It was gusty around here for a few days last week, and after the wind stopped on Saturday I noticed that the sky was exceptionally clear. So, on a whim, I decided to head out and try my luck at a star trails picture.

However, I didn’t feel like making the long trek out to Anza Borrega, so I compromised instead on Lake Henshaw, which is less dark than Anza but also about an hour closer. I knew this would mean a fair amount of light pollution on a long-exposure shot, so I decided to work with that by deliberately putting some light in the frame. The result is a picture that looks as if it were taken at sunrise. In reality, the yellow glow—from Warner Springs, about ten miles away—is only barely visible to the naked eye. But if you leave your shutter open for three hours, it turns into something very bright indeed.

I’m not sure if I’ll try this again. It has to be done in winter, when the nights are long, and for a really good shot I’d probably have to trek out to Joshua Tree or Death Valley. And even at that, there are limits to what I can get. There’s a lot of noise in this picture, due to my camera’s small, mid-quality sensor. A six-hour exposure would make the noise even worse, and would also require me to spend six hours in my car while the camera is working. I’m not sure that’s worth it.

Still, I’m glad I did this. I like the spot I found, and the orange glow from the light pollution is actually kind of entertaining.

Here’s some great Atrios bait today:

The assailant slipped out of a park around noon one day in October, zeroing in on his target, which was idling at a nearby intersection — a self-driving van operated by Waymo, the driverless-car company spun out of Google. He carried out his attack with an unidentified sharp object, swiftly slashing one of the tires. The suspect, identified as a white man in his 20s, then melted into the neighborhood on foot.

….At least 21 such attacks have been leveled at Waymo vans in Chandler, as first reported by The Arizona Republic. Some analysts say they expect more such behavior as the nation moves into a broader discussion about the potential for driverless cars to unleash colossal changes in American society. The debate touches on fears ranging from eliminating jobs for drivers to ceding control over mobility to autonomous vehicles.

It’s the Luddites reborn! Luckily for them, they’ll get off easier than the loom smashers of old, who were variously hanged, shipped off to Botany Bay, or tossed in prison for a few years. On the other hand, I don’t imagine they’ll have any more impact than the original Luddite rioters either. The power looms took over and so will the driverless cars. Resistance is futile.

I continue to be amazed by the number of people who are convinced that driverless cars are a mirage. Their arguments boil down to driving is complicated and they don’t work yet. Both true! And both meaningless. Weaving is also complicated, and the first power looms were kind of clunky. But they worked eventually and so will driverless cars. We’re better off figuring out what to do about it than we are putting our heads in the sand.

Senate via ZUMA Wire

So. Elizabeth Warren. I guess I should noodle out loud about what I think of her. This is all pretty vague and unformed, but here goes:

• First things first: she’s obviously a solid progressive who would support progressive goals like universal health care and so forth. However, we’re going to have a lot of candidates who fit that mold this year.
• I like the FDRish way she defends capitalism and just wants to save it from itself.
• I’m not so thrilled—yet—with her foreign policy. She sits on the Armed Services Committee as an obvious way to shore up her military cred, but her big speech recently on foreign policy fell flat for me. She tried to make it all about applying her progressive domestic values to foreign affairs, but that just doesn’t cut it. At some point, she’s going to have to take some firm stands on real foreign policy issues that aren’t just extensions of progressive domestic values. What does she think of China? Russia? North Korea? Israel? Yemen? Iran? Saudi Arabia? Free trade? NATO? Nuclear modernization? Ohio class submarines? Cyberwarfare? Etc.
• She gave a speech a while back about shoring up private pensions: 401(k)s, IRAs, and so forth. I liked it. Portable pensions are obviously here to stay, and it’s better to talk about how to make them better than it is to moon forever about the loss of old-school company pensions—which weren’t all that great anyway.
• I’m not sold at all on her idea of the government manufacturing generic drugs. Governments should do the kinds of things they’re good at, and this is definitely not one of them. What’s more, if you really are a capitalist at heart, you should consider direct control of manufacturing as a last resort after you’ve tried everything else. The fact that Warren is proposing it as a first-best solution does not leave me with the warm fuzzies about her judgment.
• Let’s face it: her handling of the whole Pocahontas/native heritage affair was pretty ham handed. As an issue, it doesn’t matter that much. But as an indicator of how well she handles difficult situations, it might not bode well.
• She has very little political experience. But I don’t know if that even matters anymore.

Overall, Warren still strikes me as a bit shallow, a candidate with one big issue and not too much else. But she has plenty of time to fix that.

Does this look scary to you? It should. But to most people, it's just another confusing chart showing something or other that they don't really get.NASA

Scottish science-fiction author Charlie Stross says 2018 was a truly godawful year:

I am looking for any silver linings to 2018 and coming up blank.

Oddly enough, there was a silver lining, and it comes just a few sentences earlier in his own post:

2018 was the year that the global climate change alarm sirens began to sound continuously, with wildfires and heat emergencies and melting icecaps.

Granted, this is not your typical good news, like malaria is nearly eradicated or Scott Pruitt got kicked out of the EPA. And yet, given the nature of the problem, the only way the public was ever going to take climate change seriously was to be hit in the face with it. Careful models showing temperature increases of 0.06 °C per year were never going to have any impact. Predictions of dire effects in 2100 were never going to have any impact. Famines in the Sahel were never going to have an impact. Floods in Bangladesh were never going to have an impact. Announcements of seven new extinct species of rain forest beetle were never going to have an impact.

Do I sound like I have a low opinion of the human species? Oh hell yes. The only thing that was ever likely to force people to take climate change seriously was continuous sirens—big, bright, loud continuous sirens. Frankly, I’d be pretty happy if a tsunami destroyed the White House, just like in the movies. Or maybe a heat wave killed a hundred thousand people in Paris. With apologies to Washington DC and Paris, this is what it’s going to take to get the panicked level of attention we need: something big, something clearly climate related, and something that kills a lot of white people.

So 2018 was a good year for climate change, and we need more like it: bad enough to get people’s attention before the really bad stuff starts.

As 2018 finally draws to a close, I suppose it’s time to reflect on the past year, both good and bad. I’ve tried to do this. Not too hard, I admit, but I tried. Sadly, I came up pretty empty-handed. I mean, no close family members died. I guess that counts as good news. Beyond that, everything was pretty terrible. So I guess my parting message to 2018 is not to let the door hit you on the way out.

It’s now time for me to head over to the infusion center for my monthly de-cancerization treatment. That also means today is Evil Dex day, and that in turn means there will be no old-man nonsense tonight about falling asleep before midnight. In fact, I’ll see in the New Year in Hawaii, Tahiti, and whatever Pacific island is closest to the date line. A quick look at a map suggests that American Samoa takes the prize. Don’t worry American Samoa! I’ll be ringing in the New Year right along with you!

Any deaths of children or others at the Border are strictly the fault of the Democrats and their pathetic immigration policies that allow people to make the long trek thinking they can enter our country illegally. They can’t. If we had a Wall, they wouldn’t even try! The two…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 29, 2018

This is a pretty frequent occurrence at our house: Hopper out on the front porch pretending that she’s locked out and desperately wants to come in. Hilbert looks on distractedly while Hopper gives Marian a sad look. The reality here is that if Marian opens the door, Hopper will either (a) wander off because she didn’t want to come in after all, or (b) she’ll zip in and then exit through the back door, as if she couldn’t have gotten to the backyard just by walking around the side of the house. Needless to say, the whole thing is a scam, just a test of whether the household servants are properly trained. We always pass, but just barely.

And while we’re on the subject, 2018 is nearly over and this is your last chance to help us out with our year-end fundraiser. As you can see from the thermometer above, we’re getting close to our goal! We just need a little bit more. Click here to make a contribution via credit card or PayPal.

A “friend” brings to my attention the latest column from Rich Lowry, editor of National Review. With the stock market tanking, he has some advice for Donald Trump:

For a president who underlined the increasing importance of working-class whites to the GOP coalition and who trampled so much bipartisan economic orthodoxy during the campaign, to be so overtly obsessed with the stock market is a strange disconnect….This isn’t how he should view it, and it was shortsighted to be so boastful about the good times.

….Wages would be a worthy new object of his attention. Trump has the ability to shift the public conversation onto ground of his choosing, and it’d be better if wages didn’t often take a back seat to the stock market and GDP growth. Trump has a story to tell here. A historically low unemployment rate is having an effect. Wages grew at a 3.1 percent rate year over year in October and November, the highest level since 2009.

This illustrates the problem with economics and the right: they believe their own nonsense too often. Lowry is trying to make a purely political point here, namely that if the stock market is going down, the president should start boasting about something that’s going up. Obviously that makes a kind of hardnosed pragmatic sense, but the problem is that wages aren’t exactly kicking ass these days.

Here’s a simple chart showing three different measures of wage growth over the past few years:

There’s no story here for Trump. The red line is the Employment Compensation Index, which includes everything that employers have to pay for: wages, Social Security, health insurance, etc. The green line is average cash earnings growth for everyone from burger flippers to neurosurgeons. The gray line is cash earnings growth solely for blue collar workers, who make up about 70 percent of the workforce.

I included all three of these to forestall any griping that I was cherry picking. But they all tell the same story: real wage growth during the Trump presidency is pretty low. In the most recent quarter, real wages grew about 0.2 percent over last year, and a guesstimate based on October and November numbers suggests that in the final quarter real wages grew about 0.4 percent. That’s better than no wage growth, but hardly something Trump can be hanging his reelection hat on.

As for why Trump brags on the stock market, it’s because he’s a billionaire Republican and billionaire Republicans care about the stock market. Likewise, he doesn’t care much about wages because higher wages give workers more leverage and this annoys billionaire Republicans. I’m pretty sure Lowry knows this, since Republicans scream blue murder about hyperinflation being right around the corner every time wages for ordinary workers go up half a percent.

As for Trump, he prefers to demagogue about the border wall, which is perfect for him. He can pretend that a wall will cut down on illegal immigration and therefore help workers, which gets him applause from the working class. Business owners, however, know that the wall won’t do anything, so they’re happy to let Trump rant. Everyone’s happy.

As I think you can guess, there’s not a lot to write about this morning. So how about Beto O’Rourke? Liberals are chattering a lot about how much attention he’s getting—too much? not enough?—and factions are apparently being formed for some kind of war between him and Bernie Sanders. Or maybe just between their supporters. Or something. I’m not really sure about that part. Really, I just want to know if Beto is getting lots of undeserved attention in the early race for the 2020 Democratic primaries.

So let’s take a look. Here is the past 90 days of Google Trends for Beto O’Rourke:

Hmmm. Not much action there for Beto following the election, so let’s zoom in to just the past 30 days:

Still not much. A couple of little blips, but basically flat for the past month. So how does that compare to other potential candidates for 2020?

That’s better! Over the past month Beto is right up there with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a bit ahead of Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. Whether he can keep this up after the mini-war is over is another thing entirely. We’ll see.

UPDATE: The original version of this post used a Google Trends chart showing that Beto O’Rourke was getting less attention than any of the others. It’s been corrected.

From Stacey Mortensen, executive director of the Altamont commuter rail system in San Jose:

No matter how you look at it, Merced will be the northern point of high-speed rail for quite some time. So we need to get there. We are trying to be part of the solution.

Behold California’s bullet train. A thing of beauty, is it not?