Monthly Archives: March 2018

Ever wonder what Great Britain can really do when they suspect a foreign power of aggression on their own soil, such as the recent poisoning incident? Lawfare‘s Ashley Deeks gets the details:

The press has reported on (non-forcible) reactions that the U.K. may be considering. This reporting tends to focus on imposing economic sanctions; expelling Russian spies or diplomats from the U.K.; restricting visas to Russian businesspeople; or revoking the broadcast license for RT, Russia’s national media network. These measures would be “retorsions,” or unfriendly acts that do not violate international law.

The U.K. still has another category of options: countermeasures. The Draft Articles on State Responsibility, adopted by the International Law Commission and generally accepted as an accurate restatement of customary international law, define countermeasures as acts by the injured state that would otherwise be international law violations but that are not wrongful because they are responses to an initial violation of international law by the wrongdoing state. Countermeasures should be proportional to the original violation, and their goal must be to induce the wrongdoing state to comply with its international obligations and cease the violative behavior. The victim state must cease its countermeasures once the violation ceases. Only states that are injured may impose countermeasures: This means that a victim state’s allies may not impose “collective countermeasures” on the wrongdoing state if only the victim state was actually injured. And, according to the Draft Articles, before imposing countermeasures the injured state must call on the wrongdoing state to fulfill its obligations, notify the wrongdoing state that it intends to take countermeasures, and offer to negotiate with that state.

Not the sorts of things that’ll make Putin’s hair stand on end, but then he has little enough as it is.

I wonder if the fangs were of the glow in the dark variety I had as a kid.

High Anxiety (1977) is a comic farce and a parody of, among other things, Alfred Hitchcock movies. Unfortunately, it has not aged as well as the Hitchcock movies, despite a number of individually funny bits.

I think it has to do with the lack of a serious undertone to the movie. Subjects include psychotherapy (at “The Institute for the Very, Very Nervous”), Hitchcock’s The Birds, ineffectual personal servants, dominatrices and submissives, and others, but none are really subjects of vital interest. Charlie Chaplin also used comic farce, but his subjects included the submission of workers to their corporate masters, the blindness of love, etc., subjects that are either timeless, or seem nearly so.

All that said, there are parts which still made me laugh out loud. If you happen to stumble into this flick, you will find it entertaining. But I fear it doesn’t work as well as it used to.

The zero-risk society is a bit of an aphorism these days, emblematic of the fear of any risk for children – which has left many to wonder, how are they supposed to learn about dealing with risk?

Well, in Britain it looks like they’re starting to figure that out, as Lenore Skenazy at Let Grow reports. Her conclusion?

Something Steve Benen said reminded me that there may be a fix for the national conundrum – who to vote for in a winner-take-all contest. First, the conundrum:

… we’re occasionally reminded that while the Republican Party rejects everything the Green Party stands for, the GOP nevertheless sees the Green Party as incredibly useful in moving the country to the right. Indeed, we know just as a matter of arithmetic that if Green Party voters had backed the Democratic ticket in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2016, Donald Trump would not be president today.

This is an oft-noted wail of voters – they would prefer a 3^rd party candidate, but aren’t they wasting their vote by voting for that candidate?

Minneapolis, just a few miles to my west, uses instant-runoff voting. In this method, voters may list their preferred candidates in preferred order. During counting, losing candidates have their votes redistributed to surviving candidates based on the order specified by the voters. In the end, these ballots may indicate the most accurate measurement of preferences for 3rd party candidates, while permitting such voters to also specify someone else who is “acceptable”. How about we implement this for the Presidency? Heck, we could probably do this on a state-by-state basis. (Maybe the only way, legally speaking.)

I’m sure this has been suggested many times before, but it’s worth reiterating.

Incidentally, Steve’s report is about someone on the GOP payroll in Montana who registered for the Green Party primary for the Senate seat that’s in contention, perhaps hoping to split the vote that would otherwise go to the Democratic candidate through hard line leftist appeals if he were to win the primary. It seems to me that electoral shenanigans such as this, legal or illegal, might be abandoned if we had instant-runoff, as they would become ineffective.

Akiva Eldar describes Netanyahu’s campaign tactics and their consequent fallout on AL Monitor:

In Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s school of morality and politics, accepting a bribe is no reason to unseat an elected premier, nor is a hostile takeover of the country’s media. He insists that a prime minister should not be replaced because of criminal indictments or guilty verdicts. According to Netanyahu, a prime minister can only be “replaced at the ballot box,” although what he means is that a prime minister can only be “replaced by Jews at the ballot box.”

March 17 marks two years since his horrible election-day video warning — “Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls” — and calling on Jews to turn out en masse. It’s hard to know how many votes he picked up for the Likud with this alarmist message, but the damage he caused to relations between Jews and Arabs is discernible.

The annual index compiled for more than 40 years by professor Sammy Smooha of Haifa University points to a decline in the Jewish majority’s perceived legitimacy of the country’s 20% Arab minority. The proportion of Jews accepting the Arabs’ status as a minority with full civil rights in a Jewish and democratic state fell from 75% to 68%. Three out of 10 Jews think the Arabs should leave the country and receive appropriate compensation. The percentage of Jews who refuse to have Arabs as neighbors grew from 41% to 48%.

At the same time, the Arabs’ perception of the state’s legitimacy has also changed. Whereas 66% of Arabs recognized Israel’s right to exist in the 2015 survey, the rate declined to 59% in the 2017 survey. Only a minority, 47%, of Israeli Arabs are reconciled to Israel as a state with a Jewish majority compared to a majority of 60% two years earlier. In addition, the study discerned a significant increase in the threat perception of Israeli Arabs, with 73% fearing a severe undermining of their basic rights compared with 68% in the previous poll.

There is a certain resemblance to GOP tactics for riling up their base, isn’t there? Get the emotions going, call the other side “God haters”, get the fight or flight mechanism firing – and then harvest the votes.

It’s really quite despicable, isn’t it? And it has consequences, as the cohesiveness of the Israeli state falls apart, which in turn exacerbates the tensions in the Middle East.

There’s been quite the hubbub since the House Intel Committee abruptly terminated its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and concluded there wasn’t any interference.

Excuse me, the GOP members of the House Intel Committee, being in the majority, did so “…over the fierce objection of Democrats.”

Wait, wait, I’ve still got it wrong. SOME of the GOP members of the House Intel Committee blah-blah-blah.

Who’s the goat here? Retiring, and that’s probably the key word here, Representative Trey Gowdy (R-SC). From Politico:

Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina said that the evidence gathered by the committee clearly showed Russia’s disdain for Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton, and was “motivated in whole or in part by a desire to harm her candidacy or undermine her Presidency had she prevailed.”

Rep. Gowdy is a member of the Tea Party, so we know he’s not a moderate. He led one of the fruitless investigations of the Benghazi tragedy.

But apparently he’s remembering some conservative positions, such as country comes before party.

I wonder how long it’ll take before someone tries to RINO him out of the party. Although, given that he’s retiring, it might not be worth the time, except as an object lesson.

Let the purification rituals begin. Someday, there’ll be three members of the GOP left – and two will be on probation.

After Saccone’s small-minded vitriol in the closing of the PA-18 special election, compare to his opponent, Conor Lamb (D), and his commentary the morning after the election:

“Look, I was at a lot of polling places yesterday with cars parked outside of them that had president Trump’s bumper sticker on them. So he’s a popular person here,” Lamb told CNN’s “New Day” on Wednesday. “But I think that what happens when you campaign in real life as much as possible is that those divisions go away. Everyone gave me a fair shake and I know that there are people that voted for the president who also voted for me. And, you know, I thank them for hearing me out.” [Politico]

I think Mr. Lamb has a bright political future ahead of him, if that’s what he wants. He speaks the language of inclusiveness, and, assuming he has follow-through, that will take him a ways.

Antediluvian:

Of or belonging to the time before the biblical Flood.
‘gigantic bones of antediluvian animals’

humorous Ridiculously old-fashioned.
‘they maintain antediluvian sex-role stereotypes’ [Oxford English Dictionaries]

Noted in this episode of 9 Chickweed Lane.

When clearing the gutters of ice, this is what you get …

That one piece sort of looks like amber with an embedded insect.

Nyah.

An inspiration as both a scientist and as a disabled man, he serves – present tense, yes – as a model of what you can do. Not everyone can have the support system he had, and he reportedly had his pecadilloes, but still a light in the firmament has gone out tonight.

The folks at the Center for Economic and Policy Research are searching for signs of the coming economic boom:

The National Federation of Independent Businesses released its February survey of its members this morning. The survey showed (page 29) that 29 percent of businesses expect to make a capital expenditure in the next 3 to 6 months, the same percentage as in January. This is somewhat higher than the 26 percent reported for February of 2017, but below the 32 percent reported for August of last year. It’s also the same as the 29 percent reading reported back in August of 2014 when a Kenyan socialist was in the White House.

In other words, there is no evidence here of any uptick in investment whatsoever and certainly not of the explosive increase promised by the Trump administration. Maybe if Trump did some more tweeting on the issue it would help.

To my totally untrained mind, it might be a trifle too soon for the great economic expansion to begin, but it might be time to start getting antsy about it, if you were in any way dependent on it. But keep an eye out for reports on the monthly balance of tax collection vs outlays at the Federal level, such as this one from Reuters:

The U.S. government had a $215 billion budget shortfall in February as revenues into the government’s coffers fell and outlays increased, the Treasury Department said on Monday.

That compared with a budget deficit of $192 billion in the same month last year, according to Treasury’s monthly budget statement.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the Treasury recording a $216 billion deficit last month.

If those continue to grow, then we’ll know that the Kansas “miracle” is now afflicting all of us. Only, the Federal government is allowed to run deficits, unlike the states, and the deficit hawks are muffled. Thus, we’ll need to keep watch ourselves.

With regard to the firing of Secretary Tillerson, Ezra Klein confirms on Vox the firing of the #4 person at State as well, and then lets his jaw go slack:

Let’s count the eye-opening things here:

1. Trump, whose television catchphrase was “You’re fired,” couldn’t bring himself to fire America’s top diplomat in person. This is similar to how he fired FBI Director James Comey, sending his former bodyguard Keith Schiller to deliver the news. The two incidents together confirm frequent press accounts that for all his bravado, Trump actually is loath to fire people himself.
2. Tillerson reportedly only found out about his firing when Trump tweeted about it on Tuesday morning. This statement likely represents shock on the State Department’s part as well.
3. The lead State Department spokesperson is openly insulting the president by leaking details about Tillerson’s dismissal that paint him in a negative light.
4. Tillerson, whose tenure in Foggy Bottom was widely seen among foreign policy experts as one of the worst (if not the worst) in modern history, still believed he was doing a good job at the time of his firing.
5. It’s still unclear why, exactly, the secretary of state was just fired at this particular moment in his spectacularly unimpressive tenure as America’s top diplomat.

In the Trump administration, chaos is something of a norm. But this is shocking even when grading on that curve.

With regard to Ezra’s #5, my previous offhand remark that this is cover for a possible disaster for the Republicans in the PA-18 special election has grown on me. Ezra’s making the classic error of trying to evaluate the event without thinking about the political context. Since Tillerson was out of favor with Trump, it was easy to sacrifice him.

And while Tillerson may have been one of the worst to occupy the post in recent memory, Pompeo may try to best him in that department. Assuming he’s confirmed in the post.

Readers remark on the dismissal of Secretary of State Tillerson:

Typical Trump. He likes to surround himself with a phalanx of Yes Men to advance his position as the “smartest man in the room.” Non-conformity must be avoided at all costs. Another sad day for America.

Trump’s nominee to replace Tillerson is Mike Pompeo, current CIA Director and a former far-right House member. He is considered to be a close ally of President Trump. I wonder if President Trump is feeling like he needs some support from his Cabinet.

Another:

Were basing this story on what we have been told. The relationship didn’t seem right from day one, and it’s not nice to call the boss names .We shall see if it was a good decision in short order. Plus in defense of Tillerson it would be hard for a guy who was big time in the private sector to follow somebody’s agenda. I really think he took the job because you’re not supposed to say no when the President ask’s you to serve.

The reader has a couple of good points. I think it all started with Trump’s preoccupation with appearance, because Rex Tillerson surely has the look of a distinguished diplomat – not my deduction, of course, as many other writers have noted about Trump.

But, as the reader points out, he didn’t have the experience to be Secretary of State, having been a private sector guy all his life.

This is probably illustrative of why Trump has been a failure so far – he doesn’t understand how to pick the people with whom he has to work.

BTW, Tillerson wasn’t the only State employee let go today. Conor Finnegan reports on Twitter:

Vaughn Hillyard relays some information about the PA-18 special election:

If accurate, it continues the narrative that the GOP has become the party of the Christian far-right, which is more than a little morally confusing, given the nature of the leader of the GOP – President Trump.

It does suggest, however, that Saccone may have hurt his chances of winning. This is the rhetoric you use to firm up your base when you are certain they are all of the Christian variety. However, on the flip side are the Independents, who generally remember that this is a secular nation, and may even take offense at the suggestion that those who are not voting Republican are doomed to the Nth circle of hell (I don’t recall just which circle was reserved for Americans who don’t vote Republican). He’s circumscribed his potential voters to those who buy into divisive, hateful rhetoric.

And that’s not a recipe for winning.

From 38 North‘s Adam Meyers is some commentary on North Korea during the run-up to the Trump-Kim meeting. He’s certain that North Korea’s Kim will continue to aggressively defend its interests:

In response to the most recent round of UN sanctions, a spokesman of the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated: “We define this ‘sanctions resolution’ rigged by the U.S. and its followers as a grave infringement upon the sovereignty of our republic and as an act of war violating peace and stability in the Korean Peninsula and the region.“ This initial reaction, now that the ebullience of the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics has passed, should put the world on notice that the Kim regime may see offensive cyber operations as a proportional response to the increasing chokehold of international sanctions. What might such an attack look like?

North Korean operators have been observed over the past several months targeting a variety of organizations that might be seen as viable targets for a retaliation, including financial organizations and defense contractors. North Korean operators would likely use an existing penetration as a jumping off point looking for a high-profile target to inflict damage upon as a show of force. Attacks that occurred during 2016 demonstrated DPRK actors had the capability to penetrate a financial institution and use their processes against them in a currency generation scheme that netted millions of dollars in currency. Based on several other high- profile attacks that followed this watershed event, it is possible that DPRK actors already possess access to organizations that may meet their needs. If a suitable penetration is not present, a new one would be targeted, likely using spear phishing emails or a “watering hole” attack (compromising a legitimate website likely to attract targets of interest who would then be infected with malware). Both techniques have been leveraged by DPRK cyber operators successfully in the past.

The North Koreans will not be angelic during this period prior to the big meeting. Embedded in his commentary is a description of a strategy new to me:

If a suitable penetration is not present, a new one would be targeted, likely using spear phishing emails or a “watering hole” attack (compromising a legitimate website likely to attract targets of interest who would then be infected with malware). Both techniques have been leveraged by DPRK cyber operators successfully in the past.

I’ve fallen way behind on the dark-side of programming, I fear.

I’ve been meditating of late on how human processes or customs don’t really seem to scale. First, I suppose I should define what I mean by scale. As a software engineer, a process is scalable if its functionality and performance is relatively insensitive to the amount of data it’s processing.

But this isn’t quite what I mean here. In today’s context, a human process or custom is scalable if it continues to display positive survival characteristics regardless of the context in which it is utilized. Now, there should be an equivalent to the word “relatively” in the first paragraph, but I’m not sure what that word might be. When one says insensitive to context, that means context can assume any value and the process continues to be valuable to humans as a survival mechanism, and I do understand that there are truly no behaviors which can be completely insensitive to context in the manner defined.

So let me clarify how I am considering context to change, and that is in terms of population density. Thus, in one fell statement, I’m trying to say that human customs that have good survival characteristics at low population densities begin to reverse that attribute at higher population densities.

One of the best examples of this lies in humanity’s custom of dividing into tribes for, paradoxically enough, survival reasons. At low population densities, when faced with competition from other tribes, whether these are based on geography (nationality) or religious reasons, it was a positive survival characteristic to reproduce quickly. Families of ten or more produced excess children which could work the fields, serve in the military, and secure other purposes critical to the group’s survival.

But this survival mechanism, pursued to the N^th degree, actually exacerbates the problem of scarce resources as population rises. Consider the problem known as the tragedy of the commons. Economists and libertarians will characterize the tragedy of the commons as a problem in which a resource does not, and most usually cannot, have a human owner that will manage it and, if possible, renew it, but as an unmanageable and important resource, all comers have a go at it without thought as to whether its harvesting will extend it beyond its capacity to renew. The most common example with which I’m familiar are fisheries.

But the pressure behind the tragedy of the commons is burgeoning population. Without a large and growing population, we would not be harvesting the fisheries with great abandon, or draining marshes for more living space, or opening mines in wilderness areas such as Minnesota’s own BWCA – or finding the existence of our civilization threatened by anthropogenic climate change.

And this is all pushed along by customs from bygone eras. Have children, keep the bloodline going, out-grow that other sect over there, grow grow grow! I don’t even need to give a name to the sect because it’s always true regardless of the sect; those that do not grow disappear. The Quakers tried not reproducing, as I recall, and disappeared in the dust of history.

Yet the logic of the low population era persists – how do you tell someone not to  have ten children? It’s the problem of They got here first and therefore they win, so you’d better not have more than one kid – there’s no justice in the justification. Their group is threatened by the growth of other, potentially savage, groups, and unless they can convert outsiders to their cause like the Quakers did, they have to reproduce. And, absent a reasonable ladder to the stars, we see pressure continuing to build on our resources, on our environment, and on ourselves.

The resolution? I suspect it’ll be just like deer and wolves, with dramatic drops and climbs as the two revolve around a dynamic balance, which is so bloodless in that abstract way of writing, but implies the bloody deaths of fawns and pups, mothers and fathers. The analogs in the human world will be bloodier because we have bigger weapons and behaviors not strictly motivated by simple survival.

In a way, this is yet another blow to the Creationist argument, because God, if it actually does have an existence, has sure given us an awful set of tools for continuing our existence. Their existence and behaviors are far more congruent when assuming we come from an animal evolutionary tree, than when we think we’ve come from some omniscient being who has plans for everyone.

And what are our chances for finding better survival tools? Beats me. Science provides us a way to recognize the problem, but I doubt any controlled & peaceful manner of population reduction will really work, unless the approach that appears to have evolved in Japan, which seems to be a distaste for sex, spreads across the globe.

Seems unlikely.

Your Dark view of the future for today.

The first in this series goes to Pennsylvania GOP chairman Val DiGiorgio for this statement:

“The other reason it’s so tight is, you have to remember, this is a Democrat district, notwithstanding the fact that the president won this by 20 points.” [Politico]

According to Ballotpedia, the last time this district was represented by a Democrat was 2000. In fact, redistricting happened in 2010, so one might argue that this district has never been represented by a Democrat – but I think the boundaries are similar prior and post, so it might be a specious assertion.

In any case, the Democrats didn’t even run a candidate 2014 and 2016, and defeated his last serious oppont 64% – 36%.

Someone’s in a panic. Is it him or his bosses?

My reaction to the news that Secretary of State Tillerson had been fired? A visceral feeling that another honorable man had been booted out of the Administration. Which is somewhat ridiculous, given how the State Department has reportedly been chronically understaffed by Tillerson, and become fairly irrelevant under his leadership.

And now I see this from NBC News:

Hours before being ousted as secretary of state, Rex Tillerson called the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy and his daughter with a military-grade nerve agent in the U.K. “a really egregious act” that appears to have “clearly” come from Russia.

On his way back from a trip to Africa, Tillerson said late Monday that it was not yet known whether the poisoning “came from Russia with the Russian government’s knowledge.”

But Press Secretary Sanders refused to confirm the Russian connection asserted by Prime Minister May of the UK. I get the feeling that Tillerson, another amateur, was at least doing the best he could do under the circumstances.

And it sort of brings a tear to my eye, even though he should never have been in that position.

Reportedly, CIA Director and former House Representative Mike Pompeo will be nominated to take over the Secretary of State position. Will he be a stolid guardian of President Trump?

Decedent:

Noted in “Odor Thought To Be Sewage Leads CA Prison Staff To Inmate’s Body,” Hoa Quách, San Diego Patch:

“Examination was limited by decomposition artifact,” the autopsy said. “The only demonstrable natural disease was his hepatitis cirrhosis due to chronic hepatitis C viral infection. Sudden death has been associated with hepatic cirrhosis; however, the decedent was not clinically in liver failure and was not known to be jaundiced. Although it is certainly possible that the decedent died of natural causes related to his liver disease, focal bronchitis, and/or (redacted) due to homicidal violence cannot be completely excluded.”

A reader remarks on my review of The Incredibles:

Huh. I’m usually really critical about plot holes, but I’ve really enjoyed this movie, multiple times. I don’t see the flaws you spead of. Sure, Mirage has been helping Syndrome, but without knowing her motivations for starting that endeavor, we can’t say for certainty that she shouldn’t draw the line at innocent children. Maybe she has a grudge against the other supers. I also didn’t see any glaring editing flaws. It’s mostly a comic farce, so I’m not expecting depth.

I must have watched this movie more than a dozen times, annoyed that for all the excellence and thought that went into this, in the end it just doesn’t quite come together. Or isn’t quite perfect.

On Mirage I suppose we can agree to disagree. I was also bothered by Mr. Incredible’s lack of emotional distress over the murders of the other supers, though. Perhaps the social dynamics of being supers was such that one could laugh at the deaths of other supers (think of the discussion of capes with Edna), but it just rang a trifle false for me. Probably all they would have had to do to fix that, for me, was to have Mr. Incredible gently pat Gazerbeam’s remains on his way out of the cave. In fact, Gazerbeam’s final action, which is to burn the stolen password into the wall of the cave, indicates a certain social bonding, which Mr. Incredible could have reinforced, for the audience, through a simple sentimental action.

In terms of editing, I noticed a lack of flow during some of the escape from the island. It just seemed herky-jerky.

Comic farce, like most (all?) theatrical drama, has the capactiy for real depth and thought. Just think of Charlie Chaplin’s work.

Hey, think you’re fairly nifty? Maybe you can sell your genome:

EncrypGen, one firm in the vanguard of this movement, is launching its first product this week. Essentially, this is an online database where an individual can upload their digitised genome. It can then be left there until they want to show it to their doctor, for example. Or, if they opt in to a service launching later this year, their data can be sold to researchers too.

With this service, scientists scouring the database will see anonymous profiles, along with details such as hair colour or medical conditions. If they find a profile of interest, they can ask for access. Users will then be able to negotiate a price for handing over part or all of this genomic data. As drugs are twice as likely to make it to market when they are based on human genetics, pharmaceutical firms are likely to be willing to pay the most. [NewScientist, 24 February 2018, paywall]

And what coin will they be paying you in? Did you guess …. this?

Payment to the data’s owner will be in the form of EncrypGen’s freshly minted cryptocurrency, DNA coin, which can then be traded or sold. Initially, there will be pricing guidelines, but David Koepsell, the firm’s co-founder, believes market forces will eventually dictate genomic value.

Just how many fads can they ride at once?

Long time readers know that I don’t have a lot of patience with amateurs working on critical problems, but now NewScientist bids to set me on the straight path. In “Work the crowd: How ordinary people can predict the future,” (NewScientist, 24 February 2018, paywall) Aaron Frood reports on experiments involving teams of amateurs working problems:

The answer surprised even the US intelligence officials behind the experiment. It turns out crowds really can make accurate predictions – so accurate, in fact, that they promise to permanently change how states analyse intelligence.

We have known some of the benefits of collective wisdom since Aristotle, but a slightly more recent example features in the 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds by journalist James Surowiecki. The opening pages tell the story of the day Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton went to a country fair. Galton, a formidable scientist himself, asked people to guess the weight of an enormous ox. Most got it absurdly wrong, but the median guess of the 800-strong crowd was just 1 pound off the true weight of the ox, which for the record was 1198 pounds, or 543 kilograms.

The wisdom of crowds is an integral part of life today. We try suspected criminals by jury. We use crowdfunding websites to back new products. We follow the throng to popular restaurants. Now it even seems it may be possible to predict the future using the masses.

The underplayed element? It took me a couple of days to bring this to the fore in my brain. From a sidebar:

Are you a superforecaster?

Crowds of ordinary people can be good at predicting the future. But the most accurate predictions come when you identify the best 2 or 3 per cent of a crowd and team them up. Nearly all these superforecasters have a university degree, a wide range of interests and a curious mind. They also tend to have a few other key characteristics. [Intelligence, Shrewdness, Motivation and commitment, Teamwork are the headers.]

So we’re not talking about average folks making extraordinary forecasts, we’re talking about extraordinary folks working together to come up with extraordinary forecasts. This isn’t crowd-sourcing, despite the advertising, but the employment of top line people who just don’t happen to hold advanced expertise in the subject area. In fact, what did happen to the experts in the competitions?

… in 2005, a book called Expert Political Judgement brought crowd predictions to the fore again. The author Philip Tetlock, a psychologist now at the University of Pennsylvania, had studied expert predictions for two decades. In one experiment, he surveyed about 300 professional political and economic forecasters, asking them a series of questions about the future and getting them to pick answers from a range of options. He also asked them to assign a probability to their stance. He amassed tens of thousands of predictions and compared them with what really happened. The experts performed terribly: worse than if they had assigned equal odds to each outcome every time.

Along with the failure of the experts, notice one other thing: the subject areas. We’re not talking a wide range of subjects, but two of the vaguest and hardest, politics and economics. It’s unfortunate that the nature of the test areas wasn’t played up in the article, as it might have revealed more about the problems of experts in these areas, as well as how the teams of top-flight amateurs solved their problems. A differential comparison of the experts against the teams might have yielded (and perhaps it did) key insights into what goes wrong for the experts, and how they might compensate in the future.

So, in the end, I feel justified in sticking with my judgment that we need experts in government, not a pack of amateurs. Not only this, but the debacle occurring in Congress is enough to leave me content.

How bad has it been negotiating with the North Koreans? Robert Carlin on 38 North, a veteran of these activities, describes it:

The fact is that when they are serious, the North Koreans are good negotiators, but no better than our own. They practice Diplomacy 101. A productive set of negotiations with them follows a pattern found anywhere in the world: Define the problem in terms that both sides can claim benefit from a solution; divide the problem into parts; move from easiest to hardest to solve; fix details and define terms; review again so that both sides understand what is and what isn’t in the agreement; agree on implementation details and timetable.

No agreement is an agreement unless both sides say it is. That’s tautological. “Seizing control” of the agenda is a bad idea. The North Koreans know we won’t negotiate simply on the basis of “their” agenda, and we should know the same about them. It never hurts to be the first one to put a piece of paper on the table, and since the North Koreans are frequently in reaction mode, that’s often what the US is able to do.

On the other hand, now we have two new faces. Based on Trump’s failures to make deals, it’s a bit nerve-wracking, while Kim is more of an unknown quantity. There may be more continuity on the North Korean side than the American side – which may be a good recipe for being snookered. Carlin’s final word on the matter:

High-level meetings with the North, in my experience, have not been a zero-sum game. The last thing we should want is to force them into that mold.

This will be deadly serious business for both sides – not a situation for a fly-by-night rookie. But that’s probably why North Korean made the offer to talk and to throw quite the toothsome cookie out as bait.

Readers react to Trump’s presence in Moon Township, PA:

Instead of endorsing Saccone, he spent 65 minutes of his 70 minute speech praising himself. What a dumbass we have for a president.

He’s a narcissist. Another:

He was there to rally the troops. People love those rallies, that doesn’t mean you have to agree with him, but it works, he is out and about, not on the golf course.

Those who show up seem to get all het up, sure. I wonder if the attendance is all they’d like it to be, though. And, yes, nice to not see Trump on the golf course. Which reminds me, from Culture Cheatsheet:

Politifact reports that since taking office, Donald Trump has made regular visits to his own golf clubs in Florida and Virginia. CNN reported in January 2018 that in his first year in office, Donald Trump spent 95 days at his signature golf clubs. He golfed in Florida, Virginia, and New Jersey.

NBC’s Golf Channel reported early in 2017 that Barack Obama played 333 rounds as president and averaged 41 rounds per year. CNN noted at the end of 2017 that Donald Trump could be on track to triple Obama’s time on the course. But the network did note that “It is unclear, however, whether Trump golfs each day he visits a course or how many rounds he plays when he does.” CNN adds, “Trump’s golf outings are notable only because he repeatedly mocked Obama for the time he spent on the golf course and said he wouldn’t have time if he were elected president.”