Monday, November 18, 2024

New Heights

There's no question, he's the leader of our party. So now he's got a mission statement. His mission, and his goals and objectives, whatever that is, we need to embrace it. All of it, every single word. ... If Donald Trump says "Jump three feet high and scratch your head", we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That's it.

- Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX)

This week's featured posts are "Harris lost the war of ambient information" and "Caligula's Horse and other controversial appointments".

This week everybody was talking about Trump's appointments

The worst ones are covered in one of the featured posts. In general, Americans believe that presidents should get to choose their own people, unless they go too far. Generally, the Senate revolts on one or maybe two appointees. At a minimum, though, Gaetz, Hegseth, Gabbard, and RFK Jr. deserve to be rejected. Picking them is a test of the phenomenon in the quote above: Will GOP senators really disgrace themselves because Trump asks them to?

and more election retrospectives

As the final votes get counted, it becomes clear that Trump's victory -- while still clear and undisputed -- was anything but the mandate-establishing landslide he wants to claim. Currently, his percentage of the vote has fallen under 50% and is likely to continue shrinking. In both percentage and vote-margin terms, his popular vote victory is smaller than what he lost to Hillary Clinton by in 2016.

Lots of ink is being spilled to explain Harris' defeat and what Democrats should do better next time. I've been unimpressed by most analyses, because often Harris did do the things her critics claim she didn't, and didn't do the things they claim she did.

The point my brain keeps sticking on is why so many voters believed things that just weren't true. If you can't explain that, I don't think you've gotten to the root of the problem.

The other featured post focuses on a New Yorker article that is at least a step in the right direction.

and Palestine

I'm not sure how I didn't notice this until now -- I noticed it this week because Truthout had an article on Thursday -- but in September a UN Special Committee submitted a report on the situation in not just Gaza but the West Bank as well.

The report raises serious concerns of breaches of international humanitarian and human rights laws in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including starvation as a weapon of war, the possibility of genocide in Gaza and an apartheid system in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. It documents the impact of the conflict escalation since 7 October 2023 on Palestinians’ rights to food; to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment; to physical integrity, liberty and security of persons; as well as the disproportionate effects on the rights of women, children, and future generations more broadly. The report also highlights the ongoing attacks against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and refers to developments in the occupied Syrian Golan. The report provides recommendations to the General Assembly and Member States; to the State of Israel; and to businesses operating with Israel, that in any way contribute to maintaining Israel’s unlawful presence in the occupied territories.

The report doesn't present Israel's actions as unprovoked, or paint Hamas in a positive light. Section IV, the first substantive section, describes the October 7 attacks and the ongoing rocket attacks on Israel.

and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)

Tuesday, Trump announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will co-lead the "Department of Government Efficiency". This could mean a lot or practically nothing. It's hard to tell at this point.

Programs to streamline government come and go. Al Gore led one during the Clinton administration, a fact that virtually no one remembers. Musk and Ramaswamy will lead a "department" that doesn't exist: It has no employees and no budget. (They're both rich, maybe they'll fund it themselves.)

It also has no authority. Congress establishes the size and funding of government agencies. Trump apparently intends to challenge a Nixon-era law that prevents the President from impounding funds that Congress has appropriated. This will lead to a court battle that only the Supreme Court can decide, and could take some while to play out. It will be a test of the Court's partisanship, because the Court obviously would not have granted Biden such power.

But even if the Court rewrites the laws and the Constitution to give Trump impoundment power, it still belongs to him, not to Musk and Ramaswamy. Maybe Trump will rubber-stamp the DOGE's recommendations. But they're bound to be deeply unpopular, so maybe he won't. We'll see.

In general, the American people are inconsistent on the subject of government. If you ask them the broad question of whether government is too big or spends too much money, they'll say it is and does. But if you give them a specific list of programs to cut, they'll support those programs. Typically, voters grossly overestimate how much of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid, bridges to nowhere, and obscene art projects.

Trump pledged during the campaign not to cut entitlements, and some of his proposals would make the entitlement-funding situation worse. He is likely to want to spend more on defense, and he'll have a hard time refusing to pay the interest on the national debt. Once you set all that aside, not much is left for DOGE to slash.


One thing is certain: We will be seeing a whole bunch of articles/tweets/posts about how stupid science is and how crazy the government is to support it. I'm already seeing tweets about studying the sex life of beetles, and I'm sure there will be many more.

Science is always an easy target if you want to make government spending sound ridiculous. Decades ago, Senator William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave out the Golden Fleece Award to highlight expenditures he thought were obviously wasteful. Scientific research was a frequent "winner".

I'm sure that silly research projects do occasionally get funded, but the bigger problem is that good scientific experiments often sound stupid if you don't understand what the scientists are looking for. Ben Franklin flying kites during thunderstorms probably looked foolish to any neighbors who noticed. The significance of Galileo dropping weights off a tower was probably lost on contemporary observers. ("They fell. What did you think would happen?")

More recently, the popular weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy came out of research on Gila monster venom, which no doubt could have been made to sound like a complete waste while it was happening. But what about the sex lives of beetles? Well, if a beetle invasion is devouring your crops, you might wonder about ways to discourage them from reproducing. Shutting down the beetle equivalent of Match or Tinder is probably worth a look.

and BlueSky

X/Twitter has been losing users ever since Elon Musk bought it and turned it into a safe space for Nazis, and eventually into a big in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign. He's made it much harder to avoid right-wing propaganda or to shield yourself from abusive trolls. (Brian Klaus has labelled it a "Perfect Disinformation Machine".)

The big reason to stay on X has been all the other people who are there, including a lot of the world's top journalists. (Frequently, I back up points I'm making in the Sift by linking to X.) But as the user experience has gotten worse and worse -- a prime example of what Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification" -- restless X-natives have talked more and more about going somewhere else.

The question was where? One candidate was Threads, a platform created by Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram. But whatever advantages Threads might offer are overwhelmed (at least in my mind) by the fact that you're just replacing one Internet oligarch with another. Mark Zuckerberg might just be playing Saruman to Musk's Sauron.

At the other extreme is Mastodon, which is based on open-source software and exists in a variety of "instances", in which somebody has generously decided to host a social-networking community on their hardware.

But since the election there has been a mass exodus to another alternative, BlueSky. Lots of the people I have followed on X -- Paul Krugman, Chris Hayes, Michelle Goldberg, Josh Marshall, James Fallows ... -- are now on BlueSky, with more joining every day. This week The Guardian closed its X accounts and moved to BlueSky en masse.

I've been experimenting with BlueSky (and also Mastodon) for several months. As on X, I don't post much, and mainly use the platforms to announce Sift articles. I read a lot there, though, to find things to write about.

I've generally found BlueSky a more pleasant experience than X, though I can't tell how much of that is cultural and how much is baked into the software. (I'm told that blocking trolls is much easier on BlueSky, though I haven't had to use that feature. People seem to understand that they'll be blocked if they become abusive, so abuse is comparatively rare.) Recently, though, it has become useful in the same way that X has been useful, so my attention has been shifting in BlueSky's direction.

I confess I don't really understand BlueSky as an organization. Wikipedia says:

Bluesky is a decentralized microblogging social media service primarily operated by Bluesky Social PBC, a public benefit corporation based in the United States.

I'm not sure how the "public benefit" part works, but the corporation does have investors who probably expect to make money somehow. Ultimately, that might make BlueSky subject to the same forces that enshittify everything on the internet. So it's hard to say how long this halcyon period will last. Long term, Mastodon is probably the more durable alternative, if only everyone would move there. But for now, BlueSky seems to be the sweet spot of short-message social media: more pleasant than X, more useful than Mastodon.

and you also might be interested in ...

I had to check this several times before believing that it wasn't a joke: The new owner of Alex Jones' fallen media empire is the satirical newsite The Onion.

Jones lost a defamation suit to the parents of the children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, which he repeatedly claimed was a hoax. He filed for bankruptcy in an attempt to avoid the $965 million judgment, and the bankruptcy process resulted in auctioning off his assets.

The Onion plans to shutter Jones' InfoWars and rebuild the website featuring well-known internet humor writers and content creators, according to a person with knowledge of the sale.

The Onion published a very Onionish statement from the CEO of its parent company, Global Tetrahedron.

All told, the decision to acquire InfoWars was an easy one for the Global Tetrahedron executive board.

Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.

Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.

The statement does not reveal the purchase price, but says GT got a "steep bargain" of "less than one trillion dollars".


Nazis are apparently feeling emboldened by Trump's victory. Saturday afternoon, a small band of them marched through downtown Columbus. The Columbus mayor and Ohio governor have condemned the march, though I expect we'll wait a long to before Trump has anything to say about it.


Red-state Democrat Jess Piper divides Trump-supporting women into four categories:

  • Wealthy and well-connected. They'll get tax cuts and they feel safe from Trump's anti-woman policies.
  • Indoctrinated. Mainly by religion. They're single-issue anti-abortion voters who explain away Trump's personal issues.
  • Pick-me. Women who count on the men in their lives to protect them.
  • Ignorant. "I watched an interview of one young White woman who said she voted for Trump because he 'brought abortion back to the states.' She thought Trump was legalizing the procedure. Roe fell during Biden’s term, and she seemed to blame Biden for the ban."

Rudy Giuliani's illegal attempts to avoid paying his defamation liability have finally gotten to be too much for his lawyers.


State laws that single out trans kids for discrimination are inevitably headed for the Supreme Court. Some have been thrown out, but Indiana just upheld one.

and let's close with something deep

We often talk about people "going underground" to escape attention, but in ancient Cappadocia they literally did.

The ancient city of Elengubu, known today as Derinkuyu, burrows more than 85m below the Earth's surface, encompassing 18 levels of tunnels. The largest excavated underground city in the world, it was in near-constant use for thousands of years, changing hands from the Phrygians to the Persians to the Christians of the Byzantine Era. It was finally abandoned in the 1920s by the Cappadocian Greeks when they faced defeat during the Greco-Turkish war and fled abruptly en masse to Greece.

The article estimates that 20,000 people might have lived in the underground city at its peak.

Monday, November 11, 2024

Sorrowful Arrivals

Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arrival. When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.

- Alan Paton Cry, the Beloved Country  

This week's featured post is "My Way-Too-Soon Election Response".

This week it was hard to think about anything beyond the election

That's the subject of the featured post. Long as that post is, there's a lot I didn't get to.

In general, I am avoiding articles that predict the electorate will now get what it deserves. They're emotionally satisfying, but I don't think they lead anywhere good. However, I can't resist sharing this H. L. Mencken quote:

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.


The stock market seems to be anticipating corruption, as well-connected companies saw their stocks soar after the election. The American Prospect runs through a list of big gainers, including the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and installment lender MoneyLion, which the Biden administration has accused of overcharging members of the military.

Another big winner: Elon Musk, whose net worth has now exceeded $300 billion. On the surface this makes no sense, because Trump has been an outspoken critic of electric cars like the ones Musk's Tesla makes. But if Trump surrounds himself with oligarchs like Putin has, Musk will be one of the most prominent.

BTW, I would be wary of investing in Tesla. If Musk decides to screw the minority shareholders, will the Trump Justice Department protect them? This question illustrates one of the problems of shifting from a rule-of-law government to an authoritarian government: Everything becomes less trustworthy, so the machinery of economics gets creeky and slow.


Another person apparently slated for a high position in the new administration -- like maybe Secretary of Health and Human Services -- is RFK Jr., who has no healthcare credentials and a history of promoting conspiracy theories about vaccines.


One of the first things to watch is how quickly Trump's mass deportation plans come together, and what (if anything) can be done to slow them down. In his first administration, he moved quickly to implement his Muslim ban, which met a lot of resistance and eventually was significantly delayed/altered by the courts.

but there's still a world out there somewhere

Meanwhile, Germany's ruling coalition has dissolved, leaving the current chancellor without a majority in the Bundestag. Expect a no-confidence vote in January and elections in March.

Germany's economy has stagnated since Covid, producing all sorts of internal tensions. (Germany is one of the countries that would love to have the "bad" Biden economy.) In recent years the neo-fascist Alliance for Germany (AfD) Party has been gaining. Whether they can win the March elections is the next political disaster to worry about.


I'm not sure which narrative of the recent violence in Amsterdam to trust. It followed a Netherlands/Israel soccer game. In some accounts the violence was a pure antisemitic eruption. In others, obnoxious fans on both sides exchanged provocations until fighting broke out.

and you also might be interested in ...

Pope Francis recently started using #Saints in his tweets, not realizing that it refers to the New Orleans Saints football team. The team's X account thanked the Pope for his prayers and replied, "We need them."

The Saints are having a slow start to the season, and were sitting in fourth, and last, place in the NFC South. A significant number of injuries have struck among wide receivers and the offensive line, and last week head coach Dennis Allen was fired. But there are signs the Pope’s prayers could be working: on Sunday the Saints won for the first time since September, holding on for a narrow win over the Atlanta Falcons.

and let's close with some monkey business

Wednesday, 43 lab monkeys made a break for it after an employee at Alpha Genesis Primate Research Center in Yemasee, South Carolina left a door open. As of Sunday, 25 of the rhesus macaques had been recovered. Most of the rest seemed to be in the trees surrounding the lab complex, and occasionally jump back over the fence to interact with their caged compatriots. Police have warned people living nearby to keep their doors and windows locked.

News articles have been vague about what experiments the monkeys are part of, saying only that they "hadn't been tested yet", and so there was no public health threat. CBS reports:

According to its website, Alpha Gensis breeds monkeys and provides "nonhuman primate products and bio-research services" across the globe. The company's clinical trials reportedly include research on progressive brain disorders. ... The Post and Courier newspaper reported last year that Alpha Genesis won a federal contract to oversee a colony of 3,500 rhesus monkeys on South Carolina's Morgan Island, known as "Monkey Island."

Monkeys are uniquely valuable in medical research because they are so similar to humans. But that similarity also makes the cruelty of medical research uniquely horrible.

The Alpha Genesis CEO painted an amusing picture of the escape:

It's really like follow-the-leader. You see one go and the others go. It was a group of 50 and 7 stayed behind and 43 bolted out the door.

I find myself rooting for the monkeys to stay free as long as possible. I occasionally vacation down the road on Hilton Head Island. The next time I do I'll be looking closely up into the trees.

Monday, November 4, 2024

Sufficiency

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

- Matthew 6:34

I haven't checked, but this may be the shortest Weekly Sift ever. Here's why: Given how close and how consequential tomorrow's election looks, it's hard to think about anything else. And yet, it's also hard to come up with anything worthwhile to say about it. I could try to predict who's going to win, but you'd be foolish to believe me, because I don't know. I could collect a lot of other people's predictions, but they don't know either.

We're down to the point where you can vote, you can encourage your friends to vote, and you can do some election-day volunteering. Beyond that, you can watch the Future arrive at the usual rate of one second per second.

Back in 2008, I started doing election preview posts, predicting how the evening was likely to play out, given poll-closing times and what the opinion polls were saying. The 2008 preview was so accurate that I started thinking I knew something. (I said that California's outcome would be projected almost immediately after polls closed at 11 EST, putting Obama over the top. That's exactly what happened.) I got 2016 drastically wrong, but I didn't learn my lesson and wrote a 2020 preview anyway.

This year has been an ongoing master class in the pointlessness of speculation. Pundits have talked and written endlessly about how the debates would go, whether Biden would or should drop out, what process the Democrats should use to replace him, whether Harris would do any better, who the two VP nominees should be, whether Trump's endless gaffes would cost him, what the "October surprise" might be, how various voting blocs -- women, Blacks, Hispanics, union members -- would respond to Harris, and on and on.

If you ignored all of it, you are probably better off than the rest of us, or at least calmer. By tomorrow, we will all have voted, contributed, volunteered -- or not. What has mattered is action, not divining the future.

Here's what I will say: In a typical election, late-deciding voters mostly break the same way. So for better or worse, there's a good chance we won't have the kind of photo-finish the polls are predicting.

If this were a typical election, it would be obvious that Trump is blowing it down the stretch: the Puerto Rico insult (and his unwillingness to distance himself from it), simulating oral sex with a microphone, fantasizing about pointing guns at Liz Cheney, and so on. Despite major media continuing to sanewash Trump -- CNN posted video of the oral-sex pantomime with the caption "At a rally in Milwaukee, former President Donald Trump became visibly frustrated after dealing with technical problems on stage." You'd never know he raged for over three minutes about problems any other speaker would shrug off, and then made an inappropriate sexual gesture -- the man's hateful and unhinged nature has been on full display for anyone who cares to look.

But as we all know by now, this isn't a typical election. No one knows what the late-deciders are thinking. We'll just have to wait and see.

There are any number of other things you could choose to worry about. But there will be plenty of time to start worrying about them after Wednesday or so.

For example: Trump seems to be gearing up once again to claim power even if the voters reject him. He and Speaker Johnson have some "secret plan". Elie Mystal has a guess about what it might be. And who knows what the Supreme Court will do? Will they let him lose? Every time the Court has had a question put to it, it has ruled for Trump, often in complete opposition to precedent or even written law. How far will it go? I don't know and neither does anybody else who isn't on the Court. But unless you're on the Harris legal team, you can procrastinate on that bit of worrying until the post-election legal battles actually start -- which they won't if Trump wins legitimately (because Democrats respect the voters' right to reject them).

If Trump wins and begins assembling a fascist administration, that also would be worth worrying about, and even moreso if Republicans get control one or more houses of the new Congress. But worrying about it now won't give you any special advantage.

As for the next two days: I voted early and I sent Harris a check months ago. I've been trying to make the case for her and against him for months. Now all I can do is watch and wait -- and try not to obsess about things that may or may not happen.

If you're trying to convince some last-minute deciders to vote for Harris, here's some material to work with.

The NYT writes one paragraph that sums up why you shouldn't vote for Trump, and backs up each statement with a link to a longer article. Matt Yglesias writes a positive case for Harris, which isn't flashy because it centers on "normal" things like integrity, the rule of law, and taking a pragmatic approach to helping ordinary people solve typical problems like how to afford a house or send their kids to college.

If you're talking to someone who thinks voting for Trump is the "Christian" position, point them to this guy.

If you're talking to a progressive who won't vote for Harris because of Gaza, show them this.

One final thing: As I explained at some length in August, if you think you're nostalgic for the "Trump economy", what you're actually nostalgic for is the pre-Covid economy, when a lot of things were cheaper. But electing Trump won't bring those days back.

Around the world, governments took very similar actions to keep their economies going while fighting Covid. And around the world, those actions eventually led to inflation; it's not a Biden/Harris thing. Our inflation happened to show up after Trump left office (because that's when the new vaccines allowed the economy to reopen) but his actions had as much to do with it as Biden's. Once you recognize the hit Covid was on the economy -- and would have been even if Trump had been reelected in 2020 -- you can appreciate how well the Biden/Harris administration has managed the recovery from Covid.

Here's a metaphor that might help: Think about how you might feel as you leave the hospital after being treated for a heart attack. Do you feel as carefree and vibrant as you did before the heart attack? Probably not. But you also feel a heck of a lot better than you did when you arrived in the ER, and you should appreciate what the doctors did to pull you through.

Trump is selling nostalgia for 2019, before Covid did its damage. But on that day in 2021 when Biden was inaugurated, the "Trump economy" was a mess. It's much better now.