responses from more than 200 people who are part of the TransYouth Project, one of the largest and longest community-based studies on the experiences of transgender youths. The majority of respondents expressed satisfaction with the gender-affirming care they received, with only 4 percent — nine respondents — expressing some form of regret.

That's from the Washington Post's write-up. Unfortunately, nothing is ever easy when it comes to studies like these. This one has a decent, though not spectacular, sample size, and an excellent retention rate. Almost nobody dropped out along the way. But there's also this from the study itself:

The sample in the present work was unique in a few ways that are notable for interpretation of these results. Most showed signs of their transgender identity by 4 years of age. On average, they socially transitioned at age 6.7 years, and most were fairly binary in their gender identities and gender expressions throughout childhood. Early-identifying youth who are especially insistent about their identities are also more likely to socially transition in childhood and identify as transgender or continue to show gender dysphoria in adolescence and early adulthood.

In other words, nearly all the children in this study had been socially transitioned for many years before they began medical treatment. This is probably the most treatment friendly sample it's possible to get.

So once again we have a study of trans kids that doesn't really tell us much. It does suggest that medical interventions are probably OK for kids who are especially certain about their identity, and that's good to know. But for everyone else we're still in need of rigorous studies to guide policy going forward.

Megan McArdle picks at a scab of mine today:

It’s hard to pick just one favorite form of internet insanity, but, if I had to, it would definitely be shoplifting denialism.

Over the last few years, shoplifting has clearly become a bigger problem. We’ve seen videos of brazen shoplifters casually walking off with goods while helpless security guards watch. Retailers tell us it’s a problem, one that’s forcing them to close some of the hardest-hit stores. If you live in one of those areas, it’s also visible in your daily shopping: the locked cases at your drugstore, the signs banning knapsacks or oversize totes, the armed guard who recently appeared at the exit of my local supermarket, checking receipts.

This is all true. Why would drugstores lock up toothpaste if shoplifting weren't a real problem? On the other hand, FBI crime statistics don't show a huge surge:

Shoplifting has gone up by a quarter since 2021, but it's still no higher than it was in 2017. However, I had to extrapolate this data myself and it might not be right. What's more, it's possible that retailers have mostly given up reporting shoplifting to the police since it does little good. Even the FBI admits that clearance rates are generally below 10%.

But there's also this:

This doesn't come from police reports. It comes from an annual survey of retailers by their own industry group. They have every incentive to report accurate numbers.

But there are problems here too. First, "shrink" includes losses from shoplifting, employee theft, and operational errors. Maybe it's steady because shoplifting went up and the others went down. Who knows?

Second, maybe shoplifting really has stayed steady, but it's because of the locked cabinets, surveillance systems, and guards at the door. There's no sure way to tease out causality.

What to think? It sometimes happens that widespread anecdotal evidence flatly doesn't match the best statistical data. This is one of those cases. So what's the best bet: trust the statistics or trust the anecdotes?

The case for statistics is that they really do tend to be reliable on a nationwide basis. The case for anecdotes is that they can identify trends faster and at a more granular level.

The case against statistics is that they're bloodless and don't always capture the full scope of things. The case against anecdotes is that media coverage can amplify limited local events into broad moral panics that don't represent reality. In turn, this can motivate businesses announcing weak results to blame everything on the excuse du jour—in this case shoplifting—because that's better than admitting you're managing the business poorly.

This has all been a longwinded way of saying that I find this particular issue perplexing. The anecdotal evidence really does look convincing, but maybe it's only capturing isolated incidents in a few high-crime cities. And why doesn't it show up in any of the data?

I don't know.

New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters said today that Kamala Harris has a clarity problem. Liberal Twitter is aghast:

I get it: Trump is famous for long, meandering paragraphs of word salad that are sometimes incomprehensible. But even if Peters is wrong in a technical sense, he's right in every practical sense that matters. Trump is crystal clear that:

1. He's against illegal immigration.
2. He's anti-woke.
3. He's in favor of tax cuts.
4. He's against China and in favor of protecting American industry.
5. He's pro-Christian.
6. He'll fight against bureaucratic red tape.
7. He's in favor of more coal, oil, and gas production.
8. He's anti-crime and pro-cop.
9. He's pro-gun.

There are obviously also issues where Trump tries to either stay quiet or fudge his position: Israel, abortion, and climate change, for example. But for the most part, every human being in the country knows at least the direction of his main positions.

This is less true of Kamala Harris. Partly that's because she's been on the national stage for only three months compared to Trump's ten years. But there's more to it than just that. She's certainly in favor of abortion rights. Everyone knows that. She supports Obamacare and believes in climate change. But take a look at that list of nine Trump positions. Harris is a little fuzzy on every single one of them.

I'm obviously extremely pro-Harris, but this doesn't blind me to the way she comes across. Most people know she's generally liberal and will do liberalish things as president, but that's about it. There's still some doubt on where, precisely, she stands on lots of hot button issues. There's no similar doubt about Trump.

POSTSCRIPT: I should add that a little fuzziness isn't necessarily bad. Lots of successful politicians try to appeal to all sides. But it is what it is.

The FTC has been busy as the Biden presidency winds down. A few days ago they finalized "Click to Cancel," which requires businesses to make it as easy to cancel an order or subscription as it is to purchase one in the first place:

Today they announced a ban on fake reviews:

I don't know how effective these new rules will be, but three cheers to Lina Khan for trying.

This is Lake Fulmor, a few miles away from Idyllwild on Highway 243. The mountain in the background is Black Mountain.

Three weeks ago, Florida's general counsel sent a letter to local TV stations ordering them to stop broadcasting a commercial in favor of Proposition 4, which creates a right to abortion. A few days ago a judge told them bluntly to knock it off. It was a plain violation of the First Amendment.

Today we learned more. The general counsel, John Wilson, filed an affadavit saying the letter came straight from the office of Gov. Ron DeSantis and that he resigned a week later rather than send out a second, similar letter.

This is your freedom-loving Republican Party at work. They have been terrified to learn that even in red states most people are opposed to strict abortion bans, and they will do anything to prevent the will of the people from being heard. The First Amendment, to them, is just a minor roadblock to be bulldozed whenever it's inconvenient.

What happened to the confident march of progressivism that inspired lefty politics for the past couple of decades? It seems to have died out, replaced by a budding rightward movement in American politics.

The explanation is simpler than most observers think: This is what always happens. Episodes of progressivism are rare in American history and usually produce a backlash after a decade or two because they overreach and finally get too far ahead of public opinion.

• New Deal progressivism was weakened by the war and finally collapsed afterward thanks to perceptions of destructive union activism; softness on communism; and hardline desegregation.
• The counterculture of the '60s eventually broke on the shoals of good intentions that went too far for most Americans: busing as a way of fighting racism; a continued obsession with "root causes" in the face of rising crime; and a humiliating retreat from Vietnam. Combined with a failing economy it killed progressivism for a generation.
• The same thing has happened this time but with different issues: the transformation of anti-racism into wokeness; trans activism taken to extreme levels; "defund the police"; and immigration softness that's become indistinguishable from open borders.

The American public welcomes the thrill of progressivism every few decades—but only just so much and only for a short while. Then they retrench. But the good news is that progressive gains are generally permanent. Our most recent surge of progressivism was modest by historical standards but still produced Obamacare, gay marriage, marijuana legalization, and, with an assist from the Supreme Court, growing support for abortion.

Now we're suffering through the usual backlash and politics is moving slightly rightward. Mainstream Democrats can either fight this or accept it. The former guarantees irrelevance while the latter delivers public acceptance at a modest price—modest because the growing lunacy of the Republican Party means Democrats don't have to move far to still seem like a better choice.

It seems like the choice should be easy, right? But it never is.

Homes are expensive these days, but that doesn't seem to be stopping anybody. Among young families, the homeownership rate is currently 35%, higher than it's been anytime in the past 30 years outside of the housing bubble years.

Elon Musk, as part of his jihad against FAA red tape, has been telling this story lately:

SpaceX had to do a study to see if Starship would hit a shark. I'm like "It's a big ocean, there's a lot of sharks. It's not impossible, but it's very unlikely." OK fine, we'll do it, but we need the data, can you give us the shark data?... Eventually we got the data, and the sharks were going to be fine. We thought we were done.

But then they hit us with: 'Well, what about whales?" When you look at the Pacific, how many whales do you see? Honestly, if we did hit a whale, the whale had it coming, because the odds are so low.

Is this story true? It's very hard to check. Is Musk talking about Starship launches, which happen in Texas, or booster splashdowns, which are typically in the Indian Ocean? It's vanishingly unlikely that any US agency would be worried about a splashdown in international waters 10,000 miles away. On the other hand, hitting stuff in the water isn't a big concern during launches. Trying to figure out this story is made all the harder by Musk's reference to the Pacific Ocean. Starship launches go out over the Gulf of Mexico and splashdowns are in the Indian Ocean, so what is he talking about?

I'm assuming that Musk is talking about Starship launches from his Starbase facility in Boca Chica at the southern tip of Texas. The first thing you need to know is what this looks like:

As you can see, Starbase is neighboring three different protected areas in the middle of a vast network of wetlands. Ecological concerns have obviously been top of mind since the very start.

The second thing you need to know is that SpaceX has broken or skirted FAA rules for its launches constantly since the first launch:

On at least 19 occasions since 2019, SpaceX operations have caused fires, leaks, explosions or other problems associated with the rapid growth of Mr. Musk’s complex in Boca Chica. These incidents have caused environmental damage and reflect a broader debate over how to balance technological and economic progress against protections of delicate ecosystems and local communities.

....Mr. Musk and the company had pledged a different sensibility when setting up operations in Boca Chica. The project, SpaceX told local officials, would have a “small, eco-friendly footprint” and “surrounding area is left untouched,” meaning it “provides for an excellent wildlife habitat.”

A small facility was never Musk's plan. He intended to build a gigantic facility. The FAA mostly let him get away with this because they were sympathetic to SpaceX and its importance to the US space program. This is the irony: far from burying Musk in red tape, the FAA has been mostly in his pocket for years. What's more, the FAA is always under considerable pressure to approve Musk's plans from friendly members of Congress. Because of this, Musk was routinely able to carry out launches without full approval or without carrying out all of the FAA's orders.

This all came to a head after Starship's first test launch, in April 2023, which ended four minutes later in a huge fireball and the destruction of the launchpad, sending steel sheets, concrete chunks, and shrapnel thousands of feet into the air. What made it worse was that Musk had gone ahead with the launch despite explicit orders from the FAA not to. The FAA apparently treated this like a "boys will be boys" incident, while officials at the Fish and Wildlife Service were furious.

In any case, this naturally got everyone's attention and the FAA demanded a lengthy investigation along with lots of changes to the rocket assembly—which included adding a "deluge" system that dumped millions of gallons of water on the launchpad during takeoffs. This didn't make Musk happy. Then, in October, the FAA began working to gain approval from the Fish and Wildlife Service, which capitulated and gave its full blessing on November 15. Starship's second launch was scheduled for three days later.

Here's where things get tricky. I assume this is the sequence of events Musk is talking about, and I assume it's the Fish and Wildlife Service that allegedly asked for the shark and whale studies. But did they?

If they did, it was almost certainly not because they were afraid of sharks being hit by falling debris. Rather, they were concerned about runoff from the deluge system and how it might affect endangered species. For your edification, here is their final determination:

They also concluded that metals released into the water from launches was minimal and would have "no long-term negative effects to ecological communities."

Now, if you've actually read all the way to here, you may notice that we have information about plovers and ocelots and turtles, but we still don't really know if sharks or whales were involved in any of this. If they're not endangered they won't show up in the table above, so that doesn't tell us anything. What would tell us something is the final report from the Fish and Wildlife Service, but this doesn't appear to be public. So we don't know.

Still, what really seems to have happened is this: Musk eventually burned through his goodwill even with the FAA, which was tired of his antics and his refusal to follow orders. For that reason—and because his rocket exploded—they started clamping down a bit. Musk can't abide that, and that's what prompted his recent attacks against supposed government red tape.

But sharks and whales? I dunno.