Monthly Archives: August 2019

As North Carolina’s GOP continues its tradition of shenanigans, until just a couple of days ago, the North Carolina GOP had a web site up called Vote.GOP. EQV Analytics took a look at the site and came to a few conclusions:

The exact same service – without any of Vote.GOP’s privacy concerns – is already available at the North Carolina State Board of Elections website itself, so Vote.GOP actually delivers no value to the voter, while proving valuable indeed to the GOP by collecting the voter’s detailed personal identifying information.

They use their brand name as a way to collect private information from trusting voters.

But our analysis of Vote.GOP finds it worse than merely useless. It can, in fact, actually cause innocent voters to be purged from the North Carolina poll book, disenfranchising them.

See their analysis for the how of it, but it’s certainly a good fit with GOP voter suppression tactics nation-wide. But …

But why would Vote.GOP treat the voting rights of what are likely to be its mostly Republican users with such obvious disregard? Our review of the site’s Javascript code offers a likely answer.

Every visit to Vote.GOP peppers the user’s browser with tracking cookies, web beacons, and data-harvesting code, including code attributed to a division of Tremor International, an Israeli advertising technology company whose RhythmOne subsidiary touts its ability to harvest web users’ “demographics, psychographics, shares (including dark social media), interests, purchase behaviors, and browsing habits.” Linking up that sort of profiling with the highly personal identifying information that Vote.GOP users give away is the holy grail of campaign advertising. It enables precision micro-targeting of just the right message to exactly the voter most likely to be persuaded by it, just as Cambridge Analytica did for the Trump campaign in 2016.

Knowing that, it’s easier to understand why Vote.GOP’s developers paid only cursory attention to building a functional voter assistance service: because it’s really all about capturing vulnerable voters’ personal data.

I notice that EQV Analytics discusses how RhythmOne is trying to emulate the notorious Cambridge Analytica scandal, and yet may be skipping over a far more serious concern^[1]. Because the user is now identifiable, specific activities can be connected to that user. And if those activities are in the least questionable – a dark social media site, a visit to a porn site, or any other site which is questionable in the reader’s context, and now there’s leverage. It’s illicit, morally dubious, and fits right in with the North Carolina GOP’s game plan.

It may seem unlikely that extortion could be used on such a scale for either monetary or electoral gain, but don’t be so sure. Computers are great for automating these sorts of things cheaply, so who says this sort of data collection couldn’t be turned into a stream of blackmail dollars? Some relatively simple work on the end-result collection end to isolate any damage done by victims who call in the police, and even a rupture of the scheme might be contained without rupturing the balance of the scheme.

A morality-free couple of operatives could set this up, using some technical help which is already available.

¹ And I do not take the Precision Messaging facet lightly, either. Precision messaging should be renamed to Precision, Personal, & Private Message (PPPM), because that enumerates the important facets of the operationality of this technique. What does this mean? Precision means the message can be personalized to the profile of the intended reader; Personal means the reader is identifiable; and Private, the most important of all, means the message can be anything at all, unlike a public message which is subject to immediate analysis and comparison to previous messages. No connection to honesty or consistency is required. You may receive a PPPM that says the Candidate is for A, while your neighbor, who hates A, receives a PPPM that says the Candidate is against A. Now, obviously, if you talk to your neighbor, you may detect that inconsistency. Or you may not.

And that’s how you steal votes.

I personally believe PPPM should be made illegal.

Continuing the theme of elderly farm equipment:

Perhaps ‘elderly’ is a trifle hyperbolic, but old is so mundane. Is there a better term?

A bull and his rider. Will it soon be a bull and his runner?

A movie from another era, Becket (1964) moves along at is own, leisurely pace, which nevertheless breeds tension and anticipation. Why? While battles are ignored and avoided, an early signal of the nature of the story, the political and moral evolution of one man is closely examined.

Thomas Becket is advisor and close friend to the undisciplined and volcanic King Henry II of England (reigned 1154 – 1189) when he persuades several French towns to submit to English domination, much to the dismay of others of Henry’s cohort who dream of pillage and rapine. For this, he is awarded the position of Chancellor of England. But in a world of Normans, Becket is (ahistorically) a Saxon, a member of a defeated ethnic group, and as an advisor to the leader of those who defeated the Normans, a collaborator and traitor. This gnaws at him, and all the worse when a woman under his protection is taken from him by Henry; her choice of suicide, rather than lay with Henry, merely sharpens the point that digs at Becket’s conscience. Where should his loyalties lie, with the king of the group which defeated his own, or with his sullen fellows, now victimized by the conquerors? Or is there a third way?

The Church in England is an important political player in this era, causing King Henry political heartburn, and when the current leader, who occupies the position of Archbishop of Canterbury, dies, Henry arranges via the Pope in Rome for his close friend Becket, who, as it happens, is an arch-deacon, to be consecrated a priest one day, and Archbishop of Canterbury the next, despite protests from local bishops. This is a political move designed to protect Henry’s metaphorical flank, and it is unwelcomed and discouraged by Becket. He recognizes, if dimly and incompletely, that with positions of power come responsibilities, weighty responsibilities, that may change the nature of his relationship with the King. The King is the illuminating contrast, a grasping man whose main constraint may be only Becket’s good sense; it’s certainly neither the King’s mother nor the King’s wife, who Henry both despises, nor his toadying loyalists. Henry is the absolute monarch, hemmed in only by other absolute monarchs and painful realities on the ground.

Becket, now Archbishop, is met with the immediate conflict: a priest, accused of debauching a woman in his parish, is arrested by the temporal authorities. Becket is faced with the question of whether he should permit the temporal authorities to punish the man, or if this is a matter for the ecclesiastical courts, as the senior local Bishop demands. Before Becket can act, more word arrives: The priest attempts to escape, but is apprehended and, in the presence of a Lord Gilbert, put to death.

In a time in which the Church saw itself as a peer or even a master of absolute monarchs, this is a match to the conflagration in Becket’s mind. It’s a fire that burns away the thicket of desires of the temporal world, bringing into focus the role and position of the Church in society, of which he is now a high leader, and his pointed responsibility as such a person.

Becket’s demand that Gilbert surrender himself for judgment and punishment are rejected by Henry, both for practical and theoretical reasons. Henry, lacking Becket’s good counsel, concocts a scheme to remove Becket from the position that Henry put him in, accusing him of embezzlement of funds while Chancellor. Found guilty, Becket foils an attempt to inflict immediate and potentially fatal punishment through the use of holy threats and sheer personality, and then manages to escape, with the help of a confederate, to sanctuary with the King of France.

For the next several years, Becket lives in various sanctuaries, and eventually the Pope arranges a meeting in which both Becket and Henry agree to concessions. Becket can now return to his position in England, but Henry’s rage builds until, one drunken night, his incoherent utterances are interpreted by his toadies to be an order to murder Becket, and off they troop to do so.

If you’re looking for a period piece with lots of action, sword waving and that sort of thing, this is not the movie for you. With the exception of the final murder scene, there is no action in the sense of today’s era. This is not about actions, but about transformations: from temporal concerns to spiritual concerns, of loyalties from Kings to God, even of the transfer of loyalties from ethnic group transcending to the “other” and the “outsider”, or how to live together without slitting each others’ throats.

And this is primarily an internal transformation, the willingness to change and accept different thought patterns than were previously in use. This movie is about portraying those changes, the costs they exact of those who attempt them, the advantages they can bring, and the mental anguish that can accompany these gymnastics.

And, sometimes, the temporal costs of same.

This movie, technically well done and with a flock of Oscar nominations, repays careful attention with insight into the moral construction of two important, historical men.

Recommended.

Cisheteropatriarchy:

A socio-political system in which cisgender heterosexual men have authority over everyone else. Also, the way we describe society as fundamentally based on heterosexism, cissexism, sexism, and male dominance. Here, all actors are presumed to be heterosexual, cisgender, and operate in alignment with strict gender binary roles. Patriarchy is reliant upon ideologies of domination and the exploitation of all things related to the feminine, queerness, and transness. [LGBTQA+ Glossary, Michigan State University]

Noted in the second party of Andrew Sullivan’s weekly tri-partite diary entry for this week, New York Mag:

Now comes a proposed K-12 curriculum in California that would enforce these new orthodoxies on the high-school population. It would teach kids in an ethnic studies course how to “critique [sic] empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism and other forms of power and oppression.” The aim is to “connect ourselves to past and contemporary resistance movements that struggle for social justice.” Children will learn to spell women as “womxn,” and be versed in what critical race theorists call “misgynoir.”

We trotted over to the Minnesota State Fair yesterday, and I took pictures of some old farm machinery.

This, I think, is a thresher.

And here is a tractor, I believe.

And another pair.

Beautiful in big, ugly ways.

It strikes me that the recent contretemps between President Trump and his hand-picked Fed Board Chairman, Jerome Powell, is illustrative of the competing priorities of Trump and the Fed Board. Here is Chairman Powell announcing an interest rate cut of .25% (25 basis points), to the 2 – 2.25% range:

In the video, he states this is intended to support an economy that he views as still in good shape, continue to support the hot job market, and in general attempt to benefit the American people.

And President Trump’s response?

Germany sells 30 year bonds offering negative yields. Germany competes with the USA. Our Federal Reserve does not allow us to do what we must do. They put us at a disadvantage against our competition. Strong Dollar, No Inflation! They move like quicksand. Fight or go home!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2019

And

….My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019

President Trump wants a big drop of 100 basis points or more, despite the fact that would preclude the Fed from maneuvering if the bottom drops out of the economy, because the fact is that the interest rates the Fed are using, as it is, are preternaturally low.

President Trump knows he’s facing political disaster if the economy falls apart, but that’s his catastrophe, not the Fed’s. The Fed’s catastrophe is when the economy goes belly-up, but they have the long-term responsibility, unlike Trump. And Trump’s bad-faith promises are coming back to bite him, because he claimed the economy was a disaster when it wasn’t during his campaigning days, and that only he could rescue the economy. Now he’s President, and he claims to be the only one who can keep it going.

All self-serving, craven lies, but the problem with them is if the economy goes into recession, he’s the guy responsible, even though Presidents have limited control over the economy. They’re really more a function of Congress, and that becomes a complex metric of measurement involving not only growth, but protection of natural resources, national defense, and other factors.

Trump’s getting desperate as his rash promises of easy to win trade wars have come home to nest and crapped all over his tie. If the Fed were to so-rashly drop interest rates by 100 basis points, no doubt it would juice the economy, just like eating a tablespoon of sugar will juice my good reader, but a little later you end up cranky on the couch – if not fast asleep as the cats pisses on you.

But that’s all Trump needs, that little sugar rush. His catastrophe is a bad economy during election season. If he can get over that hump, he thinks he’s home free.

The Fed’s is the long-term depression which leaves us at 20% unemployment – or worse. They approach this interest rate setting business with sober care, especially given the novelty of a trade war.

So we have two similar but different catastrophes to be avoided by the two actors in our drama. A drama that’s all about ego, power-seeking, and the holy tenets of the far-right wing.

Hang on, folks. This ride could get very bumpy.

A few days ago we had our very own monsoon in Minnesota: 1+ inches of rain in about half an hour at our home here in Falcon Heights, more others. I decided to take some pictures, lit by grow-lights. Here’s the best.

Archaeology Magazine has an article on the tomb of the Griffin Warrior, which is dated to the period in which the Mycenean and Minoan civilizations were intermixing. It includes several fascinating images, including this one:

(griffinwarrior.org, Jeff Vanderpool/Courtesy of the Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati)The Pylos Combat Agate, found in the Griffin Warrior’s grave, is an extraordinarily fine seal stone measuring only 1.4 inches wide. It depicts the final moments of a battle among three warriors.

And, yes, GriffinWarrior.org does exist and is about the tomb. An amazing image, above. It fills me with wonder.

There’s a tension in democracy between the citizens and their decision-making power in terms of the greater good, and those they elect to Congress who are directly responsible for the greater good of the nation. There’s a lot of room for discussion and honorable dissension in that tension.

Still, I jumped when I read this this quote from the CEO of Palantir Technologies, Alex Karp. Palantir supplies software used by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) for managing the process of apprehension of undocumented persons in the United States. As noted here, a number of computer technology companies have run into problems when supplying competing software, as employees are uncomfortable with and may even refuse to work on such products.

But Palantir?

In an interview with Bloomberg News this week, Karp said the government should be responsible for answering difficult questions about how technologies may be used to surveil citizens.

“I do not believe that these questions should be decided in Silicon Valley by a number of engineers at large platform companies,” Karp said in the interview.

It’s interesting how one individual – or perhaps a small team of C-suiters – can make that decision, but a much larger number of engineers should not.

Think about that for a moment.

Of course, there are various caveats, such as foreign engineers not having a right to make that decision, and the engineers in question could simply leave their jobs for more morally agreeable jobs. In the latter case, though, I’d dryly observe that a corporation should really be a cooperative venture, and if large numbers of your employees are concerned that your business strategy has run over your moral standards, perhaps you should think about it.

But it really comes down to engineers who are members of a democracy being told to shut up and not have an opinion on a moral issue of the day. It’s one thing to have an opinion and express it forcefully, but to tell others that they should just sit down and work: I think that’s a problem.

This report out of Dallas has the fascination of a train wreck:

From WaPo:

America’s federal deficit will expand by about $800 billion more than previously expected over 10 years, primarily because of two legislative packages approved this year, pushing the nation further into levels of debt unseen since the end of World War II, the Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

The CBO also said that the impact of higher trade barriers, primarily President Trump’s trade war, could hurt economic growth amid widespread fears of a recession.

The United States was already expected to hit about $1 trillion in annual deficits next year, an unusually high number, particularly given that deficits normally contract during sustained periods of economic growth.

They just spat in the GOP’s holy water. I wonder if Trump will urge the GOP to get rid of the CBO as just another “deep state” entity.

Last night we were watching the news and saw a piece which caused a groan from both of us – the report of a study claiming fluoridation of water reduces the IQ of children born to mothers who have ingested that water as part of their diet. Kevin Drum saw it as well and doesn’t think much of it:

A 1 milligram increase in maternal urinary fluoride levels was associated with a decrease of 4.49 IQ points in boys and an increase of 2.40 IQ points in girls. This seems implausibly large, doesn’t it? But I can think of at least one crude way to check it. In 1950 virtually no water in the US was fluoridated. Today, fluoridated water reaches more than 70 percent of the population. At a minimum, this suggests that over the last 70 years the IQ levels of boys and girls (a) should have gone down, and (b) should have diverged by about 7 points. Has this happened?

In a word, no. Overall IQ scores in the United States have increased since 1950 and that steady upward trend has continued at least through 2014.

I don’t know where this study was published, and that can matter a lot. If you run into a anti-fluoridation proponent, this might give you a bit of ammunition.

I see the reins we keep on the banks are being released in order to permit them to pursue greater and greater profits, as noted by Politico:

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. board voted 3-1 Tuesday to give big banks more leeway to make risky short-term bets in financial markets by loosening a landmark but highly contentious regulation known as the Volcker rule.

The FDIC and four other independent agencies have dropped their proposal to tie the rule to a strict accounting standard — a move that banks argued would have made it more burdensome by subjecting additional trades to heightened supervision. Instead, regulators will give banks the benefit of the doubt on a much wider range of trades, according to the text of the final rule.

And how do I feel about this? HAH! Last time we saw the banks making risky bets, we ended up in the Great Recession. Democrats are not happy:

The rewrite “will not only put the U.S. economy at risk of another devastating financial crisis, but it could potentially leave taxpayers at risk of having to once again foot the bill for unnecessary and burdensome bank bailouts,” House Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said in an email.

So I’m not alone. Fortunately, this is not the final say:

Comptroller of the Currency Joseph Otting on Tuesday signed the revised rule. Three other agencies — the Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission — must still approve it.

The Federal Reserve may have, ah, reservations.

So how many more recessions will we have to go through before we get it through our collective heads that regulation is not a dirty word?

Libertarians would claim this is a self-correcting problem, that the survivors of the big crash will learn and not repeat mistakes, but I fear the chase of profits is turning out to be amnesia-causing.

Even Iceland’s approach to the Great Recession – they jailed their bankers – might not be enough.

Professor Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy points me at a curious case in which the plaintiff has moved to seal another of his case’s records, meaning they are not public, for no particularly obvious reason:

In 2017, Bonner lost a case in New Jersey state appellate court, Bonner v. Cumberland Reg’l High Sch. Dist. Justia.com, a site that (among other things) publishes online copies of state and federal court opinions, included that nonprecedential New Jersey decision; Bonner then sued in federal court, asking the federal court to order Justia to remove the opinion. Yesterday federal District Judge Peter G. Sheridan granted Justia’s motion to dismiss (Bonner v. Justia, Inc., 2019 WL 3892858):

Plaintiff seems to believe the New Jersey [appellate] opinion is his personal property…. Plaintiff seeks to prevent the [opinion] from being “reported, copied, distributed, shared, or by any other means used by anyone or any website.” “[T]he courts of this country recognize a general right to inspect and copy public records and documents, including judicial records and documents.” …

Plaintiff is proceeding pro se, and the Court should read Plaintiff’s complaint [here, amended] generously and hold it “to less stringent standards than formal pleadings drafted by lawyers.” … [But t]he amended complaint is substantively meritless, as was the original complaint.

Plaintiff is essentially attempting to seal the Appellate Division’s Opinion, which—like federal court documents—[is] open to the public. There is a heightened public interest in disclosure of materials that are filed within the Courts, which outweighs private interests in confidentiality, as the Courts are funded by the public and in general judicial proceedings are not done in secret….

It’s worth noting that public access to judicial records is one of the keys to monitoring for incompetent or unworthy judges, and so simply acceding to his request was not an option. The importance of that monitoring for the health of society is too great. Naturally, there are exceptions.

But it’s also worth remembering that these rules come from the pre-Web era, an era where one had to either visit the Court or know do a bit of work in order to request the records. In this era of online records, the satisfaction of idle curiosity is, sometimes, a little too easy.

In the end, I have no dispute over the judge’s decision. But it does bring up the subject of just how hard it’s become to drop out of society – and whether or not it’s a legitimate interest of society’s members. Most of me says that, yes, it’s legitimate, but there’s a small part of me that wonders.

Politico notes the latest President Trump maneuver:

To hear President Donald Trump and his allies tell it, the federal investigators who spent the past two years investigating the president are about to go down. …

They’re expecting all of this to come from a spate of Justice Department probes reviewing the full scope of the Trump-Russia investigation, which culminated earlier this year with special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

“This was treason. This was high crimes,” Trump said during a recent Fox News interview with Sean Hannity. “This was everything as bad a definition as you want to come up with. This should never be allowed to happen to our country again.”

These hyperbolic expectations have legal experts, even some who are often sympathetic to the president, skeptical that the final product can equal the Trump-fueled rhetoric.

Keep the base worked up, deepen their paranoia, and don’t let them think. Don’t give them a reason to read the Mueller report. Use the same tactic to attack your enemies as a warning to never attack again.

The resentment of the Trump base, brought on by the rapid and sometimes illicit, in their eyes, changes sought by progressives, not to mention progressives’ attitudes, and deepened by far-right pundits building a political movement, makes them quite vulnerable to taking these charges seriously, even if Trump’s allies express doubt that they’ll amount to anything. Why? Because he’s fighting back, and that’s what the base hungers after most. The fact that he’s clumsy and ineffective is immaterial because they never learn that he’s ineffective; the news doesn’t reach them, or is swallowed up by the next controversy.

All Trump has to do is keep them convinced he’s winning. If a recession hits, then he may have a problem. That’s why he’s trying to cast aspersions on Fed Chair Powell, even though a recession is the result of many factors, most beyond the President’s control.

They say you can pop the seeds just like popcorn.

Long-time readers are aware that I don’t view the end-goal of capitalism to be the accumulation of money, wealth, or even garden gnomes. From investors to CEOs, I have often said that the customers and employees come first, and if you can’t take care of them, wiggling your way to a profit regardless is so much a transgression that you might as well call it as secular sin: it hurts, rather than helps, society.

And now I have some company. A pack of CEOs from companies such as American Airlines, American Express, and others are at least signing a letter suggesting that they believe there’s things more important than their profits out there. Here’s the letter, minus the signatures:

Americans deserve an economy that allows each person to succeed through hard work and creativity and to lead a life of meaning and dignity. We believe the free-market system is the best means of generating good jobs, a strong and sustainable economy, innovation, a healthy environment and economic opportunity for all.

Businesses play a vital role in the economy by creating jobs, fostering innovation and providing essential goods and services. Businesses make and sell consumer products; manufacture equipment and vehicles; support the national defense; grow and produce food; provide health care; generate and deliver energy; and offer financial, communications and other services that underpin economic growth.

While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders. We commit to:

• Delivering value to our customers. We will further the tradition of American companies leading the way in meeting or exceeding customer expectations.
• Investing in our employees. This starts with compensating them fairly and providing important benefits. It also includes supporting them through training and education that help develop new skills for a rapidly changing world. We foster diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect.
• Dealing fairly and ethically with our suppliers. We are dedicated to serving as good partners to the other companies, large and small, that help us meet our missions.
• Supporting the communities in which we work. We respect the people in our communities and protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses.
• Generating long-term value for shareholders, who provide the capital that allows companies to invest, grow and innovate. We are committed to transparency and effective engagement with shareholders.

Each of our stakeholders is essential. We commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities and our country.

Do they mean it? I guess we’ll find out. But it’s encouraging to see what might be considered thought leaders finally getting out the information that maximizing profits cannot be the be-all and end-all of corporate life – or it’ll be the end of corporate life. Some appear to have realized that the bumpy road ahead may be partly due to the past actions of their companies.

Not everyone agrees this is a good idea. WaPo claims, but I could not find, that the Council of Institutional Investors issued a statement:

… an association of pension funds, endowments and foundations, said it “respectfully disagree[s]” with the statement, adding that it “undercuts notions of managerial accountability to shareholders.”

A carefully chosen phrase, don’t you think? As if shareholders and their profits are primary. I’d be careful with that particular entity. They appear to be all about the money – no surprise, of course, given that they’re investors.

I’m glad I never started a company. The tension between profits and trying to render good service to the customer would have driven me nuts.

From WKYT of Lexington, KY:

A parent took a photo of one of Fayette County Public Schools’ “In God We Trust sign,” and it was in the form of a dollar bill.

Brittany Pike shared the photo on social media, which our reporting partners at the Lexington Herald-Leader report was taken at Athens Chilesburg Elementary School.

This comes during the first school year where public schools have to display “In God We Trust” prominently in areas including a cafeteria or entryway. The bill was passed in the Kentucky General Assembly during the 2019 regular session.

Bill sponsor Brandon Reed, R – Hodgenville, is accusing Fayette County Public Schools of playing “political games.”

“It is extremely disappointing to see Fayette County Public Schools spend time searching for silly loopholes to a law that passed with broad support from both Democrats and Republicans and received over 70 votes in the House of Representatives,” Reed said. “Many districts across the state have chosen the avenue of creative student artwork, which my bill expressly allowed for and would come at little to no cost to our schools.”

An utterly brilliant way to humiliate the wannabe-theocrats who sit in the Kentucky legislature, isn’t it? I’m sure they’re trying to hide behind the lack of pantheon-specificity, but in the end those children of an agnostic / atheistic nature or parentage are still disadvantaged by this sort of empty propaganda.

I see the Lexington Herald-Leader is reporting that the dollar bill vitiates the pressure on those kids, according to Pike herself:

“This school year Kentucky began requiring schools to place “In God We Trust” in the building. I absolutely love living in a school district that wants to follow the law while also ensuring EVERY student feels welcomed back regardless of religious beliefs. Thank you so very much Fayette County Public Schools for simply posting a dollar with ‘In God We Trust.’ My kids don’t feel awkward or excluded for not believing in any God.”

I hope she’s right.

In an increasingly complex and interconnected world, the law is no exception. On Balkinization, Sandy Levinson meditates on the intellectual mettle of SCOTUS:

For better or worse, incidentally, those students who arrive at law school “insufficiently” trained in economics, are in effect forced to pick up skills in basic economic analysis, given the pervasiveness of “law-and-economics” in every aspect of the contemporary legal curriculum, including constitutional law. But this is not at all true, say, of picking up the skills necessary to analyze complex data and statistical argument. (Ans so we get the suspender-snapping prideful illiteracy of Chief Justice Roberts, who dismisses such argument as “gobbledygook” irrelevant to understanding the realities of contemporary gerrymandering, etc.) And, frankly, even those students who took some American history as undergraduates are increasingly likely to know only American social history. As important as that is, one can still lament that fewer and fewer students are really familiar with what today seems a decidedly old-fashioned knowledge of American political history or even American i(or more general) ntellectual history insofar as that almost necessarily focuses on books written by highly literate members of elites who could get their scribblings published.

It is often painful enough to read debates among the justices about the meanings of past precedents. See, e.g., the shouting match between Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Breyer about Brown in Parents Involved (where I believe Breyer was clearly correct, for what that’s worth). It is excruciating, though, to read debates among the justices about controverted aspects of our history, as in the opinions of Scalia and Stevens in Heller. As I wrote at the time, neither opinion would have been admissible as a paper in a half-way rigorous seminar on legal history at a major university. It appears clear that the same is true of Gorsuch’s musings on the facts of Schechter, even though he had read a single book, by Amity Schlaes, from which he drew his description of the case. …

One of Mark Tushnet’s most famous descriptions was “the lawyer as astrophysicist,” referring to the belief among the smart people who become successful lawyers, that they can master any subject, however arcane, in a weekend of intense study. (This is linked, I suspect, to the belief that our favorite political candidates can truly master the arcana of complex public policy simply by being “briefed” in some of the details of the subject. What does one really need to know, for example, in order to posit a belief in “Medicare for All” (via single payer or using private insurance, as in a number of European countries), as opposed to tweaking Obamacare (or, indeed, repealing it and beginning with something brand new?) It is easier to presume that our favorites can indeed master the relevant materials than to come to terms with the fact that they really know very little about the subjects in which they are called upon to make crucial decisions. (And when it’s Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, making the decisions, we might well wish instead to have chimpanzees throwing darts at boards!)

I suppose I shouldn’t be entirely surprised, given my and others’ remarks on discouraging opinions by Alito and Kennedy. The failure of the Court to refer to experts and avoid their own preconceptions and biases, however, will reflect poorly on the Court when later versions of the Court overrules those decisions decisively. Ideological zealots may think they’ve fared well, when in retrospect, they fail the test of time.

Complexities of modern life may exceed the capacity of any single human mind to plumb all the depths, and that’s why we have experts and group research.

My cousin & non-profit management expert Scott Chamberlain continues to express astonishment at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s Board of Trustee’s management style – or lack thereof:

“Some trustees say that prudence requires them to hold onto the $60 million endowment in case it’s needed to bankroll a future replacement orchestra. ‘The endowment trust was created to support the BSO or its accredited successor,’ Chris Bartlett, chairman of the Baltimore Symphony Endowment Trust, wrote in an email. (The emphasis on ‘or’ was Bartlett’s.)”

Wow. So that’s where the money is going. The trustees looking ahead to funding a newer, different orchestra.

Or to clarify, the trustees are choosing to withhold much-needed funds from a respected, venerable, 103-year old orchestra—choosing to actually force financial hardship on an organization they are charged with protecting—and when it folds, they’ll maybe support some sort of new orchestra that arises from the ashes.

This is monstrous.

Again, I don’t dispute that trustees have to take the long view. But they are supposed to take the long view of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra—the entity the endowment was created to support. Not the long view of some hypothetical group that may or may not exist in the future.

There are so many things wrong with this picture. Let’s start with the most basic, obvious questions:

• Would a new orchestra actually arise from the ashes? Isn’t that a hugegamble to take? Back during the Minnesota Orchestra lockout, many folks asked the musicians why they didn’t just create a new orchestra of their own? The answer was made clear again and again—it is supremely hard to create an orchestra from scratch. It requires a significant staff to get it up and running. It needs a place to rehearse and perform. It needs HR expertise to hire musicians. It needs significant capital to pay salaries, healthcare right from the start… or no one will come to work for it. And so forth. Why go through all that time, trouble, and expense when… there’s already an organization that has all these things?

I wonder if management is made up of conservatives matching the new definition of conservatives, and if the musicians are all liberals?

If you have an interest in symphony orchestras or non-profits in general, Scott is an excellent resource.

In support of my prediction that Big Ag will do well as the trade war with China heats up comes from AgMag:

Farm bailout payments designed to offset the impacts of President’s Trump’s trade war have overwhelmingly flowed to the largest and most successful farmers, according to [Environmental Working Group’s (EWG)] analysis of the latest Department of Agriculture data.

EWG today released updated data on payments made through the first two rounds of the Market Facilitation Program, or MFP. Through April, total MFP payments for 2018-19 were $8.4 billion. …

EWG’s analysis of the data found:

• The top one-tenth of recipients received 54 percent of all MFP payments.
• Eighty-two farmers have so far received more than $500,000 in MFP payments.
• One farm, DeLine Farm Partnership, of Charleston, Mo., has so far received $2.8 million in MFP payments.
• The top 1 percent of MFP recipients received, on average, $183,331. The bottom 80 percent received, on average, less than $5,000.
• Thousands of residents of the nation’s largest cities received MFP payments.
• MFP payments continue to leave out minority farmers.

As of 30 July. While these results do not appear to have been properly scaled – for example, a primitive scaling would be on a per-acre basis – I do not doubt that the larger concerns would also be on top of just about any reasonable scaling. The ability of larger concerns to gather up this compensation comes from both political connections and simply having the resources to recognize and collect these government handouts.

I talked a little recently about Turchin’s observations of the farmlands emptying out as the demographic cycle enters the disintegrative phase as the land owners concentrate more and more land in their hands, and I think this is another step along the way for the American farmer.

I haven’t mentioned our tomato crop much this year, but, yes, it’s doing well.

Taller than me, yep.

Psephologists:

Psephology (/sɪˈfɒlədʒi/; from Greek ψῆφος, psephos, ‘pebble’, as the Greeks used pebbles as ballots) is a branch of political science, the “quantitative analysis of elections and balloting”. As such, psephology attempts to scientifically explicate elections. [Wikipedia]

Noted in an email:

Polling disaster: Australian psephologists are facing a barrage of criticism for their failure to predict the Coalition’s  election victory.

I have not commented on President Trump’s reported interest in having the United States purchase Greenland, which is currently a part of Denmark, but I had actually thought it was a rare example of outside of the box thinking by our otherwise third-rate President. However, Professor Stacie Goddard may not agree with me, as she writes on WaPo’s Monkey Cage:

Trump’s musings over Greenland are part of his larger tendency to see territory as a tradable commodity, particularly in dealing with the Middle East. During the 2016 Republican presidential primary debates, candidate Marco Rubio chastised candidate Trump for treating Palestinian aspirations for statehood as a “real estate deal.”Jared Kushner’s plan for Middle East peace relies on territorial exchanges between the Palestinians, Jordan and Egypt. Trump’s March tweet recognizing Israel’s control over the Golan paid little attention to the symbolic claims at stake.

This is a dangerous approach to territorial conflict. As recent events in Kashmir make clear, nations are still prepared to shed blood and treasure to secure national claims. Understanding the symbolic value of territory is key to managing this and any future territorial disputes.

In other words, Trump’s real estate approach to Greenland may be the tip of the melting iceberg.

I’m a little concerned over her statement because context matters, and when it comes to nationalism and territorial matters, context is a big deal. What, for example, if Greenland was part of Belgium, would the Greenlanders consider themselves Walloons or Flemish, and would they feel so deeply linked to a non-homogenuous country? What if, say, Russia had retained the Ukraine after the Soviet Union breakup – would the ties that bind be made of metal or dissolving silk?

I fear there may be a certain amount of unwarranted generalization occurring in Professor Goddard’s thinking in a world where context and specificity overwhelms the abstract rules that people searching for explanations would like to find. Speaking as a software engineer, I love those rules spawned by generalization, too – but I know sometimes generalizations are hideously false.