The University of Michigan’s adolescent drug survey announced some dramatic results today:

Increases in adolescent vaping from 2017 to 2018 were the largest ever recorded in the past 43 years for any adolescent substance use outcome in the U.S.

Here’s a chart:

I had two immediate reactions:

• In just a few years, vaping has wiped out two decades of work getting teens to quit (or never start) cigarette smoking. In 1997, the survey recorded that 36 percent of 12th graders had smoked in the past 30 days. This year, the combination of vaping and cigarette use hit 34 percent.
• Can this really be true? After three years of relative stability at around 15 percent, vaping suddenly skyrocketed to 27 percent in a single year?

Nearly all of the increase comes from an increase in vaping nicotine, and my skepticism about this disappeared when I looked up revenue figures for Juul, the top seller of vaping devices and pods. I knew that the Juul fad had practically taken over American high schools recently, but it turns out that Juul reported a monster revenue increase of nearly 800 percent between 2017 and 2018 (from $107 million to $942 million), and they control about 75 percent of the market. That’s enough all by itself to account for a huge single-year increase in vaping.

So the answer appears to be yes, this really can be true. Vaping in general, and Juul in particular, have wiped out years of hard work to get teens off of cigarettes. And since most of the increase is in vaping nicotine, it means we’re raising yet another generation of addicts, sucked in by the same kind of marketing that was originally used to suck them into cigarette smoking. What a crime this is.

This is a tufted deer at the Prospect Park Zoo. I was browsing through the photos I had taken at the zoo when Marian walked in, pointed at the deer, and said “ohhhh.” So that was it. The decision was made.

Alex Edelman/CNP via ZUMA

This is quite a day. Robert Mueller had recommended that Michael Flynn—Donald Trump’s erstwhile National Security Advisor—serve no prison time for lying to the FBI because he had cooperated fully in their investigation. Unfortunately for Flynn, the judge wasn’t satisfied with the redacted report from Mueller and demanded to see the whole thing. He was not a happy man after he had read it. Here’s the LA Times:

Saying he was not “hiding my disgust, my disdain” for Flynn’s crime, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ripped into the retired three-star Army general in a blistering rebuke from the bench before issuing his sentence.

Noting that Flynn was an unregistered agent of a foreign country — Turkey — while in the White House, the judge angrily pointed to the furled U.S. flag in his courtroom. “Arguably, that undermines everything this flag over here stands for. Arguably, you sold your country out!” Sullivan said. “All along you were an unregistered agent of a foreign country, while serving as the national security advisor to the president of the United States!”

Pressed by the judge, Flynn’s lawyer, Robert Kelner, said, “No, your honor,” when asked if the FBI had engaged in any misconduct or had violated Flynn’s rights when they interviewed him. Kelner added that Flynn stood by his guilty plea.

And more from the Washington Post:

“The court’s going to consider that [i.e., that Flynn sold out his country],” the judge said. “I cannot assure you, if you proceed today, you will not receive a sentence of incarceration.” Sullivan also asked a prosecutor with the special counsel’s office whether Flynn could be charged with “treason.”

Flynn, standing straight and flanked by attorneys on either side, looked shaken, his jaw clenched. Sullivan declared a recess to let Flynn consider whether he wanted to proceed and let the judge impose a punishment, or to delay and cooperate more with the special counsel in hopes of leniency.

Flynn decided to delay his sentencing. Needless to say, this should put an end to all the nonsense from the Trump gang that Flynn had been fooled by the FBI and had no idea that it was illegal to lie to them:

Sullivan reminded Flynn he could get into “more trouble” if he were to lie in court, then asked, “Were you not aware that lying to FBI investigators was a crime?”

“I was aware,” Flynn said.

That should put an end to the nonsense. As usual, though, I assume this will do nothing to stop Fox and Rush and the rest of the noise machine from claiming that Flynn did nothing wrong and was just a victim of a liberal witch hunt.

Michael Reynolds/CNP via ZUMA

First Mexico was going to pay for it. Then NAFTA 2.0 was going to be so awesome that Mexico would pay for it in increased trade—or tariffs—or something. Then Congress had to pay for it, but Mexico would reimburse us someday so no worries. Then it would be paid for “other ways.”

That was this morning. Donald Trump caved to his fellow Republicans who didn’t want to shut down the government over his damn wall, and Sarah Sanders announced to the press that “there are certainly a number of different funding sources that we’ve identified that we can use.” And what are those “sources”? Nobody knows. Probably the same ones that are going to fund the greatest health care system the world has ever seen.

Honest to God, Trump is the worst negotiator I’ve ever seen. Even if he wasn’t paying attention you’d think he would have learned something in his 40 years of real estate wheeling and dealing. But apparently not.

How has the infamous Steele dossier panned out so far? There’s still no evidence of the pee tape or Michael Cohen’s trip to Prague.¹ Sorry. But there was always way more to it than that, so Cheryl Rofer has taken a fresh look at the full set of 45 claims in the dossier and evaluated them based on what we know now. I was curious to get a higher altitude look, so I grouped them into categories based on their current status.

Here’s what I came up with. Note that these are my interpretations of Rofer’s summaries. She isn’t responsible for them in any way.

Aside from three oddball claims that I couldn’t really classify (6, 7, and 19 if you’re counting), it looks to me like the dossier includes 15 claims that are now fully or partially supported and 27 claims for which we have no evidence so far. These 27 claims include a fair amount of insider Kremlin gossip.

What I found most interesting is this: although there’s no public evidence one way or the other for these 27 claims,² there doesn’t appear to be a single claim that we know with certainty is false. There are claims that have been denied by the American participants, but none that we have documentary proof of being mistaken. Partly this is because it’s hard to prove a negative, but it’s still surprising that not a single claim in the report has been conclusively debunked. It’s especially surprising since the dossier is a patchwork of raw intelligence, and even if it was well done by competent professionals you’d still expect it to include at least a few claims that, two years later, we could say were categorically wrong.

All things considered, then, the dossier has held up pretty well. There are a couple of sensational claims (Prague, pee tape) that are unproven and, at this point, seem unlikely to be true, but the fact that they got lots of media coverage doesn’t mean they were critical to the overall integrity of the dossier. Taken as a whole, it looks like a pretty solid report that’s probably provided lots of good leads to follow up.

¹There’s a single McClatchy story from April claiming that Robert Mueller has evidence for the Prague trip, but since then no other reporting has confirmed this. It might still be true, but at this point I’d be pretty skeptical.

²Just to repeat, there’s no public evidence one way or the other for these 27 claims. We have no idea what the intelligence community knows that has remained unleaked.

Here is President Trump this morning:

I hope the people over at the Fed will read today’s Wall Street Journal Editorial before they make yet another mistake. Also, don’t let the market become any more illiquid than it already is. Stop with the 50 B’s. Feel the market, don’t just go by meaningless numbers. Good luck!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 18, 2018

Most of this is indecipherable Trumpese, but he’s right about one thing: the Wall Street Journal does indeed say that the Fed should keep interest rates low in order to spur growth:

U.S. growth may be slowing….The world economy has notably slowed, with warning signs in China and Europe in particular. The uncertainty introduced by Mr. Trump’s tariff battles have reduced trade flows and dampened investment. Housing and autos, both sensitive to interest-rate increases, are down. And a few cracks are showing in credit markets, especially high-yield bonds.

….Some of our friends fret that if the Fed stops now, it will never get back to normal. But it will surely never do so if there’s a near-term recession. The best way to normalize is to keep the expansion going as long as possible without inflation.

Oddly enough, I agree. That doesn’t happen very often, but they’re basically correct to point out that inflation is low, the world economy is a little worrisome, unemployment is low, and unwinding a decade of quantitative easing is unknown territory. So why not take a little pause and leave interest rates low? But here’s a funny thing. Back in 2015, when a Democrat was president, the mavens running the Journal’s editorial page didn’t believe that lower interest rates had anything to do with economic growth:

The great paradox of this expansion is that the monetary policy that is supposed to spur faster growth hasn’t spurred faster growth….Our guess is that the Fed gurus have been wrong because like so many in Washington and Wall Street they have overestimated the power of monetary policy to propel the real economy.

….It’s heresy to say so, but maybe after six years of zero-interest rates, and long after the financial crisis ended, the Fed should wonder if its policies haven’t become an impediment to faster growth. Maybe letting markets begin to set interest rates again would lead to a better allocation of capital and less economic uncertainty.

Note that this was written back when inflation was lower than it is now, GDP growth was lower than it is now, unemployment was higher, and the Fed was sitting on a pile of assets even bigger than today’s. These are all the things the Journal claimed to be concerned about in yesterday’s editorial, but they didn’t seem to care about any of them three years ago when every one of these indicators was worse than it is today and therefore pointed more strongly toward the Fed actively keeping interest rates low.

Because there’s only so much deceitful mush I can take, I don’t regularly read the Journal editorial page. So maybe over the past few years they’ve decided for good and honest reasons that interest rates are important to spur economic growth after all, and I just haven’t seen it. Maybe. Then again, maybe they prefer a weak economy when a Democrat is in the White House and a strong one when a Republican is president—and will then just invent whatever mush is necessary to persuade the rubes to follow along.

I dunno. That’s not a very nice thing to say, is it? But it sure seems like it’s right.

For some reason I was noodling about the 2020 election today and suddenly wondered what the 2018 congressional results would look like if you converted them to presidential votes. That is, if you look at which party got the highest popular vote in each state, and then added up what that comes to in Electoral College votes, which party would have won the presidency? Luckily for me, it turns out that Nate Silver was curious about this exact same thing on the day after the election, and he created a nice map that was exactly what I was looking for:

Obviously this is not a perfect projection, and lots of things can happen in two years. Still, even if you look at only the states in dark blue—the ones that weren’t even close—it adds up to an Electoral College total of 278 for Democrats.

At the same time, you might also notice that this depends on Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin all coming back home to the Democratic Party. Is that going to happen, or will Trump manage to con them again about his intense love for the working man?¹ That’s impossible to predict.

Roughly speaking, though, this suggests that if Democrats nominate someone who’s nothing more than as popular as the average Democrat, they’ll probably win. Especially since it’s my guess that the economy is going to turn down at least modestly between now and the end of next year.

POSTSCRIPT: This is all part and parcel of my belief that Donald Trump was something of a fluke and Republicans know perfectly well that they’re demographically doomed. It’s true that a lot of people—including me—have been saying this for a long time, and it’s continued not to come true. So why should it come true now? That’s simple: the non-white share of the population really does keep going up and Trump has now irreparably identified Republicans as the party of white racism. It’s hard for me to see him winning in 2020, and it’s hard for me to see the Republican Party winning much of anything for the decade after that. Somehow they need to reinvent themselves as a conservative party sans racism, and that’s going to take a while.

Am I wearing rose-colored glasses? Could be. God knows that Republicans have a seemingly bottomless bag of chicanery to suppress the vote of non-whites. But eventually the tide is going to come in no matter how hard they work on shoring up the dike of white identity politics. I think 2020 is it for them.

¹Gendered usage deliberate.

Every once in a while you hear some new crackpot meme—Agenda 21, Pizzagate, “stand down,” etc.—and you wonder what it’s about and where it came from. Usually, though, it’s too much work to figure out the whole bizarro history behind it, so you just shrug and move on.

But today is different! It’s your chance to get in on the ground floor of the latest crackpot meme. Check this out:

Want to understand how the Right Wing lie machine works?

This moment, right here. FOX asks Comey about something called the “Domestic Investigations Operations Guide.” Comey’s expression says, What are you going on and on about?

By morning it’ll be the Right’s Newest Testament. https://t.co/6THtnBdO2r

— Philippe Reines (@PhilippeReines) December 17, 2018

Now, Comey’s expression might say WTF, but his actual answer is that the FBI interview of Michael Flynn did indeed follow the guidelines set out in the Domestic Investigations Operations Guide. But obviously Fox’s ace intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge has something in mind here, and you can bet we’re going to hear about it shortly. Before long, DIOG will be the meme du jour and your friends will all be scratching their chins wondering what a DIOG is. But you’ll be able to explain it all to them!

Maybe. I mean, you never know which new memes are going to take off and which ones will die an unheralded death. For right now, though, it looks like DIOG has a fighting chance of becoming shorthand for Mike Flynn is an American hero and he’s in jail only because Jim Comey had it in for him. Stay tuned.

POSTSCRIPT: Yes, you can hear the sound of a duck quacking in the background starting around the 25-second mark. Don’t worry about it. It’s someone having fun with their cell phone or something.

People from back east are fond of claiming that Southern California has no seasons. This is a canard. It is autumn right now, and our leaves are as bright and colorful as anyone’s. Some of them, anyway. This is a picture of my neighbor’s fence a couple of weeks ago, and as you can see, it’s fairly brimming with fall colors. So there.

The facade of the Old Spaghetti Factory building back in better days when it was the KNX building.

This is a story of Los Angeles. Don’t worry, though, it’s a short one and you’ll find it either amusing or rage-inducing depending on your point of view.

Back in 2008 an apartment building was approved for construction at the corner of Sunset and Gordon. After a few years of lawsuits, the project was sold to another developer, who was once again given permission to begin construction as long as they kept the facade of the Old Spaghetti Factory restaurant (est. 1969) intact. Yes, this is what counts as historic preservation in LA. Sure, it was an entirely undistinguished building, but it was erected in 1924. Historic! (You can read more about it here.)

In the event, the developer concluded that the crumbling old building couldn’t be saved, so they tore it down and built a replica. Then they built the apartment building. Then people moved in. But then a judge ordered everyone to move out. The LA Times describes what happened:

Four years ago, a judge dealt a huge blow to the owners of a 299-unit apartment tower on Sunset Boulevard, striking down the project’s permits and, ultimately, forcing the building’s residents to move out…..The Coalition to Preserve L.A., a group funded by the Hollywood-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation, criticized the city’s environmental review of the tower, saying traffic counts on local streets are off by about two-thirds. The city’s review overestimated the number of residents who will rely on public transportation, said Mitchell M. Tsai, the coalition’s lawyer.

Wait. The developer was sued by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation? What does this have to do with AIDS? Well, the head of the foundation was and is Michael Weinstein, and back in 2015 he had gotten pissed off about an entirely different venture called the Hollywood Palladium development:

Weinstein had been a vocal opponent of the project and a regular attendee at community meetings, where he urged the developer to reduce its height. The proposed buildings would block the view from the international headquarters of Weinstein’s AIDS nonprofit, on the 21st floor of the Sunset Media Center on Sunset Boulevard.

Shortly after that, Weinstein decided that every tall building in Los Angeles was evil, and even bankrolled a city initiative that would have put a two-year moratorium on all development. That failed, but Weinstein’s lawsuits against tall buildings continued. The purported reason has shifted a bit over time, but has something to do with AIDS patients frequently being poor and the new buildings having insufficient low-income housing. The board of the foundation apparently puts up with this because Weinstein is a dynamo who raises enormous amounts of money for AIDS and HIV-related causes. If he wants to spend a few million a year on a hobbyhorse, why not? It’s better than spending money on a private jet or something.

Anyway, the Sunset and Gordon project was re-approved last week, but of course that doesn’t mean anybody gets to move in. It just marks the beginning of a whole new round of lawsuits, presumably based on the allegedly faulty traffic analysis. By a weird coincidence, it turns out that every new building project in LA has done a poor job of traffic analysis and therefore gets sued.

I read a lot of complaints about how long it took to build the new World Trade Center in New York City after 9/11. But that was a huge skyscraper, and even at that it only took 13 years. In Los Angeles, a bog ordinary 299-unit apartment building still hasn’t opened its doors after ten years. It just goes to show the danger of blocking the view of the wrong person.