or at least the writers and actors are on strike together which halts most activity. This was the story that this morning’s talking heads programs devoted a considerable portion of their time if not most of it.

To my eye the most interesting dispute is over the role of artificial intelligence and in particular generative artificial intelligence in the large language model form it has taken recently. It seems to me that the irony of the situation is lost on practically all participants. How much natural intelligence does it take to keep writing the same stories over and over again? And what is the role of the writer in movies that primarily consist of car chases and/or explosions and what little dialogue there is is heavily improvised? There is not a lot of creativity out there; no wonder they’re worried about generative AI.

The last time the writers and actors were on strike at the same time was in 1960 and Ronald Reagan was the long-time head of the Screen Actors Guild. He negotiated a pretty good contract for SAG. Maybe the same thing will happen again. I doubt. Not only is Fran Drescher no Reagan, the circumstances are very different.

These strikes are taking place in the context of an entertainment industry whose business model is failing. From 1913 to 1948 the model that evolved was one of motion picture studios that increasingly gained control of the theaters in which movies were shown. That ended in 1948 and the studios suffered a long painful death that continued into the 1960s. That coincided with the rise first of broadcast television networks and then with cable television companies. The rise of premium cable networks over the last 30 years or so saw increased intertwining of movie studios with cable television.

Now some of the biggest producers of “content” as it’s so blandly called are Internet streaming services, e.g. Netflix, Amazon, etc. Broadcast television is almost completely dead; just look at the Emmy nominations announced recently—almost all nominations went to product that was on cable or streaming.

The number of cable subscribers peaked in 2016.

That’s the context of these strikes. Movie studios have suffered possibly their worst period ever, beginning in 2020; broadcast television is practically dead; cable isn’t what it used to be. Add AI to this and you’ve got one fine mess.

Nobody has a right to a business model. I don’t know what business model will arise from present developments but it will be very different from what preceded it.

Ruy Teixeira considers a recent poll on U. S. immigration policy:

Taking immigration first, we asked voters to choose from three options:

1. People around the world have the right to claim asylum and America should welcome more immigrants into the country;
2. America needs to secure its borders and create more legal and managed immigration paths to bring in skilled professionals and workers to help our economy grow; or
3. America needs to close its borders to outsiders and reduce all levels of immigration.

Under a quarter (24 percent) chose the first option, emphasizing the right to asylum and admitting more immigrants, which is closely associated with the Democratic Party. By far the most popular option was the second one, emphasizing border security and skilled immigration, which 59 percent favored. The draconian third option, which favors just closing the border and reducing all immigration was chosen by 17 percent. The latter two positions outnumber the permissive first position by three to one.

Among moderates, the second position was chosen by an overwhelming 66 percent and just 18 percent favored the permissive first position, not much more than the 16 percent who favor the draconian third position. Among the swing-y pure independent group, the story was similar: 62 percent chose the second position and the same number—19 percent—chose the first and third positions.

It’s clear Democrats do not occupy the center ground here.

His poll found the same true for environmental policy and transgender policy: The positions staked out by the party organization are closely aligned with the Democratic Party’s progressive wing and out of sync not just with the majority of Americans but with the majority of Democats.

How can the Democratic Party be so undemocratic? I’ve already provided my answer: the party organization is under the control of its progressive wing and I was widely criticized for stating that but it’s obvious to anyone who actually understand how the parties work today. Much more power is concentrated in the hands of the party leadership than was the case fifty years ago. When you recognize that Nancy Pelosi is a founding member of the House Progressive Caucus and Hakeem Jeffries was a member in good standing of the caucus for years. They each left of the caucus only when they assume a leadership position in the party.

But what about Joe Biden? Isn’t he a moderate? The policies he’s espousing are more closely aligned with the progressive wing of the party than with its moderates.

You may find this article at Phys.org by Nicola Scafetta interesting, frustrating, or infuriating or some of each. The article considers the role of the sun in climate change. Here’s the opening paragraphs:

Although the sun provides nearly all the energy needed to warm the planet, its contribution to climate change remains widely questioned. Many empirically based studies claim that it has a significant effect on climate, while others (often based on computer global climate simulations) claim that it has a small effect.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) supports the latter view and estimates that almost 100% of the observed warming of the Earth’s surface from 1850–1900 to 2020 was caused by man-made emissions. This is known as the anthropogenic global warming (AGWT) theory.

The answer to the question is that we don’t really know. However, rather than taking an the extreme precautionary principle approach that the IPCC seems to I think there’s another way of looking at things.

There are things we can’t do much about like the sun and its cycle and things we can do something about. Why not address some of the things we can do something about? Catastrophizing may be easier to organize mass movements around but it doesn’t actually produce practical solutions.

That’s why, for example, I think that hybrids are a better alternative to straight internal combustion engines than electric vehicles are. Not to mention that they’re much stingier in their use of materials like rare earths, the discovery, mining, and processing of which pose problems of their own.

As if in reaction to my earlier post, David A. Andelman explicates the problems underlying the riot in France in a post at American Purpose:

The host of deep-seated fault lines that have sent many into the streets here on so many occasions runs very deep. Vast disparities persist in rank, wealth, privilege, and opportunity between classes; and now—with the increasingly diverse nature of French society—in the distrust, fear, and hatred of individuals who do not look, sound like, nor believe in the same fundamentals as the bulk of the French people.

Perhaps none of this was brought home to me more immediately or viscerally than by a prescient remark from one of France’s great strategic thinkers—Count Alexandre de Marenches, the longest serving head of French intelligence and counselor to presidents from Charles de Gaulle to François Mitterrand.

“The greatest, perhaps mortal, danger for France is the vast community that is living within our nation whose language we do not speak, whose religion we do not embrace, whose customs we do not understand or accept,” he told me in the early 1990s, when we were working on our book The Fourth World War. This is still France’s greatest danger today.

In the thirty years since Marenches’ observation, this nation-within-a-nation has grown and metastasized, adding new elements and accents, into multiple pockets of frustration, poverty, and lack of opportunity that have implanted themselves all over France. Earlier waves of migrants came from French colonies in North Africa (the Maghreb) or southern Africa. The latest waves come from different Islamic regions torn by violence or terrorism.

And therein lies the rub. Historically, France’s colonies like Algeria and Niger were part of France. Legally, the French have allowed more or less open immigration from those places as long those moving to France adopted “Frenchness” which includes the French language and French mores and manners.

Within those constraints the French government doesn’t even keep track of the population by race, country of origin, or religion so long as they’re French.

As M. Andelman observes an increasing number of French people don’t speak French and don’t accept French manners or mores. The Frenchness which is the very foundation of the modern French state is collapsing and I’m not sure what can be done about it.

I’ve been musing for some time on the subjects in the title of this post and the brouhaha concerning them. Let’s define a few terms.

A lie is the knowing telling of an untruth with an intent to deceive.

Misinformation is telling others incorrect things whatever the intention. It also doesn’t matter whether the speaker knows that what they’re saying is untrue. The only requirement for it to be misinformation is for it to be untrue.

Disinformation is a lie, particularly one told by the government. It’s propaganda.

There are also just plain differences of opinion.

I’m wary of the government trying to deal with misinformation. That trends into Big Brother pretty quickly. And I do not think our government should engage in disinformation at all. I don’t think that’s consistent with a liberal democracy.

In this post I’m soliciting examples of disinformation, misinformation, and just plain differences of opinion.

The clearest example of disinformation I can think of from the fairly recent past with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s remarks about wearing a facemask in March 2020. As he has subsequently admitted, he believed he was telling an untruth in discouraging people from wearing facemasks. He has also stated he had a good motive for it.

Many of the things that are claimed to be misinformation are actually differences of opinion. So, for example, although I think that anthropogenic global warming is real I recognize that not everyone agrees with that. When they air their disagreement that’s not misinformation.

The “lab leak hypothesis” for the origin of COVID-19 is one possible explanation for the disease. It’s not misinformation.

How about some other examples of misinformation, disinformation, and differences of opinion?

I think we can conclude reasonably from Joel Kotkin’s latest post at UnHerd that he’s not too fond of California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

I have no particular opinion of Gov. Newsom. All I can say is that he would probably be better than Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.

IMO this is what keeps President Biden secure in his job—that the other alternative are so bad.

Here’s another article I wanted to highlight. At The War Zone Joseph Trevithick writes:

A U.S. Navy briefing slide is calling new attention to the worrisome disparity between Chinese and U.S. capacity to build new naval vessels and total naval force sizes. The data compiled by the Office of Naval Intelligence says that a growing gap in fleet sizes is being helped by China’s shipbuilders being more than 200 times more capable of producing surface warships and submarines. This underscores longstanding concerns about the U.S. Navy’s ability to challenge Chinese fleets, as well as sustain its forces afloat, in any future high-end conflict.

Read the whole thing.

What’s missing from the article is that shipbuilding doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Not only can’t you add more shipbuilding overnight, as the author points out:

Shipbuilding is also a complex and costly affair that requires large amounts of skilled labor and resources, which can take significant time to source. Delays or other hiccups in shipbuilding, as well as repair and overhaul work that requires shipyard capacity, can easily cascade. This reality has manifested itself to an especially extreme degree for the U.S. Navy when it comes to submarine maintenance.

but we need to produce more steel and the thousands of other materials used in modern navies, mine more iron and coal and thousands of other commodities, and create entire supply chains nearly from scratch.

We used to produce more of all of those than anybody else but over the last half century have steadily deindustrialized. It was a stupid, risky, and expensive mistake.

I wanted to bring this post by Joann Muller at Axios to your attention. It appears that sales of electric vehicles have hit a bump:

The growing mismatch between EV supply and demand is a sign that even though consumers are showing more interest in EVs, they’re still wary about purchasing one because of price or charging concerns.

It’s a “Field of Dreams” moment for automakers making big bets on electrification — they’ve built the cars, and now they’re waiting for buyers to come, says Jonathan Gregory, senior manager of economic and industry insights at Cox Automotive.

However:

Hybrid vehicles have much lower inventory levels, supporting Toyota’s argument that consumers want a stepping stone to fully electric cars.

I suspect that when gas prices are skyrocketing people start thinking about EVs but when gas prices are stable or falling not so much. At that point other factors loom larger.

Speaking only for myself I do not find myself at all tempted to purchase an EV but I am considering a Toyota hybrid or maybe a PHEV for my next car.

I am deeply tempted to quote Jason L. Riley’s Wall Street Journal column on black economic progress in full but will just quote a couple of substantial chunks of it:

The black American worker has had a pretty good run in recent years, though you might not know it because the political left and its allies in the press prefer to accentuate black struggle. Racial inequality shouldn’t be ignored but neither should black progress.

Between 1963 and 2012, unemployment averaged 5.1% for whites and 11.1% for blacks. The 2008 financial crisis hit black workers especially hard, with unemployment reaching 16.8% in March 2010. Under President Obama, black unemployment declined but didn’t fall below double-digits until the seventh year of his presidency. When he left office in January 2017, the black jobless rate was 7.5%. Under President Trump it dipped to 5.3% in August 2019, then fell to a record-low 4.7% in April of this year.

Positive black economic trends undermine the liberal argument that we live in a society stacked against certain racial and ethnic minority groups, so these trends tend to get played down or spun to advance a left-wing agenda. Last week’s jobs report put black unemployment in June at 6%. Bloomberg, Reuters and other news outlets were quick to note that this was the second consecutive month that black unemployment had increased. That’s true—the rate was 5.6% in May—and perhaps a trend is developing. Still, one month of 6% unemployment is hardly cause for panic, and other data on black workers suggest that the labor market remains strong.

For starters, the black employment rate of 58.9% is only 1.5 percentage-points lower than the white rate of 60.4%, which is a historically narrow racial gap. Second, labor-force participation rates for black workers, which have tended to trail those of white workers, now surpass them slightly. The trend started before the pandemic and has been noticeable for most of the past year. In June 2020, 62.2% of working-age blacks were employed or looking for a job, versus 61.9% of whites. Last month the rate was 62.6% for blacks and 62.3% for whites.

with this conclusion:

What’s more likely to improve black outcomes in the workforce are better black outcomes in the classroom, not a return to irresponsibly low interest rates. Addressing the racial achievement gap, which worsened under Covid, ought to be a priority. Which makes the nation’s teachers unions and their opposition to school choice a far bigger problem than Mr. Powell’s Fed.

I don’t know that school choice is the solution or even part of the solution. I think it’s fair to suggest that big city teachers’ unions need to change their focus from protecting their turf to improving educational outcomes. Maybe parents and students need to change what they’re doing as well. If you’re going to blame everything on racism and, in particular, “systemic racism” you need to include an explanation of why the economic fortunes of black Americans improved as much as they did from 2017-2019.

I’ve already given my explanation: I think that restricting immigration of entry level workers helps black Americans.