Elizabeth Warren's Fox News snub reveals a pre-2016 mindset

Sen. Elizabeth Warren writes:

Fox News has invited me to do a town hall, but I’m turning them down — here’s why[.] Fox News is a hate-for-profit racket that gives a megaphone to racists and conspiracists — it’s designed to turn us against each other, risking life & death consequences, to provide cover for the corruption that’s rotting our government and hollowing out our middle class. . . .

Fox News is welcome to come to my events just like any other outlet. But a Fox News town hall adds money to the hate-for-profit machine. To which I say: hard pass.

In contrast, Bernie Sanders did a Fox News town hall last month.

Elizabeth Warren is going in exactly the wrong direction here. She doesn't seem to have learned the lessons of the 2016 election. Democratic politicians have to be willing to have conversations with conservatives. In a huge, diverse country like this, a national politician can't afford to broadly cast the other side as villains. I know her statement on its face is denouncing a corporation, but Fox News isn't just a corporation; it also represents a certain kind of voter. Calling your opponents deplorable is more effective at galvanizing your opponents than winning people over to your side.

Of course, shunning Fox News is a way for liberals to signal their own purity. But when you're fighting an uphill battle to win back the presidency, purity is less important than trying to persuade any voters in the country who'll listen.

“And so far ... I’m very pleased with the results,” Beto lied.

Former Rep. Beto O'Rourke admits that he "can do a better job" of talking to America, which is refreshingly candid, but then he also tells an obvious lie:

"It will take a lot of time, a lot of miles. A lot of hours,” O’Rourke said. "But I’m willing to put in the work. And so far we have, and I’m very pleased with the results.”

Though it's still early and one of the lesser candidates could surge into first place, Beto must be disappointed to be seen as one of the lesser candidates, months into the race. He must have expected to be doing better than this: "Beto is polling worse than ever." (Here's an interactive chart of aggregated polls from RealClearPolitics.)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says Republicans take her too literally

“This is a technique of the GOP, to take dry humor + sarcasm literally and fact check it. . . . But the GOP is basically Dwight from The Office so who knows.”

So AOC wants us to take her seriously, not literally?

Where have we heard that before?

Pete Buttigieg on the problem with “identity politics”

"Buttigieg calls out Democrats for playing 'identity politics'" is the headline at NBC News.

Could this be Pete Buttigieg's Sister Souljah moment?

Here's the video of Mayor Buttigieg's speech to the Human Rights Campaign yesterday. I've cued this up to start just after 19 minutes in:



Here's some of what Buttigieg said. I know most of this doesn't seem unusual for a progressive Democrat. But precisely because he's mainly putting this in progressive terms, the parts where he deviates from the hard-left line have the potential to be that much more inflammatory (notice the boldface):

I'd like to comment on one of the buzz words of our time: so-called identity politics. No one knows quite what to make of it today. . . . It is true that each of us can see in our own identity all of the reasons we're misunderstood and then say, "You don't understand me because you haven't walked in my shoes" — something that is true, but it doesn't get us very far. Because we could also see in our differences the beginning of a new form of American solidarity, by recognizing that the one thing we do have in common may be the challenge of belonging in a society that sees us for what makes us all different. I'm not talking about pretending that there are equivalencies between the different patterns of exclusion in this country. . . .

We have a crisis of belonging in this country. When you do not belong, that doesn't just put you in a bad mood, it puts you in a different country. When black women are dying from maternal complications at triple the rate of white women it means for the purposes of public health they are living in a different country. It means that for a dreamer brought to this land at the age of two months old and putting herself through college without a path to citizenship and the only place she knows then even though she's as American as the rest of, us she finds her life playing out on paper in a different country. . . . When an auto worker 12 years into their career is no longer sure how to provide for their family, they're not part of the country we think of ourselves as all living in together. . . .

And these divisive lines of thinking have even entered into the consciousness of my own party, like when we’re told we have to choose between supporting an auto worker and a trans woman of color, without stopping to think about the fact that sometimes the auto worker is a trans woman of color, and she definitely needs all the security she can get. The wall I worry about the most is not the president’s fantasy wall on the Mexican border that’s not going to get built anyway. What I worry about are the very real walls being put up between us as we get divided and carved up — walls going up within the working class, within communities, even within families. . . .

I am not just like you. No two of us are like! But each of us has a story that can either separate us or connect us to those around us. Yes, I am gay and I am the son of an immigrant and an Army brat. And I'm a husband, and I am a musician, and I'm an Episcopalian, and I'm a Democrat. But above all, I am running as an American. I am here to build bridges and to tear down walls. And with your help, we can tear down those walls between fellow Americans.

When he says "these divisive lines of thinking have even entered into the consciousness of my own party" and talks about the limited usefulness of saying "you haven't walked in my shoes," he's gently but unmistakably pushing back against a strain of thought on the left that former President Obama criticized last year:

Democracy demands [that] we're able . . . to get inside the reality of people who are different than us so we can understand their point of view. Maybe we can change their minds, but maybe they'll change ours. And you can't do this if you just out of hand disregard what your opponent has to say from the start. And you can't do it if you insist that those who aren't like you, because they're white or because they're male, that somehow there's no way that they can understand what I'm feeling — that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.

Walter Olson has a column analyzing what Buttigieg said (the headline writer calls it "Mayor Pete's Sister Souljah Moment," which was published after I used that phrase in this post, but it's a common political term and a point that was just waiting to be made, so I'm not concerned with who said it first):

On one level, his comments critical of identity politics turned out to be pretty mild. Barack Obama has said most of the same things in slightly different words. It’s not as if Andrew Sullivan, Christina Hoff Sommers, or Claire Lehmann were ghostwriting his lines.

And what Buttigieg did say was interspersed with themes and language gratifying to social justice enthusiasts. He endorsed the sweeping Equality Act, which would federalize Main Street public-accommodations disputes while whittling down religious exemptions. He mentioned Stonewall and Harvey Milk. He even acknowledged his own “privilege.” (Though he left ambiguous the extent to which this referred to his white male-ness as distinct from, say, the fortunate path traced by his education and career.)

And yet the South Bend mayor immediately began taking flak for his HRC remarks from some social justice advocates, not a few of whom had already been caustic critics of his candidacy. They could detect from his choice of words that he is not 100 percent on board with their prescribed line—maybe not even 80 percent—and worse still, he is not afraid to say so.

One of his lines drawing fire is on the “my truth, your truth” notion. . . . Or as it might be put more aggressively: “we [members of a marginalized identity] are the only authorities on our experience.”

His response? That’s “true as far as it goes but it doesn’t get us very far.” To you or I, that might read like a platitude. To many on the identitarian left, it comes off as dire wrongthink: after some point that is not “very far” down the road, he intends to steer us all onto some other discourse in which identity is not a trump card. This doesn’t deny our subjective truth as marginalized individuals, exactly, but it does tend to dethrone it as The Truth of all truths.

Another example: Buttigieg’s comments were critical of what he forthrightly calls “white identity politics.” Again, a truism from one perspective, and forcefully stated too. But to some on his left, this will be seen as an attempt at false equivalence. Raising the idea that white and minority identity politics can resemble each other is deeply problematic to the identitarian left. . . .

Again and again in his speech, minor choices of wording that outsiders might not notice served as small—but real—signals of defiance to social justice scorekeepers. I disagree with much that Mayor Pete says here and elsewhere. But I’m glad that he seems to think for himself.

It will be interesting to see whether other Democratic contenders take issue with the mayor’s identity politics remarks. Or if, alternatively, Buttigieg has opened up space toward the center makes it possible for others to follow.

Presidential candidate Tim Ryan's weak response to Bill Maher on the economy

Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio in this video seems to be positioning himself as one of the more moderate Democratic presidential candidates, and that's the kind of candidate I'm hoping will emerge as the nominee.

But Tim Ryan doesn't have a decent answer to Bill Maher's predictable question about how well the economy seems to be doing. In fact, Ryan repeatedly says that wages have been increasing! He says they should be increasing even more — but still, how did that make it into his talking points?

Democrats will have to do better than this shaky performance by Tim Ryan (on what should be favorable terrain) if they want to stop Donald Trump from being reelected.

A response to those who say: "Facebook is a private company, so it's free to censor"

If a private company is legally allowed to do all the censorship it wants, that’s why we should use more of our free speech to critique that company’s censorship. That is not a reason to stay silent about a corporation censoring people on a massive, global scale. If government can’t do anything about that problem, then it’s up to us.

25 years ago in music: Weezer, Sunny Day Real Estate, Sonic Youth

1994 was a great year for music, and May 10 was one of the better days that year. Three bands, all categorized as alt rock but all significantly different from each other, put out great albums 25 years ago today.

Weezer's debut album (self-titled but known as the Blue Album) introduced the world to a joyously poppy group that used the noisy guitar sounds of grunge rock but had no need for the angst associated with grunge.

Weezer also differed from many bands of the time by clearly articulating their lyrics, allowing vivid words to pop out from the songs: "destroy my sweater," "watch me unravel," "Mary Tyler Moore," "found Jesus," "ancient feelings," etc.




"Buddy Holly" is a tribute to that pioneer of nerdy rock songs.




In "Say It Ain't So," Rivers Cuomo tells us to "be cool." But we love Weezer because they never seem to care if they're seen as "cool."




Sunny Day Real Estate also released their debut album, Diary. The standout track, "Seven," is far from the comical quality of Weezer. In this song, Sunny Day Real Estate seems to convey a mini-drama even though they words are so slurred you can't understand them, making them all the more intriguing.




The legendary Sonic Youth put out their 8th album, and their most wordily titled album: Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star.

In the lead single, "Bull in the Heather," Kim Gordon talks more than sings. As usual for Sonic Youth, the main interest of the song isn't vocals but guitars, both noisy and melodic.

Slip-ups of the day

1. Australian currency misspells the word “responsibility.”

2. Kirk Hammett slipped and fell on his wah pedal at a rainy outdoor Metallica concert. 🎸 Apparently he wasn’t seriously hurt. 🤟🏻

Ummm- I slipped on my wet wah pedal.
It rained so much I felt like I was playing guitar in the shower. #MetInMilan @Metallica pic.twitter.com/BbOamgkKhF

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) May 8, 2019

What happened to Pete Buttigieg?

This New Republic piece explains the state of Mayor Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign:

It appears that the media’s . . . honeymoon with Pete Buttigieg is over. Gone are the days of flattering coverage from, well, pretty much everywhere—stories about Buttigieg’s love of Ulysses, his faculty with languages, and affection for Phish and the Dave Matthews Band (well, I guess they weren’t all flattering stories).

Over the last couple of weeks, Buttigieg has received scrutiny more appropriate to a leading presidential candidate instead of simply being rolled out like a new diet soda. There have been stories investigating his time as mayor of South Bend, and deep dives into his decision to demolish hundreds of homes and to fire the city’s black police chief. . . . Instead of wondering whether he can knock off Joe Biden, journalists are now asking questions about his failure to connect with black voters. . . . [Click through to the article for links on all those stories.]

Thus far, Buttigieg has been resistant to offer specific proposals. Asked about the lack of a policy section on his campaign website, he was dismissive. “I’ve been pretty clear where I stand on major issues,” he said last month. “But I also think it’s important we don’t drown people in minutia before we’ve vindicated the values that animate our policies. We go right to the policy proposals and we expect people to be able to figure out what our values must be from that.” The recipe here is probably right—articulate a broader message and then fill it in with specifics—but the justification still sounds like a hedge, the natural distillate of a presidential campaign rooted in a person, rather than in what that person would do as president. . . .

An early blitz of coverage turned the small-city mayor into a big-time contender, but that means there are now expectations he will act like one. The sketches he has drawn on Morning Joe, Today, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert deserve to be colored in with actual ideas. . . .

How much should we worry about the national debt?

Somewhat, but not too much, argues this Foreign Affairs article co-written by Lawrence Summers:

The deficit dismissers have a point. Long-term structural declines in interest rates mean that policymakers should reconsider the traditional fiscal approach that has often wrong-headedly limited worthwhile investments in such areas as education, health care, and infrastructure. Yet many remain fixated on cutting spending, especially on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicaid. That is a mistake. Politicians and policymakers should focus on urgent social problems, not deficits.

But they shouldn’t ignore fiscal constraints entirely. The deficit fundamentalists are right that the debt cannot be allowed to grow forever. And the government cannot set budget policy without any limiting principles or guides as to what is and what is not possible or desirable.

There is another policy approach that neither prioritizes cutting deficits nor dismisses them. Unlike in the past, budgeters need not make reducing projected deficits a priority. But they should ensure that, except during downturns, when fiscal stimulus is required, new spending and tax cuts do not add to the debt. This middle course would tolerate large and growing deficits without making a major effort to reduce them—at least for the foreseeable future. But it would also stop the policy trend of the last two years, which will otherwise continue to pile up debt.

Policymakers must also recognize that maintaining existing public services, let alone meeting new needs, will, over time, require higher revenues. Today’s large deficits derive more from falling revenues than rising entitlement spending. More spending is not, by itself, something to be afraid of. The United States needs to invest in solutions to its fundamental challenges: finding jobs for the millions of Americans who have given up hope of finding them, providing health insurance for the millions who still lack it, and extending opportunities to the children left behind by an inadequate educational system.

Economic textbooks teach that government deficits raise interest rates, crowd out private investment, and leave everyone poorer. Cutting deficits, on the other hand, reduces interest rates, spurring productive investment. Those forces may have been important in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when long-term real interest rates (nominal interest rates minus the rate of inflation) averaged around four percent and stock market valuations were much lower than they are today. The deficit reduction efforts of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton contributed to the investment-led boom in the 1990s.

Today, however, the situation is very different. Although government debt as a share of GDP has risen far higher, long-term real interest rates on government debt have fallen much lower.

As shown in the table, in 2000, the Congressional Budget Office forecast that by 2010, the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio would be six percent. The same ten-year forecast in 2018 put the figure for 2028 at 105 percent.

Real interest rates on ten-year government bonds, meanwhile, fell from 4.3 percent in 2000 to an average of 0.8 percent last year.

Those low rates haven’t been manufactured by the Federal Reserve, nor are they just the result of the financial crisis. They preceded the crisis and appear to be rooted in a set of deeper forces, including lower investment demand, higher savings rates, and widening inequality. . . .

Low interest rates mean that governments can sustain higher levels of debt, since their financing costs are lower. Although the national debt represents a far larger percentage of GDP than in recent decades, the U.S. government currently pays around the same proportion of GDP in interest on its debt, adjusted for inflation, as it has on average since World War II. The cost of deficits to the Treasury is the degree to which the rate of interest paid on the debt exceeds inflation. By this standard, the resources the United States needs to devote to interest payments are also around their historical average as a share of the economy. Although both real and nominal interest rates are set to rise in the coming decade, interest payments on the debt are projected to remain well below the share reached in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when deficit reduction topped the economic agenda.

Government deficits also seem to be hurting the economy less than they used to. Textbook economic theory holds that high levels of government debt make it more expensive for companies to borrow. But these days, interest rates are low, stock market prices are high relative to company earnings, and major companies hold large amounts of cash on their balance sheets. No one seriously argues that the cost of capital is holding back businesses from investing. . . .

The eurozone debt crisis at the start of this decade is often held up as a cautionary tale about the perils of fiscal excess. But stagnant growth (made worse by government spending cuts in the face of a recession) was as much the cause of the eurozone’s debt problems as profligate spending. . . .

It’s true that future generations will have to pay the interest on today’s debt, but at current rates, even a 50-percentage-point increase in the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio would raise real interest payments as a share of GDP by just 0.5 percentage points. That would bring those payments closer to the top of their historical range, but not into uncharted territory.

Deficits, then, should not cause policymakers much concern, at least for now. But some economists adopt an even more radical view. Advocates of what is known as modern monetary theory (MMT), such as Stephanie Kelton, an economist and former adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, have been widely interpreted as arguing that governments that borrow in their own currencies have no reason to concern themselves with budget constraints. . . . This goes too far. . . . In truth, no one knows the benefits and costs of different debt levels. . . .

Although the U.S. government will remain solvent for the foreseeable future, it would be imprudent to allow the debt-to-GDP ratio to rise forever in an uncertain world. Trying to make this situation sustainable without adjusting fiscal policy or raising interest rates, as recommended by some advocates of modern monetary theory, is a recipe for hyperinflation.

Lead and environmental sexism

Lead pollution discriminates against boys, explains Susan Pinker in the Wall Street Journal:

U.S. counties where lead in the topsoil exceeds the national average had twice the number of five-year-old boys with long-term cognitive problems. Five-year-old girls weren’t affected. Right from conception, it seems that environmental stress, especially pollution, discriminates on the basis of sex.

Edson Severnini, a professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and his colleagues Karen Clay and Margarita Portnykh began with the United States Geological Survey’s recorded levels of lead in topsoil in 252 of the largest counties in the U.S. in 2000. They then turned to parents’ responses to a question on the 2000 census: Had their five-year-old experienced difficulties, for at least six months, with learning, memory, focus or decision making? The parents of over 77,000 children replied with a yes or a no.

We’ve long known lead to be dangerous, and adding the heavy metal to gasoline, house paint and pesticide has been banned now for decades. Nonetheless, we’re still living with lead’s legacy. Over the 20th century more than 6.5 million tons were released into the environment across the U.S., most of it still blowing around or sticking to soil particles. That is alarming because lead is a neurotoxin: It starves the brain—especially the frontal lobe of the developing brain—of protein and energy, and it doesn’t decompose.

To make matters worse, lead on painted windowsills and in garden soil tastes sugary. Innocently ingesting even tiny amounts of lead can translate to lower IQs and attentional and behavioral problems later on, researchers have found.

There is even evidence that higher levels of lead in the bloodstream can predict antisocial behavior and violence in adolescence and early adulthood, according to a 2012 study led by Tulane medical researcher Howard Mielke published in the journal Environment International.

The new Carnegie Mellon study reinforces the link between a child’s early lead exposure and an uncertain future. Preschoolers’ exposure to lead in their first five years of life increased their probability of compromised cognitive function, including a weaker ability to learn, solve problems and control one’s impulses. . . .

Boys are twice as vulnerable as girls to early neural damage, and even levels of lead that are currently considered acceptable can exert a deleterious effect. . . .

But it turns out that education can dampen lead’s harmful effects. “We actually show that if boys had some schooling, the [negative] effect was much smaller,” said Dr. Severnini. Except for . . . remediating contaminated soil where children live and play, we may not be able to control how much lead is still hanging around. But there is something we can do to protect our children’s brains, and it is called preschool.

The New York Times puzzles over how well the economy is doing

The New York Times explains why — unexpectedly — wages are rising and the economy has been growing at more than 3% for 9 straight months.

The Times says:

The recent gains are going to those who need it most. Over the past year, low-wage workers have experienced the fastest pay increases, a shift from earlier in the recovery, when wage growth was concentrated at the top.

The Times manages to find some not-so-great news in all that:

African-American workers have seen smaller gains over the course of the recovery, for example. And wage growth remains slow in some parts of the country that were hit especially hard by the recession.

Still, if these overall trends keep going through next year, Donald Trump will be on a glide path to reelection.

I'm not saying that to support Trump. I plan to vote against him. Just because the economy's doing well doesn't mean Trump's policies are the reason, and even if his policies are having good short-term effects they could still be bad in the long run.

But when was the last time voters denied the president a second term when the economy was doing well?

Why the right response to stories of vaccines triggering illness isn't to dismiss them out of hand

This is an important point about vaccines that I had never heard of before seeing this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (by Michael Segal, a neurologist and neuroscientist):

the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported April 26 that there have been 704 cases of measles so far this year. “The suffering we are seeing today is completely avoidable,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Monday. “We know vaccines are safe because they’re among some of the most studied medical products we have.”

So why does skepticism persist? One reason is that scientists, physicians and journalists are overly dismissive of the observations that circulate among the public.… A study led by neurologist Samuel Berkovic applied that approach to vaccine reactions, and the results provide a model for understanding and overcoming skepticism about the safety of vaccines.

Dr. Berkovic and his colleagues studied a genetic form of epilepsy caused by mutations in the SCN1A gene, a DNA sequence that specifies part of a channel in nerve-cell membranes that allows sodium ions to enter the cell. Children born with such SCN1A mutations are destined to develop seizures and regress neurologically.

The researchers found that the onset of these seizures peaked in the days after vaccination but then dipped below baseline in subsequent weeks. The net result was that vaccines had no effect on the likelihood of developing the inevitable deterioration from these mutations.

That is, vaccines did trigger the deterioration—but had the children not been vaccinated, the same deterioration would have occurred anyway the next time they had a cold.

These results are fully consistent with the large-population studies. But by studying the detailed time course in a genetically characterized population, they illustrated how vaccines can appear to be the proximate cause of an injury, yet the ultimate cause is genetic.

When parents ask me about vaccines, I inspire confidence by telling them that my three kids got all the recommended vaccinations on schedule. But when dealing with public policy about mandatory vaccinations, one needs to address the elephant in the room: the stories of deterioration following vaccinations. Many experts prefer to ignore such anecdotes, and when engaged in public debate, find it hard to resist the ethos of an advocate—pushing the conclusion but playing down the complexity. That’s been counterproductive. People hear stories about neurological deteriorations and trust their friends more than the experts.

Unless we act like scientists and explain the science, we won’t be effective in helping laymen put the anecdotes in context.

Is President Trump spending your money on booze for his own profit?

“A top-shelf, closed-door drinking session. $546-a-night hotel rooms. A special government credit card for Mar-a-Lago. Taxpayers foot the costs — and the president profits. . . .”

What was so great about Duke Ellington?

Duke Ellington would have turned 120 today. He died at age 75 (1899-1974).




This New Yorker article talks about what did and didn't make Ellington great, and what that has to do with how we define "originality":

[Duke] Ellington was a dance-band impresario who played no better than O.K. piano, got trapped for years playing “jungle music” in gangster night clubs, and at his height produced mostly tinny, brief recordings. (His finest was made on a bitter winter night in 1940, in a Fargo, North Dakota, ballroom.) How did he become a dominant figure of modern music and, for many people, an exemplar of art?

The typical answer used to be that he was really a master composer on the European model, all score paper and seclusion and suites. On inspection, this doesn’t hold much water. Ellington’s best music turns out to be the crystallized collective improvisation of an exceptionally ornery group of musical malcontents. To explain it all, we seem to need new categories of value, and another kind of meditation on what originality is. . . .

Ellington knew from the beginning that he needed a sound, more even than a beat or a style. The individual players he employed weren’t up-to-date urban players but, often, less sophisticated New Orleans musicians, whose great gift was a distinctly human tone, often achieved with the use of homemade mutes and plungers. They never suffered from the homogenized, driving tone of the white bands.

Over the years, Ellington cultivated those kinds of players until, with the 1940 band, he achieved something extraordinary—an all-star band that played together, soloed luminously, and never sounded competitive. As critics still remark in proper wonder, at least five of the musicians—Jimmy Blanton, on bass, Ben Webster, on tenor sax, Johnny Hodges, on alto sax, Harry Carney, on baritone sax, and Tricky Sam Nanton, on the trombone—are in the running for the very best ever to have picked up their instrument.

Yet a residue of disappointment clings to these pages [of Terry Teachout’s Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington]: Ellington was an elegant man but not a very nice one, Teachout concludes, exploiting the musicians he gathered and held so close. He used his musicians (not to mention his women) often quite coldly, and his romantic-seeming life was really one long cloud of shimmering misdirection. Teachout reveals that Ellington was rarely the sole composer of the music associated with his name. Nearly all his hit songs, Teachout explains, “were collaborations with band members who did not always receive credit—or royalties—when the songs were recorded and published.” It’s long been known by fans that many of the most famous “Ellington” numbers are really the arranger Billy Strayhorn’s, including “Take the A Train” and “Chelsea Bridge,” and that the valve trombonist Juan Tizol wrote most of “Caravan.” But much of “Mood Indigo” was Barney Bigard’s, while “Never No Lament” (which became the hit “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore”), “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” and “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” began as Johnny Hodges riffs and then became songs. “Sophisticated Lady,” “Prelude to a Kiss,” and “In a Sentimental Mood,” in turn, are melodies originally blown by, and rarely credited to, the alto-sax player Otto Hardwick.

None of these are obvious, all-purpose riffs, or simple blues phrases. They’re rich, melodic ideas, as complex as anything in Gershwin or Rodgers. Ellington owned them, but they didn’t start in his head, or take form under his fingers. Teachout says all the right things about how, without Ellington’s ears to hear them and his intelligence to fix and resolve them, these might have been butterflies that lived a day, fluttered, and died. But you sense that he’s shaken by the news. It seems like theft. It certainly bothered the musicians. Hodges used to make a sign of counting money when Ellington was playing the medley of his tunes.

One might be a touch more defiant on behalf of the Duke. Ellington really did take other men’s ideas and act as if they were his own. But he did this because he took other men’s ideas and made them his own. There are artists whose genius lies in exploiting other people’s talent, and we can recognize the exploitation as the genius. It is the gift of such artists to be able to energize and paralyze other people and do both at the same time. It may be true that Herman Mankiewicz wrote most of “Citizen Kane,” scene by scene and even shot by shot. What is certainly true is that nothing else that survives of Mankiewicz’s is remotely as good as “Citizen Kane.” That’s because he was writing “Citizen Kane” for Orson Welles. Johnny Hodges spent many years on his own, with every chance to keep his tunes to himself. No other standard ever emerged. Suppose Billy Strayhorn had been liberated instead of “adopted” and infantilized. Would he have had the energy and mastery to form a band, sustain it, recruit the right musicians, survive their eccentricities and addictions, give them music they could play, record it, and keep enough of a popular audience alive to justify the expense of the rest? It is painful to read of Strayhorn desolate over having credit for his music stolen by the Duke; it is also the case that Ellington had the genius not to have to cry.

Ellington’s ear, his energy, his organizational abilities, the sureness of his decisions are a case study for management school. (Consider the way he fired Charles Mingus for fighting with Tizol, fondly but with no appeal: “I’m afraid, Charles—I’ve never fired anybody—you’ll have to quit my band. I don’t need any new problems. Juan’s an old problem. . . .”) These are not ordinary or secondary gifts. They were the essence of his genius. Ellington had an idea of a certain kind of jazz: tonal, atmospheric, blues-based but elegant. He took what he needed to realize the ideal he had invented. The tunes may have begun with his sidemen; the music was his.

This is not a secondary form of originality, which needs a postmodern apologia, in which “curating” is another kind of “creating.” It is the original kind of originality.

There’s a reason that Duke’s players mostly complained of being cheated only of the dough. Originality comes in two kinds: originality of ideas, and originality of labor, and although it is the first kind that we get agitated about, we should honor the second kind still more. There is wit, made by the head and spun out into life; and work, created mostly by fingers engaging tools as various as tenor saxes and computer keyboards. It is an oddity of our civilization, and has been since the Renaissance, to honor wit more than work, to think that the new idea “contributed” by the work matters more than the work itself.

What Johnny Hodges was doing in making those new melodies may have been more like the copying errors in ceaseless cell fission than like premeditated decision: as he set to playing the same chord changes over and over, night after night, a lucky error in a note may, one night, have touched another and become an innovation. It was a happy accident produced by hard labor. But that it reflected effort as much as inspiration should only increase its value. No author really minds, too much, seeing his or her ideas “out there,” to be recycled, and even a conceptual artist has a slightly guilty conscience about trading in that commodity alone. (That’s why Jasper Johns fans insist that it is the finish, the touch, that really matters.) . . .

What mattered was the band. Duke Ellington was a great impresario and bandleader who created the most stylish sound, and brand, in American music, and kept a company of musicians going for half a century. That this description seems somehow less exalting than calling him a “major American composer” or a “radical musical innovator” is a sign of how far we have to go in allowing art to tell us how to admire it, rather than trying to make it hold still in conventional poses in order to be admired.

Joe Biden announces he's running for president

Joe Biden announces he’s running for president:



I’m surprised by his announcement video. It’s negative and depressing, mentioning racism and anti-Semitism and a woman who died at a white supremacist rally, even as it tries to be inspiring (showing Martin Luther King, Jr. right before cutting to Biden announcing his candidacy). He’s focused on what’s wrong with the incumbent president, but says nothing distinctive about himself in over 3 minutes.

The subtext is: Unlike the many candidates who’ve only come to your attention this year, I don’t need to introduce myself. I need no introduction. You don't need to be reminded of my time as Vice President, and I don't need to tell you where I stand on the issues.

Instead of talking about himself, he talks about us. He ends by saying dramatically: "We have to remember who we are! This is America."

We only see him sitting down in one place; there are no shots of him walking around interacting with people. He's been criticized for his age (he'll be 78 on Inauguration Day), so why not show him being more active? But shots like that would make him look more like a “politician.” And he doesn’t want to look like one more politician. He’s presenting himself to us not as Vice President Biden, but as Joe, your friend.

He starts out quoting the famous line from the Declaration of Independence about how “all men are created equal.” We all know to read that as if it said “people” instead of “men,” but it’s still an odd choice for a candidate who’s going to be criticized for being an old, white man who’s intruded into women's personal space. He includes the part about being “endowed by our Creator” with inalienable rights, signaling that he'll overtly use religion on the campaign trail.

UPDATE: The ad has been roundly criticized. That Politico article quotes a Democratic ad maker:

“It looks in memoriam. The font is your grandmother’s funeral card. To get people to watch your video and make it go viral, you want people to share it and say you’ve got to see it. Your first four seconds have to be the hook, something to get people to stay. The first 15 seconds of this is Joe rambling along. It’s the most Joe thing ever. It’s what you would’ve done in 2004.”

What's wrong with Elizabeth Warren's plan to forgive student debt

Sen. Elizabeth Warren might be my least favorite Democratic candidate. She keeps coming out with all these bold policies, but so many of them sound like bad ideas, like her plan to forgive most student debt. Here's the Washington Post Editorial Board (which is liberal — they endorse Democrats for president):

No one can accuse Ms. Warren of thinking small. What she really needs is a better sense of proportion. Her premise seems to be that student debt is all burden and no benefit, but this is not true: It represents an investment in skill acquisition that pays substantial long-term benefits. President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers estimated this lifetime “earnings premium” at about $1 million over a worker with only a high school education. It’s not unfair to expect people to pay back their loans out of that income.

What might be unfair is debt relief to the exclusion of other priorities with wider benefits, including to people who did not go to college at all. Ms. Warren proposes a wealth tax to cover the cost, the proceeds of which would then not be available for alternative, possibly more progressive uses. In any case, default rates are actually falling slightly, according to the latest Education Department figures; 84.7 percent of borrowers were current on their obligations as of the end of 2017, according to the New York Fed.

As for tuition-free college, why should children of families in the upper reaches of the income distribution scale receive an income-enhancing state-university education for nothing, when their parents are perfectly capable of helping defray the cost?

Jussie Smollett allegedly “directed every aspect of the attack” in hate-crime hoax

Well, many actors decide they'd like to direct . . .

How the Boeing 737 Max "denies [pilots'] sovereignty"

Gregory Travis, a pilot and software developer, has written a long and technical yet clear explanation of what's wrong with the Boeing 737 Max, which was involved in two recent plane crashes. And he has ideas about how to do better in the future.

Read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt:

[T]he 737 Max . . . violated that most ancient of aviation canons and probably violated the certification criteria of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. But instead of going back to the drawing board and getting the airframe hardware right . . . Boeing relied on something called the “Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System,” or MCAS. . . .

MCAS is certainly much less expensive than extensively modifying the airframe to accommodate the larger engines. Such an airframe modification would have meant things like longer landing gear (which might not then fit in the fuselage when retracted), more wing dihedral (upward bend), and so forth. All of those hardware changes would be horribly expensive.

What’s worse, those changes could be extensive enough to require not only that the FAA recertify the 737 but that Boeing build an entirely new aircraft. Now we’re talking real money, both for the manufacturer as well as the manufacturer’s customers.

That’s because the major selling point of the 737 Max is that it is just a 737, and any pilot who has flown other 737s can fly a 737 Max without expensive training, without recertification, without another type of rating. Airlines—Southwest is a prominent example—tend to go for one “standard” airplane. They want to have one airplane that all their pilots can fly because that makes both pilots and airplanes fungible, maximizing flexibility and minimizing costs. . . .

The flight management computer is a computer. What that means is that it’s not full of aluminum bits, cables, fuel lines, or all the other accoutrements of aviation. It’s full of lines of code. And that’s where things get dangerous.

Those lines of code were no doubt created by people at the direction of managers. Neither such coders nor their managers are as in touch with the particular culture and mores of the aviation world as much as the people who are down on the factory floor, riveting wings on, designing control yokes, and fitting landing gears. Those people have decades of institutional memory about what has worked in the past and what has not worked. Software people do not.

In the 737 Max, only one of the flight management computers is active at a time—either the pilot’s computer or the copilot’s computer. And the active computer takes inputs only from the sensors on its own side of the aircraft.

When the two computers disagree, the solution for the humans in the cockpit is to look across the control panel to see what the other instruments are saying and then sort it out. In the Boeing system, the flight management computer does not “look across” at the other instruments. It believes only the instruments on its side. It doesn’t go old-school. It’s modern. It’s software.

This means that if a particular angle-of-attack sensor goes haywire—which happens all the time in a machine that alternates from one extreme environment to another, vibrating and shaking all the way—the flight management computer just believes it.

It gets even worse. There are several other instruments that can be used to determine things like angle of attack, either directly or indirectly, such as the pitot tubes, the artificial horizons, etc. All of these things would be cross-checked by a human pilot to quickly diagnose a faulty angle-of-attack sensor.

In a pinch, a human pilot could just look out the windshield to confirm visually and directly that, no, the aircraft is not pitched up dangerously. That’s the ultimate check and should go directly to the pilot’s ultimate sovereignty. Unfortunately, the current implementation of MCAS denies that sovereignty. It denies the pilots the ability to respond to what’s before their own eyes.

Like someone with narcissistic personality disorder, MCAS gaslights the pilots. And it turns out badly for everyone. “Raise the nose, HAL.” “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

In the MCAS system, the flight management computer is blind to any other evidence that it is wrong, including what the pilot sees with his own eyes and what he does when he desperately tries to pull back on the robotic control columns that are biting him, and his passengers, to death. . . .

None of the above should have passed muster. None of the above should have passed the “OK” pencil of the most junior engineering staff, much less a DER. That’s not a big strike. That’s a political, social, economic, and technical sin.

It just so happens that, during the timeframe between the first 737 Max crash and the most recent 737 crash, I’d had the occasion to upgrade and install a brand-new digital autopilot in my own aircraft. . . .

The media's magical thinking about the Supreme Court

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Supreme Court on Monday said it will consider three cases to decide whether federal law protects gay and transgender workers from employment discrimination.

The cases mark the first major consideration of gay rights by the justices since the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who led a closely divided court through a series of landmark opinions culminating with the constitutional recognition of same-sex marriage.

The Wall Street Journal says this is going to "put[] the spotlight squarely on Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the former Kennedy clerk who succeeded his former boss last year." But I see no reason to think Justice Kavanaugh is any more significant in this way than Justice Gorsuch (who isn't mentioned in the WSJ article). What matters is that they're the two who joined the Supreme Court after its 2015 same-sex marriage decision; it's irrelevant who replaced Justice Kennedy and who replaced Justice Scalia. The media made the same mistake when Justice Alito replaced Justice O'Connor, shortly after Chief Justice Roberts replaced Chief Justice Rehnquist; journalists would act as if Alito were especially important because his direct predecessor, O'Connor, was more often in the majority than Rehnquist. But that's magical thinking. When two judges replace two judges on a court, it doesn't matter who replaced whom, as long as the judges' votes all count equally.

ABC News flubs presidential candidates' ages

ABC News says this about Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, the latest Democrat to announce he’s running for president:

At 40, he's the second-youngest candidate, three years older than Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, whom Moulton has described as a friend and fellow veteran.

Wait, Tulsi Gabbard and Eric Swalwell are both 38-year-old members of Congress who've announced they're running for president. Have they dropped out? No, Moulton is at most the fourth-youngest candidate, not the "second-youngest"; ABC News just didn’t bother to fact-check. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed the mainstream media getting a 2020 contender’s age wrong; as I posted before, a CNN article understated Joe Biden’s age. If the media isn’t going to be accurate about something as easy to check as the age of presidential candidates, you have to wonder how badly they’re getting the facts wrong in trickier areas.

(I posted a screen shot of ABC's mistake to Facebook for posterity, in case it's eventually corrected.)

By the way, Moulton seems to have an impressive military record as a Marine and an Iraq veteran — not that that’s been an effective way to win votes. The veterans who've run for president in recent memory (John Kerry, Wesley Clark, John McCain, Bob Dole) all failed; it's been a while since we've elected a president with a military background. So I don't expect this to be the factor that makes Moulton stand out from the crowd of at least 20 candidates.

Does society allow men but not women to have comebacks?

This New York Times article argues that women don't "get comebacks like Tiger Woods" because "society" doesn't "allow . . . women to get high enough to fall." Ann Althouse (my mom) responds:

It seems to me, there's no one to compare to Tiger Woods — the ascent, the crash, the long time in the wilderness, the perfection of the big comeback win. You can't generalize to: Men can do that, women can't. . . .

There are a lot of people who only care about golf to the extent that it's about Tiger. Who else has done that with a sport — made millions of people care about it only because of him (or her)? . . .

Getting that high means beating everybody else. There's no way for the rest of us to "allow" that. Women already enjoy the allowance of playing in separated women's sports. . . .

[The article] really does undercut women by insisting proactively that women be given something no man was given.

This is a pet peeve of mine: gender/race articles that claim men (or white men) "get" to do something or are "allowed" to do something while other people aren't. That kind of framing makes it sound like the writer is boldly announcing a discovery about how society's rules are discriminatory. But the supposed rule isn't real; it was created by the writer, not by society.

Right under the Tiger Woods piece is a New York Times article about Martha Stewart, which says she recently joked at a roast "about surviving the five months she spent in prison beginning in 2004 after being convicted of lying to investigators about a stock trade," and the joke "was a hit." The article goes on to say that she's "still a competitive business woman" and "still expanding her empire." Apparently women are "allowed" to make comebacks.

Does increasing the minimum wage also increase crime?

The Wall Street Journal looks at some of the harmful consequences of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour:

New York City’s minimum wage rose again on Dec. 31. Businesses with 11 or more workers must pay $15 an hour, up from $13 last year and $11 in 2017. Employees who earn tips can be paid a lower rate, now set at $10 an hour for waiters, provided their total pay exceeds $15.

Is it merely a coincidence that the city’s full-service restaurants have fallen into a jobs recession?

Employment in January dropped 3.7% year over year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the start of 2018, the Big Apple’s sit-down restaurants had 167,900 employees. This January, after the wage bump, it fell to 161,700, a three-year low. The preliminary February number is 161,000, even as overall city employment is up around 2% year over year.

The monthly jobs data can be noisy, but the trend fits what restaurateurs are saying. The New York City Hospitality Alliance surveyed 324 full-service eateries late last year. Nearly half, 47%, planned to eliminate jobs in 2019 to deal with higher labor costs. Three-fourths expected to cut employee hours, and 87% said they would raise menu prices.

Meanwhile, in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper posted last month, three economists examined whether minimum-wage increases had any effect on crime from 1998 to 2016. “We find robust evidence,” they write, “that minimum wage hikes increase property crime arrests among teenagers and young adults ages 16-to-24, a population for whom minimum wages are likely to bind.”

When politicians arbitrarily set the price of labor, young workers without skills can be locked out of the job market. That’s the finding in studies of Seattle’s wage mandate by a team at the University of Washington. The new wrinkle in the NBER paper is that some of these young people turn to petty crime.

What does this say about the Democrats’ idea for a nationwide $15 mandate? “Our estimates suggest,” the economists write, “that this minimum wage hike would generate over 410,000 additional property crimes and $2.4 billion per year in additional crime costs.” . . .

How did Democrats settle on a goal of $15 anyway? An organizer with the Service Employees International Union, which is behind the public campaign, joked in 2014 that “it was a pretty scientific process: $10 was too low and $20 was too high, so we landed at $15.”

Just yesterday I noticed that a restaurant where I've sometimes gone to lunch from work in Manhattan had raised all of its entree prices to at least $20. This is more than the restaurant was charging last week. I don't plan to go back. Democrats have recklessly caused harm by raising the minimum wage to unreasonable levels.

Movies vs. real life

In movies, young children are angels who go along with whatever their parents want without resistance. When they reach puberty, they're constantly being rude and rebelling. In real life, teenagers are usually more polite and well-behaved than younger kids.

Notre-Dame will be rebuilt again

In the aftermath of the fire in the Notre-Dame Cathedral of Paris, a piece in the New Republic points out:

Notre Dame’s spire was a nineteenth-century restoration by Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, replacing an original that was taken down in the reign of Louis XVI. Most constructions, all cities, every culture, are constantly rebuilt in the midst of damage and loss. Mourning and renewal are linked together as long as the world goes on. Loss is its own meaning. And civilization is the story of rebuilding.

NBC News talks about the daunting task ahead:

Jonathan Foyle, an architectural historian and author, said a critical part of the restoration process will be to assess how damaged Notre Dame’s massive stone vaults were by the blaze. Extreme temperatures can cause calcination — a process that turns stone into powder, he said.

Then, there’s the possible damage caused by firefighters trying to extinguish the blaze: Dumping cold water on red hot stone can cause it to shatter and crack, Foyle said.

“It’s gone through a very complex trauma,” he said. “You’re going to need months to figure out whether it is safe enough to stay standing.” . . .

Still, he said there are French architects trained in medieval building techniques that would be up to the task of restoring this “pioneering giant of Gothic cathedrals.”

“This building has been through the French Revolution, the Huguenots and two world wars,” he said. “I have no doubt it will rise again.”

The rebuilding process could take two decades of painstaking work and restructuring, said Emily Guerry, a professor of medieval European history at Britain's University of Kent. . . .

[Architectural historian Jonathan Foyle] estimated that it will cost tens of millions of dollars and require an army of stone masons, glaziers, plumbers and carpenters.

Still, such a massive project could signal a “rebirth,” he said.

“In a way, projects like Windsor Castle — they look disastrous, and they are, but they give life to traditional trades,” he said. “Sometimes they can have a silver lining.”

25 years ago today: Hole and Sugartooth

25 years ago today, April 12, 1994, was a good day for grunge rock.

A week after the death of Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love's band, Hole, released its breakthrough album, Live Through This.

Rolling Stone ranked it #4 on a list of the "50 Greatest Grunge Albums":

Live Through This is the sound of Courtney Love ripping herself to shreds. Her band’s second album is a roller-coaster reflection on co-dependency, motherhood and feminism that found the volcanic frontwoman making the case that she was more of a pop-culture heroine than the villainess she’d previously been painted as. . . . The title of Live Through This felt like a prophecy as Love was suddenly thrust into the role of celebrity widow.

Here's an oral history of Live Through This.

The album title is in the lyrics of "Violet" — Hole at its best:




"I’m part of an evolutionary process. I’m not the fully evolved end.” — Courtney Love




Hole was "grunge" in a way that, say, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains were not. Those bands were a mix of genres: grunge, hard rock, metal, prog rock, etc. But the unpolished, first-take feel of a song like "Rock Star" (a/k/a "Olympia") makes it pure "grunge."




On the same day, Sugartooth, a band from Southern California which never found its big break, released its debut album (self-titled). Sugartooth was best known for the first song, "Sold My Fortune":




One more from Sugartooth:

Much ado about "something"

If you're offended by Rep. Ilhan Omar's use of the word "something," you don't get to mock anyone else for being a triggered snowflake.

Her statement from last month that's causing all this controversy was that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) "was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties." She didn't make her point as eloquently as she could have, and she was technically incorrect about when CAIR was founded. But you're allowed to use a basic pronoun like "it" or "something" to refer to, well, anything — even the most horrific atrocity. As far as I can tell, she wasn't emphasizing the word "something" to minimize the enormity of the attacks. Instead, she was pithily getting across the familiar point that just because some people perpetrated these acts of war doesn't mean everyone who looks like them or practices the same religion should lose their rights.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is right; the New York Post's cover is a gratuitous attempt to stir up hatred against Omar. As you can see at that link, the cover puts her name at the top and quotes her out of context; right under that is a photo of the World Trade Center being destroyed (in a newspaper that's widely in circulated in New York City where it happened), with superimposed text saying: "Here's your something." I get that they're using the phrase "Here's your . . ." in the colloquial sense of "Here, let me show you what this is about . . ." Still, using the word "your" right after naming Omar is an almost subliminal way of linking her to the World Trade Center attack in readers' minds. I've been critical of Omar in the past, but that is not a decent way to be talking about a member of Congress.

(Photo of Rep. Ilhan Omar from Wikimedia Commons.)

President Trump shares fake news about his approval rating

President Donald Trump said “Great news!” when tweeting this image from Fox News, which says “TRUMP’S SOARING APPROVAL” at the top, and then “55% OVERALL.”

Great news! #MAGA pic.twitter.com/haZ1HbVpNu

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2019

Sounds impressive! Except for one slight detail: according to the same poll that was the basis of the Fox News report, 55% is actually his disapproval rating. His approval rating is only 43%. And he calls other people fake news . . .

Mo Elleithee, director of the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service (which conducted the poll), tweeted back:

I’m the Director of @GUPolitics & this graphic is incorrect.

The Battleground Poll shows 58% approval on the economy.

But it shows only 43% overall approval, & 52% disapproval.

The 55% number is the President’s unfavorable rating. (Only 40% favorable.)https://t.co/a00b6ljiJl https://t.co/nntXuHaUKj

— Mo Elleithee (@MoElleithee) April 11, 2019

Some other Twitter users have a theory:

My guess is that Fox posted the bogus graphic knowing Trump would tweet it. Now they can claim it was a mistake but most of their viewers will believe it's true.

— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) April 11, 2019

Pete Buttigieg on "capitalism"

Mayor Pete Buttigieg said this on Meet the Press over the weekend, in response to Chuck Todd's question about whether he's a "capitalist":

Sure, yeah. I think, look, America is a capitalist society. But — it's gotta be democratic capitalism. And that part's really important, and it's slipping away from us. In other words, when capitalism comes into tension with democracy, which is more important to you? I believe democracy is more important. And when you have capitalism capturing democracy, when you have the kind of regulatory capture where powerful corporations are able to arrange the rules for their benefit, that's not real capitalism. If you want to see what happens when you have capitalism without democracy, you can see it very clearly in Russia. It turns into crony capitalism, and that turns into oligarchy. So, I know the temptation, especially for the commentariat, is to kind of align everybody as dots on a spectrum, but that's not how most voters think.

He largely seems to be associating the word "capitalism" with "regulatory capture," i.e. incumbent businesses colluding with government to keep other businesses down. The phrase "crony capitalism" is also not really about free-market capitalism, but about big government interfering with businesses. (The distinction is laid out here — scroll down for a concise explanation of crony capitalism.) Buttigieg seems to realize all that when he says "that's not real capitalism." And yet, I'm wary of this rhetorical device of associating the word "capitalism" with things that have more to do with big government than free markets.

Here's the whole video of Buttigieg's Meet the Press interview, which I've cued to start at this part of the discussion (9:50):




(The photo at the top of this post is from a 404 page on Pete Buttigieg's campaign website.)

Why is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mocking this Fox News interviewer?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says this short interview with a customer in a diner didn't "go quite as expected," and someone else says the interviewer seemed "confused." Really?

When your ‘gritty, guy-in-a-diner’ news profile doesn’t go quite as expected 😂

This week’s #GreenNewDeal MVP goes to... ⬇️ 🏆 https://t.co/gL5vBltpfX

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 4, 2019

The interview seems completely planned out, and they both seem calm and unsurprised.

Maybe people watching it are surprised to see an interview with a liberal on Fox News.

Is this Trump's worst immigration argument yet?

President Trump has been repeatedly saying that America can't handle any more people because "our country is full." (That links to the Boston Globe, which restricts your number of free articles.)

That piece corrects the president:

Far from running out of room for more people, most of this immense country is wide open and empty. According to the Census Bureau, nearly two-thirds of the US population live in cities — but those cities take up just 3.5 percent of the nation’s land area. Add in all the other places where Americans live — villages, islands, farms — and it still amounts to a mere sliver of US territory. In 2006, a detailed federal government study of land use in the United States reported that “urban land plus rural residential areas together comprise 154 million acres, or almost 7 percent of total US land area.” Our country, in other words, isn’t 100 percent full, it is 93 percent empty.

Peter Suderman adds in Reason:

There are at least 145 countries more physically dense than the U.S. There is no sense in which America has reached its capacity to hold, support, or employ people. . . .

"Our country is full" is not an argument. It's an excuse for draconian political symbolism that will have real and lasting consequences for both immigrants and native-born Americans.

Toddler disables iPad until 2067

Try again in 25 million minutes . . .

What's the matter with having so many "Acting" officials in the Trump administration?

ABC News explains:

By the end of the week, 10 major leadership positions in the Trump administration -- including some of the most critical in the government -- are expected to be filled by individuals serving in an acting capacity. . . .

Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan has been his temporary status for almost four months, since James Mattis left at the end of December.

Besides Shanahan, the "acting" senior leadership includes soon-to-be Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, Acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, Acting Budget Director Russell Vought, Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Acting U.N. Ambassador Jonathan Cohen, Acting FEMA Administrator Pete Gaynor, Acting ICE Director Ronald Vitiello, a soon-to-be acting administrator of the Small Business Administration, and a soon-to-be acting commissioner of the Customs and Border Patrol. . . .

The president himself has expressed a preference for the "flexibility" that comes from having non-permanent leadership.

“I sort of like Acting. It gives me more flexibility . . .” the president said in January. . . .

Max Stier, the CEO Partnership for Public Service[,] . . . Stier warns of a widespread “substitute teacher effect” across the administration whereby the “acting” leaders “don’t get the respect in the classroom and also don’t personally view themselves as responsible in the long run.” . . .

“There’s also this trend of taking people out of their jobs to fill top jobs and then not filling the deputy gaps, so it’s a game of musical chairs,” he said in an interview with ABC News. . . .

John Cohen, . . . a former acting in Department of Homeland Security, spoke from personal experience in having served as an acting leader for a time during the Obama administration.

“As the acting person, and I speak from experience, you’re very much aware that you are temporary and your replacement can come at a moment's notice, so there’s this sense of discomfort about trying to bring organizational change,” said Cohen, who recalled learning that a permanent leader had been named to the job he had been filling in an acting capacity through a White House press release.

In addition to being unable to execute on a long-term vision, Cohen said, acting leaders can be more beholden to the political whims of the presidents they serve than Senate-confirmed leaders.

"This makes them potentially vulnerable to political pressure and when the acting official is serving in a cabinet level role it makes them more likely to yield to the demands of the president," Cohen said.

Does moderating comments lead to more and better comments?

The Wall Street Journal spent 5 months studying online comments and reached these conclusions (via Althouse):

Heavy commenters are often not reading much of the articles they comment on. They go to the headline, sometimes scan a small part of the story, and skip right on down to the comment box. In a sense, some have more interest in having a place to post their thoughts than in engaging with the journalism. . . .

Light commenters are more likely to say that moderation improves comment quality. . . .

One of the concepts you learn in Economics 101 is opportunity cost — which means that when you do one thing, you’re missing out on doing something else. The thing you are missing out on is the opportunity cost. In the case of commenting, we have concluded that overly focusing on the small subset of users who comment frequently and want no one intervening at all in their comments is costing us the opportunity of engaging with our much larger, growing, and diversifying audience.

Indeed, when we looked at the demographics of our heavy commenters, we found they don’t represent the Journal as a whole. That led us to focus on the people who are not commenting as much. Women and younger people have been less represented among our commenters than they are among our subscribers, so we took a look at what was keeping them away. What we heard was they want to feel safe from bullying and share their comments in a forum in which they won’t be attacked. . . .

Our standards for posts remain the same — and they can be found here — but they will be enforced more than they were. We owe it to our readers and our journalists to lead the way with thoughtful discourse.

Ann Althouse (my mom) responds: "To me, the WSJ's observations seem pretty obvious. The trick is what to do about it. Comments are great and comments are horrible. To me, it's an endless struggle."

Hidden camera invades privacy at Airbnb

A couple staying at an Airbnb in Ireland made the discovery:

"I could see the live stream video of myself looking at his phone," Nealie Barker, 42, said. "I had this horrible, sinking feeling ... We're definitely being watched.” ...

The couple, who was traveling with their four children and niece, contacted Airbnb, which doesn’t allow hidden cameras.

"Airbnb had no advice for us over the phone," Nealie Barker told NBC News, adding that the representative didn’t seem to understand the severity of the situation.

Feeling Airbnb was unhelpful, they called the host themselves. As he denied their questions about cameras on the property, she said, her husband asked, "Well then why am I [looking] at a livestream of myself?"

The host hung up but called back later, saying there was only one hidden camera.

Black hole seen

We can now see a black hole for the first time. Science magazine explains:

Astronomers today revealed that they have taken a picture of a gargantuan black hole at the heart of the nearby galaxy Messier 87. The result is a powerful confirmation of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which was used to predict black holes more than a century ago. It is also a feat for the team of more than 200 scientists who toiled for years to produce the image by combining signals from eight separate radio observatories spanning the globe. . . .

Black holes have gravitational fields so strong that even light cannot escape, so they are defined by a black, featureless sphere called an event horizon. But the holes can nevertheless be seen because they acquire a disk of gas and whip it up to high temperatures so that it glows brightly at different wavelengths.

By seeing the shape of this ring, bent into an asymmetric crescent by the black hole’s gravity, a new era of astrophysics will begin. The precise size and shape of the ring will help researchers test Einstein’s gravitational equations to see if they stand up to the test or if some other theory of gravity may be needed.

For scale: black hole, sun:

(Image by XKCD.)

Is Kirsten Gillibrand right that she's more open to changing her mind than Trump?

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (whom I've voted for repeatedly) said this in a CNN town hall:

"When I was a member of Congress from upstate New York, I was really focused on the priorities of my district," the New York senator said during a CNN town hall. "When I became senator of the entire state, I recognized that some of my views really did need to change."

Before becoming a senator in 2009, Gillibrand represented a largely Republican district in the House and expressed ideas on immigration — from blocking certain benefits for undocumented immigrants to establishing English as an official language — that have come back to haunt her as she seeks the Democratic nomination in 2020. . . .

During the town hall, Gillibrand said she has changed considerably since her times in the House, and that she was "ashamed" of her past positions. She used her ideological evolution to further distance herself from the president, who she said is incapable of change.

"For people who aspire to be president, I think it's really important that you're able to admit when you're wrong and that you're able to grow and learn and listen and be better, and be stronger," Gillibrand said. "That is something that Donald Trump is unwilling to do."

She was also asked about her dramatic shift on guns: she currently has an F rating from the NRA, not surprisingly for a Democrat . . . but she used to get an A.

So, Gillibrand says she's changed her mind again and again, while Trump is unwilling to change his mind. But wait — by her own account, she changed her mind because her job changed from representing a relatively conservative district in upstate New York to representing the whole state, which is more liberal.

Well, Trump has also changed his views. He used to be pro-choice. Trump admitted in 2015: "At one point, I was a Democrat. As Ronald Reagan changed, I also changed. I became much more conservative. I also became a Republican."

In 1999, Trump said he wouldn't want to ban "partial-birth abortion": "I'm very pro-choice. . . . I am pro-choice in every respect."

Trump said in 2004: "In many cases, I probably identify more as a Democrat. . . . It just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than under the Republicans." As you can see in that video, he said in another video (I'm not sure when) that he was "liberal on health care."

But then Trump changed many of his positions — why? We can't know, because we can't read his mind, but the most likely explanation would seem to be that he wanted to run president, and he thought he'd have the best luck vying for the Republican nomination.

Is Trump really so different from Gillibrand? Don't they both change their positions depending on what job they had or wanted?

25 years of the Offspring's Smash

25 years ago today, April 8, 1994, the Offspring came out with their third album, Smash. The previously unknown band sold over 10 million copies of what journalists inevitably referred to as "the aptly titled Smash."

Just 2 months after Green Day's commercial breakthrough, "pop punk" seemed to be having a moment, leading to somewhat silly debates about whether too much pop and success made the word "punk" inappropriate.

The Offspring's interesting lead singer, Dexter Holland, wrote their breakthrough single, "Come Out and Play," about gang violence after living near the LA riots in 1992. Holland, who was pursuing a Ph.D in molecular biology before he dropped out to focus on the band, added the "You gotta keep 'em separated" catchphrase to this song based on his experience working with hot liquids in a laboratory.




The title track of Smash, released the same day we learned of Kurt Cobain's suicide days earlier, closed out the album with a defiant declaration: "Do what I want, do what I feel like . . . Who gives a f--- if it's good enough for you? 'Cause I am alive, I am alive, I am alive!"

What's so great about unwavering beliefs?

That someone has unwaveringly stuck to the same beliefs or principles or values throughout their life is often said as if it were a compliment, but it isn't. The fact that you've consistently believed something isn't particularly valuable in itself. You might be consistently right, but you could be consistently wrong. So consistency of beliefs is not the best standard to apply when judging, say, a political leader. More useful tests are how flexible and adaptable you are, and how reliably you recognize truths and reject falsehoods. You don't get any bonus points for resolutely standing by what's irrational or false. If you have a false belief, the worst thing you can do is to keep believing it, and the best thing you can do in the future is to change.

Kurt Cobain died 25 years ago

Kurt Cobain is estimated to have killed himself 25 years ago today, April 5, 1994. His body was discovered and the news was reported 3 days later.

Over 10 years ago I made a list of the 40 greatest grunge songs as a series of blog posts, and then did a post reflecting on those who had died. I said:

I vividly remember when I was 13, sitting around watching MTV on April 8, 1994. Kurt Loder announced on MTV News that Kurt Cobain had been found dead in his home and that the cause of death was "a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head." I was so young that the meaning of that delicate phrasing didn't register with me, so I asked my mom about it. She had to explain: "That means he killed himself." . . .

He was 27. He left behind a one-year-old daughter and many others.

Nirvana [which had songs #18, #9, #1 in my list] released only three proper studio albums. In a Rolling Stone interview near the end of his life, Cobain was critical of the band's soft/loud formula and talked about wanting to branch out stylistically. He said he wanted to "learn to go in between those things, go back and forth, almost become psychedelic in a way."

We'll never get to hear how the band might have developed; the analogy would be if John Lennon had died not in 1980 but in 1965. They should have done so much more. But they changed the direction of rock music in the few years they were around. (As I said yesterday, I realize that other bands have a better claim to inventing grunge, but Nirvana perfected it and reached a lot more people.)

For days after the news broke, MTV constantly reran the Nirvana Unplugged concert, and I watched it almost as constantly. I started learning to play guitar that summer.

This is a park bench in Seattle, south of Cobain's home, where he died. The photographer, Eric Shoemaker, says: "Nirvana fans gather at the park on the memorial of Kurt Cobain's death (April 5th), to pay tribute. . . . The park's benches are covered with graffiti messages to the rock icon."

As you can see, someone wrote the first line of "Dumb," from In Utero: "I'm not like them, but I can pretend."

From the New York Times:

Suicide prevention advocates have developed guidelines for news media coverage of suicide deaths. . . . They . . . recommend avoiding coverage that describes death as an escape for a troubled person.

One example was the 1994 death of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, who was beloved among young music fans, including in Seattle, where his career rose and where he was found dead. Local coverage of his suicide was closely tied to messages about treatment for mental health and suicide prevention, along with a very public discussion of the pain his death caused his family.

Those factors may explain why his death bucked the pattern. In the months after Mr. Cobain’s death, calls to suicide prevention lines in the Seattle area surged and suicides actually went down.