The Wisconsin Supreme Court, which was in the center of creating chaos during the primary election a few months ago, is back at it for the general election:

The technical legal term for this is shitshow. https://t.co/6K3xrdgdKh

— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) September 11, 2020

Technically, the question is whether the Green Party ticket should be on the ballot. In real life, the question is whether the Green Party ticket might take a few thousand votes away from Joe Biden if they’re on the ballot. Naturally, then, the court’s four Republicans are very interested in hearing their case.

That’s bad enough, but at this late date ballots are already printed and many of them have already been mailed out. This doesn’t seem to have fazed the Republican justices, who have asked for a full accounting of what’s been printed and what’s been sent out. They appear fully ready to order the ballots reprinted and then sent out, even to voters who have already received the original ballot. Needless to say, this would be a clusterfuck of enormous proportions.

Which, I guess, is the point.

Tracy Barbutes/ZUMA

In case you’re not interested in 2,000 words on the subject, here’s the tl;dr version:

1. Climate change has made the weather hotter, which creates lots of dry, brittle undergrowth that makes perfect tinder for wildfires.
2. In the past, fires settled down a bit at night when temps went down. Now, thanks to higher nighttime temperatures, they just keep spreading.
3. For the past several decades the timber industry has clear-cut California forests and replaced them with dense new plantings. These new “forests” have no natural firebreaks to stop fires from spreading at warp speed.
4. The local power company, PG&E, is unusually greedy and has refused to spend the money necessary to clear trees from around its power lines. Every stray spark from a PG&E line is a potential fire starter.

There’s more, including a history of misguided fire suppression policies, but these are the basics. There’s not a lot that can be done about climate change in the short term, but we could certainly stop the clear-cutting; adopt better forest management; and force PG&E to follow the law. That would go a long way toward gradually reducing the fuel load and cutting back on fires started by power lines.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 10. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

A couple of days ago I linked to a study suggesting that the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was responsible for 266,000 new cases of COVID-19 in August. Today the Wall Street Journal editorial page hit back with a piece called “The Sturgis Statistical Misfire.”

I was open to this for a couple of reasons. First, like a lot of COVID-19 research, this study was released quickly and without peer review. Second, the figure of 266,000 really did seem awfully high given the timeframe and the number of infections attributed to actual attendees. So even though I normally don’t waste my time with Journal editorials, this time I did.

It started off with some snark about “deplorables.” Then a bit of background. Then some more snark about “modelers,” although the study in question didn’t really rely on any sophisticated modeling. Then an irrelevant comparison to New York state, followed by the irrelevant observation that South Dakota is still a pretty low infection state. I was starting to wonder whether they’d ever get around to the actual statistical problem, when it finally showed up in the 8th paragraph. As you’ll recall, the study looked at COVID-19 case rates in counties with different rates of attendance at the rally and found that the higher the attendance, the higher the COVID-19 outbreak a week or two later. Here’s what the Journal has to say about that:

But many “high inflow” counties like Los Angeles, Maricopa (Arizona), Clark (Nevada) and El Paso were experiencing flare-ups before the rally. These counties may have shared other characteristics like higher population density that contributed to their increases. There could be other “endogenous” variables—for instance, counties with more people who attended the motorcycle rally may also have had populations less observant of social distancing.

That’s it. They cherry picked a few counties and suggested maybe their COVID-19 case rates would have gone up anyway. You can’t do that, of course: you have to look at every county, not just a few, to get any kind of valid measurement.

This is why I don’t waste time with Wall Street Journal editorials. It’s like reading the National Enquirer: big, brassy headlines but it’s all dross inside. I’m still open to the possibility that this study overestimated the effect of the Sturgis rally, but you’re going to have to do a lot better if you want to convince me. This is just culture war sniping—the Journal is very concerned that the study scolds the (mostly unmasked) Sturgis attendees while “liberals” give the (mostly masked) BLM protests a pass—not a serious response.

POSTSCRIPT: As I was writing this, I noticed that James Freeman’s column today is headlined “Did Trump Downplay Covid Enough?” Atta boy! Don’t just defend Trump from the liberal press jackals, go all in and claim that Trump’s only problem was not lying enough.

Here in Southern California we don’t have the apocalyptic skies from hell of our colleagues in the Bay Area, but even down here things are a bit more orange than usual. This is about an hour before sunset yesterday, with the sun barely visible behind the smoke cloud and the nearby sky turned a ruddy yellow/orange. It’s actually kind of pretty in a JMW Turnerish sort of way if you don’t think too hard about what’s causing it.

Rod Lamkey/CNP via ZUMA

Republicans plan to go ahead with a symbolic vote on their “skinny” stimulus plan:

Senate Republicans plan to force a vote Thursday on their substantially scaled-back stimulus plan, in a maneuver all but guaranteed to fail amid opposition by Democrats who call the measure inadequate. After months of struggling to overcome deep internal divisions over the scope of another relief measure, Republicans hope to present a near-united front in support of their latest plan. They can then try to blame the continuing impasse on Democrats, who are expected to oppose it en masse, denying it the 60 votes it would need to advance.

The Republican plan would amount to net new spending of $300 billion, about a tenth of the $3 trillion Democrats are asking for. And I confess I don’t get it. No one is trying to raise taxes on the rich. No one is proposing benefits for the “undeserving” poor. No one is trying to bail out a Democratic president. No one is pretending that the economy is anywhere near to bouncing back yet. No one wants to use the stimulus money to fund abortions or gun registration or gay marriages.

So what’s the problem? We know that the vast majority of Republicans don’t really care about the budget deficit, so it can’t be that. Relieving the financial stress on millions of voters would surely be good for Donald Trump, so partisan politics can’t be the answer. Everyone in Congress represents a state that desperately needs help, so it can’t be a geographic thing.

And yet Republicans refuse to support a serious stimulus/rescue plan. I really, truly don’t understand. Is it just habit? Automatic opposition to anything Democrats like? What on earth is the problem?

Nick Kristof brings our attention to the latest release of the Social Progress Index, which measures just what you think it measures. The index includes things like health care, access to education, personal safety, sanitation, human rights, and so forth, and combines them all into a single number. This number doesn’t change a lot from year to year, and from 2011 to 2016 it went up by 0.34 in the United States. Since then, however, it’s fallen by an astonishing 1.06 in just four years. We now rank 28th in the world, just behind Greece.

Note that this isn’t an economic index. The US is still one of the richest countries in the world. We just aren’t using those riches to make much social progress.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 9. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Here are nine headlines currently splashed across the news at the moment I’m writing this:

• Trump acknowledges he intentionally downplayed coronavirus threat
• N.I.H. Director Undercuts Trump’s Comments on a Vaccine by Election Day
• As NFL reopens, Trump resumes attacks on players who demonstrate for racial justice
• In crackdown on race-related content, Education Department targets internal book clubs, meetings
• Patients may have seen ‘significant’ delays in medicine deliveries by USPS, Senate report finds
• Whistleblower Says DHS Leadership Tried to Halt Reports on Russian Interference
• Mike Pence slated to speak at fundraiser hosted by QAnon supporters
• Emails show HHS official trying to muzzle Fauci
• Senate paralyzed over coronavirus relief

November 3rd can’t come soon enough.

This is . . . a geranium of some kind. I thought I knew what it was, but on a second look I really don’t. Maybe it’s just a plain old wild geranium?