The LA Times reports that crime is up in California and people are worried. Let’s take a look:

I used FBI data through 2014 and the same Open Portal data used by the LA Times data for 2015-17. The Times appears to have mis-transcribed its own number for violent crime in 2017, so I fixed that (the real number is higher than the one used in the Times chart). The result is what you see above: the immense crime surge that’s prompted some people to say we should roll back the modest criminal justice reforms we’ve made over the past few years. This is nuts. It’s especially nuts because California enacted a couple of those reforms in 2011 and 2014, and crime rates surged in 2012 and 2015. Cause and effect! Of course, crime rates then dropped back to their previous levels in 2013 and 2016, suggesting that the tiny surges were either (a) nothing, or (b) temporary tiny changes while law enforcement got used to the new rules.

There’s literally nothing here unless you think that every tiny blip in the crime rate is cause for panic. It’s not. Crime rates are down about 50 percent over the past few decades, but there are going to be minor blips here and there if you look at periods of just a few years. Everybody needs to settle down here.

Kyle Mazza/NurPhoto via ZUMA

“Do you think Donald Trump has done anything right?” a friend asked me a few months ago. That was a tough one. Aside from trivial stuff, I think I eventually conceded that China really did deserve some tougher trade treatment and that the AT&T/Time Warner merger deserved to be stopped. Trump did both of these things for the wrong reasons, and in the case of China screwed up the execution epically. But I more-or-less supported the underlying concept behind both of them.

This week added two more items. First, Trump decided to withdraw from Syria. Once again, he did it for the wrong reasons, and there’s every reason to think he’s going to execute his decision as badly as possible. Still, I basically agree with him that we should never have been there and should pull out now even if it means accepting some ugly consequences.

Today brought the fourth item. After finally figuring out what James Mattis’s resignation letter really meant, Trump moved up Mattis’s final day in office to December 31 and replaced him with Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan. This was the right decision for two reasons. First, Mattis really had no right to set his own resignation date in the first place. He should either have consulted Trump about it or else simply resigned and allowed Trump to name the date. Second, Mattis wrote a truly brutal resignation letter. Trump was too dumb to figure this out for a while, but once he did he had no choice but to get rid of Mattis as soon as possible. It’s simply not possible to keep working with a Defense Secretary who has publicly declared that he believes his commander-in-chief is too soft on our enemies, too contemptuous toward our allies, and pays too little attention to national security and American values. Mattis may have said these things diplomatically, but he said them.

So there we have it: two more things Trump has done that I agree with. As usual, he did them badly and for the wrong reasons, but at least he got them right.

Over at the Washington Monthly, Tabitha Sanders comments on Donald Trump’s withdrawal from Syria:

As a candidate, Trump repeatedly stated his intentions to pull U.S. troops out of Syria….The policy change is in line with a worldview Trump has championed since his political rise: America shouldn’t continue spending trillions of dollars on other people’s wars overseas. While that may appeal to his rabid America-First base, he’s likely seeking another outcome with this decision.

Mark Landler of the New York Times seems to agree that this was a base-pleasing move:

If there was a common thread in Mr. Trump’s actions, it was his unswerving conviction that his political survival depends on securing his conservative base. Those supporters have pounded him relentlessly in recent weeks for his failure to build a border wall with Mexico….He criticized the Fed because its policy is dampening the stock market….And he pulled troops out of Syria because it fulfilled a campaign promise to extract the United States from foreign wars.

But is this true? Trump’s base is basically blue-collar white men, and this is the same group that’s supported every war since 9/11. These folks love the military, and by that I mean they love sending the military abroad to kick the asses of anyone who doesn’t like us. They were furious when President Obama pulled troops out of Iraq and furious yet again when he put a timetable on the surge of troops of Afghanistan. And then again when Obama originally refused to intervene in Syria.

Scott Clement at the Washington Post agrees, saying Trump’s surprise withdrawal “marks a rare instance in which Trump has broken strongly with his political base, which has widely supported military efforts to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.” He shows us this poll from July as evidence:

I’d sure like to see a detailed poll about this taken before Trump’s announcement. The problem is that there’s hardly any point in taking one now. Trump’s base is so cultish that they probably all changed their minds as soon as Trump said that ISIS was on the run and he was bringing our boys home. Likewise, an awful lot of liberals have suddenly decided that pulling troops out of the Middle East isn’t such a good idea after all.

I’d be a lot more interested in seeing what these groups thought specifically about Syria a few months ago. Unfortunately, I can’t find a poll that’s any more detailed than the one above. Does anybody know of one?

Today we have a guest cat who’s pretending to sleep in the early morning sunshine of Watts. She wasn’t sociable enough to come visit with me, but was perfectly happy to pose quietly as long as I stayed in telephoto range. When I tried to get closer she ran off to her apparent home at the Charles Mingus Youth Arts Center.

You may be thinking that if I was in Watts taking pictures of cats, I must have been at the Watts Towers too. Your conclusion would be both sensible and correct, and of course I took some pictures. None of them were especially memorable, but one of these days I’ll post them.

Earlier this week, final 2019 enrollment numbers for Obamacare were released. This is for states on the federal exchange only:

This means that 2019 ended up about 4 percent lower than 2018. However, there are several state exchanges, including big ones like California, that haven’t closed enrollment yet. When you account for this, and also for some Medicaid expansions that probably cannibalized some customers from the exchanges, it’s likely that net enrollment this year will end up down by 1-2 percent or so.

Over at Vox, Dylan Scott summarizes a few theories about why enrollment declined, but to me this looks like just a random fluctuation, especially since 2018 was a year of strong economic growth—which means more people got jobs that offer health insurance and therefore left Obamacare.

Overall, then, Obamacare is doing fine. So far, the loss of the individual mandate doesn’t seem to have had much effect, though it’s a little early to say that with any assurance.

Prices aren’t rising fast enough in Japan:

Japan has virtually given up on reaching 2% inflation after nearly six years of trying. An argument gaining ground in Tokyo holds that the inflation goal, once seen as paramount, doesn’t matter so much after all.

Six years? How about 20 years? Here are the past two decades of inflation in Japan:

There’s a grand total of one year above 2 percent. What’s more, over the course of two decades Japan has only two years over 1 percent. By my back-of-the-envelope noodling, prices have risen a cumulative total of about 1 percent between 1998 and 2018. That compares to a cumulative increase of about 54 percent in the United States. Of course, you might wonder if anyone should even care about this when you compare economic growth in Japan vs. the US:

Total GDP in the US has grown faster than in Japan, but that’s because our population is increasing while theirs is declining. If you look at GDP per working-age adult, both countries are doing about the same. In fact, Japan is doing slightly better.

So who needs inflation? I keep wondering this for two reasons. First, the case for positive inflation is that it allows the central bank to set effectively negative interest rates during a recession, and this allows a faster recovery than a merely zero interest rate. But does it? Japan seems to have recovered from the Great Recession about as quickly as we did.

Second, it remains unclear to me how central banks can produce inflation on demand. In theory, they can produce any inflation rate they want, but in practice they seem to have very little control over it. They can lower the inflation rate by crashing the economy, but they don’t really seem to know how to increase it.

In other words, I remain befuddled. The conventional wisdom suggests that, if anything, the US should have an inflation target of 4 percent, not 2 percent. I’ve always accepted this. But how do we get there? And is there really much evidence that it would help us even if we did?

Tolga Adanali/Depo Photos via ZUMA

Why did President Trump suddenly decide to pull American troops out of Syria? Mark Landler takes a crack at answering:

If there was a common thread in Mr. Trump’s actions, it was his unswerving conviction that his political survival depends on securing his conservative base. Those supporters have pounded him relentlessly in recent weeks for his failure to build a border wall with Mexico — one of the bedrock promises he made during his improbable journey to the White House.

He rejected the stopgap budget deal because it failed to fund the wall. He criticized the Fed because its policy is dampening the stock market, which until recently he viewed as a barometer of his success. And he pulled troops out of Syria because it fulfilled a campaign promise to extract the United States from foreign wars.

Nah. Trump’s base was certainly pounding him about the wall. And he did promise them jobs and a strong economy. But did Trump really promise to withdraw troops from Syria? Not really. He said ten different things at ten different times. Nor was his base upset about it now. I don’t think there was a single person in the Republican Party, Trump supporter or not, who had so much as mentioned Syria in the past few months. It just wasn’t an issue.

So what really motivated this sudden U-turn? I don’t know any more than you, but here’s my guess: it was the Friday afternoon call from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan informing Trump that Turkey’s army was about to launch an attack on the Kurds in Syria. This gave Trump two options. He could have told Erdoğan to bring ’em on and gotten ready for a fight. Or he could have backed down and told Erdoğan to hold off for a bit while he withdrew American troops.

I think it was the latter. Erdoğan threatened him and he caved. A guy like Erdoğan understands that this is the best way to deal with Trump. There’s not much more to it than that.

UPDATE: I wrote this before I read this AP dispatch, which confirms that the Erdoğan call was what prompted Trump to get out of Dodge. Ironically, it turns out that even Erdoğan was surprised at how quickly Trump backed down. He expected Trump to withdraw over a period of a few months, which would have given Turkish troops time to prepare for their assault. Instead, in his typical fashion, Trump just ordered an immediate withdrawal. This will likely produce a little more chaos than Erdoğan wanted.

I have three quick things on my mind that aren’t really worth a full blog post each:

Wall. DC insiders know not to use definite articles in front of agency names. It’s “CIA says,” not “the CIA says.” Now this bit of grammar policy has spread to Trump’s border wall. Josh Marshall explains:

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me the word has apparently come down from the White House that the wall, as in the wall to be built along the southern border, must now be called “wall”….Today in a congressional hearing, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told Rep. Tom Marino: “From Congress I would ask for wall. We need wall.”

this is an actual quote from the secretary of homeland security of the united states, and not the incredible hulk. “from congress i would ask for wall. we need wall.” hulk smash. pic.twitter.com/VH4d4LRPYu

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) December 20, 2018

Nicotine vaping. Writing yesterday about vaping, I said that although it’s better than tobacco smoking (no lung cancer = big win), nicotine addiction is still pretty bad. But is it? I’ll make two quick remarks about that. First, the effects of nicotine per se on health are fuzzy. It appears to have some harmful effects, but probably not terrible ones. This isn’t really why I think the Juul fad is potentially so bad.

So here’s remark #2: Nicotine is wildly addictive. Withdrawal symptoms are between those for heroin and cocaine, and the difficulty of quitting is higher than for any other common drug. This is what I mean when I say it’s “very bad.” Kids who start vaping as teens are likely to get addicted pretty quickly, and that means they’ll be spending $1-2,000 per year on their nicotine habit for the rest of their lives. Even if nicotine has no negative health effects at all, I still count that as “very bad.”

Syria withdrawal. I’ve gotten several responses about Syria explaining that our troops there basically act as a tripwire: Working with the Kurds, they’ve stabilized the northeast part of the country, and all other combatants stay away because they know that killing a significant number of American troops would result in a massive reprisal. I’m not entirely convinced of this, and in any case it prompts my usual question: how long? We’ve been there four years. We’ve been in Afghanistan for 17 years. The Middle East is obviously not going to stabilize anytime soon, so does that mean we stay there forever? Or what?

A couple of weeks ago, as you know, I visited the LA Arboretum. But first I had lunch at the Farmer’s Market. After that, in the time between the arboretum closing and then reopening for their evening show, I dropped over to Caltech to take a few pictures and check out the monopod.

You’ll see photos of all of this eventually, but let’s start with the Farmer’s Market. I frequently get complaints that my lunchtime photos are not related to lunch at all, so here you go: a pair of pastrami sandwiches from Phil’s Deli. That’s a lunchtime photo.

First Trump refused to sign any budget deal that didn’t include $5 billion in wall funding. Then he caved in. He’d just fund the wall from “other” sources. Now he’s changed his mind again. Congress has agreed on a short-term budget bill to avert a government shutdown, but suddenly Trump won’t sign it unless he gets his wall. “The President is continuing to weigh his options,” says Sarah Sanders.

Trump is, by nature, a lousy negotiator. But he also can’t be taken at his word, and this makes him a terrible negotiator. What’s the point of even trying to deal with him?