Ron descends from the mountain

It has been over a year since I wrote a real post here.  The reason for my long absence is that I have been struggling with a number of existential crises.  Three of them, in fact.  The first is over climate change.  The second is over the political situation in the U.S.

The third is not so easy to distill into a slogan.  It has to do with the idea that the kind of outcome I want to see for the world is simply not possible because it actually violates the laws of physics.  It's pretty geeky as existential crises go, and one of these days I'll write about it (click here for spoilers), but for now climate change and politics are more than enough to fuel my despair so I'll focus on those for the time being.

The TL;DR is that a while back I came to the conclusion that the climate change situation was hopeless, that the distance between what would need to be done to avoid catastrophe and what could plausibly be done given the geopolitical situation here on earth was so vast that the odds of averting catastrophe were indistinguishable from zero.  But it was even worse than that.  I first became aware of climate change more than thirty years ago.  Back then it was a long-term concern, something that might start to produce some observable effects in my lifetime, but where the really bad stuff wouldn't happen for 100 years or so.  Twelve years ago I moved from LA to San Francisco thinking that would make a difference in my personal exposure to the worst effects of climate change.  I now think that was wildly overoptimistic.

Let me be clear about what I mean by "the bad stuff".  I'm not talking about the extinction of life from the surface of the planet, or even the extinction of homo sapiens.  That is not going to happen.  We're not talking about "saving the planet".  The planet, and even our species, has been through much bigger changes than what we are facing.

I'm talking about the end of technological civilization, the organization of humans into cooperating groups larger than tribes.  I'm talking about what happened beginning at the end of the last ice age when humans stopped being nomadic hunter-gatherers and started to engage in large-scale agriculture.  That led to the formation of city-states, then to empires and nation-states, and ultimately to the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and cat videos on your smart phone.

I've become a big fan of industrial civilization.  It has allowed me to live a life of relative leisure compared to most of my ancestors.  I have beheld great wonders.  I have even been privileged to participate in the production of a few of them.  I want those who come after me to have the same opportunities.

But the maintenance of our civilization is heavily dependent on a stable climate.  This is because it depends on infrastructure, and infrastructure is generally not mobile.  Factories and data centers are generally housed in buildings and connected by networks of roads that are attached firmly to the surface of the earth.  And the same goes for farms.  And so civilization depends on a certain amount of climate stability.  In particular, it depends on rain falling in somewhat predictable patterns.

Those patterns are changing.  And that change is happening with breathtaking speed.

This has become very evident to me living in California, which is one of the epicenters of climate-change-related drought.  But this phenomenon is not unique to California.  It is global.  The Mississippi river is at historic lows because there is drought not just in California, but across the U.S.

The reason that all of these places are getting drier is that the jet stream, which once brought winter rains, has been moving further and further north.  The reason for that is that the jet stream is caused by the temperature difference between the arctic, which once has a giant ice cap on it year-round keeping it nice and chilly.  But that ice cap has been melting.  That moves the jet stream, and the rains, to the north.

Some time in the next 10-20 years the arctic ice cap will almost certainly melt entirely producing a so-called blue-ocean event.  What happens after that is anybody's guess, but whatever it is it will almost certainly not be good.  The jet stream could stop altogether, along with rain in California.

California currently produces 13 of the agricultural output of the U.S.  Without rain, all of that will stop.  If it were only California that might be survivable, but it won't be.  Droughts do not respect political boundaries.  There is a real possibility of drought-induced global famine some time in the next 10-20 years.  Within 100 years it is all but certain to happen.

This in and of itself, as bad as it is, would not necessarily be calamitous if not for the second problem: humans are very resourceful creatures, but to be our most effective we have to cooperate.  To solve the climate-change problem we are going to have to cooperate on an unprecedented planet-wide scale.  And lately we have not proven to be very adept at this.  We can't even agree that climate change is in fact a problem that needs to be dealt with, let alone what we're actually going to do about it that has a chance of succeeding.  Our geo-political institutions just do not appear to be even remotely up to the task.

In the past year I have been holding my breath to see if the Democrats could address the short-term problem of crazy Republicans trying to overthrow the government of the United States.  As I write this the jury is still out, but I've decided that it doesn't matter.  Despair is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and so at times the right thing to do is to suspend disbelief and proceed as if you believe that there is an answer even if you have no idea what it might be.  You never know when you might be pleasantly surprised to learn that you got it wrong.  And make no mistake: literally nothing would make me happier than to find out that I'm wrong about this.

So I've decided to start blogging again in the hopes of discovering that I'm wrong, that there is in fact hope of saving civilization from itself.  Over the course of the next few weeks I'm gong to write up some detailed analysis of both climate change and U.S. politics in the hopes of starting a discussion that might lead to either uncovering existing ideas that I'm not currently aware of, or generating some new ones.  I have no idea where this is going to lead, or indeed, if it's going to lead anywhere.  Like I said, in my heart of hearts at the moment I think this effort is doomed.  But there is something inside me that won't let me rest peacefully unless I try nonetheless.

Someone is impersonating me on Facebook

This (https://www.facebook.com/ron.garret.54/) is my profile on Facebook.

This (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100080342422733) is not my profile.  It is someone trying to impersonate me.   Apparently, at least six people I know have already fallen for this ruse.

I've submitted a DMCA takedown request on the grounds that this person is violating my copyright on my avatar image, but it is sheer luck that this came to my attention at all.  Someone who received a friend request from the imposter got suspicious and contacted me directly.  Otherwise, this person could have been impersonating me for a long, long time and I would never have known until they got some sensitive information out of one of my acquaintances and used it to hack into my bank account or something like that.

For the record: I never use my Facebook account, and this is one of the many, many reasons why.  If you are getting a message from me through Facebook it is almost certainly fraudulent.

[UPDATE] Clicking on the fraudulent link now results in a page that says "This content isn't available right now."  So I'm guessing this has been dealt with.  But I'm also guessing that trying to prevent this from happening again could turn into a very frustrating game of whack-a-mole.

Game over for Roe v. Wade -- and constitutional rights

You may not have heard, but the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade yesterday.  They did it covertly, by failing to act on Texas's devilishly clever end-run around the Constitution.  And in failing to act, they have effectively terminated the rule of law in the United States and opened a Pandora's box of vigilanteism powered by civil lawsuits, against which the Constitution can offer no defense.

Make no mistake: the unenumerated right to privacy and the concomitant right to have an abortion are still nominally the law of the land.  But no one can exercise that right in Texas any more.  And it is much, much worse than that, because in letting this law stand, the Supreme Court has effectively overturned another bedrock principle of American jurisprudence, which is that in order to prevail in a civil lawsuit, a plaintiff has to show actual damages to themselves.

We can see the future where this will lead us because there is already one notable exception to this principle on the books: the Americans with Disabilities Act, which empowers anyone, disabled or not, to bring civil suits against establishments who violate the law.  The result is a sleazy industry of spurious lawsuits, and the proliferation of swimming pool lifts that hardly anyone ever uses.

But at least in the case of the ADA, there is an actual law underlying the suits which has passed constitutional muster.  In the case of the Texas law, citizens are now empowered to sue people for exercising their constitutional rights!  It should be a tautology that this is unconstitutional.  What can it possibly even mean to have a constitutional right if the government can, by using this tactic, nullify your ability to exercise it?

But the Supreme Court doesn't see it that way.  They let the Texas law stand without comment.  And that's it.  Game over.  Your constitutional rights now exist only on paper, not in the real world, at least not in Texas.  (I don't want to quibble over whether or not Texas actually qualifies as "the real world."  You know what I mean.)

There is now no limit to the extent that this new tactic can be used to strip people of their rights.  A state legislature could pass a law empowering people to sue their fellow citizens for speaking out against the government, or owning a gun, or remaining silent when questioned by the police, or trying to vote, or simply being uppity.  On what possible principled basis could such laws be overturned now?

This is the way democracy ends, not with a bang, but with silence in the dead of night.

Conservatives Can't Handle the Truth

When the truth is not on your side one thing you can do is to try to change it, and when that doesn't work, outlaw it:

Under the culture war rallying cry of combating “critical race theory” — an academic framework centered on the idea that racism is systemic, not just a collection of individual prejudices — [Republican] lawmakers have endorsed an extraordinary intervention in classrooms across Texas.

Their plans would impose restrictions on how teachers discuss current events, bar students from receiving course credit for civic engagement and, in the words of advocates, restore the role of “traditional history” to its rightful place of primacy by emphasizing the nation’s noble ideals, rather than its centuries-long record of failing to live up to them.

So much for freedom of speech.

Now, I am sure some pseudonymous troll will point out that liberals support restrictions on teaching creationism, but that is not true.  What we oppose is teaching creationism as science because it isn't.  I'm sure most liberals would be more than happy to have creationism taught as part of a class on comparative mythology or comparative religion.  I certainly would.

Conservatives can't handle the truth.  Conservatives fear the truth.  So they have to stamp out the truth because the truth is not on their side.

Unfortunately, it is far from clear that they won't succeed.

Republican Hypocrisy Watch: Cancel Culture is Bad -- Unless it's Republicans Doing the Cancelling

The brazen shamelessness of Republican hypocrisy is on full display as they move to remove Liz Cheney from her leadership position for daring to say that Donald Trump lost the election while at the same time whining about cancel culture.

I am really beginning to wonder if there is anyone left in the Republican party who realizes that you can only act like the old Soviet politburo for so long before you start to achieve the same results that they did.

Repeal the Second Amendment

It has become repetitive to the point of being tiresome: a crazy person buys an automatic weapon and kills a bunch of innocent bystanders.  TV "news" reporters gather like vultures on a carcass.  Prayers are said.  Hands are wrung.  Soap boxes are scaled and calls for gun control are recited, which collide head-on with the second amendment and DC v. Heller.  And then, a few days later, everyone forgets it ever happened until the next crazy person buys a gun and shoots some innocent people and the whole cycle starts all over again.  And again. And again and again and again and again and again.

There is a simple solution to the problem: repeal the second amendment.  By "simple" I do not mean "easy to implement."  It clearly is not that.  I simply mean that this solution is conceptually and procedurally simple.  You don't have to argue about how to interpret the Constitution, or what a "well regulated militia" is.  All you have to do is decide that the second amendment is doing more harm than good, and it's time for it to go.  We've done it before.  We can do it again.

The second amendment has clearly outlived its usefulness.  Like the three-fifths doctrine, it is a relic of an earlier time.  Two things in particular are very different in today's world than the one in which the second amendment was ratified.  First, the U.S. now has a standing army. And a navy.  And an air force.  And a space force.  And marines.  And a coast guard.  And a national guard.  And a department of homeland security.  And a DEA and an FBI and a CIA and an NSA.  Between those and a few other government agencies, those organizations have been doing a pretty good job at protecting the territorial integrity of the United States, at least since 1865.  Whatever you think a "well regulated militia" means, it is clearly no longer necessary for the security of a free state.

The second thing that has changed is that technology and the laws of physics no longer limit the amount of damage an individual can do the way they did in 1791.  Back then, smooth-bore muskets and canon were the state of the art in weaponry.  They were severely limited both in range and firing rate.  A highly skilled musket operator can get off 2-3 shots a minute at most.  An AK-47 does that in a third of a second.  In 1791 a deranged shooter could reasonably hope to get off no more than one or two shots before they were subdued by an angry mob.

And of course there is no principled reason to stop with an AK-47.  If the second amendment really does convey an unfettered individual right to keep and bear arms, and if that right is not limited to the technology of 1791, then on what possible basis could you draw a line that includes assault weapons but not bazookas or tanks or stinger missiles or even nukes?  The right to defend yourself won't get you out of this jam, for two reasons.  First, no one has ever used an AK-47 in self defense.  They are offensive weapons (there's a reason they are called "assault rifles" and not "defense rifles").  And second, the second amendment specifically calls out the reason for the right to bear arms, and it is not individual self-defense, it is the need to maintain a "well-regulated militia".  Whatever else that phrase might possibly mean, individual self defense plainly ain't it.  The founders knew about individual self-defense, and if that was the reason they enshrined the right to bear arms, they would have said so.

The only reason that second amendment endures is a concerted propaganda campaign by the National Rifle Association (funded mainly by the gun industry) and adolescent fantasies about good guys with guns vanquishing bad guys with guns.  We saw the end-game for that this past January 6.  Vigilante justice and violent revolution plays a lot better in spaghetti westerns and other conservative fantasy worlds than it does in today's reality.

So it is time for the second amendment to go.  Repeal it now.  Stop this insane cycle of slaughter.

P.S. Note that calling for the repeal of the second amendment is emphatically not a call for "taking everyone's guns", though many will surely see it that way.  Repealing the second amendment merely allows guns to be outlawed through the normal democratic self-governance process, it doesn't require them to be outlawed.  Whether or not they should actually be outlawed in any particular jurisdiction is a totally separate question from whether outlawing guns should be allowed at all, just as the question of whether marijuana or alcohol should be outlawed in any particular jurisdiction is separate from the question of whether it should be permissible to outlaw it at all.

Ron's Commandments

For the last year and a half or so I have run a weekly Bible study which attracts a diverse group of believers and non-believers.  On a semi-regular basis someone will challenge me by asking, essentially, could I do better than God, which is to say, better than the Ten Commandments, in coming up with a pithy set of rules to guide our behaviors and the structuring of our society.  I decided to take up that challenge because, yes, I think I can do better.  In fact, I think pretty much anyone could do better because, frankly, the Ten Commandments are a pretty low bar.  The actual Ten Commandments are not what most people think they are and even the text that is commonly considered as the Ten Commandments is not that hard to improve upon by modern standards.

So here are Ron's Commandments, or at least a first draft.  They weigh in at 358 words versus 309 for the popular version and 466 for the actual version (i.e. the ones that the Bible refers to as The Ten Commandments).  I'll post all three versions here for easy reference.  You decide which set you would rather live by.

The popular Ten Commandments (Exo20 and Deu5):

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.

Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

You shall not murder.

You shall not commit adultery.

You shall not steal.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

The actual Ten Commandments (Exo34):

Behold, I make a covenant: before all thy people I will do marvels, such as have not been done in all the earth, nor in any nation: and all the people among which thou art shall see the work of the LORD: for it is a terrible thing that I will do with thee.

Observe thou that which I command thee this day: behold, I drive out before thee the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite.

Take heed to thyself, lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land whither thou goest, lest it be for a snare in the midst of thee:

But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves:

For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God:

Lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they go a whoring after their gods, and do sacrifice unto their gods, and one call thee, and thou eat of his sacrifice;

And thou take of their daughters unto thy sons, and their daughters go a whoring after their gods, and make thy sons go a whoring after their gods.

Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.

The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep. Seven days thou shalt eat unleavened bread, as I commanded thee, in the time of the month Abib: for in the month Abib thou camest out from Egypt.

All that openeth the matrix is mine; and every firstling among thy cattle, whether ox or sheep, that is male.

But the firstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb: and if thou redeem him not, then shalt thou break his neck. All the firstborn of thy sons thou shalt redeem. And none shall appear before me empty.

Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest: in earing time and in harvest thou shalt rest.

And thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at the year's end.

Thrice in the year shall all your menchildren appear before the LORD God, the God of Israel.

For I will cast out the nations before thee, and enlarge thy borders: neither shall any man desire thy land, when thou shalt go up to appear before the LORD thy God thrice in the year.

Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven; neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left unto the morning.

The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the LORD thy God. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk.

And, just for the record, the next two verses:

And the LORD said unto Moses, Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel.

And he was there with the LORD forty days and forty nights; he did neither eat bread, nor drink water. And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.  [Emphasis added.]

Ron's Commandments:

Be kind to your fellow humans, and all other sentient creatures.  Don't cause them unnecessary pain.  Don't murder them.  Don't rape them.  Don't enslave them.  Do not bear false witness against them.  Strive to understand them even (especially!) when you disagree.  Avoid eating them.  If you must eat them, raise them and slaughter them humanely.  Under no circumstances eat your fellow humans (c.f. Jer19:9).

Organize your society around democratically elected governments charged with establishing regulated free markets and social safety nets.  People have a fundamental right to vote for the people who make the rules they are expected to live by, and to clean air, clean water, food, clothing, and shelter.  No one should be deprived of these basic human needs under any circumstances.  If you see homeless people around you, you are doing something wrong.  Fix it.  Private property is not a fundamental right, but a mechanism for promoting work, innovation, and acceptance of risk.  Wherever it fails to meet that purpose it should be abolished.

Don't get hung up about sexuality.  You are complex living beings.  Sexual urges are as fundamental to your nature as hunger.  Sex is not a sin.  But causing unnecessary pain to a fellow being is, so you should only have sex in the context of mutual informed consent of all parties involved, which means adult humans.  Children and animals cannot give consent.

I reveal my truths to you through your experiences, not through prophets.  So be skeptical.  Do not believe anything except on good evidence, not even these commandments.  Base your choices on the evidence whenever you can, but recognize that time advances inexorably and so sometimes you will have no choice but to act on incomplete information and take leaps of faith.

Recognize that the thing that sets you apart from the rest of creation is your capacity to create new ideas.  Cherish and nurture that.  Especially cherish those ideas that lead to better environments for creating new ideas, like books, peace, quiet, love, and mutual support and encouragement.

Dance.  Sing.  Mourn when you must, celebrate when you can.  Enjoy your life, and do everything you can to help others do likewise.

PSA: I'm debating Matt Slick tonight

FYI, I'm doing a YouTube debate this evening at 5:30 PST with Matt Slick on the topic of "Atheism, Christianity, and morality".  It will also be recorded so you don't have to watch it live.  Here is the link.

The rats are finally begining to flee the SS Trump

From The Washington Post:

Whether President Trump is forced from office or serves out the remaining days of his term, he is now destined to slink out of the White House considerably diminished from the strapping, fearsome force he and his advisers imagined he would be in his post-presidency.

In the wake of the mob attack on the Capitol that Trump incited, some allies have abandoned him, many in the business community have shunned him and Twitter took away his social media megaphone. Many Republicans also hold him responsible for losing their Senate majority with last week’s twin defeats in Georgia, not to mention their House majority two years ago.

Emphasis added.  What is remarkable about this is that the Post is reporting that Trump is "destined to slink out of the White House" not in an opinion piece, but as news.  Front-page news.

This is a hopeful sign.  It means there is hope we could get out of this mess without any further bloodshed and loss of life.  That, of course, is up to the people who have supported an enabled Trump to this point.  The more of them repent now, the more likely the rest of them will lay down their arms.  I'll still give you long odds against, but not nearly as long as I would have before reading this story.

Arnold Schwarzenegger compares the Capitol attack to Kristallnacht

Arnold Schwarzenegger just released a video in which he compares the Jan 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to Kristallnacht, and draws a straight line from the Proud Boys to the early Nazis by way of his own personal experience growing up in Austria in the long shadow of World War II.  The video gets a little corny and treacly towards the end, but the analogy is apt and the warning is one we would all do well to heed.  Worth watching at least the first half of the video.

The Capitol attack was not the beginning, and it won't be the end

A dry run of the attack on the U.S. capitol occurred the day before in northern California:

Here in California’s rural, conservative northern counties — where people have long wanted to split from California and form a new state called Jefferson — the kind of anger and distrust of the government that Trump has fomented is on full display.

And it is not likely to go away any time soon, because some residents believe there is great political utility in making government officials believe that potential violence could become all too real.

“We have to make politicians scared again,” Carlos Zapata, who attended the supervisors’ meeting, told The Times. “If politicians do not fear the people they govern, that relationship is broken.”

The last four years, and even Jan 6, have been a warmup.  The main event, the real damage that Donald Trump will do to our country, is yet to come.

Trump and the Reverse Cargo Cult

Speaking of prophetic observations, here is a particularly profound one made by Hans Howe back in 2017:

Trump administration lies constantly but doesn’t even attempt to make it seem like they aren’t lying.

...

Trump’s supporters don’t care about being lied to. You can point out the lies until you’re blue in the face, but it makes no difference to them. Why? Because it is just a game to them. The media lies, bloggers lie, politicians lie, it’s just all a bunch of lies. Facts don’t matter because those are lies also. Those trolls on Twitter, 4Chan, T_D, etc. are just having a good laugh. They are congratulating each other for being so smart. We are fools for still believing in anything.

Well worth reading the whole thing.

Ron prognosticates: Trump will pardon the capitol rioters

I don't think I'm going very far out on a limb to make this prediction, but I just wanted to get it on the record before it happened.  It seems like some low-lying prophetic fruit that I just felt like picking this morning.  (Oh, and I also predict that he will also issue blanket pardons to himself and his family.)

As long as I'm writing, an administrative note: I am now moderating all comments on this blog.  For seventeen years I have not done this because I believed in free speech, and I still do.  But my recent posts have attracted conspiracy cockroaches.  I would just ban the worst offenders, but unfortunately the Blogger platform doesn't allow that, so I'll have to filter everything manually.  I deeply regret having to take this step, but I will no longer allow my blog to be an outlet for repeated blatant lies that are a clear and present danger to the country that has been my home for most of my life.

So here's the new rule: I will no longer publish anonymous or pseudonymous defenses of right-wing propaganda.  If you want to defend these positions here, you're going to have to do it under your real identity, as I have been doing for the last 17 years.  If you really have the courage of your convictions then show your face.  If not, then go crawl back into the holes from whence you came like the cowards that you are.

[UPDATE] One pseudonymous coward has taken to the comment box to whine about censorship.  Tough.  One man's censorship is another man's exercise of editorial control.  I have actually had an editorial policy since the beginning, but it hasn't really been necessary to enforce it much until now.  If you send a letter to the editor of the New York Times they are under no obligation to publish it, and neither am I.  You are perfectly free to write your own blog if you want to be heard.  But this blog belongs to me, and if you're not willing to show your face or demonstrate that you have a basic grip on reality you are not welcome here.  Begone, pseudonymous trolls.

Faith and Insurrection

 Article III section 3 of the Constitution of the United States says:

"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."

Donald Trump, while wielding the authority of the Presidency, incited a violent insurrection against the government of the United States.  It cannot possibly be any clearer that he committed treason, and hence he is an Enemy of the United States, and hence anyone who still actively supports him at this point is giving aid and comfort to an Enemy of the United States and hence also guilty of treason under the Constitution.  I make these allegations fully cognizant of the fact that treason is a capital crime in the U.S.

Of course, very few people will take this seriously despite the fact that it is manifestly true.  Donald Trump will not be indicted for treason, let alone convicted and executed for it, despite the fact that if anyone else had done what he did they would already be in shackles.  And if that person had been black, they would probably be dead already.

Seriously, imagine if Barack Obama had done the exact same thing as Donald Trump after the 2016 election: made baseless accusations of voter fraud and claims that the election was stolen from Hillary, and incited a mob of angry black men to storm the capital.  How do you think Republicans would have reacted to that?

The sad fact of the matter is that 70 million Americans voted for Donald Trump, and while some of them might have had a change of heart after the events of Jan 6, most surely have not.  Not even the actual manifestation of an attempt at violent overthrow of the government will dissuade these people that Donald Trump is the Chosen One, and anyone who dares accuse him of treason, indeed who dares to question him in any way, will face their wrath at the ballot box and now, quite possibly, in the streets or in their homes.  And so there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands.  There might even be ignominy of a second impeachment and removal from office (though I'll give you long odds against).  But there will not be justice.  Donald Trump may live out his remaining days in disgrace, but not in prison.

I think it's really important, though, to be clear about what brought us to this pass, because it is plain as day: we are here because Donald Trump lied.  And he lied and he lied and he lied and he lied and he lied and then he lied some more.  And eventually people started to think that there just had to be some truth to the lies, not because there was any actual evidence that they were true, but simply because no one could possibly lie that much, right?  Where there is smoke there has to be fire.  So the election was stolen, not because there was any evidence for it, but simply because Donald Trump said so.  And said it again.  And again.  And again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again...

And it worked.  And it continues to work.  And that is our ultimate shame: we have built a society where lying works as long as your lie is big enough and you repeat is often enough and you never back down, not even in the face of manifest catastrophe.  In this regard we are extremely fortunate that Donald Trump is merely a consummately skilled con man and not a scheming despotic mastermind, because if he were the latter we'd staring down the barrel of a much bigger gun.

How did we get here?  How did we build a society full of people so utterly incapable of skepticism and critical thought that it gave us not only Donald Trump and his followers in the tens of millions, but anti-vaxers and anti-maskers and holocaust denialists and lunar landing denialists and climate-change denialists and flat earthers and birthers and 9-11 truthers people proudly waving the Confederate flag saying it has nothing to do with slavery?

I submit that it is because, in American society, denial of the truth is considered a virtue.  Except that it's not called denial of the truth, it's called "being a person of faith."

Now, I want to be very clear here that I am NOT signing on to Richard Dawkins's rabid anti-religion agenda.  I'm sure many religious folks are fine people.  Some of my best friends are religious.  The irony here is intended to be dark humor, but in all seriousness, I am about to levy some pretty harsh criticism on religion, and I want to be very clear that there is a distinction between that and religious people.  The problem with "people of faith" is the "faith" part, not necessarily the "people" part.

The problem with faith is not that it leads you to believe in things that aren't true (though it certainly can do that).  The problem is that it leads you to believe in things without evidence, or worse, in direct contradiction to the evidence.  Again, I want to be clear that this is not necessarily bad.  There are circumstances where believing in things without evidence or contrary to evidence can be very beneficial, which is probably why we evolved the tendency in the first place.  If you believe you can kill that sabre tooth tiger despite all the evidence that it is hopeless, that might spur you to attempt to kill it, and you just might surprise yourself and succeed where your more rational competitor might have just given up and cowered in a corner and gotten eaten as a result.  In some circumstances, suspension of disbelief really can be a virtue.

But it can also be incredibly dangerous.  It's not mere happenstance that a large majority of evangelical Christians support Trump, nor that many of the insurgents were waving signs that said, "Jesus saves."  They have been trained to bow to authority, to submit themselves to the Will of God, many from a very young age.  I'm sure many of them believed in their heart of hearts that they were doing the will of God.  I'm sure many of them still believe it.

People of faith now need to wrestle with this if they want democracy to survive in the U.S.  Faith can lead to hope where there might otherwise be despair, action where there might otherwise be complacency, courage where there might otherwise be fear.  But it can also lead to people doing stupid shit like what we saw two days ago.

Where faith becomes especially dangerous is when it leaves the realm of the ambiguous and the spiritual and places itself squarely at odds with objective reality.  Your faith in your ability to vanquish the sabre tooth tiger will be put to the test when you try to act on it.  Either you will vanquish the tiger or it will vanquish you.  That kind of dynamic prevents faith from spinning too wildly out of control.  If you see enough of your tribe mates being eaten by sabre tooth tigers you may start to rethink the wisdom of believing in your prowess against them.  But your faith in (say) being rewarded in the afterlife cannot be put to the test until it is too late for anyone to act on it if you turn out to be wrong.  And if your faith is too strong you may well end up believing that, say, Donald Trump is telling the truth when he says he won the election because it was God's will so it cannot possibly be any other way.  If the evidence says otherwise, well, then the evidence must be wrong.  Too much faith leads inevitably down the conspiracy rabbit hole.

The events of Jan 6 were horrific, but we actually dodged a bullet because it could have been so much worse.  Think of what might have happened if the rioters had been organized and brought their assault rifles.  Or if, instead of inciting this riot, Donald Trump had instead decided that the best way to for him to stir the pot would be to nuke Tehran.  (And if you think he wouldn't go that far then you really haven't been paying attention.)

Faith can be a virtue, but it is not an unalloyed good.  I'm not a person of faith so there's not much I can do to help solve this problem other than to point it out.  If you consider yourself to be a person of faith, this ball is squarely in your court.

My take on yesterday's insurrection

It was never a question of whether Donald Trump would destroy the Republican party, but when and how, and whether he would take the rest of the country (and possibly the world) down along with it.  The one silver lining to yesterday's horrific events in our nation's capitol is that we finally have the beginning of a real answer.  Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell finally joined the rest of the rats fleeing the rapidly sinking S.S. Trump, leaving Ted Cruz at the helm.  I predict he will stay there like a hyena on a rotting corpse because he is so hungry for power that no matter how bad things get he will not be able to tear himself away from all those tasty, tasty MAGA voters.

That Trump's reign would end something like this was utterly predictable from the start.  I'm sorry, but if you didn't see something like this coming, you really haven't been paying attention for the last four years.  Donald Trump was never going to stop abusing his power until he got smacked down hard.  In fact, he still hasn't gotten smacked down hard, and so he is still not going to stop.  Maybe he will get smacked down in the next two weeks (by a largely symbolic second impeachment), or the next two years (by being prosecuted for his various crimes), but until that actually happens (and it is far from clear that it will) Trump is not going to stop being himself even now.

But the Republican party, thank God, is done for.  Donald Trump has set out a very stark choice for Republicans: follow me, or follow the law.  As with everything Trump does, there is no room for compromise or nuance.  You are either with him or you are against him.  Choose.

As bad as yesterday was, we still have a lot to be grateful for because it could have been oh so much worse.  Imagine if the mob that descended yesterday had been disciplined and well-organized and armed with assault rifles instead of the ragtag motley crew that it turned out to be.  Or imagine if, instead of a riot in Washington, Trump had decided that it would be a good idea to nuke Tehran on his way out the door.  Yesterday could very well have been the Reichstag fire.  Instead it was the beer hall putsch.

But make no mistake, this war is far from over.  Yes, the Republican party is finished, at least for now.  It will split into the Trump wing and the anti-Trump wing, and that will blunt its influence for a while until it can heal and reorganize.  But we have much to fear from what will inevitably rise from those ashes.  The 70 million people who voted for Trump in November of 2020 are still out there.  They are still nursing their grievances and concocting their conspiracy theories and, most frightening of all, waiting for someone new to lead them to the promised land where white people will once again assume their rightful place at the pinnacle of society.  Ted Cruz is even now maneuvering to fill that role.  Cruz is even less principled and more power hungry than Trump, and, what should really scare the living daylights out of you, a hell of a lot smarter.

In the end, the only thing that saved us from total disaster this time around was Donald Trump's incompetence.  Not Mitch McConnell, not Mike Pence, not Bill Barr, not Ron Cohen, not Robert Mueller, not Chuck Schumer, not Nancy Pelosi.  If Trump had been just a little bit less stupid, if he'd actually thought things through, if he had any skills at all beyond bloviating in front of a crowd, we might well have learned the hard way that our democracy is a whole lot more fragile than most people think it is even now.

So yes, breathe a small sigh of relief that the bulwark of democracy appears to have held this time around.  But don't take too much comfort in this because the next time we might not be so lucky.  And there will be a next time.  What happened yesterday was just the latest skirmish in a conflict that has been running cold and hot since before the founding of the Republic.  Democracy has won this battle, but the war is far from over.

I'm proud to be an American again

 

Can facts be racist?

Here's a fact:

[D]ifferences in home and neighborhood quality do not fully explain the devaluation of homes in black neighborhoods. Homes of similar quality in neighborhoods with similar amenities are worth 23 percent less ($48,000 per home on average, amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses) in majority black neighborhoods, compared to those with very few or no black residents

(And here is some analysis of that fact.)

Here is another fact:

The government-sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corporation drew a line around Bedford-Stuyvesant on a map, colored the area red and gave it a “D,” the worst grade possible, denoting a hazardous place to underwrite mortgages.

Lines like these, drawn in cities across the country to separate “hazardous” and “declining” from “desirable” and “best,” codified patterns of racial segregation and disparities in access to credit. Now economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, analyzing data from recently digitized copies of those maps, show that the consequences lasted for decades.

As recently as 2010, they find, differences in the level of racial segregation, homeownership rates, home values and credit scores were still apparent where these boundaries were drawn.

And here is a recent data point:

Abena and Alex Horton wanted to take advantage of low home-refinance rates brought on by the coronavirus crisis. So in June, they took the first step in that process, welcoming a home appraiser into their four-bedroom, four-bath ranch-style house in Jacksonville, Fla.

The Hortons live just minutes from the Ortega River, in a predominantly white neighborhood of 1950s homes that tend to sell for $350,000 to $550,000. They had expected their home to appraise for around $450,000, but the appraiser felt differently, assigning a value of $330,000. Ms. Horton, who is Black, immediately suspected discrimination.

The couple’s bank agreed that the value was off and ordered a second appraisal. But before the new appraiser could arrive, Ms. Horton, a lawyer, began an experiment: She took all family photos off the mantle. Instead, she hung up a series of oil paintings of Mr. Horton, who is white, and his grandparents that had been in storage. Books by Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison were taken off the shelves, and holiday photo cards sent by friends were edited so that only those showing white families were left on display. On the day of the appraisal, Ms. Horton took the couple’s 6-year-old son on a shopping trip to Target, and left Mr. Horton alone at home to answer the door.

The new appraiser gave their home a value of $465,000 — a more than 40 percent increase from the first appraisal.

Nothing but facts and data here, no different from the fact (and it is a fact) that blacks are by and large better basketball players than whites, and that this is not because blacks are taller (because they aren't).  To this point I have drawn no conclusions and made no value judgements.  All I've done is cite facts from credible sources.

Now, I am going to draw a conclusion, and then I'm going to make a value judgement, but I want to make it very clear that I am not going to take a position on the titular question of this post (because I have learned the hard way that that is fraught with all manner of rhetorical peril).  The conclusion I draw is this:

The facts I've presented above are an indication of the existence of a very serious problem in our society, and this problem has something to do with race.

Note well that I have intentionally said nothing about the exact nature of this problem except that it is serious and it has something to do with race.  In particular, I have not said that it has anything to do with real estate prices nor with playing basketball.

Now, I can imagine at least three different kinds of reactions to this:

1.  "Yes, there is a problem.  It is mainly a result of some external influence over which blacks have little to no control, like systemic institutionalized racism, or well-meaning but ultimately misguided government intervention, or something like that."

2.  "Yes, there is a problem.  It is mainly a result of some deficiency in the black community and so only the black community can do anything about it."

3.  "I disagree that these facts are an indication of a problem.  This is just the free market operating as expected (or something like that).  Everything is as it should be."

There is a fourth possibility.  Someone could reject the premise that these "facts" are in fact facts and say that they are lies, the product of a disinformation campaign, or something like that.  Fake news.  For the purposes of this discussion we can discount this.  The fact (and on this view it is manifestly a fact) that lies like this can so effectively masquerade as facts is a problem in and of itself, and that brings up back to 1-3.

Now I am going to make my value judgement: if you subscribe to reaction #3 then there is something deeply wrong with you.  If you can look at the current state of affairs and say that there is no problem at all, that this is the best humanity is capable of, that there is nothing left for our society to aspire to, then you are suffering from some kind of serious mental deficiency.  You either lack empathy or imagination or the ability to properly process information or something.  If that offends you, then you should probably stop reading my blog and seek counseling.

If you are still with me, then we agree that there is a problem, but potentially disagree on its nature and source.  That's fine, reasonable people can disagree about these things.  But now here are a few more facts:

1.  There was at one time legal institutional discrimination against black people in the United States, first through chattel slavery, and then through Jim Crow laws.

2.  Neither slavery nor Jim Crow were ended by societal consensus.  Slavery was ended by a civil war, and Jim Crow was ended by a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1950s and the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s, i.e. well within living memory.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was highly contentious, with the Southern states overwhelmingly opposed to it.

3.  Before the Civil War, negro slavery (as it was then invariably referred to) was openly defended by many Southerners as a positive good:

Slavery as a positive good was the prevailing view of White Southern U.S. politicians and intellectuals just before the American Civil War, as opposed to a "necessary evil." They defended the legal enslavement of people for their labor as a benevolent, paternalistic institution with social and economic benefits, an important bulwark of civilization, and a divine institution similar or superior to the free labor in the North.  Proponents of enslavement as "a good — a great good" often attacked the system of industrial capitalism, contending that the free laborer in the North, called by them a "wage slave", was as much enslaved by capitalist owners as were the African people enslaved by Whites in the South.

The right of white people to own negro slaves was explicitly enshrined in the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, which specifically provided that, "No ... law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed."

So for hundreds of years there were substantial numbers of people in the U.S. willing to defend, at times quite literally with their lives, not just racial discrimination against blacks, but race-based chattel slavery, and willing to do so openly and on the merits.  The defenders of slavery genuinely believed in their heart of hearts that they were the good guys.

Very few people openly advocate racial discrimination on the merits today, but there are some who do.  That link is to a video, one which I find rather shocking, but it is worth watching.  I am, of course, repulsed by the ideology espoused by the subjects of the film, but I really do think that these people believe in their heart of hearts that they are the good guys.  Furthermore, I respect the fact that they are willing to stand up openly for what they believe.  They wear the badge of "racist" with pride (4:00).  They leave no doubt about where they stand: "We are a white nation, founded for and by the white man." (2:40).  And, it is well worth noting, that that, too, is a fact.

Game over for the USA

I would like to think that Ruth Bader Ginsberg's untimely passing is not the catastrophe that it appears to be.  I would like to think that Mitch McConnell is a man of principle, and having once said that the Senate should not confirm a Supreme Court justice in an election year he will not brazenly expose himself as a hypocrite and confirm a Supreme Court justice in an election year.

I would like to think these things, but I can't.  My ability to suspend disbelief only goes so far.  Of course McConnell is not a man of principle.  Of course he will ram Trump's third Supreme Court nomination through the Senate in the next few weeks.  That much is absolutely certain.

What is only a little less certain is what happens after that.  If you eliminate the totally unrealistic scenario that Biden wins the election in an overwhelming landslide and Trump concedes, what are we left with?  Either Trump wins outright, or he loses on the margins, and we have a replay of Bush v. Gore, except that this time it will be adjudicated by a Supreme Court with a conservative majority, and three of nine justices appointed by the very president whose fate they are deciding.  If you think they will rule against Trump, well, I wish I shared your ability to suspend disbelief.

So the legitimacy of the government of the United States of America after January 2021 is now very much in doubt (if it isn't already).  The legitimacy of the Supreme Court is already very much in doubt, and has been ever since Mitch McConnell exercised his extra-Constitutional veto power over Barack Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland.  We are facing the very real prospect of a second Trump term even if Biden wins, to say nothing of losing 70 years of social progress.  Roe v. Wade is already as good as dead, as is the separation of church and state, and we are now we are looking at the very real prospect of also losing Obergefell v. Hodges, possibly even Griswold v. Connecticut.  LGBT rights, worker's rights, minority rights, immigrant rights, gone, squished under the new Christian theocracy thinly disguised as "religious freedom."

Fundamentalist Christians voted for Trump because he promised them power.  Some have speculated that they might be having buyers remorse but I'm pretty sure today the opposite is true.  Trump has delivered what he promised.  In spades.  His legacy will last generations.  It may never be possible to undo the damage.  The United States of America may soon be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Trump Organization.

This is what the apocalypse looks like

 This is a photo of our house taken at noon today:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is not the raw image.  I took this with an iPhone, whose auto-exposure made the image look much brighter than it actually is.  I've adjusted the brightness and color balance to match the actual appearance as much as I can.  Even so, this image doesn't do justice to the reality.  For one thing, the sky is much too blue.  The actual color of the sky is a reddish brown, the same overall hue as the rest of the image.  But the main thing to notice is that the lights in front of our house are on.  Those lights are on sensors that are supposed to make them only come on at night.  But here they are on at high noon in summer.  It's dark.  It feels like twilight.  We have to have lights on inside the house.  It is deeply creepy.

The cause of this is, of course, smoke from fires that are burning all around us, probably combined with some marine-layer overcast, though it is impossible to tell because the sky has absolutely no texture at all.  In 32 years of living in California full time, I have never seen anything like this.  No one has.  There has never been anything like this in recorded history.

Three days ago we set a record high at our house of 103 degrees.  Today it was 62 degrees when I woke up, and now at noon it has warmed up to a balmy 64.

I think we broke the planet.

UPDATE: The Washington Post has a story about this with better photos.

UPDATE2: It is now 2:30 in the afternoon and it just straight-up looks like night outside.  The sky is still glowing a faint dull red, about what you would expect an hour or so after sunset, but anywhere else you look it is full-on dark.  It is genuinely scary.

They knew. They still know.

Never forget what conservatives were saying about Donald Trump before he cowed them into submission.

(Sorry about the tiny size of the embedded video.  That's the default that Blogger gave me and I can't figure out how to adjust the size.  If it bothers you, click on the link above to see the original.)

Republicans officially endorse a Trump dictatorship

The Republican party has formally decided not to adopt a platform this year, instead passing a resolution that says essentially, "we will support whatever the Dear Leader says".  Since the resolution calls out the media for its biased reporting, I will quote the resolution here in its entirety, with the salient portions highlighted:

WHEREAS, The Republican National Committee (RNC) has significantly scaled back the size and scope of the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte due to strict restrictions on gatherings and meetings, and out of concern for the safety of convention attendees and our hosts;

WHEREAS, The RNC has unanimously voted to forego the Convention Committee on Platform, in appreciation of the fact that it did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform without the breadth of perspectives within the ever-growing Republican movement;

WHEREAS, All platforms are snapshots of the historical contexts in which they are born, and parties abide by their policy priorities, rather than their political rhetoric;

WHEREAS, The RNC, had the Platform Committee been able to convene in 2020, would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party’s strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration;

WHEREAS, The media has outrageously misrepresented the implications of the RNC not
adopting a new platform in 2020 and continues to engage in misleading advocacy for the failed policies of the Obama-Biden Administration, rather than providing the public with unbiased reporting of facts; and

WHEREAS, The RNC enthusiastically supports President Trump and continues to reject the policy positions of the Obama-Biden Administration, as well as those espoused by the
Democratic National Committee today; therefore, be it

RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda;

RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention;

RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention calls on the media to engage in accurate and unbiased reporting, especially as it relates to the strong support of the RNC for President Trump and his Administration; and

RESOLVED, That any motion to amend the 2016 Platform or to adopt a new platform, including any motion to suspend the procedures that will allow doing so, will be ruled out of order.

Here we go again

 Here is a snapshot of the current map of temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) issued by the FAA across the western U.S.:

Almost every one of those red shapes is a major fire burning.  Compare that to a similar snapshot taken two years ago at about this same time of year.

The regularity of these extreme heat and fire events is starting to get really scary.

Irit Gat, Ph.D. 25 November 1966 - 11 August 2020

 

With a heavy heart I bear witness to the untimely passing of Dr. Irit Gat last Tuesday at the age of 53.  Irit was the Dean of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Antelope Valley College in Lancaster, California.  She was also my younger sister.  She died peacefully of natural causes.

I am going to miss her.  A lot.  I'm going to miss her smile.  I'm going to miss the way she said "Hey bro" when we talked on the phone.  I'm going to miss the joy she brought to everyone who knew her, especially my parents.

It wasn't always easy being my little sister.  I could be a real dick at times.  But mainly as she was growing up she found it difficult to forge her own identity.  Irit sometimes said she felt like she was growing up in my shadow.  I was two years ahead of her in school and an academic overachiever, which is a nice was of saying I was a geek without a lot of friends.  But the teachers all loved me, and so the first thing she usually heard from them was, "Oh, you're Erann's sister!"  That was hard on her because on the one hand it was true, and she loved me, and so she embraced it.  But on the other hand she was too nice to say, "No, I'm not, I'm me.  I'm my own person with my own identity, my own dreams, my own foibles, my own strengths."  And yet, she was all those things too.

Irit's main strength was an extraordinary ability to get along with everyone.  It's not something I appreciated when I was growing up.  It is only much later in life that I came to realize how important the ability to forge interpersonal relationships is.  She was a natural from the beginning.  She was on the homecoming court.  She was the prom queen, and I don't mean that metaphorically.  My little sister was literally the prom queen in her senior year.  Her peers liked her that much.  I was lucky if I could get through the day without someone pinning a "kick me" sign on my back.

She then went on to forge an extraordinary professional career.  She earned a Ph.D., did a post-doc at NASA, and was then appointed professor of psychology at Antelope Valley College.  I saw her teach once (and only once).  She was good.  She was poised.  She was prepared.  She controlled the class.  She consistently got excellent reviews on RateMyProfessor, with a 100% "would take her class again" rating.

After about ten years behind the podium she decided she needed a new challenge and went into administration.  She become department head, president of the academic senate, and finally, Dean of Behavioral and Social Sciences.

On a few occasions I told her how proud I was of her.  I wish I could tell her again.  Sis, if you're listening, I'm proud of you, and have been for a long time.

Irit never married, but she did find love.  Lots of it.  The outpouring of emotion from her students and colleagues has been extraordinary.  If these were normal times and we were able to hold a funeral, a whole lot of people would have shown up.  That is the measure of a successful life.

Irit was engaged to be married to extraordinary man named Bob, whom I would have been proud to call my brother-in-law.  She invariably referred to him as "my Bob."  They did a lot of traveling together.  Bob is an avid cyclist, and many of their trips were BackRoads cycling trips, so she was an athlete too.  (In fact, in college, she was a body-builder.)  They had grand plans to retire in a few years and move to Tuscon or some such place.  Retiring with "her Bob" was the one dream she never got to realize.  Other than that, she lived a full and happy life (except when her older brother beat her up before he grew up and got a clue).

I will miss you, little sis.  Rest in peace.

The insidious problem of racism

Take a moment to seriously think about what is wrong with racism.  If you're like most people, your answer will probably be that racism is bad because it's a form of prejudice, and prejudice is bad.  This is not wrong, but it misses a much deeper, more insidious issue.  The real problem with racism is that it is that it can be (and usually is) rationalized and those rationalizations can turn into self-fulfilling prophecies, which in turn causes racism to not only be rationalized, but rationally justifiable.  It's a vicious cycle that leads otherwise virtuous people to unwittingly contribute to great evils.

Here's an example: professional basketball players are disproportionately black by an enormous margin.  Why?  It would seem odd if this were a result of racial prejudice.  Being a professional basketball player is not a menial job.  It's a challenging, well-respected and well-compensated profession.  Professional basketball players are role models.  The stakes are high: if a team could gain a competitive advantage by hiring more white players they would surely do so.  So it seems more likely that there is actually some kind of causal influence that results in black skin being correlated with basketball skill.

The obvious candidate for this kind of causal influence is that black people are taller than white people.  Being tall presents an obvious advantage if you're a basketball player.  I was convinced that this had to be the answer, but it's not.  It turns out that, on average, black people are actually shorter than white people.  (The source data is here.)  So there goes that theory.

There could be some other physical trait that is linked to black skin that provides a competitive advantage in basketball.  Black people also dominate in other sports, like running.  Maybe there's some biological factor that makes blacks faster than whites, or able to jump higher, and that produces a competitive advantage in basketball.

But there is another, much more insidious possibility: maybe black dominance in basketball is not a physical advantage, but a cultural one.  Maybe blacks make better basketball players simply because as a group they happen to spend more time playing basketball.  And maybe the reason they spend more time playing basketball is that other avenues of economic advancement are closed to them for one reason or another, and so basketball is seen as the only way out of the hood.  So they play basketball.

Notice that it is not necessary for it to actually be true that non-basketball careers are closed to blacks to set this vicious cycle into motion.  The mere perception that it is true is enough.  If a black kid growing up in the hood believes that he's never going to be hired as an engineer then he could reach the perfectly rational (albeit possibly mistaken) conclusion that he should not spend his time studying math but should practice basketball instead.  The result is a lot more black kids playing basketball, and doing it with much more seriousness and dedication, than white kids.  And the result of that is that the best basketball players are overwhelmingly black simply because they've been working at it harder than whites.  And so the NBA team managers make the perfectly rational decision to hire black players because they are in point of actual fact better than whites.  And then the next generation of black kids grows up seeing a lot of basketball-playing role models and very few engineering role models, and reach the perfectly rational conclusion that maybe they ought not to study engineering.

The mere belief that black people make better basketball players can actually cause them to be better basketball players in point of actual fact.  It is, quite literally, a self-fulfilling prophecy.  And the thing about self-fulfilling prophecies is that they are actually true!

Notice that all this can happen even if everyone is behaving rationally on good evidence and without any ill will on anyone's part.  Less damaging forms of the same underlying dynamic are very common.  Taxi cab drivers in Glendale, California are overwhelmingly Armenian.  Restaurant owners in San Carlos are overwhelmingly Turkish.  Cruise ship crew members are overwhelmingly Filipino (except for the senior officers).  It's not because there is anything in the genes of Armenians that makes them better cab drivers, or the genes of Turks that makes them better resaurateurs, or the genes of Filipinos that makes them better sailors.  It's purely a cultural dynamic of expectations playing against rational decision making to produce self-fulfilling prophecies.

But now, instead of basketball player or cab driver or sailor, consider a drug dealer.

Think about the mental image that popped into your brain when you read those words.  I'll wager it was not a white guy in a suit and tie in the board room of a pharmacology company, though such a person is very much a drug dealer.  The image that popped into your head was very likely a black man in a hoodie shuffling furtively on a street corner.  And yet John Kapoor is every bit as much a drug dealer as El Chapo Guzman, and vastly more of a drug dealer than, say, Aron Tuff.

You have likely never heard of Aron Tuff.  I hadn't until I started researching this post.  Tuff was sentenced to life in prison without parole because police found a third of a gram of cocaine in his yard.  It was his third strike.  Compare that to Kapoor's five-year sentence for peddling massive quantities of opioids that caused tens of thousands of deaths.  Part of the rationale for Kapoor's reduced sentence was his "philanthropy", notwithstanding that the money he used to engage in philanthropy came from dealing drugs.  Vast quantities of drugs which killed tens of thousands of people.

There is no end to the ways in which the disparities between Kapoor's sentence and Tuff's can be rationalized.  The drugs Kapoor sold were legal.  The drugs that Tuff (allegedly) possessed (but did not sell) were illegal.  Kapoor was a respected captain of industry, a job creator.  Tuff was an addict with priors.  All of these things are true.  None of them have anything to do with race, at least not overtly.  And yet, somehow the net result is that blacks get sent to prison for drug offenses a lot more than whites do.

This is the problem with racism: it's never just about the color of someone's skin.  Skin color is always just a proxy for some other quality which actually justifies the racism.  This goes all the way back to chattel slavery in the American South: blacks were not enslaved because they were black per se, they were enslaved because they were inferior.  Skin color was just an indicator of the inferiority.  Many slave owners believed in good faith at the time that they were actually doing blacks a favor by enslaving them.  If you don't believe me, all you have to do is read this excerpt from the articles of secession of the state of Texas:

...all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations...

That sounds shocking today, but it wasn't shocking then.  Millions of people passionately believed in the sentiment expressed in these words.  Tens of thousands literally fought and died for them.  They sincerely believed they were the good guys.

Today the proxy quality that launches the vicious cycle is no longer genetic inferiority, it's something else.  It's "making poor decisions" or whatever the fuck it is, it doesn't matter.  What matters is that the structure of the argument and the resulting social dynamic is exactly the same as it was in 1861: black skin is taken to be a reliable proxy for some other quality --the ability to play basketball, a propensity to criminality-- and that belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and hence actually true.  Everyone believes in good faith (indeed, correctly!) that they are acting rationally and on good evidence!  And yet the result is catastrophic.

So what do we do about it?  After all, rationality got us in to this mess, so how can it possibly get us out?  Well, first we have to agree that it's a mess.  Not everyone does.  There is a school of thought that says that everything is basically hunky-dory, at least on a systemic level.  Slavery is gone.  Jim Crow is gone.  Any remaining disparities must therefore be a result of individual choices because the playing field has now been leveled.  If there are problems they should be dealt with on an individual level.  If someone breaks the law, they go to jail.  Eventually the transgressors will figure out that it is better for them to hew to the social order, so all we need to do is send enough troops to quell the riots and sooner or later this will all sort itself out.  Now, excuse me while I mix myself a martini and get my kids ready to go to their private school.

There are actually people who think that we've already gone overboard in our attempts to address racial issues in the U.S.  There is a small but significant contingent who believes that legally enforced segregation, a return to separate-but-equal, is actually the Right Answer.  If you think these people can simply be ignored you have not been paying attention.  The Trump administration is actively courting these people.  If you are one of those people who believes that Donald Trump doesn't have a racist bone in his body, well, I have a bridge you might be interested in buying.

Personally, it seems to me that we tried segregation for about 100 years and as far as I'm concerned it was not a good outcome, and I'm white.  Like I said in my earlier post on this topic, I am the beneficiary of the current system.  The expectations that turn into self-fulfilling prophecies have worked very much in my favor.  I'm a white male, and so everyone expected me to grow up to be successful, and lo and behold I grew up to be successful.  I was there for this entire process and so I can tell you that this was not because of any extraordinary effort on my part.  I totally coasted to my success.  I figured out how to game the system in middle school, and I've been doing it ever since.  I have a very impressive-looking resume, but if you look carefully none of it actually reflects any extraordinary accomplishment on my part.  Yes, I worked for NASA for fifteen years.  Yes, that sounds impressive.  But the reason I worked for NASA for 15 years is because I happened to be in graduate school when my advisor got a job offer, and he took me with him.  The reason I was in grad school is because I was too lazy to get a real job.  The reason I was able to go to grad school in the first place is because the government gave me a fellowship, and before that the university I attended gave me a scholarship, and all that happened because I got good grades.  And the reason I was able to get good grades is that I grew up in a quiet house within walking distance of the country club (the neighborhood I grew up in was literally called Country Club Estates!) where there was not a basketball court to be found.  Tennis.  Golf.  A swimming pool where waiters would bring me club sandwiches that I didn't have to pay for.  It was fucking awesome.  And it was only possible because I was white.  There were no black people in the Country Club Estates.  Not in the 1970s.  Not in Tennessee.

Things are certainly better today.   My parents still live in the house I grew up in, and today their next-door neighbors are black, so maybe this will all sort itself out in the fullness of time.  But at the same time the Supreme Court casually disenfranchises a million ex-felons in Florida, who are, of course, disproportionately black.  The President of the United States calls white supremacists "fine people" and sends secret police to arrest people carrying Black Lives Matter banners.  An American Senator defends chattel slavery as a "necessary evil".  Black people are killed by police at a much higher rate than white people.  I don't have to worry about any of this because I'm white.  And this gnaws at my soul.

No human being should grow up believing that they will be judged by the color of their skin, and they certainly should not grow up being correct in that belief, but that is today's reality.  The first step to fixing this is to persuade people that it needs fixing, and it needs fixing now.  We've been fucking around for 400 years.  Enough.  The recently deceased John Lewis said it better than I can:

“To those who have said, ‘Be patient and wait,’ we have long said that we cannot be patient.  We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now! We are tired. We are tired of being beaten by policemen. We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again.”

I want my black brothers and sisters to be free now.  That is, of course, impossible.  The scars of 400 years of oppression will not be erased in my lifetime.  Getting to the point where everyone is truly judged not on the color of their skin but the content of their character will be a multi-generational project even under ideal circumstances, and today's circumstances are far from ideal.  But there are three requirements for solving this problem.  The first, as I've already said, is acknowledging that there is a problem.  The second is a sense of urgency.  We tried patience.  It doesn't work.  And the third is a recognition by those with power that racism is subtle and insidious.  It cloaks itself in rationality and good evidence and good intentions and a million and one reasons why this isn't your responsibility.  Simply by accepting those arguments, you advance, however unwittingly, the self-fulfilling prophecies they sustain and thus become part of the problem.

Abortion restrictions result in more abortions

Not that this was ever in any serious doubt, but now there is actual data published in The Lancet showing that abortion restrictions increase the number of abortions:

In 2015–19, there were 121.0 million unintended pregnancies annually (80% uncertainty interval [UI] 112.8–131.5), corresponding to a global rate of 64 unintended pregnancies (UI 60–70) per 1000 women aged 15–49 years. 61% (58–63) of unintended pregnancies ended in abortion (totalling 73.3 million abortions annually [66.7–82.0]), corresponding to a global abortion rate of 39 abortions (36–44) per 1000 women aged 15–49 years. Using World Bank income groups, we found an inverse relationship between unintended pregnancy and income, whereas abortion rates varied non-monotonically across groups. In countries where abortion was restricted, the proportion of unintended pregnancies ending in abortion had increased compared with the proportion for 1990–94, and the unintended pregnancy rates were higher than in countries where abortion was broadly legal.
Interpretation

Between 1990–94 and 2015–19, the global unintended pregnancy rate has declined, whereas the proportion of unintended pregnancies ending in abortion has increased. As a result, the global average abortion rate in 2015–19 was roughly equal to the estimates for 1990–94. Our findings suggest that people in high-income countries have better access to sexual and reproductive health care than those in low-income countries. Our findings indicate that individuals seek abortion even in settings where it is restricted. These findings emphasise [sic] the importance of ensuring access to the full spectrum of sexual and reproductive health services, including contraception and abortion care, and for additional investment towards equity in health-care services.

Of course this will not sway those who are opposed to abortions because they don't really care about abortions at all.  They care about punishing women for being sexually promiscuous, a goal which is well-served by making abortions illegal, and all those additional aborted babies be damned.

Game over for Hong Kong

The Washington Post reports:

Early Wednesday, under a heavy police presence and before any public announcement about the matter, officials inaugurated the Office for Safeguarding National Security of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region at a ceremony that took place behind water-filled barricades. They played the Chinese national anthem and raised the Chinese flag, although local media weren’t invited. When the ceremony was over, reporters were finally able to photograph the building’s front door.

The Metropark Hotel on the edge of the city’s Causeway Bay district will be the initial base for the new agency, staffed by Chinese security officials. It will be tasked with collecting intelligence and implementing a new law that sharply curtails political freedoms as Beijing takes greater control of the territory after anti-government protests last year. 

It’s the first time the Chinese government’s state security apparatus has been permitted to operate in Hong Kong, marking a milestone in officials’ efforts to dismantle the firewall that separated the city from the authoritarian mainland.

This is what the Metropark Hotel's web site looked like this morning:

 Just in case the type is too small to see:

This is what the death of Democracy looks like in the 21st century.  As T.S. Eliot presciently observed, it does not end with a bang, but with an under-construction notice on a web site.

Mark your calendars: I am debating Ken Hovind on July 9

I've recently taken up a new hobby of debating young-earth creationists on YouTube.  (It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it.)  I've done two of them so far [1][2], both on a creationist channel called Standing For Truth.  My third debate will be against Kent Hovind, one of the more prominent and, uh, outspoken members of the YEC community.  In case you haven't heard of him, here's a sample.  The debate will be this Thursday at 5:30PM Pacific time.  Come watch the sparks fly.

I Will Remember Ricky Ray Rector

I've always been very proud of the fact that I came out in support of gay marriage before it was cool.   I have been correspondingly chagrined at my failure to speak out sooner and more vociferously about the shameful and systemic mistreatment of people of color, and black people in particular, in the U.S.  For what it's worth, I hereby confess my sins, acknowledge my white privilege, and announce my advocacy for reparations.  No, I never owned slaves.  None of my ancestors ever owned slaves.  But there is no question that I have received preferential treatment because of the color of my skin.  Cops don't harass me.  Prospective employers don't look at me sideways.  I have shared in an inheritance of wealth that was built in no small measure on the backs of of the forced labor of black people that the descendants of those laborers have not shared.  My undeserved share of that inheritance is in and of itself a wrong that needs to be set right, notwithstanding that I had no direct hand in bringing it about.

There.  I said it.

Now, as the first step in my atonement, I would like to bring to your attention a name that should be remembered alongside that of George Floyd and Breona Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and Trayvon Martin and the dozens and thousands of other black people who have been killed because they were black.  That name is Ricky Ray Rector.  His name is conspicuously absent from this web site despite the fact that he was killed by a white man because he was black.  The reason his name is almost completely unknown is because the man who killed him was Bill Clinton, 42nd president of the United States, while he was governor of Arkansas and still a candidate for president.  Conservatives don't remember Ricky because they do not mourn his passing, and liberals don't remember him because the Clintons are as sacrosanct to them as Donald Trump is to conservatives.

Ironically, Donny and Billy have an awful lot in common.  Both are narcissists.  Both are rapists.  And, apparently, both are racists, or, at the very least, willing to play to a racist audience for political gain at the cost of innocent lives.  And, I must grudgingly concede, both are political geniuses for being somehow able to get black people to support them despite making a show of courting ant-black racist sentiment.

So as part of my penance I pledge to keep the memory of Ricky Ray Rector alive.  I will remember how he ordered pie for his last meal, and then didn't eat it because he wanted to save some of it for later.  I will remember how I supported Bill Clinton, the man who personally oversaw Ricky's execution despite the fact that Ricky was clearly not mentally competent because no one was gonna Willie-Horton him, God damn it.

I will remember these things.  I don't know if by remembering them I will sleep better or worse.  But I hope that by remembering them I will be able to look at myself in the mirror when the morning comes.