October 2, 2020

The Short Term Upside And Long Term Downside Of Trump's Debate Madness

My prognosis for the current election is more positive than it was before the debate, but the long term prognosis for the country is far more bleak. Here's why.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/the-short-term-upside-and-long-term



WASHINGTON, DC -- Remember when Al Gore kept sighing and mentioning a “lock box” during a presidential debate, and it was a great big scandal? How quaint. For those of you who are new to following politics, there once was a time when checking your watch during a debate, like George H.W. Bush did in 1992, meant you were out of touch and therefore the unequivocal loser of the debate. Comparatively minor trespasses like when Dan Quayle likened his Senate experience to John F. Kennedy’s experience -- if glitches like that weren’t career enders, they were at least considered campaign enders. Not anymore, not after Tuesday’s night’s presidential debate. While the long-term consequences of Donald Trump’s psychopathic, inhuman whatever-that-was the other night will be difficult to shoehorn back into its rotting shell, my prognosis for the current election is more positive than it was before the debate, and here’s why. Trump terrified most of the people who tuned in. Not the usual outrage that accompanies his wacky-shack TV appearances, but genuine terror. We’re in the middle of an unprecedented national emergency with a pandemic that’s showing no sign of letting up thanks to the maniacal incompetence and maliciousness of the president.

Just about everyone in the world is one edge, especially Americans dealing with the ongoing low-frequency stress commensurate with the isolation, disruption, instability, and fear brought on by the virus and Trump’s ungainly handling of it. Millions are out of work, 205,000 of us are dead, and no one knows what’s around the corner but we know it’s not a cure -- at least for now. And yet Trump, clearly not reading the room, decided to throw a 90-minute conniption on live network television, amplifying beyond 11 his absence of restraint, his hideously obnoxious temperament, his racism, his lies, and his crazy-eyed inhumanity. As a result, no one feels more secure about the status of our present calamity -- everyone feels even less secure, even more on edge -- perhaps only mitigated by Joe Biden’s presidentialness and relatively calm empathy. While I’m known as as the “don’t get happy” guy, this debate clearly damaged Trump’s chances in the election, dragging down his numbers even further. Worse for Trump, people are voting now -- today. There’s no room for voters to forget about what happened or how they felt watching the president entirely lose his shpadoinkle on television.

Thousands if not hundreds of thousands of voters watched that political atrocity Tuesday night then walked into a voting booth or filled out their absentee ballots the next day. This is great news for Joe Biden and another positive sign that Trump could be on his way out of the White House and into an orange jumpsuit. On the downside -- and hey, Stephanie Miller calls me Captain Scary Pants, so of course there’s a downside -- the long term impact won’t be as positive. Not only did Trump’s shitshow embarrass the nation on the world stage, but it also eroded our politics. Trump continued his effort to entirely vaporize the American presidency’s reputation and moral authority. But in terms of the debate process, the president made it possible for future Republican presidential candidates to behave like unspooled maniacs as well. And as long as they’re not quite as unspooled as Trump, voters and the press will hardly care. After all, who could top Trump? This is how our system works. In 1992, checking your watch was considered bad. That’s superseded by the unserious game show production values in 2008 and shovel fights over penis size in 2016. And, of course, there’s Trump’s interruptions and misogyny during the debates against Hillary Clinton. Notice how these things grow more loathsome with time.

Now we have a debate entering the history books in which the incumbent president attacked his opponent’s adult son for his former drug problem, a president who refused to denounce a racist militia, a president who openly undermined the integrity of the election, and a president who lied with the frequency of an AR-15 augmented with a bump stock. Based on this trend, we should expect something worse in our future than what we witnessed this week. But even if the trend has peaked with Trump, behaviour that’s just shy of Trump’s will be more easily accepted and dismissed by voters. As soon as that Rubicon was crossed, it erased accountability for lesser obnoxiousness that will surely worsen the downward trajectory of decorum in presidential politics. Trump always makes things worse for Trump. And he sure as hell lived up to that rule this week. Make no mistake, unless there’s some sort of catastrophe between now and when the election is called, it could be that Trump ended his own presidency with that debate, doing more damage to himself than Biden ever could have. And for that reason, we might just pull up on the cockpit controls before we nose-dive into the ground. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t long term damage to repair. That, my friends -- our Second Reconstruction -- is hopefully next on the list, demanding our collective attention.

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October 1, 2020

The 'bazooka': Modern Monetary Theory in action

Peter Bofinger argues that large-scale injections of money to bring economies out of the coronavirus coma have vindicated Modern Monetary Theory.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-bazooka-modern-monetary-theory-in-action

Six months ago, I wrote a column for Social Europe with the title ‘Coronavirus crisis: now is the hour of Modern Monetary Theory’. While I think it is unlikely that the economists of the US government and the Federal Reserve read it, they seem to have come up with the same idea. In any case, the monetary and fiscal policies which have been pursued in the United States over the past six months are perfectly in line with the recipes of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

Let’s start with fiscal policy. In the second quarter of 2020 the federal government’s fiscal balance reached -30.2 per cent of gross domestic product. This value by far exceeds the previous quarterly record deficit of 11.6 per cent, in the second quarter of 2010. What did the government do with all the money? A large amount was used for transfers to private households. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, enacted in March, gave the unemployed an extra $600 a week in benefits. This supplement played a crucial role in limiting extreme hardship; poverty may even have gone down.

What about monetary policy? In line with MMT the Fed started already in the first quarter to purchase huge amounts of Treasury securities. In a longer-term perspective the amount of these transactions far exceeded any historical precedent. During the ‘quantitative easing’ period in the first quarter of 2011, the Fed purchased a maximum amount of Treasuries, totalling 8.4 per cent of GDP. In the first quarter of 2020 the purchases reached 18.9 per cent and 21.2 per cent in the second quarter (see graphs). While MMT envisages direct central-bank lending to the government, the Fed typically purchases bonds on the secondary market from primary dealers—large, globally active banks. But if the banks know that the Fed is willing to purchase, in effect, unlimited amounts of Treasuries, this does not make an economic difference.



Immediate impact

What were the economic effects of this strategy? It had an immediate impact on disposable personal income—again, way beyond any precedent. Net transfers (after tax) reached almost one-fifth of GDP; in the Great Recession the maximum was 7.5 per cent, in the first quarter of 2010. Thus, the transfer payments did not only compensate for the decline in wage incomes: they boosted the disposable incomes of American households to a record high (see bar chart).



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October 1, 2020

The Joke's on Us

In the 2010s, Hitler memes and “ironic” racism filled the internet. What if we had taken them seriously?

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/09/how-memes-lulz-and-ironic-bigotry-won-internet/616427/



Remember when the internet used to be fun? Whitney Phillips does. The digital anthropologist was recently looking through a huge set of images from the late 2000s that had been posted to Reddit. The first comment described the era as “a more simple time,” and sure enough, the pictures were weird, silly, and creative. Talking cows. Cats playing video games. A bear on a golf course. A guy Photoshopped to have mouths for eyes. Then she noticed something else. Something disturbing. The thread began, she wrote recently, “with a lighthearted meme about Hitler.” After that was “dehumanizing mockery of a child with disabilities. And more sneering mockery of an old man hooked up to an oxygen tank. And date rape. And violence against animals. And fat shaming. And homophobia. And racism. And pedophilia. And how hilarious 9/11 was.”

If you’ve spent any time online, you will have imbibed both the aesthetic and, perhaps, the ethics of “meme culture” or “internet culture.” This is the mashed-up jumble of images, jargon, and folk art that gushed out of sites such as 4chan, Reddit, and Tumblr from the late 2000s. The look was lo-fi and absurdist, and the tone was eye-rolling, cynical, self-aware. Blocky white letter captions on pictures of exaggerated facial expressions. “HALP,” “OHRLY,” “KTHXBYE.” Adorable cat GIFs. In the 2000s and early 2010s, Phillips was one of a group of academics, activists, and intellectuals who studied memes, and promoted the idea of the web as a space of unfettered, anarchic creation. The revolution would be user-generated. (The founders of social networks—primarily young, carefree, middle-class white Americans—agreed.) Okay, the argument went, this outpouring of creativity had its darker elements, but that was part of its countercultural charm. The casual sadism of trolling was just “lulz,” which shouldn’t be taken seriously. Sexism, racism, and other hatreds were being invoked for nothing more than shock value. It was ironic, duh.

In 2009, she attended a live show called Meme Factory, which aimed to explain this new language of the internet. Three young men sat in front of microphones, talking deliberately fast, occasionally projecting pictures onto the screen behind them. There were “fails”; there were “owns”; the viewers didn’t have to think much about the people who were the butt of the joke. The first Meme Factory show began with a disclaimer about its offensive content, delivered in front of a picture of a white cat captioned with what was a popular phrase at the time: Internet. Serious Business. Phillips remembers laughing until she cried at a repeat performance the next year. There was an assumption that everyone in the room “got it,” that they understood who was being satirized—the racists and the homophobes—and that everything was just for lulz. But the blizzard of memes didn’t allow any time to distinguish between the cute and the offensive, the innocuous and the hateful. One section, Phillips recalled, showed “several internet-infamous young white women who had inspired widespread mockery online.” Such women, the three men explained, were referred to as “camwhores.” When the photograph of one flashed on-screen, the crowd booed. A man in the audience shouted: “Kill her!”

Phillips, an assistant communications professor at Syracuse University, now thinks she got it wrong. All that ironic racism doesn’t feel so ironic anymore. “I don’t even know exactly when it totally shifted,” she told me, from her yellow-painted living room in Syracuse, New York, her hands anxiously fluttering around her face as we spoke over Zoom. “What seemed to be fun and funny ended up functioning as a Trojan horse for white-supremacist, violent ideologies to shuffle through the gates and not be recognized.” The 2010s were the decade when internet culture ate real life; when the boundary between “IRL” and “on the internet” dissolved. By the time the decade ended, a certain kind of liberal was forced to accept that we had been far too complacent about how dark politics could get, and how the ironically awful parts of the internet helped that to happen. Many others have walked down the same path of recognition as Phillips. What was once dismissed as “trolling” is now recognized as harassment and abuse; where flat earthers and 9/11 truthers once seemed laughable, today’s conspiracy theorists commit acts of violence.

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October 1, 2020

Vaccine Chaos Is Looming

The COVID-19 vaccines furthest along in clinical trials are the fastest to make, but they are also the hardest to deploy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/covid-19-most-complicated-vaccine-campaign-ever/616521/



On the day that a COVID-19 vaccine is approved, a vast logistics operation will need to awaken. Millions of doses must travel hundreds of miles from manufacturers to hospitals, doctor’s offices, and pharmacies, which in turn must store, track, and eventually get the vaccines to people all across the country. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, along with state and local health departments, coordinates this process. These agencies distributed flu vaccines during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic this way, and they manage childhood vaccines every day. But the COVID-19 vaccine will be a whole new challenge. “The COVID situation is significantly different and more complex than anything that we have had to deal with in the past,” says Kris Ehresmann, an infectious-disease director at the Minnesota Department of Health. The two leading vaccine candidates in the U.S.—one developed by Moderna, the other by a collaboration between Pfizer and the German company BioNTech—have progressed so quickly to clinical trials precisely because they are the fastest to make and manufacture.

They rely on a novel vaccine technology whose advantage is speed, but whose downside is extreme physical fragility. These vaccines have to be frozen—in Pfizer/BioNTech’s case, at an ultracold –94 degrees Fahrenheit, colder than most freezers—which will limit how and where they can be shipped. The ways these vaccines are formulated (without added preservatives) and packaged (in vials that hold doses for multiple people) also make them easier to develop and manufacture quickly but harder to administer on the ground. In other words, speed is coming at the expense of convenience. “For this first generation of vaccines, we won’t trade off safety. We don’t want to trade off effectiveness,” says Kelly Moore, the associate director of immunization education at the Immunization Action Coalition. So instead, the U.S. is planning for a vaccine that requires brutally complicated logistics. Public-health departments in states, territories, and major cities are currently drawing up vaccine plans for the end of October.

It’s still unclear whether these vaccines are safe and effective—and it’s extremely unlikely that data will be available by the end of October. But the departments are getting ready. Many are already stretched thin by the ongoing pandemic, and they are now helping plan, as Moore puts it, “the largest, most complex vaccination program ever attempted in history.” The leading vaccine candidates both deploy a new, long-promised technology. Their core is a piece of mRNA, genetic material that in this case encodes for the spike protein—the bit of the coronavirus that helps it enter human cells. The vaccine induces cells to take up the mRNA and make the spike protein and, hopefully, stimulates an immune response. By using mRNA, vaccine makers do not need to produce viral proteins or grow viruses, methods that are used in more traditional vaccines and that add time to the manufacturing process. This is why Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech have been able to get their vaccines into clinical trials so quickly.

Moderna went from a genetic sequence of the coronavirus to the first shot in an arm in a record 63 days. To get a naked strand of mRNA inside a cell, scientists have learned to encase it in a package called a lipid nanoparticle. mRNA itself is an inherently unstable molecule, but it’s the lipid nanoparticles that are most sensitive to heat. If you get the vaccine cold enough, “there’s a temperature at which lipids and the lipid structure stop moving, essentially. And you have to be below that for it to be stable,” says Drew Weissman, who studies mRNA vaccines at the University of Pennsylvania and whose lab works with BioNTech. Keep the vaccine at too high a temperature for too long, and these lipid nanoparticles simply degrade. Moderna’s and Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccines have to be shipped frozen at –4 degrees and –94 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively. Once thawed, Moderna’s vaccine can then last for 14 days at normal fridge temperatures; Pfizer’s, for five days.

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much more at the link

October 1, 2020

Trump Delivered Worst Debate Performance In Modern History

The president incinerated his one opportunity to catch up with Joe Biden in the polls with the worst performance in living memory.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/trump-delivered-worst-debate-performance



The first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was without a doubt the most horrendous in modern history. For those still scarred by the spectacle of Trump stalking Hillary Clinton on stage during their debate in 2016, this came as somewhat of a surprise. But no one should ever doubt Trump’s ability to lower the bar and drag everyone into the hateful sewer of his damaged psyche. Behind in the polls and desperate to claw his way back into the race, Trump’s game plan was to be aggressive with Biden and put him on the defensive. In Trump’s rage addled mind, this meant behaving like a domineering, sociopathic, bully for the entire duration of the debate. He refused to let Biden speak by aggressively interrupting him, attacked and insulted Biden’s family, accused him of being mentally unfit for office, and lied about every topic he was asked to speak about. Like a petulant child, Trump raged at not only Biden, but at bewildered moderator Chris Wallace, who completely lost control of the debate and was unable to reign in the president as he laid waste to the format of the event. Trump had agreed to set rules for his engagement with Biden, that included allowing his opponent to speak without interruption during his allotted time.

But Trump, unable to control his impulses, just shouted over Biden as he tried to make his points. The effect certainly rattled Biden, who it must be said, did not have a great performance last night. Biden was a little shaky, fumbled some of his answers, and looked his age as the furious Trump bore into him relentlessly. But the former Vice President stayed the course, kept his cool, and counterpunched well on occasion. “Will you shut up, man,” Biden even said at one point, speaking on behalf of the entire planet fed up with Trump’s belligerent lying. Biden, to his credit, was particularly effective during the Coronavirus Q and A, where he managed to take complete control of the narrative. He painted Trump as an inept liar who knew the dangers of the disease but refused to tell the public the truth about what he knew. More importantly, Biden took several opportunities to speak directly to the American public, asking them how they were doing during the pandemic and steering the conversation away from Trump’s favorite topic: himself. Biden came across as a decent, honorable man concerned about the welfare of the American people, and dedicated to making life better if he gets into office. While he was unable to stop the sneering Trump from controlling the debate, Biden got his message across and drew an effective contrast between himself and the president: Trump doesn’t care about you, but I do. It was more than enough to win the debate.

Trump had to deliver a breakthrough performance, a once in a lifetime showing to reverse his pathetic polling numbers and give himself a shot in November. But he couldn’t do it. Trump simply doubled down on everything that has made most Americans despise him. From the lying to the name calling and bullying, it was 100% Trump for a grueling two hours. And it failed spectacularly. Even Chris Christie, the dutiful henchman who had helped Trump prep for the debates was aghast after the debate ended. On ABC he was asked whether that had been the debate they prepared for. “No,” said a clearly rattled Christie. “It was too hot. You come in and decide you want to be aggressive, and I think it was the right thing to be aggressive. But that was too hot.” It wasn’t too hot. It was a train wreck, and everyone in Trump’s inner circle knew it. Sean Hannity desperately tried to clean up the damage, but even he struggled. “Some people probably think it was too hot,” he told Donald Trump Jr. “But it was both sides.”

The debate revealed the painful truth about Trump’s presidency and his floundering campaign: it is a fraudulent con. Trump has no policies, no substance, no plan, no ideas, and no strategy to move the country forward. Just more hatred, anger, and divisiveness. Capitalizing on this glaring weakness, Biden reminded voters what was on offer going forward. “Under this president, we have become weaker, sicker, poorer, more divided, and more violent,” he said. As if determined to prove Biden’s accusations right, Trump refused to condemn White Supremacy and sent a message to White Nationalist group the “Proud Boys”, telling them to “stand back and stand by” while people vote. And that summarized the sordid affair. There is a demented fascist in the White House intent on burning everything around him to the ground. Biden’s job going into the debate last night was to let Trump hang himself and present himself as a viable president for the next four years — and he did just that. Biden has to do two more debates in the coming weeks, but they likely won’t make any difference. Trump’s appalling performance means that only the most ardent political junkies will tune in to see what happens. The president basically had one shot to convert remaining independents and moderates, and he blew it in truly spectacular fashion.

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