As you all know, exposure to lead in infancy can lead to lower IQ, poor education outcomes, and higher rates of violent crime later in life. But another thought popped into my head this weekend. Among other things, lead does its work by weakening executive control in the brain, which is associated with things like impulse control and the ability to associate future effects from present actions. So aside from crime, what else might be affected by lead exposure?

How about obesity? This is just a guess on my part, but it strikes me that a child who loses impulse control and the ability to think about future consequences, might also be more likely to eat without thinking about the added weight down the road. This could easily lead to obesity later in life.

The only reason I’m mentioning this is that I have no way of testing it myself, so I thought I’d throw it out into the ether and see if anyone else has a bright idea for looking into this. Maybe NHANES data? I’m pretty sure a straight ecological study, of the kind that demonstrates the lead-crime link, wouldn’t do any good. But longitudinal data might. Anyone out there have any ideas?

Ross Douthat uses a new study from the Voter Study Group to defend religious Republicans:

In general, churchgoing Republicans look more like the party many elite conservatives wanted to believe existed before Trump came along — more racially-tolerant, more accepting of multiculturalism and globalization, and also more consistently libertarian on economics. Secularized Trump voters look more like the party as Trump has tried to remake it, blending an inchoate economic populism with strong racial resentments.

The problem is that the word “churchgoing” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. How about if instead we just take a straight look at how religious people say they are? To do that, we have to read a report by the same author for the same group published a year ago, which identifies a group called “American Preservationists” as Trump’s core constituency. Here it is:

Despite being the most likely group to say that religion is “very important” to them, they are the least likely to attend church regularly….They are far more likely to have a strong sense of their own racial identity and to say their Christian identity is very important to them….They feel the greatest amount of angst over race relations: they believe that anti-white discrimination is as pervasive as other forms of discrimination, and they have cooler feelings (as measured on a feeling thermometer scale) toward minorities. They agree in overwhelming numbers that real Americans need to have been born in America or have lived here most of their lives and be Christian.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that Trump’s core supporters are the most religious and feel the greatest amount of racial resentment. However, they don’t actually attend church a lot.

So here’s the dodge. Nearly every survey suggests that Trump’s most loyal Evangelical voters are also the most racist and xenophobic. But if you don’t like that conclusion, you can instead look at “churchgoing,” and you’ll find that it’s weak churchgoers who are the most racist and xenophobic. Then it’s a quick hop and a skip from “non-churchgoing” to “secular” and you’re all done. Religious Trump supporters are great! It’s the secular ones who are the real problem.

But it’s all sleight of hand. Religion goes together with both national and racial identity and it always has. Trump’s most religious supporters may, like him, not actually show up for church services very often, but they’re still the most religious wing of the Republican Party. They’re also the most racist wing. You might try to camouflage this with irrelevant statistics, but there’s really no way of getting around it.

Senators Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein need to invite Christine Blasey Ford to testify before the Judiciary Committee. They also need to ask the FBI to investigate Ford's allegations to find out if they're credible.Jeff Malet/Newscom via ZUMA

If Brett Kavanaugh had driven home from a party drunk and killed someone when he was 17, I wouldn’t consider that disqualifying for his nomination to the Supreme Court. High government service shouldn’t be limited to people who led perfect lives even as teenagers. If he had cleaned up his act and acted responsibly ever since, he’d be a perfectly fine candidate.

The same might be true of the actual sexual assault allegation against Kavanaugh, but there’s a key difference: his continued denial that anything happened. This isn’t something that’s decades in the past, it’s something he’s doing today.

So before Kavanaugh’s nomination can move forward, several things need to happen:

• The Judiciary Committee should invite Christine Blasey Ford to testify.
• The FBI needs to conduct an investigation to find out—or at least get a better sense of—whether this was an isolated bad act or if Kavanaugh acted this way repeatedly.
• Kavanaugh needs to acknowledge what he did and apologize to Ford.

Depending on how this goes, it might be enough to clear Kavanaugh’s way—at least for senators who were going to vote for him anyway.¹ But it might not. The only way to find out is to take Ford’s allegations seriously and look into them.

Needless to say, all of this is based on my view that Ford’s story sounds quite credible and Kavanaugh is probably lying about it. If the FBI investigation suggests this isn’t the case, then obviously Kavanaugh has nothing to acknowledge and there’s no further impediment to confirming his nomination.

¹It goes without saying that I’d vote against Kavanaugh regardless. There are several reasons for this, but the most important is that he seems to have a pretty uncomfortable habit of lying under oath.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh during the first day of his confirmation hearing.Ken Cedeno/ZUMA

For the past week the story of Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her mysterious letter about Brett Kavanaugh has been roiling Washington. It started when Ryan Grim of the Intercept revealed the existence of the letter. Then Feinstein turned the letter over to the FBI without explaining what it was about. Then we learned that it concerned an alleged sexual assault committed by Kavanaugh back in high school. Kavanaugh denied everything, and within a day had produced a letter attesting to his character from 65 women who knew him in high school. But this actually ratcheted things up even further: How did Kavanaugh manage to produce such a testimonial so quickly? Was it ready to go beforehand because he knew that more details of the assault were certain to come out?

We’ll never know for sure, but today the details did indeed come spinning out. This is no longer a vague, anonymous allegation against Kavanaugh. The victim, Christine Blasey Ford, who wrote the original letter to Feinstein, has gone public:

Speaking publicly for the first time, Ford said that one summer in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh and a friend — both “stumbling drunk,” Ford alleges — corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County. While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.

“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.” Ford said she was able to escape when Kavanaugh’s friend and classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them, sending all three tumbling. She said she ran from the room, briefly locked herself in a bathroom and then fled the house.

Ford said she told no one of the incident in any detail until 2012, when she was in couples therapy with her husband. The therapist’s notes, portions of which were provided by Ford and reviewed by The Washington Post, do not mention Kavanaugh’s name but say she reported that she was attacked by students “from an elitist boys’ school” who went on to become “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.” The notes say four boys were involved, a discrepancy Ford says was an error on the therapist’s part. Ford said there were four boys at the party but only two in the room.

So why did Feinstein sit on Ford’s letter for so long? And why did Ford wait until now to come forward?

For weeks, Ford declined to speak to The Post on the record as she grappled with concerns about what going public would mean for her and her family — and what she said was her duty as a citizen to tell the story….By late August, Ford had decided not to come forward, calculating that doing so would upend her life and probably would not affect Kavanaugh’s confirmation. “Why suffer through the annihilation if it’s not going to matter?” she said.

….Her story leaked anyway….As pressure grew, the New York Times reported that the incident involved “possible sexual misconduct.” By then, Ford had begun to fear she would be exposed, particularly after a BuzzFeed reporter visited her at her home and tried to speak to her as she was leaving a classroom where she teaches graduate students. Another reporter called her colleagues to ask about her.

….As the story snowballed, Ford said, she heard people repeating inaccuracies about her and, with the visits from reporters, felt her privacy being chipped away. Her calculation changed. “These are all the ills that I was trying to avoid,” she said, explaining her decision to come forward. “Now I feel like my civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation.”

Katz said she believes Feinstein honored Ford’s request to keep her allegation confidential, but “regrettably others did not.”

Until now, this story has had little impact beyond its obviously titillating nature as a source of gossip for political obsessives. There just wasn’t enough there to endanger Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Now there obviously is. Monday is going to be a big day.

Two important stories on the same topic have been published recently, and I strongly recommend that you read both of them all the way through. The subject is Russian cyber-warfare, and the first one is by Terrell Jermaine Starr from a recent issue of MoJo:

Oleh Derevianko was on the road to his parents’ village in Ukraine on a bright June day in 2017 when he got a call from the CEO of a telecommunications company….Across Ukraine that day, cash registers suddenly shut down. People trying to withdraw money saw ransom demands appear on ATM screens. Lawmakers in the country’s parliament could not access their laptops. Turnstiles in Kiev’s subway stopped working, and departure boards at the airport went down. Technicians at Chernobyl, the site of the deadly nuclear disaster in 1986, had to manually check radiation levels after their computers failed.

….This was no random malware. It was an act of cyberwar—the latest digital attack from Russia….In 2015, hackers went after the electrical grid and shut off power to 225,000 Ukrainians. Another attack, in 2016, blacked out one-fifth of Kiev. And last year came the multipronged offensive that would eventually be known as NotPetya (after the Petya ransomware that it partially mimicked).

Cyberwarfare has been a key part of Russia’s grinding, multi-pronged war against Ukraine for years. Starr tells this story and sets the stage for Andy Greenberg’s terrific Wired piece that focuses solely on last year’s NotPetya attack. It turns out that there’s a Ukrainian piece of software called M.E.Doc, sort of the the equivalent of Quicken in the US. It’s very widely used, and some bright bulb in Moscow discovered that it had a bug:

In 2015 and 2016, while the Kremlin-linked hackers known as Fancy Bear were busy breaking into the US Democratic National Committee’s servers, another group of agents known as Sandworm was hacking into dozens of Ukrainian governmental organizations and companies. They penetrated the networks of victims ranging from media outlets to railway firms, detonating logic bombs that destroyed terabytes of data….But those attacks still weren’t Sandworm’s grand finale. In the spring of 2017, unbeknownst to anyone at Linkos Group, Russian military hackers hijacked the company’s update servers to allow them a hidden back door into the thousands of PCs around the country and the world that have M.E.Doc installed. Then, in June 2017, the saboteurs used that back door to release a piece of malware called ­NotPetya, their most vicious cyberweapon yet.

Here’s the big question: was this simply another front in Russia’s cyberwar against Ukraine? Or did they know perfectly well what would happen next?

The code that the hackers pushed out was honed to spread automatically, rapidly, and indiscriminately. “To date, it was simply the fastest-propagating piece of malware we’ve ever seen,” says Craig Williams, director of outreach at Cisco’s Talos division, one of the first security companies to reverse engineer and analyze Not­Petya. “By the second you saw it, your data center was already gone.”

….The release of NotPetya was an act of cyberwar by almost any definition—one that was likely more explosive than even its creators intended. Within hours of its first appearance, the worm raced beyond Ukraine and out to countless machines around the world, from hospitals in Pennsylvania to a chocolate factory in Tasmania. It ­crippled multinational companies including Maersk, pharmaceutical giant Merck, FedEx’s European subsidiary TNT Express, French construction company Saint-Gobain, food producer Mondelēz, and manufacturer Reckitt Benckiser. In each case, it inflicted nine-figure costs. It even spread back to Russia, striking the state oil company Rosneft.

NotPetya broke out of Ukraine in seconds and spread throughout the world. Greenberg’s piece is mostly a portrait of how it affected Maersk, one of the world’s biggest shipping companies. Long story short, it destroyed the company’s entire IT infrastructure and shut down half its business for over a week. Only a lucky coincidence—a single backup of a critical module that miraculously happened to survive in Ghana—allowed them to eventually rebuild their systems. In all, it cost Maersk a billion dollars. The total cost of the attack is estimated at about $10 billion.

But that’s not the key aspect of this. The part we still don’t know for sure is whether this was deliberate. Was NotPetya just another attack on Ukraine that went disastrously awry? Or was it a deliberate pilot test of a devastating piece of malware that was fully expected to spread throughout the world?

Those of us who are critics of Russia—and Vladimir Putin in particular—are usually focused on Putin’s retrograde politics. Putin has shut down the press; murdered his opponents; jailed dissidents; used homophobic legislation to stoke bigotry and reactionary rage; co-opted the church to portray himself as the only reliable protector of Russian culture; killed off opposition parties; and just generally centralized authority in himself to a degree last matched in the post-Stalin Soviet era.

But there’s also his aggressive foreign policy: wars in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea, and threats against the Baltic states and others. Regional hegemons usually engage in a fair amount of military activity, so perhaps much of this can be written off as nothing all that unusual. Your mileage may vary. But Russia’s cyberwarfare is something quite different: it is destructive, highly advanced, and very definitely not restricted to the ordinary kind of hegemonic military activity, which is typically targeted at either border states or very limited engagements in proxy wars that are temporarily deemed important for some reason. Russia has made it clear that cyberwar is something it takes very seriously and is willing to use against anyone, whether they’re at war or not. That obviously includes us. And just as obviously, our current president has decided to do almost nothing about it.

Read these two pieces. They’re eye-opening if you haven’t been following this stuff closely. For most of us, we can only hope that the Pentagon and the NSA are ignoring Donald Trump and doing a good job of fighting this stuff on their own. In the meantime, the big question is: Why doesn’t Trump care? And why does the Republican Party allow him to get away with not caring?

The perceptive among you have already recognized the subtle hints that I am no longer in Irvine. I’m in New York, and at the moment I feel like I’ve spent a day walking through soup. But I’m sure a quick shower will make me feel human again.

I’m here because I felt like taking one last photography trip this year, but I was given the excuse by Gideon Rose, editor of Foreign Affairs, who needed a couple of people for a panel about the most important global trends of the next century. My answer, of course, is artificial intelligence. I may or may not be right about that, but I will say that at least it’s probably a more entertaining topic than the fall of the liberal order or the future of Marxism.

Anyway, here’s a livestream of the event if you have the patience to watch it. At one point, Gideon calls me one of our foremost expositors of enlightenment values, or something like that. Wasn’t that nice of him? Unfortunately, the world being what it is, I suspect this hints at a bit of naiveté too. Oh well. I’ll take the good with the bad.

And here we go:

Look! The lovely people at Amazon delivered Hopper some brand new living quarters! Jolly decent of them, no? This picture was taken over the weekend, while the new boîte de chat was still in pristine shape, but I’m sad to report that it’s already showing signs of wear and tear. It’s almost as if some animal the size of, oh, I don’t know, a raccoon or a smallish dog, was chewing away on it. It’s sort of mysterious, no?

Here’s a different way of looking at the American economy, courtesy of David Leonhardt:

This is similar to my chart from Wednesday except that Leonhardt shows incomes of the poor going up slightly while I show them going down slightly. Either way, the natural question is: where did all the money go? The answer, of course, is that it mostly went to the men and women who nearly destroyed the world ten years ago until Barack Obama bailed them out. Now they’re busily working with Donald Trump to lower their own taxes and repeal the modest regulations that were put on their banks.

As near as I can tell, they are hellbent on causing another financial meltdown sometime in the next decade. And why not? The last one worked out pretty well for them.

This is yet another in my (nowhere near finished!) Overexposed LA™ series. It is, of course, the original Tommy’s at Beverly and Rampart, one of Los Angeles’s great contributions to the culinary arts.

The first Tommy’s I went to was the location in Eagle Rock in 1976 when I was a freshman at Caltech. “Who’s up for a Tommy’s run?” someone asked, and not knowing any better, I said sure, I’ll go. It was only when we got there and ordered that I realized the burger was drowning in chili, which didn’t really appeal to me. But what can you do? So I ate it, and a long love affair began. Luckily, Tommy’s now has a couple of locations in Orange County, so I can go anytime I want. And I do.

Alex Tabarrok, Michael Makowsky, and Thomas Stratmann have a new paper out that will, unfortunately surprise no one. The subject is civil asset forfeitures, where police get to keep money any they find in (for example) your car even if there’s no evidence that it’s drug related and nobody is convicted of a crime. They just declare the money suspicious, and that’s that.

In some states, police departments get to keep the money they seize. These are the states the authors look at. Then they look at one other variable: whether the local government (city or county) is running a deficit. Guess what they find? More civil asset forfeitures! Are you shocked!

There are no increases in arrests for murder or assault or burglary. Just for crimes where the police get to keep the money. But there’s one more thing. A picture is worth a thousand words, so check this out:

The more black (and Hispanic) an area is, the more likely it is that strapped local governments will turn to civil asset forfeitures to raise revenue. But the more white an area is, the less likely they are to increase the use of civil asset forfeitures.

The lesson here is simple: white boys have daddies and their daddies have lawyers. It’s best not to mess with them. Just stick with harassing the black kids who can’t really fight back and who nobody cares about anyway. That’s just smart policing, my friend.