Over the past decade, apprehensions¹ at the Mexican border were fairly steady at about 30,000 per month. After Donald Trump became president, apprehensions went down, then up, and then spiked briefly during the “caravan” surge of 2019. However, by the end of 2019 we had returned to about 30,000 apprehensions per month, roughly the same as we had during the 2011-2016 period. In other words, even after everything Trump did at the border—separating children from their parents, keeping asylum seekers from filing claims, building a wall, etc—all he accomplished was to get border crossings back to where they had been when he took office.

¹Apprehensions are generally considered a pretty good proxy for the number of people trying to cross the border illegally.

From the New York Times:

People of color have been disproportionately affected by Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, and new research is heightening concern about the susceptibility of children in these communities. They are infected at higher rates than white children and hospitalized at rates five to eight times that of white children, the data shows. Children of color also make up an overwhelming majority of those who develop a life-threatening complication called multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C.

Black adults die of COVID-19 at about twice the rate of white adults. Black children—if my arithmetic is correct—die at about 5x the rate of white children. This matches their hospitalization rate, which is also about 5x higher than white children. Hispanic children are even worse off: they’re hospitalized at about 8x the rate of white children.

It’s mind boggling that we still don’t know what’s behind this. I’ve read endless studies of racial disparities caused by various kinds of systemic racism: Maternal mortality is 50 percent higher among Black mothers. Black drivers are pulled over 100 percent more often than white drivers. Etc. But what accounts for gaps that are so much larger? Like 200 percent worse? Or 400 percent worse? Or, in the case of Hispanic children hospitalized for COVID-19, a stunning 700 percent worse? Why?

“Children don’t exist in a vacuum,” said Dr. Monika K. Goyal, a pediatric emergency medicine specialist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington….“They live in homes where their parent or caregiver doesn’t have the luxury of telecommuting, so they are at increased risk of exposure,” she added. “They are also more likely to live in multigenerational households. It’s all connected.”

…Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a professor of pediatrics at Stanford, agreed: “I know exactly what’s happening to those kids. Their parents are frontline, blue-collar or essential workers.”

This is probably true, but does it account for the size of the gap? As Goyal says in a newly published study, “these observed racial/ethnic disparities in infection rates only slightly attenuated after adjustment for socioeconomic status.” In other words, even when you do comparisons with poor white families who also work in essential jobs, use more public transportation, and so forth, Black and Hispanic families still contract COVID-19 at much higher rates. We need far more concrete research about what could account for such huge disparities than we’ve gotten so far, and we need it now.

This is yet another panoramic photo. In order to get the whole thing, I pointed the camera toward my feet and snapped a picture, then pointed it higher, then higher, and finally pointed it up toward the houses in the background. Put all these shots together and you get the full shadow.

But! As you can see, I attracted company, which means the first photo has a cat in it. But where is the cat’s shadow? The answer is that it was there in the first shot, but in the second shot it wasn’t because the cat had moved away. When Photoshop merged all the shots, it chose the second one for the middle part, and the second one had no shadow. So you end up with a person with a gigantic shadow and a cat with no shadow. Weird.

Alternatively, the cat is actually a vampire. They’re the ones that cast no shadows, right?

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through August 31. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

The line for the United States has suddenly acquired a huge blip at May 18. I don’t know why, but it’s probably because the Johns Hopkins boffins reversed a decision they made a while ago to integrate the New York City “correction” smoothly rather than as one single gigantic daily report. Or something. Whatever it is, it doesn’t affect the total number of deaths or the current mortality rate, so it’s not worth worrying about for the moment.

Here it is, the last of my lantana pictures. Does that make you happy or sad?

AND THIS: Apparently I forgot to tell everyone what the not-a-tennis-ball was. It’s one of those balls you put on the legs of a walker to help it slide across the floor more smoothly.

Like most taxes, tariffs on goods and services get passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices. The cost of these tariffs has amounted to a steady $300 per household since the Reagan era, but that changed two years ago when President Trump imposed an array of new tariffs on foreign goods. American households now pay an average of $700 each in tariffs, more than double what they’ve paid under previous administrations.

The president of the United States passed along the following tweet this morning:

🟥 Black Lives Matter / Antifapic.twitter.com/2fmDlT52aN

— TDN ® (@TDN_NOTICIAS) August 30, 2020

This video has nothing to do with BLM, nothing to do with ANTIFA, and nothing to do with the violence in Portland or Kenosha. It’s just an excuse to put up a random video of a Black guy shoving a white woman. In other words, it’s pure racist incitement. Disgusting.

UPDATE: The original source of this video has been suspended by Twitter. Here’s a single frame from the video that gives you a sense of what the scene looked like.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through August 30. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through August 29. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Margaret Sullivan notes today that fact-checking has outlived its usefulness:

As scholars have observed, calling out falsehoods forcefully may actually cause people to hold tighter to their beliefs. That’s the “backfire effect” that academics Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler wrote about in their study “When Corrections Fail” about the persistence of political misperceptions: “Direct factual contradictions can actually strengthen ideologically grounded factual beliefs.”

Fact-checking has always been a mug’s game. Politicians discovered long ago that they could say anything they wanted no matter how obviously wrong it was and it would do them no harm. Any fact-checking would be seen by a tiny fraction of the audience that saw the original claim, so lies were net positives no matter how upset fact-checkers got about them.

Donald Trump has taken this to its logical conclusion, where he practically invents a whole different reality, but fact-checking has little impact even on this. At this point, virtually everyone already believes that either (a) Trump lies all the time, or (b) the media hates Trump and calls everything he says a lie.

This is why I favor a sort of “Fact of the Day” approach to this. That is, short blurbs that simply display something in the news without reference to anything Trump has said. Like this:

Sure, the motivation for showing this is Trump’s claim that he’s been great for manufacturing. But there’s no need to say that, which immediately loses half your audience. Just show the facts with minimal comment. Manufacturing’s share of the workforce has been declining since 1946 and it continues to decline to this day. Then let people draw their own conclusions.