Mister Measles and Chemtrails

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation. Among the most notorious peddlers of misinformation is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Joe Sommerlad at The Independent:

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has invited ridicule by announcing he is “looking at chemtrails” and their adverse impact on public health, reviving a long-debunked conspiracy theory.

RFK Jr was addressing the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense at an event in Washington, D.C., Thursday when he assured his audience “you have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House”. The health secretary, who chaired the organization from 2015 to 2023, also said he planned to bring “science transparency” to their concerns about inoculations.

Of the worst U.S. measles outbreak in 35 years, the RFK said: “We care about every child who dies from measles. They get headlines. I’d ask you to care about children who are dying or suffering or being injured by vaccine injuries.”

Then he added: “We’re also looking at chemtrails and the impact of emissions from aircraft, and those potential impacts on health.”

Kennedy was alluding to the chemical trails left behind by planes as they cross the sky, which are visible from the ground, resemble wisps of cirrhus cloud and evaporate harmlessly within minutes.

Constitution Day: Scalia on Originalism

Today is Constitution Day.  Many posts have discussed the Constitution.

Justice Antonin Scalia, October 18, 1996:

The argument is usually made in anthropomorphic terms, much like commentary on the part of people who talk about the stock market as resting for a new assault at the 4000 level. The modernists do the same thing with the Constitution. The argument is as follows:

"The Constitution is meant for a living society. If it could not grow and evolve with the society, it would become brittle and snap. You have to provide the flexibility."

This is a very plausible argument. It sounds wonderful, until you start to think, "Now, wait a minute. What is the real motive of these people who want to chuck away the old, original constitution? Is it really flexibility that they're looking for?"

What was the situation before Roe vs. Wade (1973)? If you wanted a right to an abortion, you had to create that right the way a constitutional democratic society creates most rights. You had to pass a law providing for and protecting that right. If you didn't want it, you had to pass a law against it.

The same was true of capital punishment. Existing law authorized capital punishment. If you wanted to abolish it, you needed to get a change in the law.

Regarding capital punishment, I have sat with three colleagues on the Supreme Court who think that capital punishment is unconstitutional, even though the Constitution mentions capital punishment. The due process clause--a clause you're all familiar with-- provides: "No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law..." What do you think the drafters of the clause were talking about? They were talking about the death penalty. And elsewhere in the Constitution, it says you shall not be sentenced for a capital crime without a grand jury indictment. What do think the drafters were talking about? They were talking about the death penalty, clearly approved in the text of the Constitution.

For the constitutional evolutionist, or modernist, it doesn't matter what the text of the Constitution says. For the modernist, everyday is a new day. And so, the death penalty, which might have been constitutional in the past, may very well be unconstitutional today. Now does that produce flexibility? Under the original disposition, if you wanted to have the death penalty, you enacted a law authorizing it. If you didn't want it, you repealed the law authorizing it. That's flexibility.

So, these people who go around talking about the need for growing and bending are uttering nonsense. What these people want is to impose a view of things on the whole soiety from coast to coast, and it is most quickly and most effectively done through the Constitution. And the easiest and quickest way to get something into the Constitution is to get it done via judicial interpretation. Rather than go the slow, difficult, and trouble- some route of getting a constitutional amendment drafted, formally proposed and rati- fied, persuade the highest court in the land to interpret the Constitution so broadly and loosely as to enable it read the desired policy into the Constitution

Russian Foots Don Jr's Bill

 Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy. Russia and China are prominent influencers.

Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski at Pro Publica;

On May 24, Donald Trump Jr. was celebrating in the Bahamas, as scantily clad dancers in stilettos and sailor caps performed for him and his guests. It was the last night of his wedding, a lavish, three-day party held across a pair of ultra-exclusive private islands. A five-tier funfetti cake had been airlifted in from Florida, and helicopters and seaplanes descended on the islands before guests settled into their oceanfront villas. That night on the beach, Trump Jr. lifted his bride into the air while fireworks launched from a barge over the sea.

“It was everything we dreamed of and more,” his wife later wrote on Instagram.

That dream was heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.

Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.

In 2017 Andrew Rafferty reported at NBC:

Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer who he believed had damaging information about Hillary Clinton in the midst of the 2016 election — and wrote "I love it" about the prospect of getting his hands on the material, according to emails released Tuesday by the president's eldest son.

The email exchange shows an acquaintance with ties to Russia, music publicist Rob Goldstone, told the son of then-candidate Donald Trump last year that the attorney has "information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father."

Although it was clear that Trump Jr. was told by Goldstone he would be meeting with a "Russian government attorney" and that the information was "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump," Trump Jr. expressed no hesitation in the email chain and, in fact, appeared enthusiastic.

California Poverty

A number of posts have dealt with poverty.

According to the most accurate measure, California does poorly.

 From the Census:

The national official poverty rate of 10.2% was 2.9 percentage points lower than the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) rate of 13.1% in 2025, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Poverty in the United States: 2025 report released today.

...

The official poverty measure defines poverty by comparing pre-tax money income — gross (before taxes) income from things like earnings, Social Security, and pensions — to a threshold based on family size. Families or individuals are considered to be in poverty if their income falls below that threshold.

The SPM is a broader measure of poverty. It takes into account income plus the value of benefits from government programs designed to assist low-income families (like SNAP and housing assistance). It then subtracts medical, work and other necessary expenses.

It also accounts for state and federal taxes, adding things like tax refunds and subtracting taxes paid. Another difference: SPM thresholds vary by geography and housing tenure (renters, owners, and those without rent or a mortgage) while official poverty thresholds are the same for the whole country.

...

The bottom panel of Figure 1 shows the three-year average SPM rate by state. From 2023 to 2025, Louisiana (19.0%) and California (17.8%) had among the highest SPM rates, while New Hampshire (8.0%), South Dakota (8.0%), Minnesota (7.9%), Nebraska (7.5%) and Maine (6.4%) had among the lowest.

Few Elected Officials Come Directly from the Working Class

Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality. The effects of inequality reach many corners of American life.

Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences:

In the United States, about half of all jobs are working-class jobs: manual-labor jobs like construction worker, service-industry jobs like home health care worker, clerical jobs like receptionist, and informal-sector jobs like day laborer. These jobs are held by men and women, young and old, from every race and religion, across every part of the country. (For more on how researchers define working class, see the Frequently Asked Questions section at the end of the report.) Working-class jobs are occupations that don’t provide employees with much material security, that don’t require capital or extensive formal education, and that don’t give employees much autonomy. These working-class jobs are indispensable to the economy and to our society: modern life in the United States is unthinkable without the people who pave roads, repair electrical lines, style hair, move freight, work in factories, deliver packages, stock shelves, build houses, repair cars, clean hotel rooms, answer phones, dig trenches, cook and serve food in restaurants, clean hospitals, ring up groceries, fix potholes, and empty garbage.

Although working-class jobs are essential to our way of life, people from working-class jobs almost never go on to hold elected political office. A 2013 study found that working-class jobs made up 52 percent of the labor force, but fewer than 10 percent of city council members had working-class jobs, fewer than 3 percent of state legislators held or had come from working-class jobs, and the typical member of Congress had spent less than 2 percent of their entire precongressional career doing the kinds of jobs that employ most Americans.1

Similar patterns have been documented in every systematic study that has ever been conducted on this topic. In 2025, researchers found that fewer than 2 percent of U.S. state legislators had working-class jobs as their main or most recent occupations.2 A 2019 analysis in The New York Times found that only 12 of the 535 members of Congress serving at that time had ever held a working-class job.3 A 1979 study by the Insurance Information Institute, an advocacy group for the insurance industry, found that just 5 percent of U.S. state legislators had working-class jobs.4 A 1954 study by a political scientist at the University of North Carolina found that just 2 percent of members of Congress had been low-salary workers, wage earners, servants, or farm laborers.5 Throughout all of U.S. history, there has never been a session of Congress in which more than 2 or 3 percent of legislators had a working-class job when they first got into politics.6

Figure 1 compares the share of working-class jobs in the U.S. labor force to the most recent data we have on the rates at which people from working-class jobs become city council members, state legislators, members of Congress, governors, Supreme Court justices, and presidents. Viewed this way, it is clear that people from working-class jobs are rare in the halls of power in the United States. If working-class people were a political party, that party would make up about half of the electorate but just tiny percentages of our political institutions.

Figure 1: Working-Class Americans Rarely Hold Public Office in the United States

Warning!

Artificial intelligence is an increasingly important topic in politics, policy, and law.

Peter Hall at Scientific American:

Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned this week and left behind a blunt accusation on X: his former employers—Anthropic and, before that, OpenAI—were “gambling with our lives.”

Then, in a move no public relations team would have signed off on, Evan Hubinger, an alignment science lead at Anthropic, wrote that he agreed with Coxon and that he put the chance of artificial intelligence killing all humans within the next decade at greater than 10 percent. All this came from a senior researcher at a company that has been racing to build the very systems he fears.

In an interview with Wired, Coxon said incidents such as July’s Hugging Face breach—in which OpenAI models that were undergoing a cybersecurity test circumvented controls that were meant to isolate them from the Internet and compromised parts of the AI start-up Hugging Face’s systems—helped spur him to speak out, though he stressed that the problem was broader. (Coxon, Hubinger, Anthropic and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment from Scientific American.)

Coxon’s and Hubinger’s fears, shared by plenty of other AI researchers, center on alignment, the difficult problem of matching an AI model’s behavior and apparent objectives to what humans want. The concerns still sound like science fiction: loss of control, recursive self-improvement and superintelligence—the possibility that AI models slip beyond their bounds, update their inner workings to gain power and eventually become too capable for humans to rein in.

Bruce Mehlman:

A Speech Against Assisted Suicide

Ethos in rhetoric is an appeal to the speaker's or writer's credibility, character, and authority to sway an audience.  Opposition to assisted suicide tends to be more prevalent on the political right than the political left.  So in a recent House of Commons debate, one speaker demonstrated the idea of ethos: a Labor MP who has a terminal illness spoke out against an assisted suicide bill.

The single speech that might well have defeated the wretched Assisted Dying Bill. pic.twitter.com/PuG1vJk9P7

— Emily Hewertson 🇬🇧 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 (@emilyhewertson) September 11, 2026