For the Record: Don't Make a Federal Case of It (or Try If You Want to, But You'll Fail)

 

That's pretty ridiculous, right? The video is mocking January 6 organizers inside the House, like Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Paul Gosar!

Somebody on Gosar's staff is a regular Jonathan Swift!

— Toxic Positivity (@Yastreblyansky) November 18, 2021

Because personally, if I'm a member of Congress and somebody portrays me as a cartoon serial murderer, I'm not going to think it's making fun of somebody else. If I were involved in it, of course, I'd put it more in the old Warner Brothers style than anime—that looks more satirical to me—putting Gosar's face on Elmer Fudd. And he'd fail to get his kill, that's a lot funnier, trust me.

And in Sinemascope

Sociological Bent

So two weeks ago was Bad David Brooks, and last week we had Self-Help David Brooks ("The Awesome Importance of Imagination", which read like a compilation of BrainyQuotes, though it actually wasn't), so naturally today Woke David Brooks is doing a shift ("Joe Biden Is Succeeding"), which among other things praises the Biden agenda to the skies. And then explains why he's qualified to disagree with the economist Lawrence Summers on the subject of whether last spring's American Rescue Plan might overstimulate the economy and lead to inflation

Larry is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known and someone I really admire. If I were an economist, I might have agreed with him. But I’m a journalist with a sociological bent. For over a decade I have been covering a country that was economically, socially and morally coming apart. I figured one way to reverse that was to turbocharge the economy and create white-hot labor markets that would lift wages at the bottom. If inflation was a byproduct, so be it. The trade-off is worth it to prevent a national rupture.

and then agrees with him anyway

Dud

Mr. Bret Stephens is just such a hack ("The Federal Bureau of Dirty Tricks"):

This month’s bombshell indictment of Igor Danchenko, the Russian national who is charged with lying to the F.B.I. and whose work turns out to have been the main source for Christopher Steele’s notorious dossier, is being treated as a major embarrassment for much of the news media — and, if the charges stick, that’s exactly what it is.

Put media criticism aside for a bit. What this indictment further exposes is that James Comey’s F.B.I. became a Bureau of Dirty Tricks, mitigated only by its own incompetence — like a mash-up of Inspector Javert and Inspector Clouseau. Donald Trump’s best move as president (about which I was dead wrong at the time) may have been to fire him.

"Bombshell indictment" is a matter of perspective, but readers would be better prepared to judge for themselves if Stephens would reveal exactly what Danchenko is alleged to have lied about and how many lies he told, but Stephens only says he is

Killers

 

Re the recent document dumps from the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis:

Remember 26 March 2020, when coronavirus task force coordinator and full-time Hermès model Deborah Birx gave an interview to the Christian Broadcasting Network featuring a surprising evaluation of President Trump's intellectual preparedness for dealing with the Covid crisis?

“He’s been so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data,” Birx said. “I think his ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.” (via Aaron Rupar/Vox)

You might be surprised to hear it, but it turns out that she eventually changed her mind about that, if it's really what she actually thought at the time [Narrator Voiceover: "It's not exactly what she thought at the time"]. Healthcare advisor Andy Slavitt, talking to her that August, said she was chafing at having been dropped from Trump's circle of trusted advisers, where she'd been largely replaced by radiologist and Hoover Institution fellow Scott Atlas, who knew nothing whatsoever about epidemiology and had been busy on Fox News advocating a "herd immunity" strategy in which healthy young people would voluntarily expose themselves to Covid-19, especially kids:

Jersey Note

 

Phil Murphy and Steve Sweeney in September, just before the first gubernatorial debate. Via insidernj.

This, from Nancy Solomon at WNYC, is a take on the New Jersey election that may not make it beyond the local radio audience, which would be a shame, because it could be a very useful corrective on a misinterpretation of what actually happened to cause the unexpected closeness of Governor Phil Murphy's race and the cataclysmic loss of the state's most powerful politician (I mean more powerful than the governor), Senate President Steve Sweeney, to a commercial truck driver, Edward Durr, who claimed to have spent a total of $153 on his campaign.

The received take being, as Sweeney put it, that it was a part of the same "Red Wave" that hit Virginia, or in the terms set by the losing Republican gubernatorial candidate,

Mr. Ciattarelli, a former state assemblyman, has said that the election results are a rejection of the left-leaning policies championed by Mr. Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs executive who notched a raft of progressive victories during his first term.

“Every single time misguided politicians take this state too far off track, the great people of this state push, pull and prod it right back to where it belongs,” Mr. Ciattarelli said on Friday. “Right back to where it needs to be: the common-sense center.”

Which seems like a dubious interpretation of the fact that it was the centrist kingpin, not the progressive governor, who lost—not to mention Mr, Ciattarelli himself (that was from his concession speech, too, which it took him ten days to work himself up to).

Made Men

 

Via Heavy.

I am going to be discussing how sorry I feel for Kyle Rittenhouse in a minute—not as sorry as I feel for the guys he murdered and their families and friends, and not so sorry as to doubt whether he deserves to be found guilty, and (of course) not as sorry as he feels for himsself, but something, a liberal twinge—but I need to work myself into it. 

From a headline, now gone, in The New York Times continuing updates page on the Rittenhouse trial:

Kyle Rittenhouse, who styled himself a medic, said he is now studying nursing.

As the report clarifies, he was lying both times. When he and his friend Dominick joined the crowd on the night of the shootings and he told people he was making it up. He doesn't even have a high school diploma—he dropped out of school three years ago, and I can't find any suggestion online that he earned a GED (he was taking online GED courses in June). Not that being a high school dropout makes you a bad person! But habitual lying does make you a liar. 

By the same token he is not studying nursing at Arizona State University, as he testified under oath:

It Ain't Necessarily So

A man learned in the Law stood up to test Jesus. "Rabbi," he said, "what must I do to attain eternal life?"

"What does the Law say?"

"It says to love the Lord with all your your heart and all your soul and all your might and all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself."

"Then that's what you should do."

"But who is my neighbor?"

Was Covid Everywhere Before It Was in Wuhan?

 

Image via Loyal Companions.

So sometime in the spring of 2017 doctors in Malaysia discovered a new coronavirus that didn't seem like a big problem, infecting a bunch of kids in a hospital but not dangerously. The interesting thing about it was that the kids had apparently caught it from dogs, and not from each other; genomic analysis showed that it was a canine virus (apparently there are a lot of canine coronaviruses).

At the same time, members of a team of American medical volunteers in Haiti, 11,000 miles away, were also getting infected by something: when they got home to Florida, some of them felt "a bit under the weather". Not exactly sick, but they had slight fevers and they weren't at their best. Because the zika virus was circulating in Haiti at the time, they got themselves tested, but they didn't have zika. The virologist who tested them, though, John Lednicky of the University of Florida, was curious enough to want to see if there might be some other virus in their urine samples, and there was: the exact canine coronavirus that was infecting kids on the other side of the planet, as it turned out, four years later, last May.

"The virus probably circulates widely, but no one has paid attention to it," Lednicky says. He suspects it's all over the world. And if you've been around dogs frequently, you might have been infected with this virus — or developed an immunity to it by exposure to similar virus. "We'll know when scientists start looking for antibodies inside older blood samples taken from patients with respiratory disease. How many of them were misdiagnosed all along?" 

The good news, says NPR's science correspondent Michaleen Doucleff, is that virologists are now really starting to work on identifying and tracing all kinds of viruses that aren't problems—at least not yet. But the thing that really struck me was the likelihood that SARS-2 CoV was probably circulating all over the world too, before December 2019:

"Almost certainly, SARS-CoV-2 was circulating for quite some time and making people either a tiny bit sick or not sick enough to be noticed," she says. If scientists had detected it at this stage, perhaps the world would have had time to develop a test for it, some promising treatments and even a preliminary vaccine. Perhaps the pandemic would have taken a much different — perhaps less deadly course.

It doesn't occur to NPR to say so, but the whole story looks to me like strong evidence that the science-fiction "lab leak" story of the Covid-19 pandemic is just wrong—the story that came out of Italy a year or so ago, and caused a lot of pushback in the Covid community, in which Italian scientists claimed to have found antibody evidence of the novel coronavirus in Lombardy two months earlier than the Chinese identified the virus itself in Wuhan, implying that whatever happened to the virus in Wuhan that made it transmissible among humans happened in Milan too, around the same time, becomes really plausible. 

Tippy-Top Student Flamboyance

Update: Hit "Publish" a little prematurely on this one, late at night, and it's now somewhat revised and extended.

Flamboyants, via disney.fandom.

Say, what's woke David Brooks up to these days? A little less woke, to put it bluntly, castigating the élites, of course, as you'd expect from a part-time New York Times columnist and Aspen-backed social entrepreneur! Well, some élites ("Democrats Need to Confront Their Privilege"):

One of the Democratic Party’s core problems is that it still regards itself mainly as the party of the underdog. But as the information-age economy has matured, the Democratic Party has also become the party of the elite, especially on the cultural front.

Democrats dominate society’s culture generators: the elite universities, the elite media, the entertainment industry, the big tech companies, the thriving elite places like Manhattan, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

In 2020, Joe Biden won roughly one-sixth of the nation’s counties, but together those counties generate roughly 71 percent of the nation’s G.D.P.

Look, I know we're all tired of this, but in the first place unless you're a very old-fashioned Marxist you don't envisage a two-party system where one party is the ruling class and the other one is the advance guard of the proletariat. Most people are not "the élite", by definition, so a true "party of the élite" wouldn't be able to win an election. For a majority, you need some non-élite voters.

Heuristics

 

Vie The Decision Lab,

You know who lost big in yesterday's election? Both sides—I mean, both sides of the "progressive"-"centrist" debate among Democratic party strategists. In Virginia, old-hat neoliberal Terry McAuliffe seems to have lost, just barely, to an empty-suit multimillionaire and the threat of Critical Race Theory. In New Jersey, Phil Murphy, one of the nation's most progressive governors, may or may not have just barely squeaked through against an empty-suit multimillionaire and the threat of "schools teaching sodomy in sixth grade." 

Murphy's bête noire, New Jersey Senate president Stephen Sweeney, ally of Camden kingpin George Norcross and leader of one of the most obstructionist "centrist" factions of Democrats, seems to be losing, also just barely, his own seat, which he's held for 20 years, in what they inevitably call a "stunning upset": 

For the Record: Whatever it is, Marquito is against it

Byzantine mosaic, 12th or 13th century, in the cathedral of Monreale; the two wayfarers Lot invites into his house in Sodom turn out to be angels, and warn him to get out of town. Photo by Ghigo Roli.

This wonderful move by the Biden administration  to compensate some of the horrors wreaked by the Trumpies deserves more attention than it's getting—

The Wall Street Journal first reported on Thursday that the Biden administration is in talks to offer separated migrant parents and children around $450,000 per person. That would mean that if a parent and a child were separated at the border, together they would be eligible for a combined payment of $900,000.

—and Republicans want to provide it, in the worst way:

The Art of the Impossible

Illustration by William Pène du Bois for his 1947 juvenile novel The Twenty-One Balloons,  via Swann Galleries.

Robert Kuttner, at The American Prospect:

In 1948, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. Harry Truman’s approval rating was in the 30s. He was universally expected to lose. So Truman sent Congress a Roosevelt-scale program that he knew Republicans would vote down, and he went on the road to remind voters of the difference between Republicans and Democrats.

In 1964, Democrats were in solid control of both houses, but Lyndon Johnson, campaigning for the presidency against a lot of suspicion in his own party, in mourning for our handsome young murdered president from Massachusetts and not sure how we felt about the unelected Texan, did something rather similar. In May he gave a commencement address at the University of Michigan calling for the United States to become a "Great Society"—

Joe Did What? The Return of Team Optimist

Can't believe I'm still doing this, but it's really not over, and there are some reasons to be pleased with today's program from Biden, assuming he's put it out because he really thinks he has a deal, and supposing he might be right—

“After months of productive, good-faith negotiations with President Biden and the White House, we have made significant progress on the proposed budget reconciliation package,” Sinema said in a statement. “I look forward to getting this done, expanding economic opportunities and helping everyday families get ahead.”

Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), the other centrist holdout, would say only, “In the hands of the House” when asked about the new framework in the Capitol on Thursday.

If I understand that correctly, it means Manchin is saying his own work is done, until Pelosi sends the bill over for him to vote on—that is, he's not planning to undermine it any farther than he's already done. 

The worst cuts seem to be those of the paid leave provisions, which were supposed to cost somewhere between $494 billion and $547 billion over the ten-year period, the prescription drug pricing negotiation initiative, which would have saved the government between $460 billion and $530 billion over the same period, and the free community college. Sanders has had to let go his plan to include vision and dental care in the Medicare menu, but hearing remains. The immigration approach is not chopped liver ($100 billion to improve efficiency and humanity in green card process, asylum process, border, etc.) but isn't at all the promised reform (which I think probably couldn't fit in the reconciliation).

What's in the bill remains pretty good, if limited in time for some items:

RIP

Dear blogfriend Peter Hochstein, known to you all as The New York Crank and in the comments as Etaoin Shrdlu, died April 9 this year, apparently of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, at what must have been around 80 or 81  (he graduated from Antioch in 1961). I just Googled him this morning, wondering why he hadn't posted anything at his own blog or anywhere else since March, and found his brief obituary at the Antioch website.

Another blogfriend, MBouffant, sent us a link to a very fine blog obituary (bloggobit?) by Jill of Brilliant at Breakfast, which I hope everybody will read. He was a superb writer, with a droll fantasy under an old ad man's discipline (he could never write anything without a clear-cut shape), and a kind though cranky person, and we'll miss him forever. His last post, from just three weeks or so before he died, was a particularly good one, dark and funny, which somehow helps me hope with Jill that his passing was quick and peaceful.

Public Health is Public

North Western Fever and Smallpox Hopsital, Hampstead, 1871, via UK National Archives. 

 Piece at The Atlantic by the extraordinary Ed Yong putting the concept of "public health" in its US historical context in the Progressive era, with the realization that poverty, inequity, and exploitation were literally making people sick:

A mixed group of physicians, scientists, industrialists, and social activists all saw themselves “as part of this giant social-reform effort that was going to transform the health of the nation,” David Rosner, a public-health historian at Columbia University, told me. They were united by a simple yet radical notion: that some people were more susceptible to disease because of social problems. And they worked to address those foundational ills—dilapidated neighborhoods, crowded housing, unsafe working conditions, poor sanitation—with a “moral certainty regarding the need to act,” Rosner and his colleagues wrote in a 2010 paper.

Providing the slumdwellers with fresh air, clean water, and light protects everybody from tuberculosis, cholera, and typhoid, even us upstanding citizens on the right side of the railroad tracks. 

This is such a nice communitarian picture, of something that really existed in our country at one time, through it existed, of course, at the same time as the rapacity and cruelty of the Gilded Age, and the real power was generally wielded by the robber barons who were responsible for the poverty and inequity and exploitation—government being largely their obedient servant, the "management committee of the bourgeoisie" as Marx called it. 

For the Record: Make it so, Democratic senators!

 Couldn't help diving back into the economics a bit, because Shapiro thinks he DEVASTATED my girl Senator Warren:

1. Warren is not particularly a proponent of MMT, though she's understood the point that deficit panic is stupid. She insists that "debt matters" https://t.co/cuMZRN0Xf8 pic.twitter.com/bfON5SYGyt

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 25, 2021

Nevertheless after five years in which we've added something like $10 trillion to the national debt, first because of Trump's insanely wasteful tax cuts, then the emergency response to the COVID crisis, it's time to start adding more tax back into the mix https://t.co/u5NFk4ba1c

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 25, 2021

You really need to learn something about a subject before you start popping off on it. I realize you get paid by the tweet and don't have much time to prepare.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 25, 2021

And then I got annoyed by the very distinguished historian Timothy Snyder, retailing a silly formula in place of an argument:

The Soul of Moderation

Drawing by Hugh Lofting of Dr, Dolittle and his creatures, with the Pushmi-Pullyu at left.

Another day, another confusing story on the mysterious views of Senator Sinema. Yesterday, a leaker speaking to Politico asserted that she had agreed to accept some kind of tax program to fund somewhere around $2 trillion for the reconciliation bill—

"Senator Sinema has agreed to provisions in each of President Biden's four proposed revenue categories — international, domestic corporate, high net worth individuals, and tax enforcement — providing sufficient revenue to fully pay for a budget reconciliation package in the range currently being discussed."

— A source familiar with the discussions

—but then House Ways and Means chair Richard Neal came away from a 40-minute conversation with her on the subject unsure whether she had anything specific in mind at all, though he was convinced she was ready to make a deal:

Stop Trying to Make Fetch Happen

 

Former U.S. president Donald Trump launches 'TRUTH' social media platform

Says some of the more measured coverage, from Reuters. Well, not exactly. Actually, it's that he will launch it, as soon as the company that's going to create it exists, after the finalization of a merger between the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) and a company called Digital World Acquisition Corp, a "special acquisition company", the singular purpose of which is to buy TMTG for $293 million and list it on NASDAQ. Unless some shareholder in the acquisition company, run by former investment banker Patrick Orlando decides to take their shares back, and Orlando's track record in setting up special acquisition companies or SPACS is not a long or hope-inspiring one:

Orlando, who has worked at Deutsche Bank and BT Capital Markets, has launched at least four SPACs and has plans for two more, according to his firm's website and regulatory filings.

But none of the SPACs have completed a deal yet. A China-based SPAC that Orlando led failed last month to complete a merger with Giga Energy Inc that would have valued the transportation solutions provider at $7.3 billion, because it could not deliver the cash required, according to regulatory filings.

My bold. Also, TMTG, or as Trump Jr. called it yesterday in a Fox News interview,

The End of Economics

 

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I've been having a hard time thinking any thoughts about anything relevant other than what's happening in Congress, which is far too noisy at this point for me to think I understand anything, and my "ideas" about money, which nobody likes, too intangible and abstract for most regular readers but raw and downright backwoodsy from the standpoint of more refined visitors, and I meant my promise that the previous post would be the last one.

But I did bump into a kind of back door, which I'll get to below, to a part of the discussion that's more or less concrete and interesting, the ancient history part where, as you may or may not remember, the theory of the origin of money I hammered together out of old bits of scrap metal out in the shed turned out to be awfully similar to the brilliant and highly controversial theory developed by the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber in his 2014 Debt: The First 5,000 Years, except his had vast amounts of exemplification, archaeological and documentary (some of it reputedly wrong), backing it up.  

Hi, It's Stupid: The Last Post on Modern Monetary Theory

 

Statue from 2009 by the late William Fawke, in the Garden of Heroes and Villains, Warwickshire, via Ellen Herold's Pinterest.

Hi, it's Stupid to say Modern Monetary Theory is all wrong, but I just can't help myself.

George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, the great Irish philosopher midway between Locke and Hume, argued brilliantly that things don't exist—I mean things, material objects, the out-there stuff we see and touch, in that you can have a perfectly coherent picture of the universe without them: all you need are minds, full of perceptions, and that's enough. Things corresponding to the perceptions don't have to be there. "Berkeley's system," says the Stanford Encyclopedia mildly,

while it strikes many as counter-intuitive, is strong and flexible enough to counter most objections.

Which made Dr. Samuel Johnson, the irascible lexicographer whose portrait serves as my avi, pretty mad. Because obviously the theory was revolting to his stolid English soul, but he didn't even know how to participate in the discussion. One day as he was leaving a church with his future biographer, James Boswell, they started chatting about it, Boswell observing that "though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it." As they spoke, they passed a big stone along the path and Johnson turned to give it a powerful kick, no doubt hurting his foot: "Thus I refute it!" 

Meaning, more or less, GTFOOH, are you telling me this doesn't exist? Deze nutz!

This is my problem with so-called Modern Monetary Theory.