MACA: Make America China Again (OK, the "Again" doesn't really work but you try coming up with cute titles for fifteen years)

Great Marketplace segment from Matt Levin on how a economy (in this case China's) functions when it can't trust its own government's data.

How to deal with untrustworthy government economic data? Look to China 

Liu said nobody really believes China’s National Bureau of Statistics when it says Chinese GDP grew over 5% last quarter.

China watchers like her look for data from third parties that are proxies for economic activity, like freight volumes.

“If economic activities are of a high level, then you would anticipate trucks are moving around,” Liu said.

Investors and economists also look to data on electricity use or nighttime light or heat emissions from satellite imagery.

These work-arounds help but they don't take the place of reliable official numbers.

“There are marketing firms, domestic Chinese firms, some foreign firms in China that do market research,” Kennedy said. “They do their own surveys of consumers.”

But that system is by no means perfect. Sure, the Chinese economy has grown dramatically the past few decades, but Derek Scissors at the American Enterprise Institute says the lack of good government data has nevertheless hurt Chinese businesses.

“Firms can't tell what's going on,” Scissors said. “They look at official data and say, ‘Should we get into this industry? I can't tell.’ And then they make bad decisions.”

As sub-optimal as that may be for China, a similar situation here in the US would almost certainly be worse.

It’s also important to remember here, nobody has ever really trusted the Chinese Communist Party’s statistics, and Chinese markets have learned to adapt.

Scissors said U.S. businesses have come to depend on good government data, and he worries whether politics might infect more than just the jobs report.

“If we're moving into an era where official statistics are unreliable, that's a huge shock the Chinese economy never had,” said Scissors.

Because they never had reliable stats to begin with.

Josh Marshall on the value of credible data and on the cost of losing it

Josh Marshall has a detailed and extremely well-thought-out reaction to the BLS firing on his Editor's Blog. The whole thing is essential reading, but I want to focus on his conclusions, both because of the way they relate to our post yesterday and how they emphasize a point we've been making for months now.

It’s difficult to capture the magnitude of the importance of government economic data (and other data in different realms). Employment numbers and all government economic data are, taken together, like the instrument control panel for the national economy — for policy makers, markets, corporate decision-makers. Trump’s action injects uncertainty into every decision-making process throughout the economy. It’s not too much to say that credible and consistent economic data is a big driver of prosperity and growth. It allows more informed risk-taking, better informed decisions. But it’s not only these in-the-moment decisions. The revised and final data become the canonical record of what happened. And not just for government. Histories of this era will be written based on that data, economic research, etc.

The impact of this decision is great for the credibility of government financial data which, for most of the last century, has been deemed basically beyond reproach as a systemic, professional and non-politicized record of economic fact. The impact on credibility is already there. What actually happens and how those subsequent actions impact the economy going forward remains to be seen.

It has been obvious since April—and has only grown more so in the following months—that the markets have failed to price in the enormous and growing risks facing the U.S. and world economy under Trump. As we saw again today, every time something happens that makes catastrophe even more likely, the markets will respond with a sharp drop and then go back to “things are fine” mode the next day.

 

 

Many—perhaps most—analysts and commentators are more comfortable discussing market moves as rational reactions to new data, but we are purely in the realm of animal spirits now. To make sense of investor behavior in the summer of 2025, you have to think in terms not just of market psychology, but of dysfunctional market psychology, using concepts like denial, cognitive dissonance, or battered spouse syndrome.

JPMORGAN, on Trump firing the BLS chief: “.. It is unlikely such a policy action will rejuvenate job creation or bolster confidence. Rather, the risk is that markets begin to question the validity of US macro data, including the CPI data that are the inputs to the $2.1tn TIPS market.”

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— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) August 4, 2025 at 12:04 PM

The worst possible time to start playing Kriegspiel with the US economy

[First, a word about the admittedly obscure title. There is a chess variant where neither player gets to see the other player’s pieces. When you want to make a move, a referee tells you whether it's legal or illegal and if there's a possibility of a pawn capture. From there, it's up to you to make educated guesses about where your opponent’s pieces are.]

If you keep up with the news at all, you've certainly heard that last week President Trump reacted to a bad jobs report by firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The response has been outraged—CNN justifiably termed it Orwellian—but putting aside how bad this is for democracy, I've been thinking about the disturbing practical implications.

Just remembering I wrote this ~3 weeks ago. For once wishing I’d been wrong. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

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— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) August 2, 2025 at 1:30 PM

He's promising to protect the integrity of the data by firing statisticians who follow established methods of data collection and processing whenever those methods yield numbers that don't please the boss.

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— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers.bsky.social) August 3, 2025 at 7:18 AM

One of the ways we distinguish between a healthy nation and a totalitarian or failed state is by the quality of its data. When countries feel the need to cook their own numbers, it is never a good sign. When they do it this openly, it's even worse.

The U.S. has long been known for producing timely, accurate, and trustworthy statistics, and it is difficult to overstate how essential a role they play in policymaking, business decisions, and investment strategies. The Fed needs these numbers to intelligently set policy. Financial institutions need them to allocate resources and manage risk. If we include data about weather, agriculture, etc., countless businesses rely on this government service on a daily basis.

If these sources of information become less accurate or if you undermine people's faith in them, the direct and indirect cost is immense.

“.. The message .. was unmistakable: Government officials who deal in data now fear they have to toe the line or risk losing their jobs ..” @peterbakernyt.bsky.social @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/u...

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— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) August 3, 2025 at 8:00 AM

Even putting aside all those troubling echoes of 1984, this would be incredibly foolish and reckless even under the best of circumstances—and those are not what we're facing at the moment.

A little over six months into this administration, we are facing multiple self-inflicted, unprecedented crises, all of which have the potential to interact in dangerous and unpredictable ways: a massive tariff war; an attack on the independence of the Fed; a potential labor crisis targeting our food supply; destabilization of the institutions that keep society and commerce moving smoothly; stunning levels of corruption; looming financial crises; and the increasing probability of the ultimate economic tar pit, stagflation. Add to that a weakening dollar and a ballooning deficit.

Me three months ago:

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— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers.bsky.social) August 1, 2025 at 3:53 PM

Can you predict the next 3 months?

— Bribleck (@bribleck.bsky.social) August 1, 2025 at 3:57 PM

Wish I could but here’s what I think; Tariff chickens will come home to roost and you’ll see it in inflation more. Stagflation will be a real possibility

— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers.bsky.social) August 1, 2025 at 3:59 PM

@Barrons published my op-ed note on stagflation July 1, 2025. This week’s economic data points straight towards stagflation in the second half of 2025. This New Stagflation Coming Won’t Feel Like the ’70s. #Econ #EconSky www.barrons.com/articles/inf...

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— Joe Brusuelas (@joebrusuelas.bsky.social) August 2, 2025 at 12:38 PM

Between devastating cuts and open attacks on the institutions that provide data, the people who will have to navigate these potential catastrophes will have to do so blind. 

A Letter from Tom Lehrer

While looking through the blog archives to see what we'd written about Tom Lehrer, I came across this post from the excellent site TechDirt that I had meant to write about before my goldfish-level attention span saw something else bright and shiny. 

I had intended it to be part of our ongoing IP thread, but it's also a nice memorial reminder that professor Lehrer was pretty cool in general. 

Then, in 2020, we wrote about him again, noting that he had put up a website where he had announced that all of his lyrics had been officially dedicated to the public domain, and he encouraged people to do what they wanted with them. At the time, we noted that this did not cover the actual music, but Lehrer had suggested he would add that at a future time.

Apparently, that future time has come. Lehrer has expanded the letter on his website, now dated to November of 2022, even if much of it is identical to what we wrote about two years ago. But the big difference is that he’s now including all of the music in the public domain dedication:

I, Tom Lehrer, and the Tom Lehrer Trust 2007, hereby grant the following permissions:

All copyrights to lyrics or music written or composed by me have been relinquished, and therefore such songs are now in the public domain. All of my songs that have never been copyrighted, having been available for free for so long, are now also in the public domain.

The latter includes all lyrics which I have written to music by others, although the music to such parodies, if copyrighted by their composers, are of course not included without permission of their copyright owners. The translated songs on this website may be found on YouTube in their original languages.

Performing and recording rights to all of my songs are included in this permission. Translation rights are also included.

In particular, permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action.

Some recording, movie, and television rights to songs written by me are merely licensed non-exclusively by me to recording, movie, or TV companies. All such rights are now released herewith and therefore do not require any permission from me or from Maelstrom Music, which is merely me in another hat, nor from the recording, movie, or TV companies involved.

In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs.

So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.

 

The Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel is still out there.

Tom Lehrer Full Copenhagen Performance




Wernher von Braun




Poisoning Pigeons In The Park

Eight years ago at the blog -- perhaps our most evergreen post

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

"A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is."

Another excerpt from Charles Mackay's  Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I believe "a company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is" was an initial business plan for Groupon.

Some of these schemes were plausible enough, and, had they been undertaken at a time when the public mind was unexcited, might have been pursued with advantage to all concerned. But they were established merely with the view of raising the shares in the market. The projectors took the first opportunity of a rise to sell out, and next morning the scheme was at an end. Maitland, in his History of London, gravely informs us, that one of the projects which received great encouragement, was for the establishment of a company "to make deal-boards out of saw-dust." This is, no doubt, intended as a joke; but there is abundance of evidence to show that dozens of schemes hardly a whir more reasonable, lived their little day, ruining hundreds ere they fell. One of them was for a wheel for perpetual motion—capital, one million; another was "for encouraging the breed of horses in England, and improving of glebe and church lands, and repairing and rebuilding parsonage and vicarage houses." Why the clergy, who were so mainly interested in the latter clause, should have taken so much interest in the first, is only to be explained on the supposition that the scheme was projected by a knot of the foxhunting parsons, once so common in England. The shares of this company were rapidly subscribed for. But the most absurd and preposterous of all, and which showed, more completely than any other, the utter madness of the people, was one, started by an unknown adventurer, entitled "company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is." Were not the fact stated by scores of credible witnesses, it would be impossible to believe that any person could have been duped by such a project. The man of genius who essayed this bold and successful inroad upon public credulity, merely stated in his prospectus that the required capital was half a million, in five thousand shares of 100 pounds each, deposit 2 pounds per share. Each subscriber, paying his deposit, would be entitled to 100 pounds per annum per share. How this immense profit was to be obtained, he did not condescend to inform them at that time, but promised, that in a month full particulars should be duly announced, and a call made for the remaining 98 pounds of the subscription. Next morning, at nine o'clock, this great man opened an office in Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and when he shut up at three o'clock, he found that no less than one thousand shares had been subscribed for, and the deposits paid. He was thus, in five hours, the winner of 2,000 pounds. He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again

 

"Indeed, if you can’t wrestle with the heavy amount of absurd at the heart of our political moment you will simply be lost or be having an irrelevant conversation with other gatekeepers."

Reporter: Are you considering a pardon Ghislaine Maxwell? Trump: I’m allowed to give her a pardon

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) July 28, 2025 at 6:52 AM

🚨Trump admitted that Jeffrey Epstein “stole” young women working at the Mar-a-Lago spa, including Virginia Giuffre.

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— Republicans Against Trumpism (@rpsagainsttrump.bsky.social) July 29, 2025 at 12:31 PM

I've come to the conclusion that rational people are overly likely to project rationality onto others, particularly in the fields of politics and business. To be clear, assuming that someone's actions are sensible and well thought out is not a bad starting point, but you shouldn't let it blind you to the possibility that the person in front of you is acting out of anger, catharsis, panic, or simple stupidity — particularly when there's a history of one or more of those things.

Rather than look for a secret game plan that explains why the White House has made a string of decisions that only served to deepen the crisis, it probably makes more sense to assume that this is a profoundly dysfunctional group of people acting mostly out of panic.

The past week has given us at least two perfect examples. First, the idea that pardoning the most notorious sex offender currently imprisoned in exchange for testimony that would exonerate Trump to the extent that people would stop asking to see the files is absurd — but fanning the speculation with “I could if I wanted to” sound bites actually makes things worse. At the risk of starting an argument over Occam's razor, rather than looking for a cunning strategy, it's probably best to go with the most obvious explanation here.

Trump says Epstein poached young women from Mar-a-Lago. That raises new questions about what he knew. 

It is also important to consider the fact that Trump is an increasingly confused elderly man with an ever-diminishing attention span with a bizarre compulsion to boast at the most inappropriate times. Some commentators are treating yesterday's comments about Epstein “stealing Trump’s people” as a blockbuster confession. It certainly sounds bad and it could very well indicate that Trump knew what Epstein was doing — but it could also be another bizarre non-memory that the president has been prone to as of late.

Possibly related to the tendency to project rationality onto irrational people is the reluctance of the press to look too closely at extreme craziness. This latter concept was recently addressed by both Josh Marshall and Lawyers, Guns & Money’s excellent Cheryl Rofer.

Here's Marshall [emphasis added]:

A few days ago I got in a back and forth with someone on Facebook about the Jeffrey Epstein story. This person insisted it’s a non-story and criticized the Times — that’s what was important to him — for devoting so much time to it. It was a “pseudo-story” as the journalism argot has it, a kind of pent-up story with no substance or consequence or even existence beyond journalists pretending it’s real. I said that this was a category error. As journalists, our job is to cover and explain what is actually happening, not to act as gatekeepers deciding what’s up to our standards of substance or policy-seriousness or whatever else.

Now, it’s very true that “what’s actually happening” is carrying a lot of weight here. Lots of things are happening all the time. The Kardashians are happening. Reality TV shows are happening (a complicated topic we’ll return to). Fad diets are happening. But in political news when we say that “something is happening,” I mean chains of events which are driving public opinion, changing the dynamics of political power, shifting policy in ways that affects people’s lives, etc. When a sitting president is facing a significant rebellion in his political coalition, having his presidency consumed by efforts to contain the cause of that rebellion and so forth that is a major story. The fact that the essence of what is happening — the beliefs, conspiracy theories, etc. — are, in many ways, absurd does not change that fact. Indeed, if you can’t wrestle with the heavy amount of absurd at the heart of our political moment you will simply be lost or be having an irrelevant conversation with other gatekeepers.

I’ve argued at various points that TPM was ahead of the curve roughly during the Obama years because we paid a lot of attention to what was then sometimes called The Crazy — the subterranean world of GOP and far-right politics; the colorful, weird and almost-always super racist congressmen (and sometimes women) from obscure rural districts. That was portrayed as a sort of moving circus, cheap laughs, click-bait — not real politics. We were often criticized for giving it so much attention. I never thought that was right. And unfortunately the Trump presidency itself vindicated our read of that era. The Crazy was the reality of Republican politics. It was the John Boehners and Paul Ryans who were a kind of respectable veneer placed over its true engine of power and motive force. From the outside, it appeared that these leaders had to run the GOP while wrangling the far-right Freedom Caucus. In fact it was the Freedom Caucus that ran the GOP through a tacit collaboration with presentable and ultimately tractable figures like Boehner and Ryan. Trump’s intuitive political genius was to see that you could ditch the front man and run the GOP directly from the Freedom Caucus, which has been the story of the Trump Era.

And Rofer:

Josh Marshall does something today that’s like what I did a few days ago on QAnon. He takes the crazy seriously. It’s been easy to dismiss Hulk Hogan and his lawsuit or the idea that pedophiles are drinking the adrenochrome of our children. These things are far outside the wildest imaginings of most of us. But the Hogan lawsuit was the product of outside-the-box strategy, and significant numbers of people believe the QAnon dogma or something like it and act on those beliefs. The Hogan lawsuit has distorted journalistic practice, and Donald Trump’s QAnon supporters vote and influence others.

We need to consider how they are thinking. We need to get ahead of Peter Thiel, who was instrumental in the Hogan lawsuit and is now playing multiple roles in politics. He is a mentor to the Vice President and involved in multiple grabs for significant governmental roles via companies he controls. QAnon believers are a significant chunk of Trump’s support.

The reason we need to understand their thinking is to get ahead of them and to develop strategies of our own to thwart and defeat them.

Marshall details why he did not see the Hogan lawsuit as newsworthy. Most of us have ignored the QAnon fictions because they are ugly and bizarre. It’s easy to point and laugh at the people who believe them. But those people now occupy large parts of our reality. The Epstein furor, which is weakening Trump, is a product of QAnon beliefs. The degree to which it is throwing Trump off his game is hard to understand in any other way.

 

 

 

Musk : engineering :: Trump : deal-making

We've hit this point before, but this is a good time to revisit it.

Elon Musk’s fortune rests on his reputation as a “real-life Tony Stark.” The primary reason people continue to insanely overvalue his companies is because of his mystique as an almost superhumanly gifted natural engineer who, despite his lack of formal training, will somehow be able to leapfrog over companies with more advanced technology to provide things like robotaxis, AI, and humanoid robots.

The reality is just the opposite. While Musk is able to carry off the impression of competence when phonetically repeating things his staff told him, when he goes off script, the results are invariably embarrassing. It was one of these times that got Musk on our skeptic radar: when he proposed a high-speed vac train that ran on a cushion of air. As silly as the subsequent Hyperloop startups were, none of them were stupid enough to actually use this design, substituting in a maglev approach instead. Basically, when real engineers tried to build real things, they scrapped Elon’s ideas and just kept the name.

Musk’s relationship to engineering is almost perfectly analogous to Trump's relationship to the art of the deal. His reputation as an incredibly savvy businessman was, perhaps, the key factor in his political rise, but—possibly even more than Musk—the reality is the reverse of the persona.

The widespread perception of Trump as a business genius was largely an illusion produced by a talented TV producer, augmented by relentless self-promotion and questionable business ethics (these last two further support the Musk analogy). The myth of a competent Donald Trump ignores a history of ill-conceived deals and badly run companies.

Examples of the man's inability to negotiate continue to accumulate.

From Paul Krugman:

So U.S. consumers will soon be suffering. But why are U.S. manufacturers so upset with the Japan deal? Because in combination with Trump’s other tariffs this deal actually leaves many U.S. manufacturers worse off than they were before Trump began his trade war.

This is clearest in the case of automobiles and automotive products. Trump has imposed a 25 percent tariff on all automotive imports, supposedly on national security grounds. This includes imports from Canada and Mexico. And here’s the thing: Canadian and Mexican auto products generally have substantial U.S. “content” — that is, they contain parts made in America. Japanese cars generally don’t.

But now cars from Japan will pay only a 15 percent tariff, that is, less than cars from Canada and Mexico.

OK, it’s not quite that straightforward, because imports from Canada and Mexico receive a partial exemption based on the share of their value that comes from the United States. Yes, it’s getting complicated. But we may nonetheless now be in a situation where cars whose production doesn’t create U.S. manufacturing jobs will pay a lower tariff rate than cars whose production does.

Wait, there’s more. Trump has also imposed 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, which are of course important parts of the cost of a car. Japanese manufacturers don’t pay those tariffs.

Overall, the interaction between this Japan deal and Trump’s other tariffs probably tilts the playing field between U.S. and Japanese producers of cars, and perhaps other products, in Japan’s favor.

If this sounds incredibly stupid, that’s because it is. So how did this happen?

You might imagine that making a deal with one of our most important trading partners must have involved a team of experienced, skilled negotiators backed by economic experts. But in reality it was clearly pure amateur hour. Look at the photo at the top of this post, from CNBC. It shows Trump with a card in front of him laying out one much-hyped though probably meaningless part of the deal, a promise by Japan to invest in America. How much? The card says $400 billion, but that number was crossed out by hand and replaced with $500 billion, which somehow became $550 billion in the final announcement.

Next thing you’re going to tell me that Trump will start modifying weather forecasts with a Sharpie. Oh, wait.

So Trump’s negotiators probably had no idea what they were doing, and didn’t realize that in their frantic rush to conclude a deal they were agreeing to tariffs that would be highly unfavorable to U.S. manufacturing.

Why were they frantic? Trump has been the subject of considerable mockery over having made big promises about his ability to negotiate trade deals, then coming up empty month after month. So he and his people were surely anxious to make some major announcements before his self-imposed deadline of Aug. 1 — anxious enough not to realize quite what they were agreeing to.

 

R.I.P. Tom Lehrer 1928-2025 (Part 2)

 We wrote quite a bit about Lehrer here at the blog. This week we'll be revisiting some favorites.

 

Thursday, September 27, 2018

"I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."

While reading up on public perceptions of the space race during the postwar era, I was disappointed to learn that my favorite Mort Sahl line wasn't actually from Mort Sahl.

Satirist Mort Sahl has been credited with mocking von Braun by saying "I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."[39] In fact that line appears in the film I Aim at the Stars, a 1960 biopic of von Braun.

Thank God we still have Lehrer.

"Wernher von Braun" (1965): A song written and performed by Tom Lehrer for an episode of NBC's American version of the BBC TV show That Was The Week That Was; the song was later included in Lehrer's albums That Was The Year That Was and The Remains of Tom Lehrer. It was a satire on what some saw as von Braun's cavalier attitude toward the consequences of his work in Nazi Germany

 

R.I.P. Tom Lehrer 1928-2025 (Part 1)

We wrote quite a bit about Lehrer here at the blog. This week we'll be revisiting some favorites.

Friday, June 18, 2010

Dying is easy; comedy is hard -- journalism edition

"When they see us coming, the birdies all try an' hide,
But they still go for peanuts when coated with cyanide."

It started with poisoning pigeons in the park.

Maybe I should be more specific.

It started a few weeks ago when I heard the song "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" as part of a Tom Lehrer* tribute on Prairie Home Companion. Impressed by the wit of the lyrics (the man rhymed cyanide, for God's sake) I decided to see what a professional song writer would think about Lehrer.

My go-to guy in these matters is Brad Kay, songwriter, music historian and former mystic knight. Brad can be a tough critic, particularly if your name isn't something like Gershwin, Waller or Ellington, but if I was expecting him to be dismissive of someone who was just a comic songwriter I was in for a surprise.

Brad had literally nothing but praise for Tom Lehrer. He talked about how graceful and apt Lehrer's choice of words was and about profoundly he understood each of the genres he worked on. This led to discussions of Spike Jones (who was an accomplished and successful percussionist before he started using gunshots and noisemakers in his music) and P.D.Q. Bach (who as Peter Schickele has composed a large number of well-regarded symphonies, musicals, and film scores). All of this suggested that the first requirement for creating comic music of more than passing interest was being a good musician.

It's probably not surprising that the general public has trouble taking the creators of comedy seriously, but their peers have no such difficulty. P.G. Wodehouse counted George Orwell among his fans. Any number of dancers and acrobats have commented on the grace and athleticism of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton (Keaton was particularly remarkable having mastered that most difficult of athletic feats, the controlled fall, by age three). As for acting, it's almost a truism that comic actors can easily do drama while dramatic actors often struggle with comedy.

So if the best musicians, writers, dancers and actors can be found doing great comedy, how about journalists?

The following clip [Sadly now a dead link -- MP]  is a thoroughly typical segment of the Daily Show. Take a look and consider it from a journalistic standpoint. Look at how clear and concise Stewart is. Check out how important but underreported facts are introduced and how everything is placed in a relevant context. I wonder how many hours of cable news you'd have to watch to meet the standards of just another Daily Show?

*Arguably the world's coolest mathematics professor.

 

Dan Froomkin discusses why Epstein is the only Trump scandal the mainstream press isn't afraid to cover

 

 

 Yesterday I made a passing reference to the role that this being Republican-on-Republican violence made the story an acceptable target for respectable news organizations. 

While Trump's long, close friendship with Epstein had been well known for years, Musk was able to get it on MAGA’s radar, which re-energized the scandal. Suddenly the story wasn't the president's creepy relationship with arguably the world's most famous pedophile; it was the base's reaction to that relationship.

 I meant to come back to this idea, but now, thanks to veteran press critic Dan Froomkin, I don't have to.

From Why can’t journalists cover democracy like they cover Epstein? 

Coverage of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal shows that mainstream journalists still have the capacity to latch onto a story and not let go.

They’ve thrown everything they’ve got at this story, and delivered the goods. Every day there’s something Epstein to report about: New reactions, old reactions, new evidence, old evidence, fresh quotes, old quotes.

They’re reaching out to sources, mining the archives, asking everyone what they think.

Print journalists are not letting this story fall off the tops of their front pages no matter what. Cable news anchors are leading their newscasts with it on the hour, one after another.

It’s impressive.

But now that we know that our top journalists can sustain a major story and stoke public outrage when they choose to, the question arises: Why haven’t they done that with other stories whose long-term significance in many ways dwarfs this sordid sex scandal?

OK, yes, I get it: The Epstein scandal represents the first major split between Trump and his base, which until now has been resolutely behind him. That’s new, and therefore news.

The story also has sex.

But most of all, the reason our top journalists are so excited about this story is because, for once, the criticism of Trump is coming from “both sides.”

The leaders of our top newsrooms are pathologically afraid of being accused of partisanship. So only if people on “both sides” agree does the media consider something a real scandal.

That effectively gives the right veto power over what the media cares about. If the right presents a united front, the coverage — even of threats to American democracy, or to the planet — will be listless and sporadic. Which it is.

But I would argue that if you weren’t afraid of accusations of partisanship there are many bigger and more consequential scandals that deserve the all-hands-on-deck, keep-the-story-on-the-front-page treatment Epstein is getting.

 

A few quick thoughts on the latest Epstein news.

Nicole Lafond writing for Talking Points Memo:

By now you’ve maybe seen the news that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is, effectively, shutting down the House’s legislative work and sending everyone home early for August recess in order to block any House floor action on the release of investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased convicted sex offender.

His rationale for all of this is two-fold. He says that after conversations with the White House and President Trump, he believes that lawmakers need to give the executive branch “space” to do the work they are already doing to release the files. This supposed work to make the documents public is only a few days old. Trump only directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into unsealing grand jury material in the case (a maneuver that will likely yield little) after a week of bad-for-Trump headlines — spurred by his own Justice Department’s decision to not release any more info to the public. A growing rift began to emerge last week not just among Trump’s MAGA base of conspiracy theorist influencers, but within the Republican Party as well.

At least 10 House Republicans had indicated they would join Democrats in supporting a bipartisan resolution sponsored by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), which calls for releasing a lot more from the Epstein investigative files than the Trump administration is currently looking into unsealing. Massie and Khanna planned to use a procedural move, a discharge petition, to compel a vote on the matter.

As is so often the case in 2025, it's important to remind ourselves just how bizarre these events are. The Democratic resistance has struck an extraordinary blow in the Republican-controlled House based on a scandal most of which was in the public record a decade ago.

It is also important to remember that without Elon Musk—or, more precisely, the Musk/Trump feud—none of this would have happened. Just to recap the events: Musk made a number of bitter enemies in the White House, sometimes leading to actual physical confrontations. When he left, one or more of those enemies dropped the dime on him with The New York Times and provided the paper with the photographs and videos behind their exposé. No one likes having their drug habits and weird family life exposed in the paper of record and, as mentioned before, Elon Musk is even more vindictive and driven by rage than Donald Trump. Musk used his powerful right-wing platform to pound the Epstein drum.

While Trump's long, close friendship with Epstein had been well known for years, Musk was able to get it on MAGA’s radar, which re-energized the scandal. Suddenly the story wasn't the president's creepy relationship with arguably the world's most famous pedophile; it was the base's reaction to that relationship.

Once the press, particularly The Wall Street Journal, got going on this one, it was inevitable that damaging revelations would start gushing forth. The Wall Street Journal started things with the story that prompted the lawsuit from Trump. The New York Times, in catch-up mode, rushed forward with their own story a couple of days later, followed by one where CNN dug through old unaired footage and photos and uncovered a wealth of material. This was followed by the WSJ coming out with yet another story, this time revealing that Trump had been lying when claiming that Bondi never told him he was in the Epstein files.

I'm not going to speculate on how long this will continue other than to say I suspect we still have at least a little ways to go. I'm certainly not going to hazard a guess as to what impact this will have on the midterms and beyond. The situation is complicated, and we have no real precedent to guide us. I will say, however, that those who dismissed the Trump/Musk feud and the re-emergence of the scandal as sensationalistic distractions probably need to rethink some of their assumptions.

John Michael Osbourne 1948-2025

 Ozzy Osbourne, as you probably heard, passed away this week. He had an extraordinarily long and successful career, produced lots of memorable music, and greatly influenced the evolution of heavy metal music.

He also was a reminder that, if you stick around for long enough, respectability comes for us all.

When Osbourne made the jump to solo artist, he was perhaps known less for his music and more for what previous generations knew as a geek act. Though there had been outrageous stage shows before him—particularly Alice Cooper—the Grand Guignol there never pretended to be real. Ozzy Osbourne was known for biting the heads off actual pigeons and bats (though there is some disagreement about which, if any, of the animals were alive at the time).

You might think that sort of reputation would haunt a performer, but infamy fades, and oldies have a way of becoming safe and comforting regardless of their original context. Still, there were a few of us who did raise an eyebrow when a fast-casual dining chain picked this song for one of their commercials.

 

The Talking Tina Fallacy

 [If you want to get picky, that's Talky Tina.*]

The Talking Tina fallacy is the tendency to ascribe sentience, emotions—and often supernatural properties—to any non-human animal or object that uses language, be it a trained parrot, a mechanical device, or a piece of electronics.

 

LLMs were all but designed to play on the Talking Tina fallacy. Even when the responses are total gibberish, they still have the superficial indicators of language proficiency. The word choice seems appropriate. The phrasing is natural. The rhythms and alliteration have a familiar feel.

These moments where we get the linguistic form captured perfectly but with no underlying sense should be a reminder of what the algorithm is—and is not—doing: that each word or phrase is being generated not based on meaning but simply on patterns in the training data.

Even here, though, our human compulsion to project makes us see things that aren't there. The very term “hallucination” implies that something different is going on—that these nonsensical answers represent some kind of malfunction in the model. But the process that tells us that the square root of 4 is an irrational number is exactly the same as the process that tells us the square root of 2 is. 

Human communication starts with meaning. We then try to find words to convey those ideas, information, feelings. LLMs start with generating words that match the phrasing and patterns found in the data they were trained on, and quite often, by getting the form correct, they also produce what we as humans see as meaning. It is entirely something we are projecting upon the algorithm’s responses—but that doesn't necessarily make it valueless, as long as we understand the almost diametrically opposed approach that the computer is taking compared to what we would do.

Right now, LLMs are novelties of highly limited use in the real world. If we are to move beyond that and actually take advantage of what might be the biggest advance in natural language processing ever, we need to have a clear mental model of what they're doing—and how we can or can't make use of them.

If we have a clear and detailed understanding of what's going on, we can find all sorts of ways to use these wonderful tools. More importantly, we can know when not to use them. 

* "Talky Tina" was a play on and used the same voice as the then popular "Chatty Cathy," which undoubtedly made the episode even creepier at the time.

Checking in with LA weather. It’s nice.

 Burbank.

 

I frequently feel the need to throw good news in because East Coast journalists will so gleefully report anything bad that happens in Southern California, invariably giving it much more attention than they would far worse disasters anywhere else in the country. Recent case in point: the horrific flooding in Texas.

This pleasant weather is partially the result of the seasonal lag. The hottest part of summer in Southern California comes weeks after the summer solstice, with average temperatures in September being only a degree or so lower than those of August and considerably warmer than July, with the occasional triple-digit day popping up in October.

There are few things which longtime residents find more annoying than New Yorkers complaining that there’s no weather in Los Angeles. There are also few comments that display greater ignorance of the region.

I’ve lived oceanfront on both coasts and in quite a few places in between, and this is the only town I know of where people will call up friends within the city limits and ask, “What’s the weather like where you are?”

This is partly due to the sheer size of the place. The area of the city is just under 500 square miles. The area of the county is close to 5,000 square miles. That said, the bigger factors relate to terrain. The elevation of the city goes from zero to over 5,000 feet. For the county, it’s over 10,000. Both have snow every year.

The county covers coastal areas, mountains, valleys, high deserts, and low deserts. I’ve heard local meteorologists claim that this produces seven distinct microclimates. The TV weather forecasts are broken up into multiple sections for this reason.

One result is that you will experience stunning ranges of conditions often within a few miles of each other. A few years ago, while driving the 405 from North Hollywood, my car’s thermometer dropped more than 30° in the space of about a dozen miles.

I’m not much of a traveler, but I’ve been around the continent a fair amount — particularly the contiguous 48 — mostly by car, so I’ve actually seen it. And I’ve never encountered anything like LA weather in terms of complexity, contrast, or quirks.

There’s a bigger lesson here. If California weather is more varied and interesting than you’ve been led to believe by the national press, perhaps the impression you’ve gotten about other aspects of the state — its culture, its economics, its politics, the problems it faces with housing and wildfires — are also more complex than you realize.

All so the son of a loony Silicon Valley billionaire can have his own studio.

It’s easy to forget now, but for at least half of the 20th century, CBS had one of the premier news organizations in the country. People still talk about Edward R. Murrow standing up to Joseph McCarthy, but if anything, the network did even more important and courageous work during Vietnam and Watergate—often better than The Washington Post or The New York Times. Now we’ve seen all three of those organizations caving to authoritarian pressure.

I don’t want to view the past through rose-colored glasses, but I’ve read quite a bit about the reporting of those events and about what was going on behind the scenes, and I honestly believe that the people who ran these organizations back then would have shown more courage and character if they were around today.

For CBS, we all knew it was over after the 60 Minutes settlement, but the firing of Colbert removes even the pretense of anything more than cowardice and corruption.

Closing with a favorite clip from Colbert's early days.