Today I read this story in the Guardian: In 2018, almost 30 cities across New York state received federal money to carry out a specific, urgent task: removing lead service lines that poison drinking water. The city of Troy — which sits across the Hudson River and just north of Albany — was among them, ...continue reading "What’s going on with the water in Troy?"
In 1968 Lyndon Johnson nominated Abe Fortas to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, but the nomination failed because Republicans, along with some Southern Democrats, filibustered it. The Southerners didn't like the fact that Fortas was Jewish. Republicans, however, pointed to Fortas's receipt of $15,000 in private funds to give nine speeches at a ...continue reading "Republicans don’t care about Clarence Thomas’s lavish vacations"
This week Republicans have: Loudly defended Donald Trump against charges of lawbreaking that he's obviously guilty of.¹ One of them even boasted that he would prevent extradition of Trump to New York, something that's clearly unconstitutional. Expelled a Democrat from the Tennessee legislature for bad behavior, with two more to come. Arrested the teenage son ...continue reading "The Republican week in review"
This is the Basilica of Sacré Coeur, overlooking Paris from 400 feet above the city on the hill of Montmarte. It amuses me that it was built as something of a middle finger from rich Catholics as payback for the imprisonment of the pope following the Franco-Prussian war. As it happens, the pope wasn't really ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"
Lindsey Graham, who once proposed a national 20-week limit on abortions, has now proposed a 15-week limit. However, this would only be a ceiling. The law would still allow states to pass more restrictive abortion laws, and this makes it obviously of no interest to liberals. But what if it were just a straight nationwide ...continue reading "How popular would a nationwide 15-week rule for abortion be?"
This is sort of an odd picture. It's the Washington Monument, of course, but it doesn't really look very tall. Is it because of the trees, which distort our sense of scale? Or about shooting it from slightly above its base? Or about the cropping of the photo? I'm not sure.
Via Alex Tabarrok, here's the racial and ethnic breakdown of inventors in the United States. The figures are from a new demographic study done by Ufuk Akcigit and Nathan Goldschlag: Every nonwhite group is massively underrepresented except for Asians, who are massively overrepresented. Women are also enormously underrepresented: In this study, "inventor" is anyone with ...continue reading "Raw data: Race, gender, and ethnicity among US inventors"
The Chinese team that collected samples from the Huanan Seafood Market three years ago has finally published its report, and an advanced draft has been posted on the Nature website. Let the games begin: A peer-reviewed paper that concludes there is no evidence for zoonotic spillover at the Huanan Seafood Market in #Wuhan has just ...continue reading "New study of COVID origins adds nothing to the raccoon dog hypothesis"
National Review's Jeffrey Blehar is unhappy about the victory of liberal Janet Protasiewicz in Wisconsin's supreme court race: The rollback of the significant Tea Party-era gains made by the GOP in the state now seems, if not foreordained, then on the horizon. Democrats have seized control of the state Supreme Court — once held by ...continue reading "Wisconsin votes to remain in the 21st century"
I think I may have a trip to Los Angeles in my near future: A battle is being waged at the Westlake/MacArthur Park Metro station near downtown Los Angeles. The weapon of choice? Loud classical music....L.A. Metro’s goal with the music and lights is to reduce crime and drive away unhoused people. ....The transit authority ...continue reading "Classical music cuts crime 20% on the LA metro"
Over at New York, John Herrman describes the TikTokification of everything—except worse: You’re stuck in line at the grocery store, so you check your phone. Your brain shuts off, and your thumb takes over. Soon, a tall video plays. A man is tricking a baboon with some sleight of hand. He makes a lighter disappear ...continue reading "How the Chinese are really using TikTok to destroy us"
This is a guy walking his dog on the road up to Idyllwild. The man's politics may be suspect, but his dog was very sociable. I had my car door open and he almost jumped onto my lap.
Just for the record, I'm not deliberately avoiding Trump news because I think it's stupid.¹ It's mostly because events like his arraignment today are already covered in minute detail by every news outlet on the planet and I don't have anything special to add. I am curious to see what the charges are, just in ...continue reading "Trump update"
Let's review the recent history of human communication: 1876-2000: Telephones provide convenient and universal voice communication. 2000-2023: Thekidsthesedays decide they hate telephones and really, really hate voice messages, so instead they use phone infrastructure to send text messages. Today: Kids realize that emojis don't actually represent the full range of human emotion, so they begin ...continue reading "Human voice is the hot new texting technology"
In today's release of economic news for February, job openings continued their yearlong fall and orders for durable goods continued their decline of the past few months (with a brief timeout for Christmas). It was against this backdrop that the Fed continued to raise rates a couple of weeks ago. Good job, Fed.
This is a bateau chugging downstream on the Seine. A few minutes after taking this picture I myself would be on one of the bateaux chugging along the Seine.
Over at Vox, Miles Bryan writes about a new study of crime in the downtown areas of New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Chicago. The study's conclusion? Actual crime has been pretty stable, but fear of crime has shot up. This, not a desire for remote work, is the biggest reason people give for not wanting ...continue reading "Crime and the (Republican) fear of crime"
The key to the Mar-a-Lago documents case is not the bare fact that Donald Trump left the White House with classified documents in his possession. That might have been accidental. The bigger question is whether Trump refused to give up the documents even after they had been subpoenaed and Trump knew he had them. Indeed, ...continue reading "The Mar-a-Lago documents case is all about obstruction of justice"
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