Over the past year Bitcoin has soared in value, largely due to its popularity in China, one of the world hubs of Bitcoin mining and trading. Unfortunately for Bitcoin, the Chinese government is not a fan of cryptocurrencies, which are mostly traded by Chinese citizens who are hedging against falls in the yuan. It’s an extra problem the central government could do without in its longstanding battle to stabilize the yuan and eventually turn it into a fully floating currency.

In the past, the Chinese government has banned Bitcoin transactions at banks and retailers, and more recently it banned ICOs, Initial Coin Offerings. Now it’s going further:

Chinese authorities are ordering domestic bitcoin exchanges to shut down, delivering a heavy blow to once-thriving trading hubs that helped popularize the virtual currency pushing it to recent record highs. China’s central bank, working with other regulators, has drafted instructions banning Chinese platforms from providing virtual currency trading services, according to people familiar with the matter.

It’s still legal to mine Bitcoins and invest in them, but for how much longer? China seems pretty determined to keep Bitcoin from gaining any more traction. Will it work? Or will determined traders figure out a way to keep using Bitcoin regardless? In the past, China’s actions have pushed down the value of Bitcoin for short periods, but it always rebounds, finding ever higher highs. Recently it hit $5,000 before falling to a bit over $4,000:

The latest Chinese action could push Bitcoin down even further. And if it doesn’t, will China get tougher, banning Bitcoin investment entirely? This will be an interesting test of the power of stateless digital currencies vs. the old-fashioned power of real-world governments to control their own territory. As China goes, so goes Bitcoin.

Steve Bannon was interviewed on 60 Minutes tonight. Here’s my favorite excerpt:

Maxppp/ZUMAPRESS

A couple of days ago Amazon announced that it would be opening a “second headquarters” somewhere in the United States. Since then, there’s been a cottage industry in pieces about why some particular city would be great for Amazon.

Knock it off, please. Amazon can google this stuff as well as the rest of us, and they already know which cities are serious contenders. Among those cities, the winner will be whichever one showers them with the biggest bribes.

Alternatively, they literally know the winner already, and the competion is just a ruse to raise the bribe amount from gargantuan to record-shattering.

One way or another, though, it’s all about the bribes. And if you have to ask the price of entry, you can’t afford it.

Here’s a sentence for you to ponder:

1968 was no year for a catching of the breath.

This is a no-no, because you’re not supposed to start a sentence with a numeral. Because of this rule, here’s how that sentence is rendered in Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties:

Nineteen sixty-eight was no year for a catching of the breath.

That sure looks dumb to me. But hey, rules are rules. Whatcha gonna do? I say: change the rule. For one thing, I don’t know where this “rule” came from. Who invented it? Why do we follow it? For example, what’s wrong with the following sentence, which is a pretty common formulation?

69 percent of Americans believe the earth is getting warmer due to human activity. That drops to 23 percent among Republicans.

That seems perfectly readable to me, whereas spelling out sixty-nine doesn’t. That’s because we’re not used to seeing large numbers spelled out, since it’s never done anywhere else. Note that if we abolished this rule it would also solve the idiotic workaround of things like, “Seven in ten Americans believe the earth is getting warmer.” That solves the copy-editing problem, but makes the entire story hard to read and less accurate. Writers end up switching back and forth between percentages and fractions, which is confusing as hell.

Please note that none of this applies to small numbers, which have their own rule: numbers from 0-12 are generally spelled out, while larger numbers are rendered in numerals. So you’d never see, for example, “3 of my friends are coming over to visit.”

Change the rule! Change the rule! Who do I see about doing this?

Yesterday I posted a picture of the moon peeking out from behind the clouds, and wondered aloud about why the clouds had a bit of a red tinge to them. The most common answer had to do with our local wildfires, but this was wrong. I failed to mention that this photo was taken a month ago, and this misled a lot of you. The winning answer involved Science™: it was all due to moonlight filtered by the water droplets in the air. The droplets cause the blue light to scatter, leaving behind the rust-colored tinge.

But enough about that. In today’s catblogging, our local cats are back after last week’s kitten blogging. Today’s photo features Hilbert hanging over the second-story balcony to keep an eye on everything happening downstairs. And what was happening? Some suspicious-looking guy with a camera was walking around taking pictures of cats.

A couple of years ago I wrote about an NBER study showing that Fox News induces people to vote Republican. Not too surprising. But now this study is finally being published, so it’s getting renewed attention. Are there any differences between the old and new versions? Well, there’s this:

Old paper: Were a viewer initially at the ideology of the median Democratic voter in 2008 to watch an hour of Fox per week, her likelihood of voting Republican would increase by just over 15 percentage points.

New paper: Were a viewer initially at the ideology of the median Democratic voter in 2008 to watch an additional 3 minutes of Fox News per week, her likelihood of voting Republican would increase by 1.03 percentage points.

Hours have turned into minutes. That’s about it. The basic results stay the same, as illustrated here in colorful chart form:

In 2008, John McCain won 45.7 percent of the popular vote. This paper is therefore suggesting that if Fox News didn’t exist, he would have won only 39.4 percent of the vote. That would have been quite the epic shellacking for a two-person race, right up there with Barry Goldwater and Alf Landon.

This seems a little excessive. For one thing, if the numbers were really that high it implies that Democrats would have occupied the White House continuously since 1992 if only Fox News had never existed. I’m not sure anyone buys that.

Still, even if the effect isn’t this big, other studies have confirmed that Fox News has a clear effect on voting while liberal outlets like MSNBC don’t. This means we can thank Fox News for both the Iraq War and Donald Trump. We can also thank them for their decades-long effort to weaponize the aggrieved white vote. Thanks, Fox News!

POSTSCRIPT: Why the focus on presidential races? There’s a lot more data available for House races, and it’s more geographically concentrated too. Somebody should do this kind of research to see how much effect Fox has on House and Senate races.

Scott P. Yates via ZUMA

Should the city of Richmond, Virginia, tear down the statues of Confederate leaders that line Monument Avenue? Ed Gillespie, who’s running for governor this year, says no:

Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman, lobbyist and adviser to President George W. Bush, said he would prefer to keep the statues up – in part because of the cost of removal, which has been estimated at $5 million to $10 million for the statues that tower over Richmond’s Monument Avenue. “There’s a lot more things we could do here in Richmond with $10 million,” Gillespie said.

Really? $10 million to tear down five statues? Not exactly:

“I never thought they’d go away,” said Bill Gallasch, 74, president of the Monument Avenue Preservation Society….A real estate agent and former appraiser, Gallasch said he believes removing the monuments would knock 10 to 20 percent off property values in the area around the avenue — costing as much as $3 million a year in city tax revenue.

Property values! Where have I heard this argument before? But would removal of five statues representing the leading white supremacists of the Confederacy really knock 10-20 percent off property values in the area? If Gallasch is wrong, then the statues might as well come down. But if he’s right, then the statues really, really ought to come down.

POSTSCRIPT: As for the actual cost of removing the things, I’ll bet there are plenty of folks who’d be willing to do it for free. And if you insist on professionals, I’ll bet a Kickstarter campaign would raise the money in no time.

Here’s the latest scandal rocking Southern California:

Visitors to the Shanghai Disney Resort in China will soon get to use a smartphone app to reserve a time to visit their favorite attraction without waiting in a long line — at no additional cost. But some Disney fans are irked because the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim launched a similar app in July at a cost of $10 a day….“It’s just the latest money grab,” wrote a Disney fan who goes by @RobertofDisney on Twitter. “There’s no reason it shouldn’t be free.”

The Chinese are laughing at us, as usual. Soon Disneyland will be a ghost town as visitors head to Shanghai instead to take advantage of its free Maxpass. I hope Donald Trump does something about this.

Dennis Brack/Black Star/Newscom via ZUMA

Here’s the latest version of the story about how Donald Trump Jr. decided to meet up with a Putin-connected Russian attorney last year:

Donald Trump Jr. told Senate investigators on Thursday that he set up a June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer because he was intrigued that she might have damaging information about Hillary Clinton, saying it was important to learn about Mrs. Clinton’s “fitness” to be president. But nothing came of the Trump Tower meeting, he said, and he was adamant that he never colluded with the Russian government’s campaign to disrupt last year’s presidential election.

So…Don Jr. wanted to collude, and he would have except that it turned out the Russians didn’t have any good dirt. Do I have that right?

Matt Yglesias says Donald Trump should try working with Democrats more often:

Why not cut deals with Democrats, jam the GOP establishment up, and let them whinge to their reporter friends about it?

It’s not, after all, like cutting deals with Democrats on legislation means that Trump will suddenly be a liberal or conservatives will have no reason to support him. Obviously Trump and Democrats will continue to disagree about immigration and gun control [etc.]….But on the other stuff, why not do the things he said he was going to do? Cut a deal with Democrats on infrastructure. Cut a deal with Democrats to reform the tax code without making a huge giveaway to the rich. Cut a deal with Democrats to lower premiums and deductibles, thus addressing actual people’s actual gripes with Obamacare.

It would work. It would be popular. It would be a legislative legacy. And while it would make Ryan and McConnell angry, they’d no more be in a position to stop it than they were in a position to stop Trump and Schumer from making a deal on the debt ceiling.

I don’t get it. This would only work if these bills got to the floor of the House for a vote. But they wouldn’t. Paul Ryan would just toss them in the waste bin and move on.

Now, it’s possible this could work if the bills were so popular, and Trump pushed them so skillfully, that Republicans began to fear losing their seats if they opposed them. But what are the odds? Trump doesn’t have the attention span to really sell this stuff. The vast majority of Republicans are in safe districts that they don’t have to worry about. And the first time Democrats crossed Trump, he’d dump them.

Republicans control Congress. Like it or not, that’s who Trump has to deal with.