This has been a very fecund year for the ducks and geese here in our little suburban watering hole. Last year we had no ducklings and only two broods of goslings. This year we’ve had three broods of ducklings and either four or five broods of Canada goose babies—so far.

Our favorite ducks are a pair of white ducks who seem delightfully attached to each other. They’re always together, usually within a few feet of each other and never more than ten or twenty yards apart. They’re such lovebirds, and we always thought they deserved a family. This year they got one, an adorable brood of five yellow ducklings:

But duckling season has resurfaced an old mystery. We also have a pair of gray ducks who hang around with the white ducks. At first I wondered if maybe white ducks start out gray and then turn white, and these were children of the white ducks. But I guess that’s not the case. They’re still gray. However, they’ve also hatched a family, and they still seem to hang around with their white duck friends:

That’s the entire brood, seven gray cutie pies with yellow chests. And here are the kids playing together as if down color doesn’t matter a bit:

“Ebony … and ivory.” Come on! Sing it with me. Here’s a closeup of one of the yellow ducklings:

And here they all are after an exhausting hour of paddling around in the wading pool:

Check out the one in front. He looks like a kitten after a few minutes of chasing a string around. But it’s not just ducklings around here. We also have plenty of goslings. Here’s the most recently hatched, a brood of one:

And here’s the middle batch, a few days older. This is either a brood of seven or two smaller broods that have decided to join forces:

And here’s the oldest, part of a brood of three:

The new camera takes way better pictures of baby waterfowl than the old one. Goslings always looked a little fuzzy with the old camera, and I chalked it up to the nature of gosling down. It’s so soft that I figured it looked out of focus even when it wasn’t. But in reality it was the soft lens on the old camera. The Sony has better autofocus, which helps, but it also has a far better lens and less aggressive image compression. The down on a duckling actually looks like down. Hooray!

We got our patio cover painted a couple of days ago, so I figured today’s catblogging should be a picture of Hilbert frolicking on the newly painted wood. Naturally he didn’t take the hint on his own, so I picked him up and deposited him up there. He loves prowling around on the patio cover, so he immediately started investigating things.

I took lots of pictures, but unfortunately I wasn’t really paying attention to the shutter speed, which was much too low. Pretty much everything was just a blur of Hilbert flopping and rolling and sticking his nose through the slats. So this morning I hauled him up again. The bad news is that he just roamed around on the roof and then got bored and came down. The good news is that I happened to get this one terrific shot of him. You’ll just have to take my word that he’s posing on a freshly-painted patio cover.

POSTSCRIPT: Hilbert will not be on our new team of disinformation killers. He was willing to work cheap, but we eventually disqualified him for his inability to understand that “disinformation” did not apply to dog food commercials. However, if you’d like to make a donation to help pay the human members of our team, click here.

The New York Times warns that concessions by the Chinese in trade negotiations are probably a mirage:

Chinese negotiators are preparing to offer the administration a deal to buy up to $200 billion worth of American goods….But the Chinese promises would be largely illusory, economists cautioned….“The short answer is these are unrealistic numbers,” said Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics….“It would even be a stretch to get it to $50 billion,” Mr. Bown said.

That is because the United States economy is already running near its full productive capacity, meaning it would not be able to produce enough new goods to meet Chinese demands, especially in the short term.

Hmmm. Dean Baker has some thoughts about that. And me? Naturally I have a chart:

Manufacturing currently contributes about $2 trillion to GDP. That would go up about $150 billion if capacity utilization merely returned to its 1988 level—which is obviously not impossible—and it would require adding a little less than a million workers to the manufacturing sector. Assuming that some of them came from other jobs while others rejoined the workforce, it would probably mean an increase in the employment-population ratio of about one percentage point. That would put us at the same level we were at for 20 consecutive years until the Great Recession. And this would happen over the course of several years, not overnight.

That’s a big lift, but there’s nothing literally impossible about it. And the funny thing is that the Chinese might actually be serious about this offer. They might welcome an excuse to steer their economy away from being so dependent on the US as an export market.

In the end, I suppose I doubt that. Still, the idea that our economy is so maxed out that it couldn’t produce an extra $200 billion worth of goods if China wanted to buy them is a pretty dubious proposition.

Speak English, you smug white flip-chart using bastards.Kuerbs, B/DPA via ZUMA

Huh?

Jordan Peterson, a University of Toronto psychology professor turned YouTube philosopher turned mystical father figure, has emerged as an influential thought leader. The messages he delivers range from hoary self-help empowerment talk (clean your room, stand up straight) to the more retrograde and political (a society run as a patriarchy makes sense and stems mostly from men’s competence; the notion of white privilege is a farce).

….Why did he decide to engage in politics at all? He says a couple years ago he had three clients in his private practice “pushed out of a state of mental health by left-wing bullies in their workplace.” I ask for an example, and he sighs.

He says one patient had to be part of a long email chain over whether the term “flip chart” could be used in the workplace, since the word “flip” is a pejorative for Filipino. “She had a radical-left boss who was really concerned with equality and equality of outcome and all these things and diversity and inclusivity and all these buzzwords and she was subjected to — she sent me the email chain, 30 emails about whether or not the word flip chart was acceptable,” Mr. Peterson says.

I’ve lived a pretty placid life, and I’ve certainly learned that not everyone’s life is as placid as mine. Stuff that doesn’t bother me can be a big deal to other people. But a dumb email chain sent a woman into therapy? I hope everyone will excuse me if I find this unlikely. Perhaps Peterson should have explored his patient’s problem a little more deeply?

The Wall Street Journal has an article today about the Oklahoma City School District. Back in 2015, under pressure from the Obama administration, they decided that school suspensions were out of control and were unfairly targeted toward black kids:

In Oklahoma City, the school district opted to make changes in 2015 after a broad investigation by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights found stark disparities in the way black and white students were being treated: more than a third of black students here were suspended at least once, according to federal civil-rights data, compared with 15% of white students.

“I always say this complaint was a blessing because, until the complaint came about, you didn’t have district administrators saying, ‘We’ve got an issue with suspending black students or Hispanic students,’” said Chuck Tompkins, the head of a new “school climate” office charged with carrying out the changes. “This forced us.”

Suspensions are down in Oklahoma City schools, and maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t have an informed opinion about it. However, by applying careful and rigorous analysis to the data provided by the school district, I can say this:

• In 2012-13, black students were suspended at a rate 144 percent higher than white students.
• In 2016-17, black students were suspended at a rate 133 percent higher than white students.

If the goal was to rein in the disparate treatment of black kids, OKC’s new policy isn’t accomplishing anything. Not yet, anyway. How is it possible to report on this and not even mention something like that?

To wrap up the week, today’s photo was selected by Marian. This is one of the prettiest pictures I took during our Yosemite trip in February. It’s a late afternoon photo of Half Dome, reflected in the Merced River.

From Betsy Novak, a greenhouse worker who voted for Donald Trump, on why he probably shouldn’t fire Robert Mueller:

People would be suspicious.

That’s a big Ten-Four, good buddy.

Olivier Douliery/CNP via ZUMA

A couple of days ago, North Korea released a statement saying that it might have to “reconsider” its upcoming summit meeting with President Trump after inflammatory remarks from National Security Advisor John Bolton:

But now prior to the DPRK-U.S. summit, unbridled remarks provoking the other side of dialogue are recklessly made in the U.S. and I am totally disappointed as these constitute extremely unjust behavior.

High-ranking officials of the White House and the Department of State including Bolton, White House national security adviser, are letting loose the assertions of so-called Libya mode of nuclear abandonment, “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization,” “total decommissioning of nuclear weapons, missiles and biochemical weapons” etc. while talking about formula of “abandoning nuclear weapons first, compensating afterwards.” … We shed light on the quality of Bolton already … Setbacks owing to the likes of Bolton.

Today Trump responded:

“The Libyan model isn’t a model that we have at all,” Trump told reporters during a photo session with the visiting secretary general of NATO. “We decimated that country.” By contrast, if the U.S. reaches a deal with North Korea, Kim will “get protections that would be very strong,” Trump said. “He will have very adequate protection.”

North Korea pushed, and Trump backed away. Stay tuned.

In news that should surprise no one, the Wall Street Journal reports that many cryptocurrencies are fraudulent:

Hundreds of technology firms raising money in the fevered market for cryptocurrencies are using deceptive or even fraudulent tactics to lure investors. In a review of documents produced for 1,450 digital coin offerings, The Wall Street Journal has found 271 with red flags that include plagiarized investor documents, promises of guaranteed returns and missing or fake executive teams.

“Jeremy Boker” is listed as a co-founder of Denaro, an online-payment project. In investor documents for a public offering in March, which claimed to have raised $8.3 million, Mr. Boker boasted of his cryptocurrency startup’s “powerhouse” team. In his biography, he noted a “respectable history of happy clients” in consulting before he launched Denaro. In fact, Mr. Boker’s bio image was a stock photo, there is no evidence he exists and the rest of his team appears to be fictional, except for two freelancers who said they were paid by people unknown to them to market the project, the Journal found.

I think a better choice of words would be that 271 ICOs are more obviously fraudulent than the other 1,179 ICOs that are just normally bamboozley. In any case, this kind of outright fraud is the kind of thing that becomes widespread when a bubble is about to go kablooey.

Back in the day—namely, a few months ago—I thought that maybe I just didn’t quite get blockchain technology. There must be something to it that was escaping me. But I’ve given up on that after reading quite a bit more about it. Blockchain is an interesting, if minor, innovation that has some potentially useful applications. But that’s it. It’s not a world-changing technology and it doesn’t decentralize the management of fiat currencies unless you decide not to count all the extremely centralized infrastructure that’s required to make it useful in the real world. And cryptocurrencies themselves are just a straight-up bubble of the kind that makes tulips look perfectly sensible. At least tulips are pretty. I’m pretty sure that if the trade in bitcoin were required to obey the normal rules of financial exchanges—for example, trades being recorded only if they’re made with normal, legitimately acquired money, not other flim-flam cryptocurrencies—it would collapse overnight.

So when does it collapse? Bubbles always seem to last about 50 percent longer than you’d think they possibly could, so I suppose the cryptocurrency bubble has a little while longer to go. But its implosion can’t be too far away.

Richard B. Levine/Levine Roberts/Newscom via ZUMA

For many years the internet has been torn apart over how to pronounce GIF. In 2015 we had the great white-gold-blue-black dress sensation. A few days ago brought us the Laurel-Yanny conundrum. And now we have this:

SHERIFF MIMS: Thank you. There could be an MS-13 member I know about — if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it.

THE PRESIDENT: We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast, we get them, we release them, we get them again, we bring them out. It’s crazy.

Question: who does Trump think are animals? All the people we deport out of the country? Or just MS-13 gang members? This is the very latest internet Rorschach test.