Spring having sprung, it’s also duckling season. On Sunday we saw our first brood of ducklings of the year—in fact, the first in many years. From a photographic viewpoint, the fascinating thing about ducklings is that they always look out of focus. Even when you know for a fact that the camera’s focus is perfect, somehow they still look a little fuzzy. The optical principles involved are, I’m sure, fascinating.

The first picture was taken on Monday evening near sunset. The second picture—which is in pretty good focus!—was taken on Tuesday morning.

Behold our president:

President Trump, in a stunning reversal, told a gathering of farm state lawmakers and governors on Thursday morning that he was directing his advisers to look into rejoining the multicountry trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal he pulled out of within days of assuming the presidency.

Ramesh Ponnuru says: “It would be easy for Trump critics to use this episode to point out the thoughtlessness and malleability of some Trump stances and the emptiness of some of his words. Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) is probably right, though, to take the high road.”

I applaud Sasse’s forbearance, but I’m not really in a high-road mood these days. My guess is that our moron-in-chief has finally figured out that TPP was, to a large extent, explicitly designed to create a trade region that excludes China, so now he’s suddenly interested in it. Or, more to the point, he says he is. I doubt that Trump actually cares much about it except as a way to make China nervous, since this kind of dimwitted bluffing is really all he knows. I imagine he’ll lose interest once the China trade war has played out. TPP haters can probably relax.

From Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of a book on trends in Google searches:

I was blown away by how frequently people are searching for ways to do abortions themselves now. These searches are concentrated in parts of the country where it’s hard to get an abortion and they rose substantially when it became harder to get an abortion….That’s pretty disturbing and I think isn’t really being talked about. But I think, based on the data, it’s clearly going on.

I’m not sure what kind of search terms Stephens-Davidowitz is using here, but it sounds like this deserves more attention. For example, you could read “Inside the Top-Secret Abortion Underground,” by Nina Liss-Schultz, from our March issue.

Beyond that, I can show you the search trend over the past few years for abortion in general:

Did searches spike when Trump was elected because people were worried about whether abortion would be banned? Or because lots of people got depressed and started considering having an abortion?

UPDATE: More here based on an online survey given to people who Googled terms related to self-induced abortion: “1,235 respondents completed the survey. The vast majority of the sample was female (96%), and 41% were minors. Almost three-quarters (73%) indicated that they were searching for information because they were pregnant and did not or may not want to be. Eleven percent had ever attempted to self-abort. One-third of respondents did not know if abortion was legal in their state of residence, and knowledge of legality did not differ by age.”

Note also that interest was strongest in the South, where legal abortion is most constrained.

I don’t really have anything insightful to say about this, but I thought today’s chart in the Wall Street Journal about the origin of venture capital money was interesting:

The gist of the story is the rise of Asia, but really, the bigger story is simply the rise of venture capital. In 2004, total venture capital investment amounted to about $30 billion. Since then it’s grown at a rate of 13 percent per year. But most of that growth is in just the past four years: venture capital has exploded since 2013, increasing from $50 billion to $150 billion. So are we in the midst of another dotcom bubble? I report, you decide.

The New York Times has a big front-page story today about our appalling racial gap in infant mortality. Infant mortality in general has gone down substantially since WWII, but the racial gap has actually increased. In 1950, according to the CDC, the black rate of infant mortality was 64 percent higher than the white rate. Today it’s 133 percent higher:

And that’s not all. Nearly every other rich country has made more progress toward reducing infant mortality than we have:

In 1960, we ranked 11th in infant mortality among rich countries. Not great, but not terrible. Today we rank 24th out of 27 rich countries, ahead of only Turkey, Mexico, and Chile. We are behind every single country in Europe by a large margin. This is the price we pay for our horrible health care system.

From Andrew Sprung:

While Congress balked at restoring CSR funding for 2019, CMS administrator Seema Verma is now intimating that CMS may ban “silver loading,” the pricing practice that produced this year’s discounts in bronze and gold plans.

I suppose that sounds like Latin to most of you. Here’s what it means:

• The original version of Obamacare included something called Cost Sharing Reduction. This was a payment directly to insurers that reduced the cost of health insurance for the poor.
• Last year, President Trump ended CSR payments.
• To his surprise, however, this didn’t sabotage Obamacare. In fact, due to the way premiums are calculated, it had a modestly positive effect. A full explanation is here.
• The specific mechanism for the positive effect was something called “silver loading,” where insurance companies raised premiums to make up for CSR but raised them mostly on silver plans. Since silver plans are the benchmark for subsidies, this caused subsidies to increase and the net cost of bronze and gold plans to go down.

In other words, the Trump administration is so incompetent that they even screwed up their effort to sabotage Obamacare. However, having accidentally made Obamacare a little bit better, they’re now desperately scuttling around for ways to make sure their sabotage works the way they wanted it to. Banning silver loading would do this.

What a piece of work these guys are. They’re just bound and determined to screw over their constituents using any means necessary. But look! Scary Mexicans!

In the wake of Russia’s election last month, I’ve seen a number of people asking why Vladimir Putin is so popular. Part of the answer, of course, is that he isn’t: the results of the election were rigged in several different ways. That said, he is pretty popular. He almost certainly would have won easily even in a fair election. Here’s why:

The Soviet economy was declining even before its final fall, and it started to improve before Putin took over. Nonetheless, the timing is close enough that it looks to the average Russian as if (a) the fall of the Soviet Union was a disaster, (b) the US-led “shock therapy” of the 90s made it even more of a disaster, and (c) Putin finally took charge and put Russia back on track.

Sure, the oligarchs got rich and critics of the regime were steadily shut down. But Putin is no Stalin and Russians these days don’t live in fear of being sent to the gulag. For the vast majority, it was all good news: they saw their incomes double at the same time that Putin was reasserting Russian influence on the world stage and unapologetically reclaiming its historic control over Crimea. If a few human rights were trampled along the way and a few critics sent to the morgue—well, Russia has never been a bastion of civil liberties, has it? And anyway, the self-righteous Westerners who gripe about this are the same ones who destroyed our country, tovarisch.

Of course, you might also notice that incomes have declined since 2013, even as the rest of the world has been recovering from the Great Recession. For a guy who cemented his control by pumping up the Russian economy, that’s probably a little worrisome.

Remember that scene from The Day After Tomorrow where Dennis Quaid tells everybody about the breakdown of the Atlantic current that carries warm water north from the tropics? Sure you do. Within minutes, tornadoes are everywhere, tsunamis are destroying the coast, and New York City is sent back into another ice age. I’ll remind you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzgAC1HN9Hw&t=49s

Unfortunately, this wasn’t all Hollywood bullshit. A new ice age may not be imminent, but the current in question—the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC to its friends—really is weakening, mostly due to the melting of the polar ice cap and the Greenland ice sheet, which makes the ocean water less salty. This means the coast off Greenland is cooling and the coast off of New York City is warming (Dennis got that part wrong). Here’s a picture from a new study in Nature that shows how observation matches with climate models:

That’s a pretty close fit. And if you’re the kind of person who’d really prefer to see this in complicated chart form—and who isn’t?—a second paper in Nature has you covered:

All three of these charts show a dramatic change at the start of the industrial era. The authors believe that this change was probably kicked off by the end of the Little Ice Age, but has since continued for other reasons:

This suggests either hysteresis of the AMOC in response to an early climate forcing—natural (solar, volcanic) or anthropogenic (greenhouse gases, aerosols, land-use change)—or that continued climate forcing, such as the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, has been sufficient to keep the AMOC weak or cause further weakening.

So there you have it. If this keeps up, it’s not New York that will start to freeze over, it’s Europe. Right now, they’re kept relatively toasty, even though London is about as far north as Newfoundland, because the AMOC pushes warm water from the equator up their coast. If that stops, it’s going to get pretty chilly in Britain. For more, Chris Mooney has a good writeup in the Washington Post.

Spring has sprung, which means it’s poppy season. Here are a few lovely California poppies from my mother’s front yard, which is planted entirely with native, drought-tolerant species.

Erick Erickson caught up with a friend in Congress recently while he was visiting Washington DC. This guy supports Donald Trump in public, but in private he’s—oh, what’s the right word? Disillusioned? Despondent? Boiling over with rage?

Anyway, he told Erickson he needed to vent about Trump, so they strolled down the aisles of a local Safeway and Erickson turned on his recorder:

He may be an idiot, but he’s still the President and leader of my party and he is capable of doing some things right. But dammit he’s taking us all down with him. We are well and truly f**ked in November….It’s like Forrest Gump won the presidency, but an evil, really f*cking stupid Forrest Gump. He can’t help himself. He’s just a f**king idiot who thinks he’s winning when people are b*tching about him.

….If we get to summer and most of the primaries are over, they just might pull the trigger if the President fires Mueller. The sh*t will hit the fan if that happens and I’d vote to impeach him myself. Most of us would, I think. Hell, all the Democrats would and you only need a majority in the House. If we’re going to lose because of him, we might as well impeach the motherf**ker.

….I say a lot of shit on TV defending him, even over this. But honestly, I wish the motherf*cker would just go away. We’re going to lose the House, lose the Senate, and lose a bunch of states because of him. All his supporters will blame us for what we have or have not done, but he hasn’t led. He wakes up in the morning, sh*ts all over Twitter, sh*ts all over us, sh*ts all over his staff, then hits golf balls. F*ck him. Of course, I can’t say that in public or I’d get run out of town.

Who knows? Maybe instead of being run out of town, he’d find out that there are a hundred other Republican members of Congress who think the same thing. Why not find out?