Kevin Drum

Donald Trump worked at a McDonald's today!

It's heartwarming to see Trump serving the little people, sort of like Jesus did. But you will be unsurprised to learn that it was all staged. The store itself was shut down for the day:

The cars coming up to the drive-thru window were full of handpicked Trump supporters:

Is this the ultimate in being on-brand? Trump stages himself waving to nonexistent crowds when he get off planes. He stages the cameras at his rallies so that they don't show the arena is half empty and people are leaving. He stages "press conferences" where only friendly faces are allowed. He pretends to pray during his staged visits to churches. Now he stages a few minutes of "working" at McDonald's.

Here's how the Washington Post reported it:

Former president Donald Trump briefly visited a McDonald’s in a town between Philadelphia and Trenton, N.J., as part of an effort to again assert a claim he has made without evidence that Kamala Harris never worked at McDonald’s.

The Los Angeles Times did the same, even though the rest of the story made it plain the reporters knew the event was staged and they were going out of their way not to mention it:

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump visited a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania on Sunday as he stepped up his criticism of Democrat Kamala Harris and dug into his claim, spread without offering evidence, that she never worked at the fast-food chain while in college.

The Wall Street Journal put up a video that was carefully edited to hide the fact that it was all fake. The New York Times mentioned Trump's Potemkin McDonald's visit only in a subhead:

Former President Donald J. Trump renewed an unsubstantiated attack on her at a McDonald’s near Philadelphia.

I have no idea why the mainstream media is going to such lengths to actively cover up what really happened. I've never seen anything like it.

Here's why, in the face of everything, I think Kamala Harris is likely to win in November:

My guess is that Trump's ceiling lies in his favorability rating: around 44-45%. Conversely, Harris's ceiling is everyone who doesn't view her unfavorably: around 52-53%.

My reasoning is simple: Trump is a very well-known quantity. The only people who will vote for him are those who actively approve of him. If you don't, or if you're still not sure after eight years, you just aren't going to vote for the guy.

Harris, conversely, is new on the scene for most people. Even if you're not sure you like her, it's a lightly held opinion. You might still vote for her.

This puts Harris ahead of Trump by 7-9 percentage points in potential support. I don't think Trump can overcome this in the next two weeks.

POSTSCRIPT: The big wildcard, in my opinion, is sexism. How many people, when they finally have to pull the lever for someone, will decide they don't trust a laughing, smiling, soft-hearted woman to drive a hard bargain with tough customers like Putin and Xi? This has at least the potential to seriously muck things up.

Happy Birthday to me! I was born 66 years ago at 8:02 pm, a Sunday, just as the Ed Sullivan Show came on with musical guests Tony Martin, Roger Williams, and Xavier Cugat.

The top charting song on my birthday was Ricky Nelson's "Poor Little Fool." On the following Sunday Pan Am launched the first regular transatlantic jet service from New York to Paris:

Jet service to Paris was yours for only $489.60—equivalent to $5,341 today. This was not something for the plebs. But then again, neither was the service, which featured wines poured into stemware and hot meals served on fine china on linen-covered tables.

Amos Alonzo Stagg was on the cover of Time and Mamie Eisenhower was on the cover of Life:

The New York Times from the next day tells you all the exciting stuff that happened on the 19th. Democratic gain in House likely! Dulles consults Lloyd en route to Chiang parley!

Exciting times. It was the peak year of the Baby Boom, and the month before I was born ushered in the first integrated circuit and the first credit card. Modern life revolves around both.

The Wall Street Journal asks Donald Trump how he would persuade Xi Jinping to leave Taiwan alone:

“Oh, very easy,” the former president says.... “I would say: If you go into Taiwan, I’m sorry to do this, I’m going to tax you”—meaning impose tariffs—“at 150% to 200%.” He might even shut down trade altogether.

Mr. Gigot: “Would you use military force against a blockade on Taiwan?” Mr. Trump: “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me and he knows I’m fucking crazy.”

I guess this is his all-purpose answer for everything. I wonder if he realizes that you can only do it once? Or that if he followed through we'd be short of gallium, antibiotics, and iPhones in pretty short order? Probably not.

During his rally today at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump opened with a long, rambling story about.......Arnold Palmer. For your weekend viewing pleasure, here are the last 37 seconds:

A little while back the FBI modified its crime dashboard to show monthly figures instead of annual ones. Here's what it looks like:

SRS is the old FBI crime reporting system. A decade ago they rolled out a new system called NIBRS. Over time, more and more police departments adopted NIBRS, and in 2021 the FBI finally switched to NIBRS only. It was a disaster. Not enough departments had adopted NIBRS to make it reliable, so in 2022 they once again began accepting crime reports in both formats.¹

Now that we have monthly data, we can see an oddity: in the SRS era the crime count doubles every December. During the transition era the spike was reduced as fewer departments used SRS. Finally, in the modern era the spikes go away completely even in the years when SRS data was being accepted.

What's going on? The spikes are obviously some kind of reporting artifact, but does that mean all the monthly figures are unreliable—too high in December and too low the rest of the year? And why did they go away in 2021? If the monthly figures aren't reliable, why bother even showing them?

And here's another thing: the figures for violent crime don't match the figures you get by adding the four sub-crimes (murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault). Not by a mile.

And yet more: the FBI now has figures for lots of very specific crimes. But they're useless because only NIBRS includes this stuff, so everything is shown rising substantially as NIBRS adoption spreads. The numbers literally mean nothing.

What's going on with the FBI's data boffins? Can we trust any of their public facing numbers these days?

¹This is why crime data for 2021 is unreliable.

It was actually this sentence that initially got my attention in Ross Douthat's column today:

Existential anxiety and civilizational ennui, not rationalist optimism and humanist ambition, are the defining moods of secular liberalism nowadays.

Um, what?

Ross Douthat suggests today that the country is ready for a return to religion. He recommends Spencer Klavan’s book Light of the Mind, Light of the World, which he describes this way:

It’s an argument that the materialist model of the universe as a closed physical system, in which units of matter bounce around like billiard balls, has been overthrown by the quantum revolution — which demonstrated, to the bafflement of many scientists, that probabilities only collapse into reality itself when a conscious mind is there to measure and observe.

This is simply not correct. To the extent that we know what's happening at all, wave equations collapse when they interact with the outside world. In the famous example of Schrödinger's cat, the state of the cat is undetermined as long as the box containing the cat is closed. When it's opened and interacts with its environment, the state collapses into either a dead cat or a live cat because, in some sense, the universe is then forced to make a decision.¹ It doesn't matter if anyone is watching.

Likewise, quantum computers perform calculations by taking advantage of superpositions of isolated qubits. When the calculation is complete, the computer measures the resulting state—and it's the interaction with the computer that causes the qubits to decohere and produce a single classical result. No conscious mind is required aside from the trivial one that we humans never know for sure what's going on until we see it ourselves. But as an argument for God that's as silly as suggesting that maybe all the food in your refrigerator appears only when you open the door.

Nobody is persuaded that God does or doesn't exist with logical reasoning like this. But to the extent logic matters, the issue has nothing to do with quantum mechanics. It has to do with whether the universe evolves following mathematical law—any mathematical law. If you believe it does, you're an atheist whether or not you call yourself one. If you don't believe it does, then pick a religion, any religion. You're a person of faith.

¹Or so we think. The collapse of the wave equation—aka decoherence—remains something of a mystery to this day. We have rules for measuring it, but no firm physical model to explain what's really happening.

Elon Musk warns that under Kamala Harris, "All of America will be Californicated. And not in a good way."

I don't know about that. California looks pretty good to me:

What exactly is the problem here? Warts and all, it seems like the whole world, let alone the whole country, would be lucky to be Californicated.

The homelessness rate in California is 3x the rate for the rest of the country.