Have I mentioned we're elevating our house?
Thing is, though, a lot of the adaptation responses also qualify as massive collective action to change the status quo to deal with a problem in the future.
I think you're ignoring the effects of class and wealth here. It's difficult to prevent climate change not purely because humans have trouble with big long-term projects (surely we can point to big long-term projects undertaken by various governments to supply water, develop cities, etc) but because preventing climate change not only benefits everyone rather than just benefiting the wealthy but because preventing climate change costs and inconveniences the wealthy. Whereas you can easily target adaptation to rich people and rich communities - the wealthy get sea walls and, I dunno, domed air-conditioned communities or whatever, and the poor get diseased slums that flood every spring. (The middle class who can afford to elevate their houses, etc, are obviously a declining population.)
If you stop climate change, you may provide business opportunities in green development, but you tank the price of oil (because you have to say "we are leaving this oil in the ground; it's on your balance sheet but it's not actually valuable) and similarly destroy value in existing industries and hence in existing stock portfolios.
If you adapt, you get to keep all that value, drain the oil to the last extractable drop and get all those lovely business opportunities for becoming even richer. Of course, lots of people will die and/or become immiserated, but who cares? It's not like anyone cared about the people sinking into misery and dying before climate change.
I'm telling you, I'm about one more budget bill from heading up to the Iron Range to form a guerrilla band. If you stop hearing from me but a mysterious frowning bandit starts raiding the wealthy of the upper midwest, don't tell the FBI.
Yeah, I think that's true, but the energy toward prevention seems more wasted than a good idea about some tech to deal with rising sea levels (it's possible we're so bad at this that that also doesn't get funded/built/developed).
...don't tell the FBI
No worries. They'd just tell the press who told on you and then your band could get revenge.
Don't hate the antecedent, hate the consequent.
surely we can point to big long-term projects undertaken by various governments to supply water, develop cities, etc
None on this scale, and, crucially, none with this long a wait to payoff. Governments don't generally try to build an entire city at once; they grow organically. So do water supply projects etc. You build a bit and you get a benefit, then you upgrade or expand and you get a bit more. Yes, the end result is a huge edifice, but it's been done in lots of little bits each of which yielded a noticeable benefit in fairly short order. The Lord Provost says "Let's build a New Town for Edinburgh!" and five years later, there it is, or at least there the first bits are, with nice houses and people living in them, and everyone says "canny lad that Lord Provost, well done". Or the Corporation hires Bazalgette to build some stupendously huge sewers and five years later everyone's going "wow, the Thames barely smells of shit at all these days".
"Prevent global warming" is all going to have to be put into place decades before any of it starts showing effects, and even then the effects will be uncertain; it will realistically be more like "prevent it being as bad as it would otherwise have been".
8. You have mentioned it and it sounds like a good idea. I worry about my friends in Florida whose house is 12 feet above sea level. They're in their late 50s so they'll probably just about be OK, but their heirs and assigns will inherit a saline pond.
And conversely, preventing global warming is not a digital thing. Every little will help. Yes, it's pretty much inevitable that there will be some degree of warming in the next 100 years, but the amount really matters in terms of that crucial "million Chinese peasants displaced" metric. I use that example because the current Chinese government know their history and know that Chinese governments get overthrown in exactly two ways, 1) steppe barbarians invade and 2) extreme weather events lead to crop failures and massive unrest, and I reckon they're more worried about 2) than 1) these days.
Florida real estate has been a scam from almost the day they shoved the last Seminole out. You should worry about decent states.
A smart strategy would combine prevention and adaptation. A certain amount of badness is going to happen even if we have serious action on prevention.
The problem with a adaptation strategy is that there are going to be massive famines. People worry about sea level rise but for some reason the inevitable famines don't catch attention. You can walk away from rising sea levels. You can't walk away from crop failures. An adaptation strategy would require massive investment in farming in places where crop failures are unlikely, and investment in the infrastructure for getting the food to people whose farms have dried up and blown away. It would also require relocating those people so that they have a chance of making it on their own.
As is I'm willing to bet all the oil is coming out of the ground and getting burned. I'm also concerned that there may be a hell of a lot more oil than people suspect, but that's an argument for another day. The only realistic hope for mitigation is to keep the coal in the ground. The war on coal needs to escalate.
Also, remember, the consequences of climate change are unpredictable. It's easy to imagine a town spending billions on sea walls and then finding out that their biggest problem is sinkholes.
Obviously some problems will be easy to anticipate but, still, building something now to solve a problem two decades from now is fraught with the potential for wasted effort.
12 is a good point. Are the seawalls going up in Jiangnan yet?
It's easy to imagine a town spending billions on sea walls and then finding out that their biggest problem is sinkholes.
Or indeed spending billions on a 3m sea wall and then finding their biggest problem is a 4m storm surge.
You can walk away from rising sea levels. You can't walk away from crop failures.
Can't you? Historically, people have, in huge numbers. Why do you think there are so many people with Irish surnames in America? (OK, they didn't literally walk all the way there, but still.)
Something like 25% of the population died in a two year period.
That's about equal to the number who emigrated during those years.
Sure, 80 million Bangladeshis can walk to India, won't be any problems at all.
19: Actually my family drove away from a crop failure during the dust bowl, abandoning the farm to the bank. But most people who are going to suffer are not that lucky. Sure there will be migration, but to where? And who will feed the migrants? They can walk all they want but if there's no food where they are going it's just means dying somewhere else. If you want a picture of what the future looks like for some of the Third World, look at South Sudan.
They could probably convert to Hinduism. It's not like monotheism has been working well for them lately.
South Sudan isn't a good example because it has an incredibly weak government and an incipient civil war. Countries with responsive governments that aren't at war have generally been very good at dealing with crop failures.
Here's an interesting paper on the subject:
http://www.pnas.org/content/109/16/6000.full
Natural disasters and population mobility in Bangladesh
Highlights the fact that the migrants are generally richer than average, and the population that stays in place during a crop failure is far more adaptive and flexible than thought.
And Bangladesh, in fact, is a good example for all sorts of reasons. Its last famine in 1974 didn't coincide with a general crop failure. It's had crop failures due to drought since then (1979) without famines.
And that sounds right, but if it's right, wouldn't the wiser course have been to take the inadequate human response as a given (or an input, if you like) and redirected the substantial energy expended to forestall climate change toward dealing with its inevitable effects, instead?
ajay in 3 gets this right.
Beyond that, the failure to deal with climate change is an ongoing problem whose effects keep accumulating. Adjusting to climate change is literally impossible without also preventing it from getting worse.
I suppose we might theorize that advances in clean technology will, without significantly greater intervention, halt climate change. I'm no expert, but I don't think that's what the science indicates.
26: thanks. I think the problem is a false depiction of the situation. It's just not the case that everyone has agreed climate change is a problem and we are just arguing about where best to spend our resources responding. That would be great if it were true, because we could come up with some sort of optimal blend of cutting emissions and adapting. The actual situation is not a disagreement on action between preventers and adapters, it's a split on belief between believers (all or almost all of whom would endorse some mix of prevention and adaptation) and deniers.
The problem with redirecting the energy toward dealing with its effects is a) what ajay says and b) those kinds of immediate adaptation problems are the problems that will be kicked down the road to the next generation. No one was going to elevate their house fifty years ago so that a future seller could sell it to heebie at a premium. No one's going to spend their money to research how to build a better seawall now. So I think it's the same structure of the problem you identify in the OP.
I despair of our ability to do anything. I mean, hell, New Orleans flooded with Katrina and a good portion of the responses were along the lines of "well, don't build ports on the coast!" People are going to be pissed at migrants for leaving uninhabitable areas and pissed at those who don't migrate for not being smart enough to move.
>You should worry about decent states.
Ask me tomorrow how I feel about this.
Before you guys get too bummed out, you should read up on the Montreal Protocol which totally worked and is the reason we still have an ozone layer.
So, everything is not necessarily doomed to failure, even though it probably is.
Although there is always fucking somebody:
In 1987, DuPont testified before the US Congress that "We believe there is no imminent crisis that demands unilateral regulation." And even in March 1988, Du Pont Chair Richard E. Heckert would write in a letter to the United States Senate, "we will not produce a product unless it can be made, used, handled and disposed of safely and consistent with appropriate safety, health and environmental quality criteria. At the moment, scientific evidence does not point to the need for dramatic CFC emission reductions. There is no available measure of the contribution of CFCs to any observed ozone change..."
I assume the answer here is something to do with psychology--that people interpret "let's deal with the inevitable" as despairing, whereas "let's prevent the catastrophe" has a kind of Apollo-y, can-do spirit to it.
Yes, I'm aware that the manned space program was a long time ago.
Right. There was a Battlestar Galactica episode where Faceman was looking for earth and looked away just as the ship's monitor displayed Neil Armstrong.
OT: I'm in NYC tonight if anyone wants to meet up for a drink.
Give a little warning, dude. I just had a very tense little dinner with a law school friend who was talking about how it was hard for anyone to vote for Clinton given how she'd treated the women Bill raped. I probably couldn't have ditched her, but having a better option would have been nice.
(My children were at dinner with us. I swear I didn't raise my voice, but they told me on the train home that I wasn't going to convince anyone of anything by being scary. They're probably right.)
So does that mean you want to get a drink or no?
(I couldn't do dinner earlier. Meetings.)
I'm home already, way way uptown. So no, unless you're actually in Inwood now.
I'm downtown near the World Trade Center.
It's like you guys aren't even trying.
Don't let the time stamp fool you. It's really late in this time zone.
Frank said the city never sleeps.
Marginally on topic, I'm finding I have troubles with some types of long-term planning, I guess mainly for retirement, because I lack confidence that there will be a stable path to the 30-years-from-now future. It's irrational and I'm sure I'm shortchanging future self by not setting up and managing the proper accounts.
45: Tell me about it. I am aware that a) 30 years is going to go by pretty fast and b) the grandparent I most closely resemble is the one who lived to be almost 98 (and died broke, albeit in the benign had-enough-to-reach-the-end way). With retirement I'm guessing most people find that setting aside anything is better than nothing, even considering unhappy outcomes due to market crashes or unscrupulous fund managers, etc. etc. The voluntary 15% pay cut (or whatever) is painful out here, though.
Is there a potentially better thing to do with your dollars now than the IRA or such? Save for a house on chicken legs?
I'm paying down student loans at a faster rate than the standard repayment plan. I've been told this is not smart because that money could potentially earn more as investment, but the interest rate on the loans is 6.5%, which I think is higher than the rates I've heard people beat on the market, and at this point I'll be done with the loans at the end of the year, so I'm not going to let up now.
Why, that is also exactly what I am doing this year. I say it's okay.
It's too trendy. I'm going to put my money into avocado toast instead.
I actually did eat something a menu called a "guacamole burger" yesterday, and it was slightly toasted and the guacamole was essentially spreadable avocado, and it was delicious.
I swear I didn't raise my voice, but they told me on the train home that I wasn't going to convince anyone of anything by being scary.
"You have all the failings of your class and profession and are also independently not a good person."
On the other hand, I was just reading about India cancelling a slew of new coal-fired power stations, because they're dearer to run than solar. So there's that.
Less worried about coal, because it is more readily substitutable (see 52, for example) than oil. Also it produces immediate, visible, and immediately alleviable effects (it kills people with smog) as well as causing climate change. A government can decide on a solar farm rather than a coal power station relatively easily. Much more difficult to switch the vehicle fleet over to electric.
It's half of total emissions, though, and it's the great majority of forecast growth. See Figure 7 here: https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/CO2EmissionsfromFuelCombustion_Highlights_2016.pdf
That's even better. It'd be much worse if half of total emissions were coming from something like transportation oil which would be much more difficult to substitute out. What that tells me is that a massive part of the problem can be solved by killing coal, and coal is, compared to oil, easy to kill.
The problem with redirecting the energy toward dealing with its effects is a) what ajay says and b) those kinds of immediate adaptation problems are the problems that will be kicked down the road to the next generation. No one was going to elevate their house fifty years ago so that a future seller could sell it to heebie at a premium. No one's going to spend their money to research how to build a better seawall now. So I think it's the same structure of the problem you identify in the OP.
There's also a distribution problem. Prevention efforts by anyone benefit everyone, and arguably are actively progressive (in that most places most at risk from climate change are poor). Whereas adaptation efforts are in practice likely to overwhelmingly benefit their funders, who of course are mainly going to be rich.
47: No, at that interest rate you should probably be paying off the loan. If you want to jargon it up, you have a prepayment option, and at current interest rates it is optimal to exercise it.
Definitely pay off the loan. Beating 6.5% is going to involve considerable risk.
adaptation efforts are in practice likely to overwhelmingly benefit their funders, who of course are mainly going to be rich.
Not sure about this at all. Surely the benefit of any adaptation effort will be that a certain group of people who would otherwise have been harmed by climate change now won't be. And if poor people are most at risk of harm from climate change...
I suppose at a national level it could be true - as in, Denmark will spend more per head on adaptation than Bangladesh because Denmark is richer - but at a more local scale, a seawall benefits everyone behind it, rich or poor.
I'm not sure it worked that way in New Orleans.
Yes, but a Danish seawall does fuck all for, say, Tuvalu. Whereas Danish emission reductions do as much for Tuvalu as Tuvaluan emission reductions.
Basically the second half of your post. Which is what I meant. The West/developed world is in a much better position to fund both preventive and adaptive measures, but the developing world is, on average, going to be much harder hit. The Netherlands I guess being the major exception.
Probably more, because Denmark, while small, is orders of magnitude bigger than Tuvalu and far more industrialised.
OT, unless it isn't: I had a brief pang of sympathy for Michael Gerson, which is new. Possibly this kind of piece is now very common and I never see it, but the headline struck me so I read it. It fits with a theory I've had in my head for a while, that conservatism is effectively dead, killed by conservatives.
64: He ascribes the disease to the wrong source. Trump is a symptom, not a cause. This shit has been going on since the Southern Strategy managed to concentrate the assholes who had previously been more evenly distributed between parties into just one party. The other big driver was Newt Gingrich, who more than anyone else drove the narrative that the Democrats are the enemy, to be destroyed and utterly eliminated, rather than seeing them as merely the opposing party. Then along comes Rupert Murdoch with fox News and suddenly the echo chamber becomes huge, encompassing nearly all conservatives in the US, exposing people to conspiratorial bullshit that had previously been the province of talk radio. It's been a progressive disease, with some sudden jumps in seriousness, but the right has been slouching towards Mar-a-Lago for quite some time.
But Gingrich et al were using the shitheads. Now the shitheads are using the establishment.
Politics is really distressing.
67: Yes. If CCarp is around later am curious if the Montana campaign spending law that got overturned in the wake of Citizens United would have in any way prevented the massive influx of outside cash into the special election. (About 10:1 in favor of Gianforte, per here.)
(Although I hate many, many things about the framing of that article.)
I became incoherent with rage when he referred to Rush Limbaugh as a relatively mainstream Reaganite. Anyone who's not willing to admit that normalizing Limbaugh and his ilk was already grotesque and insane gets no sympathy at all from me. It's not like the loony conspiracy theories are new, Limbaugh was selling them about Clinton in the 90s.
Gerson can come back for sympathy when he's learned to be ashamed of that.
But I'm a little tetchy after last night's dinner. The 'fact' that the Clintons were really insular and mean to people who weren't their friends, so no one in Washington liked them, was also brought up as a politically significant explanation of why she was a bad candidate.
70: If it's any comfort, there have been advertizers who dropped Hannity when he started in on the whole Marc Rich conspiracy mongering.
It's not much comfort because Trump is going to let Sinclair get all of the media.
I don't think it's right normalize Limbaugh, but Brietbart is a couple of bridges past Limbaugh.
75 is correct and terrifying because Breitbart has the ear of the president.
Relevant: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/winners-and-losers-of-the-recent-nuclear-holocaust
I don't know that Breitbart is meaningfully worse. Limbaugh did a lot of work in the 90s convincing morons that the Clintons literally killed people, didn't he? That was incredibly politically effective for them -- that sort of thing is why my idiot law school friend thinks her nonsense about Hillary is normal enough to say in public.
Breitbart might be a little louder, but Limbaugh was telling insane lies that very effectively fucked up our political world twenty years ago.
I don't know how you'd quantify it, but before Limbaugh you can go back and mention Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy and all. But this seems different to me.
I think "The president was a coke smuggler who had people murdered", from a news source that got treated respectfully, was new.
On the other hand, I don't read Breitbart -- maybe there really is a next level I'm not appreciating?
I don't think it's necessarily different because Breitbart is worse than Limbaugh (though I think it is because Breitbart is more openly white supremacist and white supremacy is the signature symptom of moral failure in America), but because there's hardly anything left of moderates or center right or whatever you want to call them. They've all either died (I think the WWII generation had a disproportionate number people too far to the right to be considered liberal but too committed to America values to have followed someone like Trump) or lost their fucking minds.
LB and togolosh speak for me, and where they conflict, LB is right.
The current situation is the logical result of everything that Nixon and Reagan and their supporters were working toward. At most, there's a class difference. Thought leaders like Gerson and George Will and Bret Stephens side with racist oligarchs who want to enslave immigrants; Trump and Limbaugh and Breitbart are with the racist rank-and-file that wants to expel immigrants. Fuck 'em all. Gerson's pose of moral superiority is ludicrous.
If we pull back from Trumpism, people like Gerson -- and Gerson himself -- are going to try to pull us right back.
Which is why the "diseased" in that headline caught my eye.
78: My father still talks about Vince Foster. Still. Limbaugh ruined my parents. Perhaps they wanted to be ruined, though.
I'm stuck on Limbaugh here, but way back in the 90s, the 'center right' was already sucking up to the evil clowns -- they were just pretending there was nothing weird about that, and the center left was going along with it. Maybe it felt a little less crazy because there was more of a figleaf over it, but it's been a quarter of a century since you could expect even the most moderate possible Republican to publicly disavow someone telling insane lies about anyone on the left.
Gerson's pose of moral superiority is ludicrous, yes. It's also necessary unless you somehow think a large percentage of America voters are going to be convinced to switch their votes by pointing out that they are huge shitheads. (I'm not suggesting you shouldn't point out that they are huge shitheads nor am I willing to stop doing that myself. But waiting for self-awareness seems pointless and 'today's conservatives are diseased' is more likely to be heard by people willing to not vote for Trump who didn't already vote against him.)
Also, while I don't know Gerson's views on immigration, immigration is one very clear case where Trump is obviously much worse the W.
You young people won't remember this, but they actually impeached Bill Clinton based on, to a first approximation, nothing.
They did. But arguably that gave Dennis Hastert something to do to keep his mind off molesting children.
85: Way back in 1980 they elected Ronald Fucking Reagan. Sure, yeah, he kept a few grownups around, but his entire schtick was a promise to Make America Great Again along more-or-less the same lines that Trump promises.
Reagan was completely full of shit, and Limbaugh loved him for it. But there were institutions that kept Reagan from accomplishing everything he wanted to do. At the national level, Reagan practically invented the Relentless Bullshit technique of governance, and dog-whistle racism always aspired to be open racism.
GW Bush was a straightforward heir of Reagan. Trump is one step removed, but still cut recognizably from the same mold.
88: Ah, the good old days, back when Republicans weren't crazy, evil assholes.
Gerson's pose of moral superiority is ludicrous, yes. It's also necessary unless you somehow think a large percentage of America voters are going to be convinced to switch their votes by pointing out that they are huge shitheads.
I am honestly really confused about this. I mean, mostly, I don't talk to these people -- did last night, but she's not even really 'these people', I think she actually voted for Clinton, she's just in a place where she thinks it's cute to be evenhanded about this crap.
Like, I hear you about how you can't make any friends by calling people shitheads. I mean, I shocked my kids by the tone I took with my law school friend last night (and got lectured on the train home about it). But accepting someone like Gerson being morally superior about how decent sensible people like Limbaugh have deteriorated is buying in to a worldview where it's uncivil and oversensitive to point out that insane lies are insane lies. And that can't get us anywhere good either.
I feel like the previous generation of Republicans would've had to be more subtle about partnering with the KGB.
The good news, kids, is that things can keep getting worse for much longer than you'd think.
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
it's uncivil and oversensitive to point out that insane lies are insane lies.
The right relies on this so much. Calling someone a liar or insane is just rude. Unfortunately that carries over into areas where the person actually *is* an insane liar. And once you get past the threshold of politeness they'll just call you an insane liar back and the press will generally evenhandedly report the two opposing opinions as if they were equally valid. The right has a major advantage in this in that they have a network of think tanks that produce pseudo-facts for them (alternative facts if you prefer). This lets them cite studies to refute the science the left and center bring to the table. My personal favorite is the one claiming that Rachel Carson is responsible for more deaths than Hitler.
I ban myself from ever using the italics tag again.
I don't think you calling people shitheads will hurt, politically or personally. Anybody who is trying to be 'evenhanded' needs pushed to make a choice.
But there are tens of millions of people who are highly emotionally invested in the Republican party and its recent past. If American politics is going to recover before they all die off, they need a story that gives them a reason to stop supporting Trump without requiring them to see themselves as shitheads. I don't particularly care if they stop supporting Trump because of insane lies about their own moral worth or not.
My personal favorite is the one claiming that Rachel Carson is responsible for more deaths than Hitler.
They're just mad that Pittsburgh renamed the Hitler Bridge after Carson.
96:...they need a story that gives them a reason to stop supporting Trump without requiring them to see themselves as shitheads.
This is good. This is key to getting people to switch support.
Yeah, I think needing a face-saving story is right. I just worry about that story being "Sure, Limbaugh was fine in the 90s, that's civil discourse. Things have just gotten bad now." But I haven't got a better story.
there have been advertizers who dropped Hannity when he started in on the whole Marc Rich conspiracy mongering
You mean Seth Rich. Marc Rich (wealthy criminal donor pardoned on the last day of the Clinton administration) was actually a legitimate scandal, albeit one that the Republicans didn't even bother to rehash in 2016.
99: Not even that. Just stay the fuck home on the first Tuesday after the first Monday.
If American politics is going to recover before they all die off, they need a story that gives them a reason to stop supporting Trump without requiring them to see themselves as shitheads.
The story has to persist for more than one or two election cycles, though.
100: How about "Limbaugh was aggressively holding the White House to open itself to scrutiny and Trump is manifestly more corrupt and less open than Clinton"?
103: Yes. That's why I think it's going to get worse before it gets better.
.they need a story that gives them a reason to stop supporting Trump without requiring them to see themselves as shitheads.
Yes indeed. The reason that the "I miss sensible Republicans" is so popular a point of view is not that it is true; it is a way of saying "I used to be a Republican, and I'm not any more (or I don't want to be), but I need some way to think about this that doesn't involve me having been a lunatic bigot for several years" and the solution is saying that you were one of those sensible Republicans who have all gone away to live on a farm in Canada or something. That way you were right then and you're still right now and you had the moral courage to switch parties when your old party went nuts.
The Republicans and Russia make me think of those movies where someone obsessed with an enemy ends up becoming what they professed to hate.
I think it's going to get worse before it gets better because Trump's win has encouraged the absolute worst people by showing them at there vote really does matter. They're going to outnumber "sensible Republicans" by a large margin.
I know that they're unrelated and don't yet constitute even the beginning of a trend, but the Erdogan bodyguards' beating of Kurdish protesters and this bodyslam incident make me worry that people-who-aren't-cops-beating-up-protesters-and-journalists-with-impunity is going to become a thing. The smell of fascism gets just a little stronger.
"Can you smell what the Trump is cookin'?"
But yes, people cheered Gianforte when he tried to apologize. The worst people have seen that being horrible is rewarded and I expect things will get worse before they get better.
The frame that y'all are looking for is, "I didn't leave the Republican Party; the Republican Party left me."
But don't expect to get that frame from people like Gerson or the National Review or whatever. The Republican Party didn't leave them. They are just a bit skeeved out by Trump, but they'll get over it.
The people like that are just Democrats now. There aren't enough of them, at least not in the states where it matters.
The actual answer is for public pressure to be brought on our institutions to not be fuckups. The media is particularly important in this regard.
The mainstream media has, for too long, regarded its function as being a megaphone for bullshitters.
I found the Brett Stephens-NYT kerfluffle heartening in this regard.
Thomas is among the thousands of readers who have written in protest since Stephens, a conservative, took a seat among the elite, and mostly liberal, ranks of Times Opinion writers.
Liz Spayd is a moron, but if people keep the pressure on, being a moron is going to become a less viable career strategy at institutions like the NYT, and the body politic will benefit.
I don't know how well that will work. Presumably public pressure running the other way is stronger because being a moron with political opinions is a very much more lucrative career strategy in general than not being a moron.
Did Ross Douthat get fired or did they add another conservative slot?
My Fox News obsessed sister tells me that th sons are "ruining" FN.
I'm hoping fo a substantial anti-media backlash here: Sinclair just bought several TV stations, and have proved that the assurances that it wouldn't affect coverage were straight up lies in the first month or so. The Lee papers -- certainly the on here -- should pay for their hounding Quist, and their feeble (and now withdrawn) endorsements of Gianforte. In a county that went 63% for Quist, the paper had endorsed GG saying maybe he wouldn't sign on to the full Ryan agenda, and maybe he'll set aside convictions he's held his entire adult life to resist voting to defund PP. GG was meanwhile going around telling everyone that supporting Trump would be his fist priority.
The local paper that wasn't run by the guy who funded The Arkansas Project didn't even endorse Clinton in the presidential race. Didn't endorse Trump either, but fuck 'em. I was feeling like I should subscribe and pay for it until they did that.
Looking this up to confirm my memory, I read their endorsement of Toomey and now I want to go shit in a newspaper box.
The local paper is a failing enterprise, and has been having huge staff turnover for the last few years. They just bought the local alt weekly, but everyone thinks they'll strangle it eventually.
Maybe blogging will come back?
Free internet porn killed phone sex lines which must have been a big blow to the ad revenue of alt weeklies.
Pelosi is promising a House vote on a $15/hour minimum wage if Democrats get it back. I think that's very good and creates a clear message. On the merits, I think $15/hour is too high for rural areas and will cause job loss/depopulation in various impoverished parts of the country. But, honestly, the people running small businesses there are the ones who put Trump in office, so I don't care.
I'm trying to think of a better way to make my point, because it's just a few hours before a holiday and starting a new project seems bad.
The 90s and now both had a culture war, but now there isn't a culture on both sides.
I thought it was noteworthy that this story ran this morning in the financial press. No endorsement obvs, maybe just a journalist panicking over attacks on journalists. But.
I have a small business in rural America and I pay $15 an hour now just because it is the right thing to do for the people that work for me. Unfortunately I have a hard time making any money because my competition underpays their employees. We need a nationwide minimum wage to set a floor on wages so the decent employers can stay in business. I can pay just about any wage as long as my competition is required to pay the same.
127: My intuition is that you're right about 15 bucks being too high for some places, but:
-Nobody really knows, and
-It would be okay to err on the high side for once.
The bargaining position of workers is so badly fucked that it seems perfectly plausible to me that the benefits of $15 would far outweigh the costs.
The Seattle experiment got a lot of ridicule from economists, but it seems to be working out just fine so far.
132 before reading 130. You are a good American OOTW.
Yes. I agree. I
I took my cousin out for dinner when I was in Seattle and the restaurant had a 'no tipping' policy. That was great.
131: Run for congress.
I have thought about it but too many people who knew me in my younger days aren't dead yet.
135: Be the change you'd like to see in the world.
127: I think $15/hour is too high for rural areas
I think most of the jobs in rural areas are service jobs (food service, retail, agriculture, health care, government) so aren't going anywhere. The low skilled manufacturing that can move has already pretty much left. The absolute wage is not so important as the need to set a floor to stop a race to the bottom. Most of the local business people seem to be too dense to understand this.
I agree about the race to the bottom problem, but I suspect the ag jobs can and will go away in many cases through shifting to crops that require less labor and also a higher percentage of the labor being provided by the owner of the land. Though, now that I think about it, the latter might be a good thing if it leads to more owners of small fields.
130: Unfortunately I have a hard time making any money because my competition underpays their employees. We need a nationwide minimum wage to set a floor on wages so the decent employers can stay in business.
Absolutely true. We do have a nationwide minimum wage, of course; it's just that it's too low. It may well be that $15/hour is too high, nationwide (I tend to agree that it would be), so the question is what's appropriate nationally. The Obama administration's proposal had been, what, $12? Or, I seem to recall some talk of something like $10.10 ...? I take it such figures are coming from actual number-crunching of some sort, to do with the cost of living here and there -- can't find an overview of it at the moment.
$15 may be too high right now. But by the time it becomes law it won't be.
That's true. There's a phase in period also.
Why does a national minimum wage have to be uniform? Why can't it be pegged to the cost of living locally?
129: That's a good article. It doesn't come across as hyperbolic to me. He's not saying that violence against inconvenient journalists is likely to become something that happens regularly, but that it wouldn't surprise him if it did, because this is the way that large-scale breakdowns in the rule of law often start.
My feeling is that the decision not to prosecute Bush-era violations of laws against torture was some sort of watershed. It set the norm that failing to enforce the law is ok if the enforcement would be directed against people who acted in their capacity as wingnuts (as opposed to those who are wingnuts per accidens but are not acting in that capacity in committing the crime).
Why can't it be pegged to the cost of living locally?
As calculated how? By whom? Wouldn't the contents as well as the cost of a "shopping basket" of essential goods vary considerably between rural areas and metro cities? I mean, I agree in theory, but many a slip, as they say.
132.4: Where? The vast majority of economists thought "We don't know what will happen."
47, 48, 49: Don't any of you work for the government or a non-profit? Public Student Loan Forgiveness is under the IBR. So you pay 15% of your income above the Federal Poverty Limit, but it's forgiven after 10 years. The more you contribute to a retirement account, the lower your student loan payment will be (and it will still be forgiven in 10 years!) and you'll have more in your retirement account.
The Kushner news, oh my. How long before we see indictments?
146: Young me did well on standardized testing.
What's the over/under on time from indictment to pardon? I'm going with less than 24 hours. I'll be astonished if it's over 48.
I think Trump sees himself in Kushner, which means Kushner is bulletproof. Kushner is also an inherited wealth "self made man" and he's banging Ivanka, so there's a resemblance and some of that creepy dad thing going on, too. There's no way that he's going to let mini-me get the shaft unless it's to protect his blood relatives. I bet he'd throw Melania under the bus for him.
144: The US government keeps cost of living estimates for the US and does what heebie suggests with federal wages. I don't know how they do the math, but it considers housing costs, consumer goods, etc. so the same job duties are compensated differently based on location.
I bet he'd throw Melania under the bus for him
Yes, but you can bet she knows enough to be able to take him down.
151: I've been wondering who would be the John Dean of this thing if there were to be one. Bu tit obviously helps if it is a lawyer or someone in a formal role who takes notes* as part of their duties. But like everything, the Trump John Dean will be a parody of John Dean.
My candidates:
Kellyanne Conway (enough of an opportunist to see a way out before others)
Melania (hates him the most of anyone)
Bannon (because)
Someone I don't know on the legal team.
Flynn (but it would be incompetent and crazy and muddy the waters)
Priebus (to "save" the GOP, but a longshot cause I don't think it is in his makeup)
In the Shakespearean version it is Ivanka.
*One of the grim amusements of the Comey firing stuff was watching people trying to spin how unusual/suspicious it was for Comey to create a contemporaneous written record.
Governments don't generally try to build an entire city at once; they grow organically. So do water supply projects etc.
I see the "don't generally" up there, so I'm not actually arguing with this, but I do still think it's worth noting that governments sometimes undertake and complete massive public works projects in a very short period of time: water systems for Philadelphia and New Orleans (in the early-nineteenth century), gigantic parks (in the late-nineteenth century), interstate highways (in the mid-twentieth century), etc. If the perceived threat is great enough -- disease, immigrants, and commies respectively -- political consensus emerges, and government builds. Unfortunately, we live in a moment of intense polarization, and climate change isn't perceived by the vast majority of people as anything like an immediate threat, and so we keep kicking the can down the road.
And since I'm talking to myself this morning, I'll also say that the roots of modern conservatism -- as a movement using rhetoric and with policy goals that we'd recognize -- reach back long before Nixon and Reagan. Kathy Olmsted's new book makes the case that we need to think about the reaction to the New Deal as the moment that the right began to go completely insane.
Plus, the big Republican idea these days is selling off infrastructure to pay for tax cuts new infrastructure shady public-private parnership deals.
155: You know who else came to power in the 30s and tried to alter the socioeconomic foundations of a country.
156: The Liberals want to pull that crap in Ontario by privatizing hydro, because privatizing a road was such a huge success.
That awful attack in Portland has drastically reduced the odds of my cheering up this weekend. What can you even say?
146: The Public Student Loan Forgiveness program would have required watching my debt grow as I intentionally failed to pay it down enough to keep up while hoping the shitheads in Congress wouldn't cancel the program. Because of the way my debt would have grown, it would have been very difficult to get back to standard repayment, whereas you can more easily go the other direction. Add the uncertainty of whether I'd work for a non-profit for 10 years and no thanks.
Further to 154: Haussman in Paris. Massive and swift.
Portland attack so horrific can't imagine terror of situation.
This is exactly right on conservative manliness and courage.
I like my women like I like my avenues, connected to points in central Paris and standing where buildings used to be.
147, 149: How long before we see indictments?
I was surprised that the usual NPR roundup of news headlines (on the radio) hasn't mentioned the latest Kushner news. Poking around news stories online, I'm guessing this is going to be billed as a case of Kushner as unwitting dupe. He was "naive", not realizing that asking for a ... more efficient* means of communication with Russia was problematic.
None of Trump's people (advisors) received ethics training, from what I understand, the Trump transition team feeling that it was irrelevant, or unnecessary or whatever.
Kushner's going to play the dumb fool, and I suspect there will be no indictments.
* It does strike me that this 'more efficient' line of defense is similar to the one Hillary Clinton used regarding her use of a private server.
78: Limbaugh did a lot of work in the 90s convincing morons that the Clintons literally killed people, didn't he? That was incredibly politically effective for them -- that sort of thing is why my idiot law school friend thinks her nonsense about Hillary is normal enough to say in public.
Although Limbaugh was of course front and center on Whitewater etc. (and this was pre-Fox News, hard to believe) I really think the NYT* and networks legitimizing slightly less crazy utter bullshit** had more to do with the acceptableness*** of those views.
*Apart from the spin of the original article (and it was a legit thing to report), I think the most egregious episode was the NYT treatment of the Pillsbury report (commissioned by the RTC to review the Whitewater deal itself). Summer of 1995, Gerth wrote a piece based on preliminary results which was headlined, "Documents Show Clintons Got Vast Benefit From Their Partner in Whitewater Deal." The final report did not show that at all to be the case, and that report received very little coverage (here is a pretty fucked up**** Politifact report on the whole episode from 2015, but which at least gives some of the basic timeline).
**Although Chris Matthews had Gennifer Flowers on Hardball when she was pitching Clinton murders.
*** I think I related here an incident where I got unacceptably livid a few Christmases back when a NYC-resident immediate family member expressed concerns with regard to "lingering questions about Vince Foster."
****The relied heavily on Howard Kurtz with gems like this: Kurtz quoted several reporters from major newspapers as saying that the report was old news -- a draft had been leaked that June -- and beside the point: Attention to the Clintons' participation in the land venture itself had dissipated, replaced instead by questions surrounding Hillary Clinton's role as legal adviser to Madison Guaranty, the firm embroiled in the real estate deals surrounding the scandal.
Limbaugh was (and is) as toxic as any of the current folks, he just had less of a supporting echo chamber back in the day. He truly was a pioneer* in taking advantage of the demise of the Fairness Doctrine. That said, in the early days he did legitimately come closer to a "just ribbin' ya" posture, although it was awful unfunny stuff.
*And he spawned many knockoffs; here in Pittsburgh the worst at that time was Quinn in the Morning, airing on an otherwise Classic Rock station. (And I see from Wikipedia that he and Limbaugh briefly worked together in the 60s or 70s.)
152: (on possible John Deans)
Hmm, maybe McGahn (I had him down as all in--but so would Dean have been at some point.)
As reports emerged about investigators' focus on Mr. Kushner, he and his wife, Ivanka Trump, discussed the possibility of having Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, issue a statement denying that Mr. McGahn had been contacted by federal officials about Mr. Kushner. Mr. McGahn, who has been increasingly uneasy in his role since Mr. Trump ignored his advice to delay Mr. Comey's dismissal, said he was not the person to write such a statement, suggesting that doing so would create a precedent requiring a response to each new report. Mr. Kushner's private lawyer issued a statement instead.
Yes, McGahn seems like the most likely Dean-type to me. For one thing, he occupies the exact same position.
171: I was thinking about folks in the Admin like him who have enough of a politics/legal background and who are clear-eved about Trump's character. They surely see that it is either going down, or going to a much, much more autocratic place with dissent actively stifled broadly through out the government. How many willing to consciously choose the latter (many who might not be are potentially enabling it, of course).
164- Good piece. Thanks.
Wasn't Gerth the one who reported Hillary did something illegal by not filing a form or something, and it turned out it was because he hadn't set his photocopier to two-sided input and also didn't notice the part of side one he did have that said "continued on other side"?
Not surprisingly it's quite hard to google for accurate information about whitewater.
Wasn't Gerth the one who reported Hillary did something illegal by not filing a form or something, and it turned out it was because he hadn't set his photocopier to two-sided input and also didn't notice the part of side one he did have that said "continued on other side"?
Not surprisingly it's quite hard to google for accurate information about whitewater.
Killary made me double post.
Also autocorrect changes Killary to Hillary. Conspiracy!
Vaguely recall that but don;t think it was Gerth*. One of the grim amusements of the Trump era is to see David Bossie being mentioned for the Trump war room." During Whitewater he worked for Dan Burton (who shot a watermelon in his backyard as part of investigating Vince Foster) but his methods were so hilariously bad that he was fired by the crazed Republicans in the House.
*May have been Chris Vlasto, an asshole ABC producer who had one egregiously edited piece on Rose Law Firm billing where he excised completely exculpatory context. And like moost of these motherfuckers still going and unapologetic. Recently, Vlasto produced the first interview with one of the women Anthony Weiner was sexting with, Meagan Broussard, together with ABC News 20/20 anchor Chris Cuomo.