Jack

The post That was then, this is now — Pakistan edition appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Bridgerton wants to explore consent while it ignores its own glaring consent issue.

Bridgerton, Shonda Rimes’s first collaboration with Netflix, may be a sumptuous, scandal-laced frolic through Regency London. But like many Shondaland series, it has plenty of dark and disturbing moments, and the show’s first season leaves us with more questions than answers. Chief among them: Does the creative team realize how badly they handled the rape scene?

Romance novelist Julia Quinn wrote the novel series on which Bridgerton is based, starting with The Duke and I in 2000. The first season, written by Shondaland veteran Chris Van Dusen (Scandal, Grey’s Anatomy), follows The Duke and I fairly closely — including one scene that’s central to the plot but that has been called out repeatedly by romance readers over the years as a rape.

In the two decades since the book’s release, much of society has become more aware of what is and isn’t consensual sex, and the show deliberately made changes to the scene to make it less explicitly nonconsensual. That indicates to me that Van Dusen and his fellow creatives knew the problems with the scene they were adapting. But the version of this scene that ended up in the show is still nonconsensual, despite the tweaks. And although it’s framed as a serious violation of trust between consenting parties, it passes without any explicit acknowledgment on the show’s part that what just occurred was a deeply disturbing violation of consent.

Bridgerton is thematically concerned with the dynamics of informed consent, which makes it even stranger that this scene was left unaddressed; indeed, if there are any lasting repercussions for the victim of the assault or their dynamic with their rapist, we don’t actually see them.

Because it happens pretty quickly and the narrative moves on immediately from the specifics of the sexual encounter itself, I’m not sure everyone will judge this scene in the same way I do. But that’s why we should discuss it.

Our hero has a secret that sets the stage for everything

Bridgerton is a historical romance set during London’s Regency era, a period of whirling 19th-century ballrooms and high-society intrigues. Our story revolves around gorgeous debutante Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor) and the fake courtship she arranges during her debut on London’s “marriage mart,” the upper-class ritual of social functions that help eligible ladies and gentlemen make a match.

Despite coming from a powerful family and making a splash at her debut, Daphne is having trouble attracting suitors — so she bets (correctly) that faking a courtship with a very eligible duke will reignite the attention of other gentlemen. Her choice of bachelor: Simon, the hunky Duke of Hastings (Regé-Jean Page), a Black man whose family was recently elevated to the peerage. Simon is trying to avoid matrimonial plots because he’s sworn off marriage, due to his solemn vow never to father children in order to let his entire family line, title and all, die with him. It’s a promise he made in order to spite his abusive late father, who emotionally abused Simon all his life and cared more about his dukedom than anything else.

The relationship ruse is mutually beneficial for Daphne and Simon, as it allows him to avoid seriously participating in the marriage mart. But of course, in between bickering and pretending to be in love, the two fake lovebirds soon develop a very real romance. Through an unlucky turn of events involving epic misunderstandings, secret love trysts, and a duel — y’know, the usual — the storyline scoots Daphne and Simon into a hastily arranged marriage. This leads to lots and lots of sex scenes because they’re a hot couple who are hot for each other. But their newfound love also creates a whole new set of problems arising from Simon’s vow never to sire a family — a vow Daphne knows nothing about.

This subplot contributes to Bridgerton’s most interesting thematic idea, if one it ultimately squanders: the relationship between scandal, secrets, and informed consent. The plot revolves around Simon’s choice not to tell Daphne that he has vowed not to have children. Instead, he only tells her that he “can’t” have children, a clear difference from “won’t.” This deception places her in a doubly vulnerable position: Daphne’s in the dark about sex generally, as a woman who’s had no sexual education, and since she’s getting most of her tutelage from him directly, she has no way of knowing that he’s hiding things from her about his sexual health and practices.

Simon’s duplicity is, to some extent, unwitting — he doesn’t intend to trap Daphne into marriage, but when events conspire to make marriage a necessity, he goes along with it, spinning a story that implies his inability to father children rather than tell her the truth. The narrative treats the difference between “can’t” and “won’t” as a crucial distinction, one that fills Daphne with horror and bitterness when she realizes it. It’s an interesting turn because Bridgerton frames Simon’s deceptive phrasing as deliberate, along with his choice to continue lying to her by omission. This deception placed Daphne in the position of being unable to give informed consent, either to sex or to their entire relationship.

The problem is that she only figures this out by raping him.

Let me back up. (Warning: This is about to get pretty graphic and gross.)

The rape scene is brief and disturbing, but it’s not treated as a rape

Daphne knows nothing about sex when she gets married. Her mother, too embarrassed to give her the specifics, sends her off to her marriage bed completely unprepared. Meanwhile, instead of telling his new wife what’s up, Simon enjoys ravenous sex with Daphne but adopts the ol’ tried-and-true contraceptive method of pulling out every time. Eventually, Daphne figures out that there’s some connection between Simon never completing the act and his insistence that he can’t have children. Determined to figure out whether he’s capable of it, she takes control during sex and positions herself on top of him so he can’t pull out.

When he realizes his predicament right before orgasm, Simon looks alarmed and tries to stop — he cries out twice for Daphne to wait — but it’s too late. Once she’s achieved her goal, she stops, and he processes what just happened in shock.

The strangest thing about this moment is that I’m not sure the show’s writers consider this scene to be a rape scene. Daphne is immediately furious with Simon for lying to her, and the show then focuses on her betrayal and rage; she even has a semantic speech about the difference between “won’t” and “can’t.” It’s clearly intended to spell out the intricacies of informed consent, but none of Simon’s duplicity justifies the way Daphne pulls his secret — and, to be clear, his semen — out of him. One bad moment of uninformed consent does not justify a moment of nonconsensual sex. And depriving Simon of his consent to both sex and fatherhood, even at the moment of climax, is still rape.

If the show had really explored the idea that Simon’s lie led to another similar violation of consent, that could have resulted in some really interesting narrative choices involving the two of them dealing with the fallout of both their betrayals and learning to communicate more clearly and carefully and sensitively.

But the show doesn’t dwell on Daphne’s choices, or on any long-term aftermath from that moment. The incident doesn’t seem to impact Simon’s ability to trust Daphne in bed. Instead, the show turns toward Daphne’s distrust of him for lying to her, dwelling on Simon’s need to win her forgiveness and give up his vow for the sake of their happiness.

I should note here that an even more nonconsensual version of this scene also occurs in the novel. Quinn clearly wrote the scenario as a violation: “Daphne had aroused him in his sleep, taken advantage of him while he was still slightly intoxicated, and held him to her while he poured his seed into her.”

Since the book was written, countless romance writers and readers have inserted productive commentaries on the role of rape (and tropes of dubious consent like “forced seduction”) in romance fiction. But according to Quinn herself in a reported recent exchange with romance vlogger BooksandKrys, the consent issues in that scene flew under the radar at the time The Duke and I was published. “Yes, it was shocking, but no one seemed to feel that Daphne had done anything morally wrong,” she told BooksandKrys. “It was only as years passed and we gained new understanding of ‘consent’ that people started to question her actions.”

Quinn offered some perspective on the dynamics of rape as early as 2003; speaking then to Time, she commented, “I can’t imagine a romance novel published today where the hero rapes the heroine and she falls in love with him ... I can’t think of anything in my books that any feminist would find objectionable. ... And I consider myself a feminist.”

Yet by 2010, the scene was being discussed among readers as an example of sexual assault and lack of consent. By 2015, readers were dissecting the scene to point out its disturbing dynamics.

That the show’s creatives included this scene while making it less broadly, but still explicitly, nonconsensual, suggests they knew it needed fixing. But it seems like they failed to see how badly they ultimately handled it. Without signaling more effectively that Daphne’s choice was just as violating for Simon as his secrecy was for Daphne, Bridgerton undermines its entire experiment in exploring the boundaries of consent.

Through this moment, the show also undermines its central relationship, causing us to question the whole foundation of Daphne and Simon’s affection for each other. Because Bridgerton doesn’t make an effort to depict Daphne’s rape of Simon as a huge issue that must be addressed for them to heal their marriage, we don’t really have much way of understanding whether their mutual trust is really fully repaired in the end. And we’re given no assurance that she won’t violate his trust the next time she decides he might be lying to her.

It’s also frankly a giant gaslight; even as I write this, I’m wondering if maybe I’m wrong and that the scene wasn’t rape — or if, perhaps, maybe this is the one time in history where somebody gets raped and it’s just not that big a deal, so it’s just kinda okay that the show glosses over it and moves on and Simon seems totally fine afterward.

Obviously, these are horrible takeaways for a show to leave us with. The dynamics of consent are complex and often frustrating and confusing, but one thing is almost universally certain: Rape is a big deal, and it often hugely impacts and alters both the rape survivor and the rapist. For Bridgerton to ineffectively convey that Daphne raped Simon and then treat it like it was a minor side note to the much bigger issue of him lying to her makes it more difficult for audiences watching it to understand what consent looks like.

The fact that the rape victim here is both male and a person of color makes it even more egregious that the show is glossing over the incident. Men are often considered silent victims of sexual assault, and Black men in particular are often made scapegoats for sexual violence, which further erases the status of Black male victims of sexual assault. In this context, the show’s emphasis on Simon as the instigator of Daphne’s choice basically paints him as being responsible for his own rape. This aligns with the broader cultural gaslighting of Black men and the shifting of blame away from the white men and women who enact violence upon them.

Bridgerton has drawn its fair share of rave reviews as, among other things, “delightful trash.” As a huge, lifelong lover of the sorts of romance stories Bridgerton is adapting, what I hate most about this summation is that it implies that the ingredients of this story are a part of the inherent nature of the raunchy, racy historical romance. Not only is that a condescending attitude toward a genre that is frequently very literary and very serious, but it’s flatly wrong: Rape, especially unacknowledged rape, is by no means a feature of historical romance writing, nor was it going unaddressed and undebated back when Quinn wrote this story 20 years ago. Countless romance writers have done better than this. Bridgerton could and should have followed their example.

Most of the countries in East Asia have very low rates of Covid relative to the West. (BTW, That’s also true of Australia and NZ.) Some people have suggested that there is some sort of natural immunity in East Asia, and that the low Covid rates do not reflect differences in behavior.

I wouldn’t entirely rule out that hypothesis, but unless I’m missing something this seems to suggest that behavior is a factor, especially mask wearing:

Japan has suffered just 18 deaths per million people, a higher rate than in China, but by far the lowest in the g7, a club of big, industrialised democracies. (Germany comes in second, at 239.) Most strikingly, Japan has achieved this success without strict lockdowns or mass testing—the main weapons in the battle against covid-19 elsewhere. . . .

As early as March, Japanese officials began warning citizens to avoid the san-mitsu or “3cs”: closed spaces, crowded places and close-contact settings. The phrase was blasted across traditional and social media. Surveys conducted in the spring found that a big majority were avoiding 3c settings. . . .

While Americans argued over whether face coverings were an assault on personal freedom, Japanese lined up outside Uniqlo for the release of its new line of masks. During the first ten weeks of flu season this autumn, Japan saw just 148 cases of common influenza, or less than 1% of the five-year average for the same period (17,000).

Japan does have much less obesity, but it’s also a society with more elderly people than the West. Thus demographics alone cannot explain such an enormous difference in fatality rates.

But it’s the flu data that really caught my eye. Suppose there were some sort of natural immunity to Covid in Japan, how would that explain the extremely low levels of flu? Doesn’t it seem more likely that behavioral changes in Japan have reduced the flu season to only 1% of the usual level?

On the other hand, the flu is less contagious than Covid and flu rates are down sharply even in countries with high Covid rates. Thus it seems like a level of social distancing that is insufficient to stop Covid often is sufficient to stop a flu outbreak.

Another piece of evidence that behavior is important comes from the fact that Wuhan was hammered by Covid and the rest of China got off quite lightly.

To conclude, we know that social distancing stops the flu. The question remains as to whether it can stop Covid.

PS. Don’t miss the Christmas star (Jupiter/Saturn conjunction) tonight—the best in 800 years—even last night it looked very impressive. SW sky—an hour after sunset.

Update: This caught my eye:

True to form, on Friday a pro-Trump lawyer named L. Lin Wood, who spearheaded attempts to overturn Georgia’s president election results, lodged a new suit on similar lines, signing off his complaint that it he made his claims under “plenty of perjury,” rather penalty of perjury.

“I declare and verify under plenty of perjury that the facts contained in the foregoing Verified Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief are true and correct,” Mr Wood, an accomplished libel attorney with a large conservative following online, wrote in his complaint.

For once I agree; Mr. Wood engaged in plenty of perjury.

Update: On second thought, perhaps I better make it clear that I’m just joking here.

Now that 2020 is almost squarely in the rearview mirror, we can all take a deep breath and ask ourselves what the heck just happened.

This was a year unlike any other, and it resulted in a few surprising travel trends that will probably stay with us long after the pandemic has officially ended.

After sheltering in place, many travelers took to the great outdoors to explore national and state parks, beaches and other natural landscapes. Others piled into the car (or tried out RV life for the first time) for close-to-home getaways and classic road trips. Many people turned to camping and glamping, or opted for vacation rentals instead of hotels.

But there’s a lot more we can learn about how travelers behaved during this most unusual year, according to hotel, flight and car rental data from Priceline.

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It was the year of spontaneity

Despite all the hurdles (getting COVID-19 tests, researching travel requirements, quarantines and more) travelers largely turned to last-minute getaways. More than 76% of flights were booked within seven days of departure this year according to Priceline and, on average, travelers booked hotels six or seven days before arrival.

Even rental cars are being booked at the last minute. Priceline saw a significant leap in same-day and prior-day reservations in 2020, compared to the year before.

Travelers stayed closer to home

The average distance of round-trip flights decreased by 20% this year. It’s possible to infer the same thing for travelers who decided to drive this year.

The most popular one-way car rental itineraries between Jan. 1, 2020, and Dec. 4, 2020, were trips from Orlando to Tampa and from Miami to Fort Lauderdale, followed by drives from Los Angeles to San Francisco and back. Only six of the top 20 itineraries were from one state to the next, and all of the itineraries were under six hours, with most closer to three or four hours.

Related: 10 ways coronavirus could forever change the future of travel

Travelers flocked to the coasts

Rental car, flight and hotel booking data from Priceline suggests travelers prioritized coastal, warm-weather destinations this year. One-way rental car itineraries were dominated by trips along the West Coast and Southeast.

The top four most popular round-trip flight routes saw travelers leaving the cities (New York and Dallas) and flying to Orlando and Los Angeles. And travelers searching for hotels are largely dreaming of warm getaways, including Orlando, Miami, Los Angeles and San Diego, among others.

But Sin City still took the top spot

Of course, no matter how crazy the world gets, some things never change. Despite all the changes — the cancellation of shows and pool parties, the closure of self-service buffets — Las Vegas took the top spot for the most popular destination for hotel bookings this year. It’s the second year in the row Sin City has claimed the No. 1 spot.

And even people who aren’t traveling to Las Vegas are dreaming of their next trip. Las Vegas was also the most-searched destination for hotels this year, followed by Orlando and Miami.

Cars overtook airplanes

We all know road trips dominated the travel industry this year, and even wintry weather can’t slow down the trend. A holiday travel report from Travelocity said 80% of respondents would drive for the November and December holidays, while only one in five would fly.

Data from Priceline underscores the shift. Americans flew about 4 billion miles less this year than they did in 2019.

Bottom line

It will surprise absolutely no one to hear that travel took a big hit this year. But as travelers have sought ways to cope with the new restrictions and challenges of 2020, they’ve also discovered new ways to satisfy their wanderlust.

What Priceline’s data may show us, above all, is that travelers were quick to adapt to the changes by exploring their own state and staying close to home, trading their boarding passes for driver’s licenses and continuing to dream about travel’s comeback in the months and years to come.

Feature photo by Jacobs Stock Photography Ltd / Getty Images

The post China fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Manitoba’s conservative leader is about as far from Trump as it is possible to be, without entirely leaving the human race. Check out the 1 1/2 minute video at this link:

How does Canada end up with people like Brian Pallister while we end up with Donald Trump and Lindsey Graham?

BTW, at a time when hospital workers in many parts of the country are overwhelmed with work, Trump retweets a nutty conspiracy theory that the hospitals are not actually flooded with Covid patients. How sick does a person have to be to do something like that?

America’s GOP seems to favor “freedom” and “liberty” as long as you use that freedom to do things that the GOP approves of. Otherwise you can rot in jail for all they care:

The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act (MORE Act), made it through the House by a 228 to 164 vote. Nearly every Democrat supported the measure, while just five Republicans voted for it. Six Democrats voted against the bill.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.), would eliminate conflict between state and federal law and allow states to set their own marijuana policies.

States rights? Why that’s positively un-American!

Trumpistas like to imagine that Trump represents “the people” against “the elites”. Actually, among 21st century candidates only McCain was less able to get “the people” to vote for him, and McCain would have easily surpassed Trump’s vote share if he’d been running against Hillary rather than Obama:

Not to mention that McCain had to run in 2008, when Iraq and the Great Recession made the GOP highly unpopular.

Biden’s 51.3% is the most by a challenger since 1932, when FDR won by a landslide over Hoover. And Biden did something even FDR failed to do in 1932, he won Pennsylvania.

On the lighter side, watch this 2 minute video of Trump’s crack legal team in action. These days, it’s hard to tell reality from SNL.

I got my Ph.D. in economics from Princeton in 1997.  Twenty-three years after graduation, I remain a professor at a mid-ranked school.  The odds that I’ll ever get a job at a top-20 department look awfully low.  How do I feel about this situation?

The socially approved response, at least within social science, is to feel and express deep admiration for the plainly superior researchers at top schools.  I’m supposed to defer to their judgment on not only (a) which research methods are kosher, but also (b) what research topics are worthwhile.  If I apply myself, perhaps I can usefully, if humbly, extend their work.

The more common responses of lower-status academics, of course, are jealousy and laziness.  Jealousy, because faculty at higher-ranked schools so out-shine the rest of us.  Laziness, because deep-down faculty at lower-ranked schools know they lack the skills to do real research.  Most aren’t even good enough to usefully, if humbly, extend the work of their betters.

Call it sour grapes, but I don’t respond to my situation in any of these ways.  With rare exceptions, I don’t admire researchers at top schools – or try to humbly build on their work.  At the same time, I’m not lazy.  And in all sincerity, I am not jealous.

Why not?  To be blunt, I deny the value of almost all of the social science research going on at top schools.  My reaction to 95% of the articles published in top economics journals isn’t so much “That’s wrong!” as “So what?”  I recognize that getting accepted by these journals requires enormous intelligence, training, and effort.  Unless you believe in the Labor Theory of Value, however, the cost of creating top publications implies nothing about the value of creating top publications.  And in my considered judgment, the value of top publications is low.  When I was in grad school, economists won big for pure – and utterly irrelevant – mathematical theory.  These days, economists win big for running bullet-proof randomized controlled trials on trivial topics.  Yes, there are exceptions.  Phil Tetlock, Ed Glaeser, Lant Pritchett, and Richard Thaler leap to mind.  Yet the rule remains: The intellectual value of top publications is low.

Does anything better exist?  Definitely.  What is it?  The kind of research I do, of course.  Plenty of scholars do what I consider “my kind of work,” but let’s focus on me.  False modesty aside, I judge my work better than most of the work done by researchers at top schools.  Indeed, I judge my work to be vastly superior.  That’s why I do it.

How so?  At minimum, books like The Myth of the Rational Voter and The Case Against Education attempt to answer social questions of great significance.  Why do democracies choose bad polices?  Why is there a gulf between learning and earning?  I say struggling with a great question is better than definitively answering a trivial one.  And since I predictably think my books actually deliver high-quality answers to these great questions, my sense of self-satisfaction with my intellectual output is through the roof.

In fact, I’d go further.  Call me a megalomaniac, but in my heart of hearts I deem dozens of my blog posts to be more valuable intellectual contributions than the typical article published in top social science journals.  Consider my “The Public Goods Model vs. Social Desirability Bias.” This wee article shows that the so-called tell-tale sign of public goods – people collectively voting for goods they don’t individually purchase – could just as easily reflect Social Desirability Bias.  A simple point?  Yes.  But I don’t think I’ve ever heard another economist clearly acknowledge this observational equivalence.  So what?  This simple point calls into question the efficiency of many trillions of dollars of government spending all around the world.  Few economists at top schools have written anything to rival this solitary blog post.

You could retort, “OK, then why aren’t you seething with jealousy?”  Simple: I’m not jealous of researchers at top schools because I would hate to trade places with most of them.  I would rather do what I do at George Mason than do what Harvard researchers do at Harvard.  Indeed, it’s not even close.  Yes, I would prefer a world where Harvard placed supreme value on my kind of work.  After all, I am a chronic daydreamer.  Yet long ago, I hedonically adapted to society’s wretched priorities.  Instead of feeling mad at the world, I rejoice that I get paid to do the work that means the world to me.

P.S. If you have tenure at a top school, none of my negativity should depress you.  Today is the first day of the rest of your career.  Why not chuck conventional standards and start doing research that really matters to you and the world?  If you want to chat about how to get started, just email me.

(36 COMMENTS)

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The journalist Matthew Yglesias, a co-founder of Vox, announced today that he is leaving that publication for the paid-newsletter platform Substack, so that he can enjoy more editorial independence.

The move may prove a good fit for Yglesias, who began his career as a highly successful independent blogger before blogging at The Atlantic and then elsewhere. But his absence as a staffer (a Vox spokesperson noted that he will continue to host a podcast, The Weeds) will make the publication he co-founded less ideologically diverse at a moment when negative polarization makes that attribute important to the country.

Like Andrew Sullivan, who joined Substack after parting ways with New York magazine, and Glenn Greenwald, who joined Substack after resigning from The Intercept, which he co-founded, Yglesias felt that he could no longer speak his mind without riling his colleagues. His managers wanted him to maintain a “restrained, institutional, statesmanlike voice,” he told me in a phone interview, in part because he was a co-founder of Vox. But as a relative moderate at the publication, he felt at times that it was important to challenge what he called the “dominant sensibility” in the “young-college-graduate bubble” that now sets the tone at many digital-media organizations.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The perils of ‘with us or against us’]

“There was an inherent tension between my status as a co-founder of the site and my desire to be a fiercely independent and at times contentious voice,” he wrote in his first post on Substack, adding on Twitter, “I’m looking forward to really telling everyone what’s on my mind to an even greater extent than I do now.”

In our interview, Yglesias explained why pushing back against the “dominant sensibility” in digital journalism is important to him. He said he believes that certain voguish positions are substantively wrong—for instance, abolishing or defunding police—and that such arguments, as well as rhetorical fights over terms like Latinx, alienate many people from progressive politics and the Democratic Party.

“There’s been endless talk since the election about House Democrats being mad at the ‘Squad,’ and others saying, ‘What do you want, for activists to just not exist? For there to be no left-wing members of Congress?’” Yglesias told me. “But there’s a dynamic where there’s media people who really elevated the profile of [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and a couple of other members way above their actual numerical standing.”

Many outlets, he argued, are missing something important. “The people making the media are young college graduates in big cities, and that kind of politics makes a lot of sense to them,” he said. “And we keep seeing that older people, and working-class people of all races and ethnicities, just don’t share that entire worldview. It’s important to me to be in a position to step outside that dynamic … That was challenging as someone who was a founder of a media outlet but not a manager of it.”

One trend that exacerbated that challenge: colleagues in media treating the expression of allegedly problematic ideas as if they were a human-resources issue. Earlier this year, for instance, after Yglesias signed a group letter published in Harper’s magazine objecting to cancel culture, one of his colleagues, Emily VanDerWerff, told Vox editors that his signature made her feel “less safe at Vox.”

Yglesias had been personally kind and supportive of her work, she wrote, but as a trans woman, she felt the letter should not have been signed by anyone at Vox, because she believed that it contained “many dog whistles toward anti-trans positions,” and that several of its signatories are anti-trans. The letter’s authors reject those characterizations.

I asked Yglesias if that matter in any way motivated his departure. “Something we’ve seen in a lot of organizations is increasing sensitivity about language and what people say,” he told me. “It’s a damaging trend in the media in particular because it is an industry that’s about ideas, and if you treat disagreement as a source of harm or personal safety, then it’s very challenging to do good work.”

The issue, Yglesias believes, is not limited to Vox. “We saw that in the way the New York Times people characterized their opposition to Tom Cotton’s op-ed,” he said, and “we saw it in what Emily VanDerWerff wrote about me––and Vox to its credit has not [been] managed in that way exactly, but it is definitely the mentality of a lot of people working in journalism today, and it makes me feel like it’s a good time to have an independent platform.’

[Read: A deeply provincial view of free speech]

The New York Times’ Opinion editor, James Bennet (a former editor in chief of The Atlantic), was forced out over the publication of the Cotton op-ed. The Times Opinion staffer Bari Weiss left the newspaper soon afterward, alleging in her resignation letter that “if a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome.” The two had been charged, in part, with offering Times readers a greater diversity of opinions. Whether the Opinion section will still carry out that mission remains uncertain.

Several years ago, I wrote about an experiment that the Harvard social scientist Cass Sunstein conducted in two different communities in Colorado: left-leaning Boulder and right-leaning Colorado Springs. Residents in each community were gathered into small groups to discuss their views on three controversial topics: climate change, same-sex marriage, and affirmative action. Afterward, participants were asked to report on the opinions of their discussion group as well as their own views on the subjects. In both communities, gathering into groups composed of mostly like-minded people to discuss controversial subjects made individuals more settled and extreme in their views.

“Liberals, in Boulder, became distinctly more liberal on all three issues. Conservatives, in Colorado Springs, become distinctly more conservative on all three issues,” Sunstein wrote of his experiment. “Deliberation much decreased diversity among liberals; it also much decreased diversity among conservatives. After deliberation, members of nearly all groups showed, in their post-deliberation statements, far more uniformity than they did before deliberation.”

Compelling evidence points to a big cost associated with ideological bubbles, I argued: They make us more confident that we know everything, more set and extreme in our views, more prone to groupthink, more vulnerable to fallacies, and less circumspect.

For that reason, ideological outliers within an organization are valuable, especially in journalism. Early in my career, I covered the trend toward epistemic closure in conservative media, including talk radio, warning that it would have dire consequences. Even so, I didn’t imagine the role that epistemic closure would play in fueling the ascent of a president like Donald Trump or the alarmingly widespread acceptance of conspiracy theories like QAnon.

[From the June 2020 issue: The prophecies of Q]

The New York Times, New York, The Intercept, Vox, Slate, The New Republic, and other outlets are today less ideologically diverse in their staff and less tolerant of contentious challenges to the dominant viewpoint of college-educated progressives than they have been in the recent past. I fear that in the short term, Americans will encounter less rigorous and more polarizing journalism. In the long term, a dearth of ideological diversity risks consequences we cannot fully anticipate.

Substack seems poised to grow because it offers some writers independence and financial benefits. It will arguably function as a corrective against growing intolerance of heterodoxy, even as it accelerates a trend toward ideological outliers parting ways with traditional publications, and makes those publications more monolithic. Mainstream media organizations should work to maintain ideological diversity during this shift, even if that causes tensions among the staff members least tolerant of ideas they don’t share.

The post How are things in North Jutland these days? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Longtime Jeopardy host Alex Trebek has died at the age of 80. Trebek had been suffering from pancreatic cancer since early 2019 but continued to host the show during his treatment.

The official Jeopardy Twitter account confirmed the news, saying Trebek passed away at his home early this morning with family and friends by his side.

Trebek had hosted Jeopardy since 1984, and the show has often been ranked as one of the best game shows of all time. Though not the original host of the show, he was, by far, its longest-serving host.

Continue Reading at GameSpot

Ballot initiatives are a mixed blessing. People can vote for some really stupid things, and people can reject important reforms. But they're also an important democratic tool, a way citizens can cut through the influence peddling that dominates state capitols across the country. When lawmakers serve entrenched interests, particularly in states where one party dominates, a ballot initiative is a way to reverse their bad conduct.

We wouldn't have the current trend toward drug legalization without ballot initiatives. We'd have much fewer criminal justice reforms. We probably wouldn't have legally recognized gay marriages.

On Tuesday night, in several states, voters used ballot initiatives and referendums to reject the best-laid plans of their political elite. And good for them! Here are some of the big highlights:

Illinois Rejects Tax Hike

Illinois' Democratic lawmakers, with the full support and encouragement of Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, voted in 2019 to change its income tax system from a flat tax of 4.95 percent to a graduated tax rate. Under the new system, the state's poorer citizens would pay slightly less (very slightly—often less than $100 a year), while those with annual incomes of more than $250,000 would see dramatic increases, up to a nearly 8 percent marginal rate.

But Illinois couldn't implement the change without voter support, because the flat tax is written into the state's constitution. So Pritzker, party leaders, and state labor unions pushed hard for public support, calling this a "Fair Tax," spending millions of dollars to promote it, and telling citizens this change was key to fixing the state's massive debt and budget deficit problems.

On Tuesday, Illinois voters flatly rejected the change. With 98 percent of Illinois votes counted, 55 percent of voters have said no. The flat tax is going to stay.

Illinois citizens are already very highly taxed, and no doubt that contributed to the proposal's failure. But there was also the extremely deceptive way Pritzker was promoting the vote. Illinois voters weren't actually voting on whether to implement the governor's "Fair Tax." They were voting on whether to give lawmakers the authority to implement a graduated tax, period. The new rates Pritzker touted were not set in stone; future legislators would be free to jack those rates up further. Whatever little savings the average taxpayer might get in the short term could very quickly be wiped out.

Pritzker's group, Vote Yes for Fairness, was defiant about the loss, blaming the state's problems (overspending and a failure to properly fund pension systems) on the rich. The group's chairman, Quentin Fulks, put out a statement pretty much yelling at the voters:

Illinois is in a massive budget crisis due to years of a tax system that has protected millionaires and billionaires at the expense of our working families, a crisis that was only made worse by the Coronavirus pandemic. Now lawmakers must address a multi-billion-dollar budget gap without the ability to ask the wealthy to pay their fair share. Fair Tax opponents must answer for whatever comes next.

In fact, Chicago's richest have been fleeing the state and moving elsewhere.

Arizona and Mississippi Embrace Marijuana

In one sense, every time drugs are decriminalized or legalized via ballot initiative the voters are defying their elected officials. After all, legislators could actually do it themselves. Heck, New Jersey lawmakers put the decision to legalize recreational marijuana to the voters via a referendum Tuesday because they couldn't get their act together to pass a statute.

But Mississippi's vote on medical marijuana and Arizona's vote on recreational marijuana show some additional defiance.

In Mississippi, supporters of medical marijuana gathered more than 214,000 signatures to get their initiative on the ballot. Mississippi has an indirect path for ballot initiatives that sends them to the state legislature before being put on the ballot. Lawmakers can choose to adopt or reject the measure at that point, but this doesn't stop it from appearing on the ballot. In Mississippi, there's also a third option: Lawmakers can propose an alternative version of the measure and put that before voters as well.

That's exactly what happened in Mississippi. The ballot measure that circulated legalized medical marijuana for a list of debilitating medical conditions, such as Parkinson's disease, Crohn's disease, and HIV. This version was on the ballot as Initiative 65. The "alternative" put on the ballot by the legislature allowed medical marijuana use only by people with terminal conditions.

Mississippi voters roundly rejected lawmakers' proposed alternative. With 98 percent of the vote counted, voters overwhelmingly supported the broader version that allowed wider medical marijuana use, and it wasn't even close. Initiative 65 pulled in 74 percent of the vote.

Republican Mississippi governor Tate Reeves complained on Twitter in October that he is opposed to "efforts to make marijuana mainstream." The reality is that marijuana already is mainstream.

In Arizona, voters rejected legalization in 2016, and so the measure's success in 2020 reflects the shifting attitudes toward marijuana use. Especially since voters passed it in defiance of Gov. Doug Ducey and nearly every other Republican officerholder with any name recognition in the state. Its victory is a wholesale rejection of state leaders' paternalistic, prohibitionist attitude toward marijuana use.

Washington Voters Reject a Plastic Bag Tax

Earlier in the year, state legislators in Washington passed a ban on single-use plastic bags that would start on January 2021. The bill, S.B. 5323 also implements a "pass-through charge" on paper and reusable plastic bags that the stores provide customers, which the stores themselves would keep.

Washington state law requires that any law that raises taxes or implements new fees be sent to the voters as a nonbinding advisory question. And voters firmly rejected the state's plan, with a full 60 percent supporting S.B. 5323's repeal.

Since this is just an advisory vote, lawmakers are unfortunately under no obligation to repeal the bill. Washington voters regularly call for the repeal of tax increases, and their objections do not appear to matter much.

In California, Ballot Initiatives Replace Republican Opposition

In several states, a single party controls both the governor's office and the legislature. In California, control is so very firmly in the hands of the Democratic Party, thanks to a legislative supermajority, that it's pretty much the veto-wielding Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom's decision which bills become laws.

This week's election results show how, as unpredictable they may be, ballot initiatives can serve as an important check on such power. California voters rejected several policies that are strongly supported by Democratic leaders.

The biggest blow: Proposition 22 cut the legs out from A.B. 5, which all but eviscerated the freelancers' ability to work for themselves, requiring companies to employ private contractors and pay them a host of benefits. The purpose of A.B. 5 was to attack companies like Uber and Lyft and destroy the gig economy in the state, all in the service of union jobs. The legislation was so badly designed that it was hitting freelance writers, musicians, Realtors, language translators, and other independent workers. Lawmakers weakened A.B. 5, but kept the assault on rideshare and delivery drivers. So Uber, Lyft, and the like forced the matter onto the ballot as Proposition 22, asking voters to decide whether these drivers could remain freelancers.

In defiance of, well, the entire Democratic power structure (including former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Kamala Harris, and the technically independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders), voters in California supported Uber, Lyft, and their drivers. With all the ballots counted, Prop. 22 passed with 58 percent of the vote. Many of these same voters overwhelmingly supported Biden and Harris in the election, but they see the importance of letting people decide if they want to be freelance workers.

Another big hit against the California Democratic establishment was the failure of Proposition 16, which would have restored racial preferences in government institutions and college admissions. It had the support of the entire Democratic Party power structure in the state, but 56 percent voted no.

Again, that's good. A look at the current demographic make-up at California colleges shows that, even when affirmative action was prohibited, colleges have been doing a better job of improving diversity at college campuses. They are no longer overwhelmingly white, and the end result of Prop. 16 would have likely pit different minority groups against each other (and especially against Asian-American students).

Though it hasn't been called yet, Proposition 15, which would update the state constitution so that the state could increase taxes on commercial and industrial properties, is losing. Prop. 15 would undercut the tax assessment limits put into place in 1978 by Proposition 13. Reversing or ending Prop. 13 has long been a goal for Democrats, and Prop. 15 was heavily supported by the party (again, including Biden, Harris, and Sanders) and a host of unions and activist groups. But where the vote stands now, 51 percent are opposed to the change. California voters, like Illinois voters, can only take so much taxation.

Finally we have the somewhat more complex failure of Proposition 25, which would have ended the use of cash bail, turned to risk assessment systems, and released low-risk defendants without money demands while those deemed dangerous or flight risks are held in pretrial detention. Reducing the dependence on cash bail is a goal of criminal justice reformers. Demands of cash bail hit poorer defendants harder, often forcing them to accept bad plea deals and get harsher punishments. It often ends up punishing low-level offenders before they're even convicted.

California lawmakers passed S.B. 10 in 2018 to eliminate cash bail, but the bail bond industry fought back and forced it onto a ballot referendum as Prop. 25. About 55 percent voted against it.

While it's easy to imagine the bail bond industry using fearmongering campaigns about out-of-control crime to fight the reforms (as they have elsewhere), the reality of S.B. 10 and Prop. 25 is a lot more complicated. Civil rights and criminal justice reform groups were part of the process of crafting S.B. 10, but at the last minute the legislation was changed to give judges more leeway and control over deciding when a defendant could be held—without any bail and therefore without any way to be free at all. This caused great concern that as implemented, S.B. 10 could actually result in more people being stuck in pretrial detention, not less.

So civil liberties groups turned their backs on S.B. 10 and ultimately Prop. 25. The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California ended up on the same side as the American Bail Coalition. All that was mostly left to support Prop. 25 was, again, the Democratic Party power structure. That wasn't enough.

Election Day is tomorrow, but the 2020 election has already begun in earnest, with more than 93 million votes cast, according to the U.S. Elections Project.

As such, companies across the board have begun offering voting day specials to help motivate as many people as possible to let their voices be heard.

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Some companies have been offering deals and other perks to would-be voters for a few weeks now, given that early voting has been underway in many states for some time, while others are offering a tighter window in which people can take advantage.

We’re likely to see more deals pop up as we draw ever closer to Election Day tomorrow. We’ll be updating this post as more relevant deals come along, but for now, let’s take a look at a few of the best offers we’re currently seeing.

Companies offering voting day deals

Hertz

Car-rental giant Hertz is offering the “Drive the Vote” promo in order to help people get to the polls, no matter the location they need to get to. You can get one free day when you pick up your car on either Nov. 2 or 3 and complete at least a two-day rental from participating neighborhood locations. Pulling off an election of this scale amid the enduring COVID-19 pandemic is no easy feat, and Hertz wants people to feel as safe as they possibly can while participating in the democratic process.

When reserving, be sure to use the code 210350.

Lyft

In 2018, ride-hailing platform Lyft began its “Ride to Vote” initiative, which is aimed at providing access to affordable transportation to the polls. It’s expanded the offering in 2020, and will offer 50% off one ride up to $10 to any polling location or dropbox when you use the code 2020VOTE. Now, this offer extends to Lyft’s network of bikes and scooters in cities around the country.

The code is valid for one ride only on Nov. 3 between the hours of 4 a.m. and 11 p.m. local time, and does not apply to Lyft Lux rides.

Uber

There are a few aspects to Uber‘s Get Out the Vote initiative in 2020. Most notably, the company’s food-delivery arm, Uber Eats has partnered with Pizza to the Polls to deliver free food via a fleet of over 180 food trucks to polling places in 25 cities across the country between Oct. 24 and Nov. 3. Also, Uber’s offering 50% off round-trip rides to and from the polls (up to $7 each way or $14 round-trip), which also applies to its fleet of bikes and scooters. Plus, the Uber app has a new feature that will help users find their correct polling place.

The discount is valid from 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time on Nov. 3 to 3 a.m. Pacific Time on Nov. 4 and is eligible for all riding options except for Taxi and Transit. Do note you’ll need to search for your polling place in the app to get the discount.

Local bike-sharing

Several bike-sharing companies are participating in “Roll to the Polls”  via The North American Bikeshare Association (NABSA), and offering free or reduced-cost transportation to voters. Here’s the list:

• Bird
• Blue Systems
• Boulder B-cycle
• Chattanooga Bicycle Transit System
• Explore Bike Share
• Fort Worth Bike Sharing
• Gotcha
• Heartland Bike Share
• Metro Bike Share
• MobilityData
• MoGo Detroit
• Movatic
• PikeRide Colorado Springs
• Populus
• Ride Report
• Shift Transit
• Tugo Bike Share

Go to RolltothePolls.com to find the nearest operator.

Local transit

Check with your local transit agency for free rides to the polls. Cities like Los Angeles and Indianapolis are offering free rides on Election Day. The Southern California transit agency L.A. Metro, for example, is offering free service on rail and bus lines through Nov. 3.

Free food

Be sure to check out hotels near you as some are offering discounts for voters on stays or on food and wine.

Election Day is also National Sandwich Day and lots of chains are offering deals or freebies so check your local franchises. If you are a poll worker even more free stuff is available to you at chains like Chopt and Shake Shack. Another example? Chobani and Seamless are giving 1,000 New York City poll workers $40 off their Seamless orders. Check out Perksforpollworkers.com.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CGsMwbbA5q2/?utm_source=ig_embed

Boston Market

Boston Market is giving away free sliders on election night from 9 p.m. to close.

Chili’s

Chili’s will have $5 “Presidente Margaritas” through Nov. 3 and is running a contest.

DoorDash

Use promo code “VOTE” for free delivery on orders over $15 on Election Day. For those with zero delivery fees already, you can use the code DPVOTE for 10% off.

Krispy Kreme

Get a free glazed donut and an “I voted” sticker on Election Day.

McDonald’s

Beginning on Election Day McDonald’s is giving out new pastry items with a purchase of a hot beverage through the app.

Wendy’s

Wendy’s is giving away its new chicken sandwich with any purchase through its app now through Nov. 8.

White Castle 

Get $4 off orders of $20 or more or $5 off orders of $30 or more on Tuesday through Grubhub, Uber Eats and Postmates. Note that White Castle is closing all locations from 7 – 11 a.m. so employees can vote.

Bottom line

We’re just one day away from Election Day 2020, and with turnout expected to be high and the ever-present coronavirus considerations, voting in 2020 will surely be unique. We’re seeing companies jump in to help get people registered, find their polling places and provide more-affordable transportation to and from. We’ll likely be seeing more promotions pop up, so check back here for updates.

Additional reporting by Clint Henderson.

Featured image courtesy of Hill Street Studios via Getty Images.

While China avoided losing its trade war with America, it is shooting itself in the foot when it comes to the war of ideas.

China recently resumed broadcasting NBA games, after a long hiatus sparked by an obscure tweet by an official who works for the Houston Rockets.

If China had not responded, no one would have paid any attention to the tweet on Hong Kong. After their hysterical overreaction, the international news media focused even more attention on China’s crackdown in Hong Kong. Not only did China look bad for its actions in Hong Kong, now it also looked bad for trying to squelch free speech in the US. Even if China were to win a limited victory by pressuring a specific group to remain silent, they lose far more by triggering much more negative commentary by the broader international community.

China uses these tactics against many countries. In the end, the Chinese government generally caves in and ends their boycotts. But the price is a steady erosion in public support throughout the world. Polls show that the public in many countries has shifted toward a much less favorable view of China in recent years. Xi’s policy is not working.

I don’t know whether this policy was Xi Jinping’s idea, or if he was advised by people in the Chinese government. But the attempt to pressure foreign countries has backfired badly, and China is losing the soft power war.

When countries do things that are clearly not in their interest, many people look for some sort of rational explanation, some sort of sophisticated and subtle strategy at work. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that even great power governments are not very smart. If a country is acting foolishly, the simplest explanation is that its government made a mistake.

Congratulations to Paul Milgram and Robert Wilson for their recent award. Tyler Cowen noted that Milgram was a coauthor of this essay:

That’s an impressive group of economists.  And here’s the abstract:

The ability of groups of people to make predictions is a potent research tool that should be freed of unnecessary government restrictions.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that this will happen, despite that powerhouse line-up of expert opinion.  Nor is it likely that the government will remove rent controls, or allow the sale of kidneys, or legalize drugs, or eliminate tax loopholes, or impose a “Cadillac tax” on health insurance, or enact a carbon tax, or eliminate tariffs on imports, or open up the aviation market to foreign competition, or let car companies sell directly to customers, or eliminate most occupational licenses, or get rid of taxi medallions, or eliminate farm subsidies, or eliminate multifamily zoning restrictions in residential areas, or do hundreds of other things that economists recommend.

That’s not to say that governments always oppose the recommendations of economists.  If they are already favorably inclined toward a policy, then they will listen to economists.  But I shake my head whenever I read articles suggesting that the economic problems we face “show that orthodox economics is wrong”.  When was orthodox economics ever tried?

(9 COMMENTS)

A memorable campaign ad from 2008 urged voters to ask themselves which candidate would perform better in an unexpected emergency: “It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep, but there’s a phone in the White House and it’s ringing ... Your vote will decide who answers that call.” Franklin D. Roosevelt answered Pearl Harbor. John F. Kennedy answered the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba. How would this year’s candidates respond when confronted with an emergency?

Joe Biden has never held the top job, so voters can only speculate. But a pandemic began on Donald Trump’s watch, so no speculation is needed. Trump showed us how he did perform in a crisis: He failed. Trump is obviously not responsible for all of the COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. But the U.S. has fared much worse than the median developed country. And among wealthy nations, its per capita deaths rank in the top five. Trump can’t avoid blame for America’s subpar performance, because voters can identify specific actions he took that contributed to the country’s failures. Especially damning is that Trump couldn’t even protect himself from the disease.

[Amy Wilentz: Trump thought he’d never get it]

Compare the White House to the NBA. Months ago, the league decided to go ahead with its season by bringing 22 teams into a “bubble” with coaches, trainers, referees, support staff, and media, despite a formidable challenge: Hundreds of young basketball players would run, pant, sweat, jostle for rebounds, huddle together in time-outs, and fill their off hours together, away from friends and family. The league developed sound protocols. Players, coaches, and others executed them competently. And the NBA went months without a positive COVID-19 test, allowing it to salvage a season worth billions of dollars while entertaining the American public.

A presidential bubble is comparatively easy to protect: Trump had all the resources of the federal government, no need for close physical contact, the ability to consult with any expert on optimal protocol, and a Secret Service to enforce whatever he decided upon. Yet he proved unable to stay healthy, not because he was stricken early, when little was known, but because he failed to take the most commonsense precautions, such as wearing a mask or not hosting large events.

Trump’s carelessness didn’t just jeopardize his own health, and that of his wife, his aides, and the Secret Service. The September 26 White House event for the Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett appears to have compromised the health of many important officials. “More than 100 people gathered,” NPR reported. “Guests mingled, hugged and kissed on the cheek, most without wearing masks. An indoor reception followed the outdoor ceremony. Seven days later, at least eight people who were at the ceremony have tested positive.” Someone may die because of the White House’s bizarre laxness at an unnecessary event. And because U.S. senators are among the infected, its consequences could conceivably delay or even derail Barrett’s nomination. Nothing like this could have happened to a president exercising good judgment.

But the drama of recent days should not overshadow Trump’s actions prior to his illness. His compounding failures of leadership date back to the very beginning of the pandemic.

Mendacity was his most avoidable failure. Presidents in a public-health crisis should tell the truth. Trump lied to Americans from the outset of this life-threatening emergency. In early February, he privately told Bob Woodward that COVID-19 spread through the air and was more dangerous than the flu, even as he downplayed the seriousness of the disease in public. “I wanted to always play it down,” he later told Woodward. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” The false impression he gave was echoed by his allies through the conservative media. Millions would have taken COVID-19 more seriously if Trump hadn’t repeatedly downplayed it. But instead of leveling with Americans, Trump kept lying month after month.

“We’re very close to a vaccine,” he declared on February 25. On February 28, just before an explosion in cases, he told Americans that the virus would soon disappear, “like a miracle.” In early March, long before the typical person could get tested for COVID-19, Trump told Americans that anyone who wanted a test for the disease could get one. On March 24, he asserted that a shutdown lasting months was untenable, in part because suicides “definitely would be in far greater numbers than the numbers that we’re talking about with regard to the virus.” On April 10, Trump said that the final number of U.S. deaths could be as few as 55,000, a mark the country surpassed before the end of that month. A week later, Trump said that the death toll would maybe reach 65,000. In May, he expressed the hope that the pandemic would end with fewer than 100,000 lives lost, though that death toll was quickly exceeded.

[Anne Applebaum: Trump is a super-spreader of disinformation]

Throughout those months, the U.S. regulatory state was failing in various ways. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed its own test procedures early on, but those proved to be faulty and based on contaminated materials,” the economist Tyler Cowen told me. “At the same time, the CDC legally prevented Americans from pursuing other testing options. That is a major reason America fell behind in the testing race, and with its late start, America was not able to buy up enough testing materials before those items became very scarce.”

A better president would have shored up America’s public-health infrastructure prior to the pandemic rather than letting it continue to decay. A better president would’ve seen the earliest failures of the regulatory state and used the powers of his office to correct them as quickly as possible. But rather than constantly insisting that the regulatory state treat COVID-19 more like an emergency and emphasizing that brief bureaucratic delays could cost thousands or tens of thousands of lives, Trump repeatedly focused on downplaying the challenge that America faced. As Ronald Klain, who served as chief of staff to two different Democratic vice presidents, told my Atlantic colleague Ed Yong, “In the best circumstances, it’s hard to make the bureaucracy move quickly. It moves if the president stands on a table and says, ‘Move quickly.’ But it really doesn’t move if he’s sitting at his desk saying it’s not a big deal.”

Trump’s failures can be exaggerated. He is not the only public official to err. His defenders are correct when they observe that Anthony Fauci fumbled his early messaging on masks, that various governors failed to adequately protect nursing homes in their jurisdictions, and that public-health officials undermined the culture of social distancing when they put out politicized statements justifying large public gatherings to protest the death of George Floyd. Many officials at the national and state levels behaved in ways that suggest they should not be trusted in future emergencies. But Trump is the only one running for president on his record.

Besides, a core part of the president’s job in an emergency is to glean useful advice from experts while overruling them when their narrow insights are outweighed by broader national interests––but for the most part, Trump neither accepted the best expert advice nor rejected the worst. He presided over the worst of both worlds. “Caution has become politically contentious in part because of disputes over whether this spring’s shutdowns were necessary. That is a legitimate subject for debate,” Scott Gottlieb and Yuval Levin wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “But that dispute has kept us from grasping the truly critical mistake––the failure to deploy diagnostic tests early that would have helped gauge where the virus was spreading. Some cities, such as New York, were on the brink of collapse. Others still had little spread and containment was possible. This failure led both to exploding caseloads and overbroad shutdowns.”

No one can pinpoint exactly how many excess deaths Trump is wholly or partially responsible for, or how much excess economic pain America is suffering because of his poor job performance, not only because of the complexity of parceling out blame and the hypothetical nature of what different leaders might have done, but also because the death toll is still rising––every week or two, COVID-19 is killing more Americans than died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

And winter is coming. Cold weather drives people inside, public-health directives that allowed many businesses to reopen by doing as much as possible outdoors will no longer be feasible in colder regions, isolated people will want to travel home to gather with family for winter holidays, and the flu season is almost here. Back in mid-September, when there were roughly 40,000 new cases of COVID-19 each day, my colleague James Hamblin interviewed Fauci. “As we approach the fall and winter months, it is important that we get the baseline level of daily infections much lower,” Fauci told him, adding that “we must, over the next few weeks, get that baseline of infections down to 10,000 per day, or even much less if we want to maintain control of this outbreak.” But Trump had no plan to do that. Daily new cases are still at more than 40,000.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s denial has now produced what he feared]

Trump’s response has not been to try something different as winter nears. In fact, his primary message to Americans when he left Walter Reed National Military Medical Center was that they should not fear the disease, because medical treatments have improved and a vaccine is on the way.

Once a vaccine does arrive, distributing it to Americans and persuading skeptics to take it will prove challenging. Trump has given ample reason to conclude that he is not capable of rising to the occasion.

Voters need not speculate as to how Trump might perform in a high-stakes emergency, because he showed us how he did perform: He lied to the American public; he did not avert or quickly correct the federal bureaucracy’s most serious errors; he repeatedly gave false assurances that contributed to many Americans being less careful than they should have been; he responded to catastrophic levels of death by pretending that victory was right around the corner, rather than changing strategies; he presided over a country that was outperformed by much of the world; he failed at the relatively simple task of protecting himself and his wife; and that latest failure threatened the lives of U.S. senators, White House staffers, and many others. Trump answered a 3 a.m. phone call, and he bungled it. Don’t let him answer another one.

Travelers concerned about contracting the coronavirus on a flight can breath at least a small sigh of relief following new evidence that there is a very low risk of catching COVID-19 onboard an airplane.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has found only 44 confirmed cases of COVID-19 caught on a flight from among the 1.2 billion people that flew between January and July this year, in a study released Thursday. That translates to one case for every 27.3 million flyers.

In other words, you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than catching COVID on an airplane, the study found.

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IATA, as well as experts from Airbus, Boeing and Embraer, all agreed that the combination of wearing a mask and the constant airflow through high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters keep cabins safe.

Brazilian planemaker Embraer found that masks alone reduced a flyer’s risk of inhaling COVID particles by six times. This is greater than the benefit of, for example, blocking a middle seat for the appearance of social distancing on a plane.

“The social distance onboard an aircraft are ensured by the airflow,” IATA medical advisor Dr. David Powell said during a briefing Thursday. “That’s the best protection onboard an aircraft.”

Related: What the heck is a HEPA filter? How airplane air stays clean

IATA’s study backs up assertions by American Airlines, United Airlines and others that blocking seats does not provide safety from the virus. Instead, those sides say that masks, air filtration and enhanced cleaning measures are the best defense against transmission on a plane.

Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian has said that his carrier’s decision to block seats into next year is more a matter of building traveler confidence than anything else. In addition, the carrier has been able to command slightly higher fares than its competitors throughout the crisis possibly mitigating the impact of blocked seats.

Alaska Airlines, JetBlue Airways and Southwest Airlines also either block seats or cap the number of flyers on their flights.

Related: Delta will block seats into January as it tries to boost traveler confidence

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), when asked about inflight transmission in August, told TPG that the data was inconclusive.

Despite the new data showing a low risk of COVID-19 transmission on an aircraft, IATA and the planemakers agreed that risks remain elsewhere in the travel process. For example, in the airport terminal or on the way to the airport.

And the trade group is not bullish on a general recovery in air travel. IATA does not expect a full return to 2019 levels of flying until at least 2024, with domestic markets returning before international ones.

“If you want to travel and minimize the risks of COVID-19, put on a mask and get on an airplane,” Luis Carlos Alfonso, vice president of engineering, technology and strategy at Embraer, said during the briefing.

Related: Global air travel unlikely to recover until 2024

Featured image Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images.

One of the world’s newest cruise lines has revealed plans for what may be the most offbeat cruise ship excursion ever: A trip into the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

Florida-based Atlas Ocean Voyages, which is scheduled to debut next year with a single ship, is planning to offer an three-day “Chernobyl experience” excursion in Ukraine that will include a walk into safe areas of the power plant — the site of the worst nuclear accident in history.

It’ll also include a visit to Pripyat, the small abandoned city near the power plant that once housed power plant workers and their families.

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Tourgoers will spend one night within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a 1,000-square-mile area around the power plant that is now a restricted area due to radioactive contamination from the nuclear accident, which occurred in 1986.

The excursion will be offered during a 16-night Black Sea sailing that will include stops in Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Georgia and Russia. The trip will kick off July 28, 2021, on the line’s soon-to-debut, 196-passenger World Navigator.

“This was something unique we wanted to do,” Atlas Ocean Voyages President Alberto Aliberti said Monday during a virtual press event to unveil more details about the line. “They are just starting tourism at a small level.”

Indeed, tourism to the Chernobyl disaster site has begun in recent years on a very limited basis, as I saw during a visit to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in 2019. Small tour companies based in Kiev, Ukraine, about two hours away, are taking small groups of about a dozen tourists at a time into the area for day tours.

Related: How to book a cruise with points and miles

A handful of visitors also can spend the night in the Chernobyl Exclusive Zone at two small guest houses in the town of Chernobyl, which also is mostly abandoned.

While the area around the power plant complex still is contaminated with radiation, it’s considered safe to visit for short periods. Workers involved in the ongoing decontamination of the reactor that melted down during the accident continue to enter the area regularly, though they only can remain in the area for a limited number of days per year.

The Chernobyl tours that Atlas Ocean Voyages is planning will be unusual in that they will include a visit to an interior area of the nuclear reactor complex. Day tours from Kiev typically only include a stop to view the complex from outside of its main gate.

Related: Trump administration paves the way for a restart of cruising

Only one of four nuclear reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant melted down during the disaster, and it has since been sealed in a way that does not let new radiation escape.

The tours also will be unusual for their size, give the line’s ships will be able to hold 196 passengers. While that’s considered a very small number of passengers for a cruise ship, it’s still a lot of people to take into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which is only sparsely visited.

Aliberti said he traveled to Kiev and Chernobyl in 2019 to discuss the visits with authorities. No other cruise line has offered an overnight tour into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

“It wasn’t hard to negotiate the trip in (to the zone),” he said. “What is important was the size of the group. Because we’re a smaller ship, and because we carry fewer guests, we were able to break it up such that our guests will not overwhelm any area.”

The tour came up Monday during a discussion of the unusual excursions that Atlas Ocean Voyages is planning for its itineraries. Billed as a “luxe adventure” line, the brand has been designed to offer not just luxury but adventurous and unusual shore excursions, Atlas Ocean Voyages vice president of sales and trade partnerships Brandon Townsley said during the press event.

The Chernobyl experience will be part of a “max shore” line of unusual, mid-cruise overland adventures that will be a highlight of the brand. Offered on some longer sailings, the excursions will last from three to six days and bring such activities as hot-air ballooning over Turkey’s Pamukkale’s mineral pools and petrified forest; and glamping under the stars at Jordan’s Petra ruins. They’ll be offered at no extra charge to passengers.

The press event was held on the first day of a virtual version of the annual Seatrade Cruise Global convention — the world’s biggest gathering of people involved in the cruise industry. It usually happens in Miami in April and draws about 13,000 people.

Aliberti said the line had approached arranging the Chernobyl tour with sensitivity, given what occurred at the site.

Related: The best credit cards for booking cruises

“You have to keep in mind that it is an area of a recent human tragedy,” he said. “We have to go into it with (an) attitude of respecting what it is.”

Atlas Ocean Voyages announced earlier this year that it would add four more ships to its fleet by the end of 2023.

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Featured image courtesy of Atlas Ocean Voyages

President Trump returns to the White House after attending a campaign event in New Jersey on October 1. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

The president said he was beginning the “quarantine” process immediately.

President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump have tested positive for coronavirus, the White House announced early Friday morning.

“Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!” the president tweeted early Friday. (For the record, the President and First Lady are actually “isolating” since they’ve already been diagnosed; quarantining is when a person doesn’t know whether they’re positive.)

Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg News reported Thursday evening that counselor to the president Hope Hicks had tested positive and was experiencing symptoms. Hicks has been traveling with President Trump and other White House staff in recent days, including to the debate in Cleveland on Tuesday and to Minnesota for a fundraiser and rally Wednesday.

The White House released a memo early Friday from Sean Conley, physician to the president, stating that “the President and First Lady are both well at this time, and they plan to remain at home within the White House during their convalescence.” Conley added: “Rest assured I expect the President to continue carrying out his duties while recovering.”

The “October surprise”

The implications for the presidential campaign — and, really, the country — are unclear at this point. Observers have been expecting an “October surprise” — an event that would throw the election into chaos — and the arrival of Covid-19 in the Oval Office may be it.

What happens in the coming days and weeks depends on how serious a case the 74-year old president has. Covid-19 is particularly dangerous for older people: a person’s risk of hospitalization and death increases with every passing decade. Neither Trump nor his physician have mentioned whether he is displaying symptoms, though Conley said he is “well.”

Rallies are out for the foreseeable future, and it’s unclear whether the president will be able to attend the next debate on October 15, at the very least.

Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

If the president’s case were to worsen to the point of incapacitation, it would be possible for the vice president and a majority of sitting Cabinet secretaries to invoke the Constitution’s 25th Amendment — making Mike Pence the acting president. But of course, Trump could also have a mild case and recover well before such a measure would be necessary.

During the debate on Tuesday, Trump mocked his opponent Joe Biden for wearing masks. ”I don’t wear masks like him. Every time you see him, he’s got a mask,” Trump said. More broadly, the president has repeatedly downplayed the threat of the Covid-19 pandemic, holding packed campaign gatherings, and arguing that the country needed to return to normal. The problem, though, was that the virus never went away — as Trump has now learned firsthand.

To date, 7.3 million Americans have been diagnosed with the virus and at least 208,000 have died.

There have been multiple cases of coronavirus around Trump

There’s no comment yet about Trump’s condition from Biden’s campaign, nor is there news on whether Biden has tested positive after his contact with the President for Tuesday’s debate.

It’s also not yet clear whether Trump and his entourage exposed members of the public to the virus. According to the Washington Post, “After White House officials learned of Hicks’ symptoms, Trump and his entourage flew to New Jersey, where he attended a fundraiser and delivered a speech. Trump was in close contact with dozens of other people, including campaign supporters at a roundtable event.”

While Trump, as well as aides and reporters in close contact with him, are regularly tested for the virus, mask wearing isn’t mandated and temperature screenings for visitors to the White House were rolled back in July.

Already, there have been several known cases of coronavirus infection around Trump — most recently, at least 11 members of the secret service and his national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, according to the New York Times.

Trump also isn’t the first world leader to test positive. Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Britain and President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil both contracted the coronavirus and recovered. Johnson’s case was particularly severe. During his illness, he spent several days in the intensive care unit, and had doctors standing by preparing to inform the world about his death.

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From nippon.com:

Japan's Supreme Court for the first time has ruled that tattooing people without a medical license does not constitute a violation of the medical practitioners law….

[T]he top court's Second Petty Bench turned down an appeal by public prosecutors over a suit against a 32-year-old man who tattooed three people. It finalizes a high court ruling that overturned a district court verdict fining the man 150,000 yen.

The Second Petty Bench … said that "tattoos require artistic skills different from medicine, and that it cannot be assumed that doctors do the act exclusively," concluding that the practice is not a medical act.

Thanks to Jenny Wilson for the pointer.

A planned House vote on a bill to decriminalize the possession of marijuana was canceled on Thursday under pressure from law enforcement lobbyists and other pro-prohibition special interests.

The expected floor vote on the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act would have been the biggest accomplishment yet for cannabis reformers, but the effort has been postponed until after Election Day, Politico reports. Democrats have gotten weak-kneed about a bill that they once saw as a major criminal justice reform.

Indeed, it would have been. The MORE Act, sponsored by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D–N.Y.), would remove cannabis from the schedules of the Controlled Substances Act and make that change retroactive, effectively expunging any federal marijuana offenses and convictions. The bill also orders federal courts to lift all sentences for people currently locked up due to a marijuana conviction.

As Reason's Jacob Sullum explained when the bill was introduced last year, the MORE Act was in many ways superior to other marijuana legislation, because it "completely deschedules marijuana rather than moving it to a lower schedule or making exceptions to the ban for state-legal conduct, and it seeks to lift the burdens that prohibition has imposed on people caught growing, distributing, or possessing cannabis, a vital project that too often has been treated as an afterthought."

This year, the bill had collected more than 100 co-sponsorships in the House—it even had support from three Republicans—and appeared on track to pass the lower chamber. Even though the bill was expected to die in the Senate, that House vote would have been historic.

Unfortunately, cop lobbyists seem to have convinced House Democratic leaders that it would also be a liability. A coalition of law enforcement special interests and other proponents of the drug war sent a letter to congressional leaders last week warning about the potential dangers associated with legalizing and "commercializing" marijuana.

That, combined with vague fears about how Republicans might weaponize the legalization vote for negative ads in swing districts, was apparently enough to convince Democrats to scuttle the vote.

That isn't just disappointing: It's pretty pathetic. Democrats were right to position the MORE Act as a vehicle for racial justice and a key step toward addressing the problems of America's criminal justice system. The war on drugs is deliberately racist, and it always has been. Decriminalizing marijuana would a pretty good first step towards righting those wrongs.

But even after everything that happened this summer to put criminal justice in the foreground of the national conversation, and even with polls showing that most Americans (and a larger share of Democrats) support the legalization of marijuana, Democratic leaders were still too spooked to take an important and historic vote. That's just sad.

If police interests find it this easy to shut down marijuana reform—which doesn't even really affect the way cops do their jobs, aside from removing one of the excuses they might use to stop, search, and seize an innocent person's stuff—how can House Democrats talk about passing policing reforms with a straight face?

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Could this be the strangest aviation story of the year?

On Sunday, Aug. 30, two jets were approaching Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to land. As they descended through 3,000 feet, pilots from both airliners reported seeing someone flying in a jetpack nearby. (Yes, you read that right: a jetpack.)

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a short statement: “Two airline flight crews reported seeing what appeared to be someone in a jetpack as they were on their final approaches to LAX around 6:35 p.m. PDT Sunday.” The FAA didn’t have more to say, but they’re investigating. Perhaps they too are perplexed.

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The first flight, American Airlines 1997 from Philadelphia, radioed that “tower, American 1997, we just passed a guy in a jetpack,” The Associated Press reports. Another pilot later the same afternoon reportedly said the same thing. He told the tower “We just saw the guy pass by us in the jetpack.”

At this point, the LAX control tower probably also was shocked — and perhaps a bit dubious. But the rouge jetpack was reportedly just 300 yards from the jets, which is most definitely a safety concern.

So the controller warned a third flight, JetBlue Flight 23 from New York, getting ready to land, “person in a jetpack reported 300 yards south of the LA final at about 3,000 feet, 10-mile (16-kilometer) final.”

Fortunately, all planes landed without incident. But who was the “person in the jetpack?”

Three days later, and we still don’t have any details. In addition to the FAA, the FBI is also investigating the incident, according to L.A.’s FOX 11.

More from TPG: When will international travel return? A country-by-country guide to coronavirus travel restrictions

Without video recording, we may likely never know what exactly these pilots saw. But it’s 2020. Anything could fly.

The chances it was a person in a jetpack are slim, according to the CEO of the Los Angeles-based company Jetpack Aviation. In a statement to the AP, David Mayman said “it’s very, very unlikely with the existing technology.”

If it wasn’t a jetpack, it might’ve been a drone.

And if it wasn’t a drone, maybe it was one of those massive helium balloons that escaped from a party at sea level. Or a big bird?

The way 2020 has gone, anything is possible. We may never know what exactly happened. But if it was a person with a jetpack, perhaps they were trying to make it to another galaxy far away. One without a pandemic, hopefully.

Featured photo by kevinjeon00/Getty Images

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Friday night CNET reported: With a device surgically implanted into the skull of a pig named Gertrude, Elon Musk demonstrated his startup Neuralink's technology to build a digital link between brains and computers. A wireless link from the Neuralink computing device showed the pig's brain activity as it snuffled around a pen on stage Friday night. Some reactions from Twitter: - "The potential of #Neuralink is mind-boggling, but fuckkkk why would they use Bluetooth???" - "they're using C/C++ too lmao" But then videogame programming legend John Carmack responded: "Quality, reliable software can be delivered in any language, but language choice has an impact. For me, C would be a middle-of-the-road choice; better than a dynamic language like javascript or python, but not as good as a more modern strongly static typed languages. However, the existence of far more analysis tools for C is not an insignificant advantage. If you really care about robustness, you are going to architect everything more like old Fortran, with no dynamic allocations at all, and the code is going to look very simple and straightforward. So an interesting question: What are the aspects of C++ that are real wins for that style over C? Range checked arrays would be good. What else? When asked "What's a better modern choice?" Carmack replied "Rust would be the obvious things, and I don't have any reason to doubt it would be good, but I haven't implemented even a medium sized application in it." But then somewhere in the discussion, Elon Musk made a joke about C's lack of "class" data structures. Elon Musk responded: I like C, because it avoids class warfare But then Musk also gave interesting responses to two more questions on Twitter: Which is your fav programming language? Python? Elon Musk: Actually C, although the syntax could be improved esthetically Could Neuralink simulate an alternate reality that could be entered at will, like Ready Player One? Implications for VR seem to be massive. Essentially, a simulation within a simulation if we're already in one ... Elon Musk: Later versions of a larger device would have that potential

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Democratic National Convention host Eva Longoria introduced Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Monday night as the man who led New York "with clear direction and memorable powerpoints" during its coronavirus outbreak. Cuomo then spoke for a few minutes about how his state "climbed the impossible mountain, and now we are on the other side."

He did not mention that the path to the summit involved the deaths of more than 30,000 New Yorkers—an appallingly high death toll that was likely worsened by Cuomo's executive order forcing nursing homes to readmit elderly citizens who were sick with the virus. Far from being a beacon of sane leadership, Cuomo has continuously beclowned himself at all stages of the pandemic.

Perhaps it's unsurprising that Cuomo failed to address his myriad failures. But at the very least, he should not have minimized the horror of what occurred under his watch. It was something of a shock, then, when Cuomo referred to COVID-19 as "just a metaphor" for the country's more serious political divisions.

"We know that our problems go beyond the COVID virus," said Cuomo. "COVID is the symptom, not the illness. Our nation is in crisis, and in many ways, COVID is just a metaphor. A virus attacks when the body is weak and cannot defend itself. Over the past few years, America's body politic has been weakened. The divisions have been growing deeper. The anti-Semitism, the anti-Latino, the anti-immigrant fervor, the racism in Charlottesville…and in Minnesota, where the life was squeezed from Mr. [George] Floyd."

It's true that the country is facing plenty of other problems, including the government's ongoing mistreatment of immigrants, lack of accountability in law enforcement, racism, and anti-Semitism. But to say that the coronavirus is, like these other problems, merely some symptom of a larger problem is absurd and offensive. It minimizes the comparative horror of COVID-19—a once-in-a-century disaster that has already killed more than 170,000 Americans and will undoubtedly kill many more. The coronavirus is neither a metaphor, nor one issue among many, nor a symptom of some other disease. It is the disease and by far the most important issue facing the next president.

Our political divisions are frustrating but thankfully nowhere near as fatal.