We are starting to see signs that death rates are plateauing in some European countries. This follows a couple of weeks of flattening case counts and increased lockdowns, so it doesn’t come as a surprise. The United States, on the other hand, is still accelerating upward. I’d guess that we have a minimum of a couple of weeks before we see any flattening.

BTW, here’s my Thanksgiving advice: Don’t. No excuses. Just don’t. Postpone it until next year and we can all have, say, a June Thanksgiving instead.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 18. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Elias Funez/Modesto Bee/ZUMAPRESS

Toward the end of a Twitter conversation about working from home, Will Wilkinson suddenly makes this observation:

It’s really striking how the decline in the % of people with college degrees in my hometown not only hurt the economy but also stuff like community theater, kids sports leagues, etc. which their volunteer-work was holding together.

— Will Wilkinson 🌐 (@willwilkinson) November 19, 2020

This is so important. The brain drain from the country into cities is well known, and its effect on poverty and economic stagnation in rural communities has been studied from seemingly every possible angle. But its effect on the social and cultural life of these communities is equally important. Ever since World War II, as college education became a national obsession, rural communities have been increasingly stripped of the people who might be thought of as their yeast: small in number, but without them everything goes flat. They are, as Will says, the people most likely to start up community theaters, coach sports teams, organize holiday parades, settle arguments, and so forth. Without them, no one steps up to do those things.

Nor is it just rural communities that this affects. It’s also affected urban cores in much the same way.

This is hardly a new phenomenon. Literature going back to Homer speaks of ambitious young people who leave the country to seek fame and fortune in the big city. And segregation by wealth has always been with us at the extremes. The Appalachians have always been very poor and Beverly Hills has always been very rich.

But it’s one thing to see this on a modest scale and quite another for it to become so widespread that it practically defines our national character. Call it the Great Unmixing, as communities have increasingly become monocultures, either all working class or all college educated, and never the twain shall meet.

I’m not aware of a good book on this subject that’s deeply grounded and free of ideological cant. Have I missed one? Or does someone need to get busy and write it?

Two years ago I posted a picture of the autumn leaves on our neighbor’s fence. Today I’m doing it again. Apparently autumn has come early this year since the leaves turned about two weeks earlier than they did in 2018.

U.S. Marines/ZUMA

It’s official: apparently the reason Donald Trump has been firing all the top leaders at the Pentagon is because he wanted new leaders who would agree to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. I have to admit I didn’t see that coming.

So what should we think about this? There are two serious arguments against it. First, a drawdown is fine in theory, but a rushed and poorly planned drawdown in the waning weeks of a presidency is a terrible way to go about it. Second, this will wreck whatever leverage we have in our current negotiations with the Taliban.

I’m not much impressed with either argument. Sure, a well-planned drawdown would obviously be better, but I’ve seen no evidence that we can’t do this in fairly short order. There are force protection issues that need to be addressed, but that’s doable. There are also concerns about getting sensitive equipment out of the country quickly in case of a sudden Taliban surge, but again that seems like a bit of a remote worry. In the end, if we have no choice but to simply destroy some of this stuff, we’ll live through it.

The second argument carries a little more weight—on the surface, at least. We’re currently negotiating a treaty with the Taliban that trades a troop drawdown for their promise to engage peacefully with the government in Kabul. But if we withdraw on our own, why should the Taliban bother promising anything at all? Why not just wait for us to withdraw on our own?

I think that’s entirely correct. However, I also think the Taliban never had any intention of honoring any treaty in the first place. We are stuck with the same problem in Afghanistan that we’ve had for two decades: If we leave, the Taliban will take over in short order and we’ll have to face the fact that we lost. We fought a 20-year war for literally nothing. No American president has been willing to accept that.

No president until Donald Trump, that is. Given Trump’s personality, I find this sort of inexplicable, but apparently he’s so dedicated to ending a forever war that he’s willing to be the president who lost Afghanistan. This really doesn’t compute, unless he thinks he’s laying a trap for Joe Biden to be the guy in office when the Taliban finally takes over. Maybe.

In any case, I have never believed that there was any end to the war in Afghanistan except one: the Taliban wins. Given that reality, we might as well get out sooner rather than later and simply accept the loss. Regardless of his reasons, that’s what Trump is putting into motion. I’m all in favor of it.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 17. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Here’s a little story. I had lunch a few days ago with a Republican friend. Not a tea party crank, just a normal, moderate Republican. We were talking about Donald Trump and he said, Well, at least you have to give him credit for Warp Speed. No Democrat would ever have done that.

I just looked at him. I barely knew what to say. Why wouldn’t a Democrat have done it?

Oh come on.

But Warp Speed was mainly about spending money. Democrats love to spend money. You’re always complaining about it.

Hmmm.

Any president would have done it.

This is an example of how we inhabit different sets of realities. Aside from the admittedly catchy name, which I give Trump credit for, Warp Speed was a program that Bill Gates and others had been talking about for months. It was funded by the CARES Act, which passed with unanimous Democratic support. Of course a Democratic president would have pushed for something like Warp Speed.

So what had convinced my friend that a Democrat never would have come up with something like that? It’s a mystery.

POSTSCRIPT: Why did I share this story? Because it struck me as different from the usual sort of thing: Benghazi, Hillary’s email, Trump won the election, etc. It’s not a dumb conspiracy theory, just a routine assumption about an opposition party that came out of nowhere and seems (to those of us in the opposition party) to be completely off base. How much more baggage like this is out there that never gets reported because it’s not crazytown stuff?

Have you heard of Substack? If you don’t pay close attention to the online writing/blogging/punditing world, you might not have. But it’s currently enjoying its 15 minutes of fame.

Newsletters are the everything-old-is-new-again hotness these days, and Substack is a platform that allows you to manage a newsletter business. What makes it unique is that it provides a ready-made infrastructure for charging subscription fees, which can vary depending on what you want to charge for and what you want to send out for free. This is handy for solo writers who just want to write and don’t feel like messing around with the business side of online writing.¹ Recent converts to Substack include Glenn Greenwald, Matt Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, and others.

Those three are the reason Substack is suddenly getting attention. That’s because all of them, to one extent or another, have joined Substack as a sort of protest against the wokeness of their previous employers. They want the freedom to say whatever they want to say without hindrance from editors or allegedly hypersensitive fellow writers. Naturally this provides a great hook for stories about whether the wokeness of the left is getting so bad that even progressive writers are finally getting sick of it. For more, check out “The Substackerati” in the latest issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.

But this is not my topic today. I’m a blogging dinosaur, which makes me a little sad about the rise of Substack. Back in the day, the virtue of blogging was that everyone could talk to everyone. Later, when many bloggers (including me) went to work for magazines, our work was still freely available. We could link back and forth and our readers always had the option of clicking those links if they wanted more details or just wanted to check and make sure we were quoting each other fairly. The same was true of news articles we commented on.

This ecoystem began to break down when newspapers started going behind paywalls. For example, I now pay for subscriptions to the LA Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. That comes to over a thousand dollars a year, and I’m not really willing to cough up any more than that. This means that I constantly run into paywalls that prevent me from even reading potentially interesting pieces. And my readers, unless they also shell out a thousand dollars a year, are likely to be unable to ever read the news pieces that I link to.

Now, with Substack, the same is going to be true of an increasing number of writers. I’m not really willing to rack up a whole bunch of $60-per-year subscription fees for individual writers, which means I’ll never know what they’re saying. And even if I did, you’d never know what they’re saying unless you’re coincidentally a subscriber too. This means we have a growing circle of writers who are influencing the political conversation but doing it semi-privately. The rest of us will only get hints here and there, the way you might have heard snatches of gossip from acquaintances who had been invited to an 18th century salon.

There is, obviously, lots of political gossiping that already happens over lunch tables or cocktail parties. Still, I’m not thrilled to see political writing begin to head behind a paywall where only a select few can read it. I may be overreacting to this, and I very much understand the business problem it solves. Still, it’s a trend I’m not very happy to see.

¹The marketing side, by contrast, is more important than ever to mess around with. You’re on your own with Substack, and it’s up to you to keep your subscriber base growing.

This is the Broad Museum in downtown Los Angeles. I posted a nighttime picture of it a couple of years ago, where I complained that it was hard to take a good picture because there was too much crap in the way. This time I took the picture from the middle of the street so there was nothing in the way, but of course that got me too close to get the whole thing in one shot. So I snapped four shots and then stitched them together.

This turned out to be a huge pain in the ass. Maybe there are some tips and tricks I don’t know about, but getting the top edge of the museum straight took a ton of time and effort. It’s still not 100 percent straight, but it’s close. And I suppose it’s better than trying to shop out the traffic lights and so forth that get in the way if you back up.

Unlike some of my other panoramic shots, this one could have been done pretty easily with a fairly normal and inexpensive wide-angle lens. But I don’t have one of those.

California Secretary of State

I was reminded yesterday that on this year’s state ballot initiatives I recorded my most brutal repudiation ever: only five out of twelve went my way. I’m pretty sure I’ve never come close to doing so badly. Here’s the scorecard:

14. Stem cells. I said NO, California said YES.
15. Split rolls for Prop 13. I said YES, California said NO.
16. Affirmative action. I said YES, California said NO.
17. Allow felons to vote upon release from prison. I said YES, California said YES.
18. Allow 17-year-olds to vote in primaries if they will be 18 by the time of the general election. I said NO, California said NO.
19. Miscellaneous hodgepodge of tax increases. I said WEAK NO, California said WEAK YES.
20. Increases penalties for certain minor crimes, primarily shoplifting. I said NO, California said NO.
21. Allows local governments to enact rent control. I said NO, California said NO.
22. Allows Uber to treat its drivers as contractors, not employees. I said NO, California said YES.
23. Requires physician or nurse to be present during dialysis treatment. I said NO, California said NO.
24. Tightens California’s consumer privacy laws. I said NO, California said YES.
25. End cash bail. I said YES, California said NO.

Some of these are not that important. I don’t really care all that much if Californians want to spend a few billion dollars on stem cell research, nor do I care that much if 17-year-olds are allowed to vote in certain primaries. For me, the important ones were 15, 16, 17, 22, 24, and 25. Every single one of those went against me except felon enfranchisement.

What does this mean? In the case of the Uber initiative, I’m willing to completely blame the $200 million ad campaign in favor of it, which was enormously effective and virtually uncontested. The others are more obviously ideological defeats. Californians just didn’t want to make corporations pay a fairer share of property taxes. They didn’t want affirmative action. They were willing to vote for a consumer privacy law even though almost none of them understood what it would do. And they just didn’t like the idea of ending cash bail.

This might be nothing more than a random drubbing for me. You win some, you lose some. Alternatively, though, it could mean that something is shifting: either California is becoming less liberal or I’m becoming more liberal. I don’t think I’ve changed much, which leads me to think that maybe California has entered a new phase of slightly declining liberalism. Maybe.

Or it might mean nothing at all. That’s always a possibility.

From the Wall Street Journal:

U.S. shoppers boosted their buying in October for the sixth month in a row, but the pace of growth slowed considerably amid rising coronavirus cases and uncertainty ahead of the U.S. presidential election. Retail sales increased a seasonally adjusted 0.3% in October from a month earlier, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. That fell short of economists’ expectations for a 0.5% rise, and was well below the 1.6% gain in September.

Is this really true? I doubt it:

I’ve mentioned this before, but retail sales are growing now at the same rate they were growing before the pandemic. The reason they’re leveling off is because they have no choice. There’s really no way they can sustain a growth rate higher than the trendline.

This business of constantly trying to explain a single month’s (or day’s) movement in some economic indicator has an ancient lineage, but we really ought to knock it off. The Journal has no more idea of why retail growth flattened than you or I do. What’s more, even a fleeting glance at a chart should suggest that there was no external cause at all. It’s just a matter of how much money people have.