No sift next week. The next new posts will appear on January 27.
From what I can tell, the manager of your local Applebee’s has more experience managing a bigger budget and more personnel than Pete Hegseth.
This week's featured post is "A Disastrous Development in Our Response to Disasters".
This week everybody was talking about the LA wildfires
As I write, the fires in the the Los Angeles area are still burning, driven by dry conditions and hurricane-force winds. A weekly blog is not the right way to cover breaking news, so I won't offer anything more than a few observations.
Fires driven by such strong winds don't look real; it's like somebody has speeded up the video.
The problem wasn’t only a shortage of manpower. Even the most formidable human efforts are useless when bone-dry undergrowth is whipped by the strongest winds the area has experienced in years, with gusts up to 100 mph. “When that wind is howling like that, nothing’s going to stop that fire,” says Wayne Coulson, CEO of the aerial firefighting company Coulson Aviation that’s battling the fires. “You just need to get out of the way.”
The New York Magazine article that quote is taken from gives some context:
Historically, the danger of wildfire has waned with the arrival of winter rains, but in recent years that pattern has changed. “On average, California’s rainy season is occurring about a month later than it did historically,” Swain says. And that increases both the length and the potential intensity of the fire season. By this time of year L.A. normally should have received several inches of rain, but it’s only gotten a fifth of an inch since last July, making the period the second-driest in over a century of record-keeping.
The trend isn’t limited to Southern California. Climate change has increased the number and severity of wildfires around the world, with higher global temperatures leading to drier weather in some regions. The Russian arctic, which hadn’t historically been prone to wildfire, has started to experience it on an epic scale, while southeastern Australia is burning with new intensity. Europe, too, has seen a steady increase in wildfires. Last year’s wildfires in Canada choked the eastern U.S. in smoke and painted the daytime red.
This is something to bear in mind whenever someone makes the argument that programs to cut fossil fuel use are expensive or uneconomical. Fossil fuels are a false economy. The reason we keep having these increasingly expensive disasters is that we have burned too much "cheap" fossil fuel. And yes, the money we spend subsidizing electric cars or installing solar panels this year won't lessen our risk of climate-related disasters next year; there's way more lag time in the system than that. But refusing to change at all is going to be much expensive in the 10-20 year time frame.
Republicans may not believe in climate change, but insurance companies do. Why aren't the wealthy climate change deniers funding new insurance companies to take advantage of established companies pulling out of Florida and other climate-threatened places?
As Noah Smith points out, climate change doesn't just increase risk, it breaks the whole model of insurance. Statistically, fire insurance works because house fires are usually uncorrelated: The insurance company can deal with one person's house burning down, because it is still getting premiums from all the other houses in the neighborhood. But when the whole neighborhood burns down at once, the company could be in trouble.
and Jimmy Carter
Carter deserved better than to have his funeral driven out of the headlines by a natural disaster, especially one caused by climate change. If all world leaders had followed Carter's lead in taking climate change seriously, that disaster might not have happened at all.
It's hard not to pair Carter's funeral with Trump's looming inauguration. Americans used to value decency and virtue in their leaders, but on the whole we no longer do.
and Trump's legal issues
Despite a flurry of legal filings, Trump was unable to prevent being sentenced for his 34 felony convictions. His sentence amounts to approximately nothing, but his convictions stand. A week from today he will enter office as the first convicted felon to become president.
While this is a victory of sorts for the rule of law, it also shows how close we are to being a government of men, not of laws. There was no real legal reason to block his sentencing, but four Supreme Court justices wanted to anyway. Trump's argument was based on expanding the reasoning of the Court's immunity decision, which similarly had no legal basis beyond the Court's partisan makeup.
It is notable, however, that even in this low-stakes dispute, four justices dissented. That suggests there is strong support within the Court for reading the July immunity decision very broadly. And, of course, if any one of the five justices in the majority should flip their vote, Trump will prevail the next time this dispute arrives on the Supreme Court’s doorstep.
Two days before that decision, Trump and Justice Alito spoke on the phone.
Alito said in a statement that the two did not discuss the case or any others involving Trump. He said they talked about William Levi, Alito's former law clerk, and if he was qualified for a potential position in Trump's administration.
Alito says this as if his excuse makes the call OK. It doesn't. Quite the opposite, giving Alito's former clerk a position in his administration could be considered a favor. Alito, of course, was one of the four justices who wanted to block Trump's sentencing.
Other legal maneuvers attempted to block release of Jack Smith's report. How that will play out is still up in the air. Obviously, if Trump can run out the clock until his inauguration, he can block release of the report himself. He's hoping to use the courts to do that.
and his fantasies of conquest
As I've mentioned before, I'm having a hard time taking seriously Trump's threats against Panama, Greenland, and Canada. I think he's trying to burnish his image as a strong man, because his weakness is about to be exposed. In The Atlantic, Robert Kagan considers the possibility that Ukraine will fall in the next 12-18 months without more aid from the US.
When Trump said during his campaign that he could end the war in 24 hours, he presumably believed what most observers believed: that Putin needed a respite, that he was prepared to offer peace in exchange for territory, and that a deal would include some kind of security guarantee for whatever remained of Ukraine. Because Trump’s peace proposal at the time was regarded as such a bad deal for Kyiv, most assumed Putin would welcome it. Little did they know that the deal was not remotely bad enough for Putin to accept. So now Trump is in the position of having promised a peace deal that he cannot possibly get without forcing Putin to recalculate.
Kagan puts his finger on the key point: Losing Ukraine weakens America in the eyes of the world. It's the exact opposite of America becoming "great again".
The liberal world order is inseparable from American power, and not just because it depends on American power. America itself would not be so powerful without the alliances and the open international economic and political system that it built after World War II to protect its long-term interests. Trump can’t stop defending the liberal world order without ceding significantly greater influence to Russia and China. Like Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and Ali Khamenei see the weakening of America as essential to their own ambitions. Trump may share their hostility to the liberal order, but does he also share their desire to weaken America and, by extension, himself?
Trump has boxed himself in. The only way to make Putin respect his "strength" is to push a massive new Ukraine aid package through Congress, which is the exact opposite of what his MAGA base wants.
Trump keeps moving the goal posts. During the campaign, Trump said he would solve the Ukraine War in 24 hours. Now his point man on the issue is saying 100 days.
Tuesday, Don Jr. and assorted MAGA influencers like Charlie Kirk went to Greenland for a photo op with "supporters" of the idea that Greenland should join the United States. But later it turned out that the photo op was staged.
Danish media reported Thursday that a series of photos featuring Kirk and Greenlandic residents in MAGA hats was staged. The MAGA cohort reportedly rounded up homeless people from the area—including one person from under a bridge—promising them a meal at the Hotel Hans Egede in exchange for their participation in the pro-Trump photo circuit.
Videos of the trip that circulated on X describe the Greenlandic participants as “the local community in Nuuk,” but several local sources that spoke with DR News described the photographed individuals as “homeless and socially disadvantaged” people who are often outside the supermarket directly across from the hotel where the Trump event was held.
“All they have to do is put on a cap and be in the Trump staff’s videos. They are being bribed, and it is deeply distasteful,” Tom Amtoft, a 28-year resident of Nuuk, told the Danish news outlet.
Trump has floated the idea of using tariffs against tiny Denmark to force the Danes to hand over Greenland. However, Denmark is part of the European Union, so tariffs targeting Denmark would mean a trade war with the whole continent.
Here's the best response to Trump's proposal to change the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
and you also might be interested in ...
The Biden administration's last jobs report is stunningly good. 256K new jobs, unemployment falling to 4.1%. Paul Krugman assembles statistics on the health of the economy overall, and comments
the fact that [Trump] inherits an economy in such good shape is actually a problem for his agenda
A statistical analysis in The Lancet claims deaths in Gaza have been underestimated.
Elon Musk is moving the goal posts: Previously he said he'd find "at least $2 trillion" to cut in the federal budget. He now claims there's "a good shot" at cutting $1 trillion.
In some alternative timeline:
The feud within MAGA is real. Here's Steve Bannon commenting on Elon Musk:
He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down. ... I will have Elon Musk run out of here by inauguration day. He will not have full access to the White House. He will be like any other person.
Speaking of Elon, his X platform has turned into a great place to spread racism.
There have been several reports of the newest Grok update being used to create photo realistic racist imagery of several football players and managers. One image depicts a player, who is black, picking cotton while another shows that same player eating a banana surrounded by monkeys in a forest. A separate image depicts two different players as pilots in a plane’s cockpit with the twin towers in the background. More images depict a variety of players and managers meeting and conversing with controversial historical figures such as Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
Callum Hood, the head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), said X had become a platform that incentivised and rewarded spreading hate through revenue sharing, and AI imagery made that even easier.
“The thing that X has done, to a degree that no other mainstream platform has done, is to offer cash incentives to accounts to do this, so accounts on X are very deliberately posting the most naked hate and disinformation possible.”
The price of political influence in the Trump administration is rising faster than the price of eggs. Want face time with Trump and his VP on Inauguration Day? It will cost you twice as much as it would have in 2017.
To get access to the candlelight dinner with Trump and the vice-president’s dinner with Vance, donors would need to have contributed at the $1m level. A $500,000 contribution would limit access to only the candlelight dinner, unlike in 2017 when it was enough for both.
Here's the central problem with the idea that "drill baby drill" will lower the price of energy (and eventually everything else"): We have a lot of oil and gas in the ground, but we don't have a lot of cheap oil and gas in the ground. Every time the price goes down, more and more potential drilling sites become unprofitable.
Case in point: Wednesday, the Interior Department held an auction for drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- and had no bidders.
The sale, which was required by Congress, marks the second time in four years that an effort to auction oil and gas leases in the pristine wilderness — home to migrating caribou, polar bears, musk oxen, millions of birds and other wildlife — has been a flop.
The repeated failures suggest that oil companies are either not interested in drilling in the refuge or do not think it’s worth the cost, despite insistence by Mr. Trump and many Republican lawmakers that the refuge should be opened up for drilling.
Smartmatic's $2.7 billion defamation suit against Fox News for lying about its software's performance during the 2020 election is still alive. Fox settled a similar suit by paying Dominion Voting Systems $787 million in 2023.
Imagine if everyone Fox has lied about had the deep pockets of a major corporation.
and let's close with something colorful
The Guardian published an unusual year-in-review piece: 2024's best photos of the Northern Lights.
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