"Expect campaign rivals to pounce on the contradictions, while the eloquent Vance will try talk his way around it — banking on the fact that Ohio twice went for a populist billionaire."

From "J.D. Vance tells associates he plans to run for Senate in Ohio" (Axios).

Vance made his name as an author [of "Hillbilly Elegy"], but he's made his career as a venture capitalist, backed by many of the coastal billionaires he now plans to rhetorically run against.

FROM THE EMAIL: Mike writes:

Well, I suppose that Vance’s putatitve opponents can point out that Vance is now a venture capitalist. But if Scranton Joe can point back to his relatively impoverished roots, Vance can make an even better claim. Vance really has been there and done that when it comes to living in and coming from poverty and a druggy/criminal culture. What got him out of there and to his “exalted venture capitalist status” was a tour in the military as an enlisted man. He followed that with a rush through undergrad school and then on to an Ivy League Law School where some of his fellow students sneered, “What are you doing here?” You’ll recall that John Kasich, running in Ohio, made much of being the son of a letter carrier for the Post Office. Whoever is likely to run against or oppose Vance won’t have his “authentic” lower class background. And if they want to paint him as a wealthy plutocrat, that sort of attack won’t work. Unlike Joe Biden who probably can’t remember anything, the voters can believe that Vance remembers where he came from.

Scott Adams gets into a conversation with China state-affiliated media.

Slave labor? https://t.co/jE5ZpzdF9y

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) April 8, 2021

I'd love to visit your famous Uyghurs training facilities to see how China gets things done. Can you also give me a tour of the Fentanyl production facilities that killed George Floyd and my stepson? https://t.co/BmZCOuarLO

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) April 8, 2021

FROM THE EMAIL: A reader named Mike writes (and I haven't fact checked the history): 

China lies. The Central Pacific Railroad was built by free labor. The Chinese laborers were highly valued employees, in fact the CP couldn’t get enough of them. They knew how to use blasting powder, they worked without the hullabaloo that the white, Irish workers created. They didn’t drink and carouse. At one time they... quit and started working for another company.

Plus the fact we’d just fought a four-year war to end slavery.

See Stephen Ambrose’s “Nothing Like It in The World.” Great book about building the transcontinental railroad.

MORE FROM THE EMAIL: A reader named Daniel writes:

I think Scott Adams wasted an opportunity -- he caught Chinese attention, but he was more interested in making domestic points to domestic audiences than in calling out the Chinese. Randomly bringing up George Floyd using fentanyl is not about calling out the Chinese. And by the way, we've got our own problems with fentanyl behavior, between Purdue, McKinsey, over-prescribing doctors and over-dispensing pharmacies. I'd call it a big loss by Adams.

Adams seems to take every opportunity to castigate China over Fentanyl. I wouldn't have brought in George Floyd. There's an ongoing trial, and the key question seems to be whether it's possible that Fentanyl and not Derek Chauvin's knee was the cause of the death. Adams is deliberately writing as if we know the answer, and I guess that's the "thinking past the sale" type of persuasion he frequently talks about. I'm sure some of Adams's followers get off on that sort of thing.

There's also this from RigelDog: 

Like you, Adams produces content every day but in the form of a podcast. He's got a pretty big audience. It may interest you to know that he considers Chinese government to be not only the enemy of the free world, but also his, Adams', personal enemy. He openly vows to take them down in any way that he can. Looks like he is making some headway and getting some (dangerous?) attention.

He must love this.

YET MORE EMAIL: Christian writes:

Looking at China and the slavery situation, we can see how so many for so long countenanced what they even the called the evil "institution" of plantation slavery. It's not the same thing, but the dynamics are similar, and the stakes even higher, with the potential benefit to the USA lower than ever. 

The South declared war over the presence of someone they thought was a threat to slavery. If we actually managed to put real economic hurt on China (or maybe just threatened enough to push them over the edge), who's to say war with millions of Chinese and hundreds of thousands of US/allies lives won't be the cost? 

And unless we impossibly managed a modern day Sherman's March from the sea across inland China to pacify the country, we wouldn't end up making anyone more free. To say nothing of the devastating generational consequences of war across economy, government growth, families, etc. The toll is much higher than the casualty count, which would be unimaginable. 

So we do the calculations - are the wealth and prosperity gains from doing business with a bad nation, while also preventing conflict, worth permitting a terrible "institution" to continue. It's not just a question of "money". We don't develop the next MRI machine without high profit margins and high sales volumes that come from overseas manufacturing a wide range of goods across the whole economy. 

We may say one thing to assuage our conscience. But our actions demonstrate with clarity how we truly feel.

What's missing from this NYT article about Henry Louis Gates?

The article starts out with genuinely sympathetic stories about another black man who was arrested twice, then ties it to the Gates story. "[B]lacks and others said that what happened to Professor Gates was a common, if unacknowledged, reality for many people of color." Now, that quote bothers me, because it assumes that "what happened to Professor Gates" is the same as the "common, if unacknowledged, reality for many people of color." But that's not my question about this article.

I have a question about this:

The police and Professor Gates offered differing accounts of what happened after officers arrived. The police said Professor Gates initially refused to show identification and repeatedly shouted at officers. Professor Gates said that he had shown photo identification to Sergeant Crowley but that the sergeant had not appeared to believe that he lived there.

There's a crucial, missing fact that the journalists, Susan Saulny and Robbie Brown, don't seem to have any interest in. What I want to know — and I haven't seen it mentioned in other articles — is whether Gates's photo ID had the address of the house on it. Was it his University ID? My UW ID doesn't have my home address on it. I have read elsewhere, not in this article, that Gates rented the house. Perhaps he had a driver's license with a different address of his on it.

If the ID did not show the address of the house that had been broken into, then Crowley's continuing investigation into whether Gates really lived there was perfectly reasonable. (Or do you — did Gates? — think that affiliation with Harvard University should end the matter?) Moreover, Gates's belligerence and presentation of himself as a person too important to be questioned should have heightened Crowley's suspicion that Gates didn't live there. While a person who really lived in the house might get outraged, many — I think most — would respect the need to make sure that there was no crime in progress and quickly find something in the house — such as an addressed envelope — that connected the name to the address.

A person who didn't belong in the house would not have that option and would be forced to pursue a different strategy, and protesting the investigation might be that strategy. The police officer is obviously not going to accept shouted assertions that this is my house and questioning of his authority. He shouldn't!

ADDED: In this radio interview, Crowley — at around 6:30 — says that he was shown only a Harvard ID, which had no no address and that an ID with an address "would have been helpful." Thanks to commenter Mike for pointing me there. Bearbee, the commenter, points me to Gates's interview with his daughter, in which Gates says:

... I got out my Harvard ID and my Massachusetts driver’s license which includes my address and I handed them to him.

So there is a real factual dispute here. (Also: My lawyer's eye catches the phrase "my address" and makes me want to ask the follow up: "By 'my address,' do you mean the address of the house Crowley was questioning you about?")

By the way, in the linked interview, Gates goes on to say:

So he’s looking at my ID, he asked me another question, which I refused to answer. And I said I want your name and your badge number because I want to file a complaint because of the way he had treated me at the front door. He didn’t say, ‘Excuse me, sir, is there a disturbance here, is this your house?’—he demanded that I step out on the porch, and I don’t think he would have done that if I was a white.

Crowley tells us the question was: "Is there anybody in the home with you?" (at 4:40 in the radio interview). It was asked, Crowley says, because of his concern that the man he was talking to was not one of the persons seen breaking into the house. Now, it seems that Gates knew that the front door had been tampered with before he arrived home, so why wasn't Gates worried about whether there was someone somewhere in the house? Shouldn't Gates have taken the opportunity to tell the police that when he arrived home, he discovered evidence of a break-in? Why didn't he seek Crowley's help with that?

Crowley says that Gates's "tone" was "peculiar." And I'm wondering why the question "Is there anybody in the home with you?" would have upset him so much. It could have been just that it was an invasion of his privacy, but think about this along with the fact that Gates didn't seem to want to report the damage to his door that made him need to force it open when he got home. Did Gates already somehow know who had broken the door while he was away, so that he wanted to protect that person? Was that person in the house, such that the question "Is there anybody in the home with you?" felt threatening to Gates?