Author Archives: Hue White

The Georgia 6th District was not decided in last night’s special election, as Jon Ossoff came up just short, with 48.1% of the vote, against a collection of GOP-affiliated candidates plus a few Democrats and Independents. Ballotpedia reports that trailing Ossoff, but qualifying for the June runoff election, is Karen Handel, with 19.8% of the vote.

Both qualifying candidates have their work cut out for them. As I’m sure most pundits are commenting, Handel’s 19.8% showing is something of a smoke-screen; the GOP does tend to come together when a final election vote is called, as we saw last November, so she will be counting on all the votes for the other GOP candidates to come to her on June 20th.

But that Trump reference is also a potential anchor around her neck. If Ossoff can tie Handel to Trump, and if Trump and/or the GOP manages to embarrass themselves in a very public manner, it’s possible that Handel will still lose on June 20th.

The bad news for Ossoff? There were four Democrat-affiliated competitors in the race – but none polled better than .3%. Add them all together and that’s less than a percentage point of the total vote. That’s not good enough to get him over the 50% mark he’ll need to become the next Representative for the Georgia 6th. The good news? Again, from Ballotpedia, and surprising to me:

President Donald Trump won in Georgia’s 6th District by a margin of 1.5 percent in 2016. This represents a significant decrease in the relative support for the Republican nominee from the previous four presidential elections. The next closest presidential race in the district since 2000 was when John McCain won the district by 18.9 percent in 2008.

This suggests a high sensitivity to Trump’s miscues. As the 6th district apparently includes much of northern Atlanta, the voters in the 6th may not be in as much economic distress as the average Trump voter. This again suggests that tying Handel to Trump may be an effective strategy for Ossoff.

The chart for the district since 2000 merely demonstrates GOP dominance:

Data Source: Ballotpedia

Sometimes the Democrats can’t even field a candidate.

In Nature‘s Scientific Reports, Martini & Haddock report on the observations of bioluminescence in the ocean:

Credit: NOAA/National Ocean Service

Bioluminescent and likely bioluminescent organisms were dominant in the entire water column (in blue, Fig. 2b), ranging between 48 and 77% of the organisms observed. The non-bioluminescent and unlikely bioluminescent organisms represented a small portion of the observations (in dark grey, Fig. 2b), ranging between 2 and 35%. These numbers do not total 100% due to animals undefined for bioluminescence, accounting for between 2 and 43% of the observations. Raw numbers of observations in each depth bin were normalized using the amount of time spent at each depth. As might be expected, the upper part of the water column has a lower percentage of undefined organisms than the less known deeper waters. However, when omitting the undefined organisms, in the global data set, probably bioluminescent organisms accounted for 76% of all observations (down, Fig. 2b), and the probably non-bioluminescent reached 24%. The variability of these percentages over depth is low, and the variability due to undefined organisms is also relatively constant. Indeed, the percentage varies only a small amount, from a low of 69%, if all undefined animals are assumed to be non-luminous, to 78% if they are all assigned as bioluminescent.

Given that generating light must take up some resources, it provokes thought on the utility of light to the general organism. It would certainly be interesting to partition the pelagic organisms by food source and see if bioluminescence distributions of the partitions mimic the general distribution, or if food source correlates with ability (or even choice!) to luminesce.

Representative Chaffetz (R-Utah), the subject of this thread, has announced he will not run for re-election in 2018. He’s been noted on this thread for his attempts to sell off public lands, and has had other recent gaffes such as ill-chosen (read: laughable) remarks concerning health care vs iPhones, claims that popular demonstrations against repeal of the ACA is conducted by “paid protesters”, and not investigating, as Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, various obvious problems with the current Administration (Flynn, etc). CNN reports that he also mounted a campaign to be elected Speaker of the House.

So he’s not an unambitious man. His party loyalty, so ill-serving the country, may put him in good stead for future opportunities.

Rumored to be interested in the position of Utah governor, it’s hard to say if he’s not liking his re-election chances, he’s tired of D.C., or if he truly wishes to move into an executive position, with a possible run at the White House. Currently 50 years old, that suggests an election in 2020 to the governorship, 4 years of experience, and a possible run when he’s 58 – eminently reasonable, given the age of recent candidates (Trump is 70).

Or maybe he’s following orders. Note this report from Utah Policy, dated 11 April:

Rep. Jason Chaffetz has taken a political hit for his recent controversial statements according to a new UtahPolicy.com survey.

52% of Chaffetz’s constituents in the 3rd Congressional District view him favorably, which is a far cry from the 73.5% he got just last November in the 2016 election. The latest number is also a 14-point drop from a similar survey conducted last February. …

Despite the opposition, it may prove difficult to oust Chaffetz in 2018, but there is a danger lurking. While Republicans support Chaffetz, Democratic and independent voters have turned on him, which could prove problematic next year.

Perhaps he’s being pushed aside for a less tainted candidate? It’ll be harder to run against a fresh GOP face than his rather soiled one.

But my speculation is more or less just a chart of possibilities, given his opportunities, age, and demonstrated ambition. Something to keep in mind as the years pass.

dispositive:

Information or evidence that unqualifiedly brings a conclusion to a legal controversy. [The Free Dictionary – Legal Dictionary]

From Feb 20th of this year, NASA‘s Solar Dynamics Observatory managed this observation:

Credit: Solar Dynamics Observatory, NASA

A solar prominence gathered itself into a twisting cone, then rose up and broke apart in a delicate dance of plasma above the sun (Feb. 20, 2017). The event, observed in a wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light, lasted just about four hours. Prominences are unstable clouds of plasma suspended above the sun’s surface by magnetic forces. This kind of event is not uncommon. The brighter area near the bottom of the images is an active region.

There’s also a couple of short movies at the link. I’ll just sit back and enjoy the picture.

For the basic health of the GOP, I’m hoping Jon Ossoff of the Democrats wins the Georgia 6th District special election tonight, delivering the message that voters will not tolerate the extremism and apparent corruption exhibited by GOP-backed winning candidates in the last several months, from Trump on down. For what it’s worth, CNN is reporting …

As of 10:40 p.m. ET, Ossoff had 50.3% of the vote, with 77% of the vote in, according to Edison Research

which is about an hour ago. 3 tenths of one percent is not much of a margin, but I think is actually better performance than most poll-watchers were expecting. Will it hold up? And will the GOP be smart enough to realize that this isn’t a time to hunker down, whatever, the result, but to learn and ask what’s wrong with them?

Hard to do for a party that supposedly controls both chambers of Congress, although Trump is more of a chaoticist than a Republican, so I’m not certain that it’s accurate to say the GOP has the Presidency as well.

Politico notes that some of the Trump supporters who beat up protesters are now wailing that it’s not their fault:

A white nationalist leader accused of assaulting a young African-American woman at a Donald Trump campaign rally filed a countersuit on Monday claiming the president directed him and other supporters to remove protesters.

Matthew Heimbach claims in his federal court filing that he “acted pursuant to the directives and requests of Donald J. Trump and Donald J. Trump for President” and that, if he’s found liable for damages, “any liability must be shifted to one or both of them.”

Too bad, buddy. Americans take on moral responsibility for themselves. You knew beating her up was a crime.

Maybe you should sue your parents.

Regarding Democratic gains in local elections, a reader writes:

That’s an enormous change in only five months. Also last week, a lot of little municipal elections in traditionally Republican places in Illinois flipped the majority to Democrats. I live in hope.

I, too, hope that there’s a mass of upsets which will persuade the Independents of the GOP extremism. With only about 30% of the electorate swearing fealty, losing in GOP strongholds might be enough to shake out the bad apples and start the GOP on the long road back to responsibility and partnership in governance – a balance we desperately need.

The next election is either today or tomorrow, depending on when I choose to publish this post [4/18/2017], in Georgia’s 6th district, featuring Jon Ossoff, lone Democrat, against a bevy of GOP contenders in a two stage open election. If no one wins more than 50% in the first stage, then the second stage, consisting of the top two finishers in the first stage, takes place June 20. FiveThirtyEight‘s Nate Silver summarizes the situation:

Ossoff has polled at a raw 42 percent on average between these polls, but he gets up to 46 percent given his portion of the undecided vote. Handel is the top Republican, at 18 percent after allocating undecideds, with Gray following her at 13 percent. Republicans combined have 51 percent of the vote, however, whereas Democrats have 48 percent.⁴

If Tuesday’s results wound up exactly like this — with Republicans winning the aggregate party vote by 3 percentage points, but Ossoff winning the top-two margin by 28 points over Handel — then what would the outlook be for the second round?

With help from my colleague Aaron Bycoffe, I found 181 elections to Congress (either the House or the Senate) since 2008 in California, Louisiana and Washington, which used the two-stage format and in which a Republican squared off against a Democrat in the runoff.⁵ Then I ran a regression to predict the runoff margin based on the aggregate party margin and the top-two margin. It came up with the following formula:

Runoff margin = .66 * Aggregate party margin + .22 * Top-two margin

Note that the coefficient is larger on the aggregate party margin than top-two margin — that’s the regression’s way of saying that the aggregate party margin is the more important indicator. However, the top-two margin — that is, who actually won the first round — shouldn’t be overlooked. Out of 21 races in our database where a candidate won the plurality in the first round but her party lost the aggregate party vote, the candidate nevertheless won the runoff 11 times. For instance, Republicans combined got more of the vote in Washington’s U.S. Senate primary in 2010, but Democratic incumbent Patty Murray got the plurality of the vote. Murray went on to win the second round over Republican Dino Rossi.

Plugging Ossoff’s numbers into the formula above, we come up with a projection that he’d win the runoff by 4 percentage points. So that sounds pretty good for him, right? Well, yes … it would be pretty good. But not more than pretty good, because he has some other things to worry about. For one thing, the margin of error in the calculation is quite high. Specifically, it’s about 8 percentage points for projecting one candidate’s vote share in the runoff, or 16 percentage points (!) for projecting the margin between the candidates. First-round results only tell you so much in these cases.

And then Nate goes on to note the partisanship factor; he is very cautious if Ossoff isn’t the outright victor, and he doesn’t believe he will be. But for all of Nate’s factoring in of intangibles, I have to wonder if he missed one.

That would be former Representative Tom Price. Although he won the 2016 seat 61.7% to 38.3%, Price’s nomination to be Secretary of Health and Human Services has served to focus a light on a number of nascent scandals, such as his misuse of his position in Congress to buy stocks of companies favored by his own legislation. How aware are 6th district voters of these alleged misdeeds? How much do they blame this on Price, and how much do they blame this on the current makeup of the Republican Party?

I guess we’ll find out. (I do actually have an uncle living near Atlanta. I should give him a call.)

And, finally, don’t forget this memorable Democratic victory from back in March. Via NBC10:

Democratic write-in candidate Emilio Vazquez pulled off a surprise victory in a North Philadelphia special election to replace disgraced state Rep. Leslie Acosta, who gave up her seat following a corruption conviction.

His victory was announced Friday morning after the city Election Board hand tallied all 2,483 write-in votes.

Vazquez became an improbable winner in a race that saw the Democrat originally slated for the ballot knocked off following a residency challenge.

That left only Republican candidate Lucinda Little on the ballot for a district — the 197th — that is 85 percent Democrat and 5 percent Republican. Little received only 198 votes on Tuesday.

A quick look at Google headlines suggest this is not without controversy. But it still makes me laugh.

We were at the Minnesota Transportation Museum‘s St. Paul location over the weekend to attend a play (it was the last showing, so I shan’t bore you with a review), and between the meal (meh! – although the cupcake with bacon wrapped around it was interesting) and the show they gave us a quick tour of the roundhouse area. This is where they work on rehabilitating their acquisitions, and so that held our collective interest.

Except for this. This was fascinating. I didn’t know steam engines came in plus-sizes quite like this:

I know they gave us a short history of this locomotive, but I was too visually stunned to take it in, except for the part where they said they’re in the process of changing the tires (his word, not mine). Fortunately, and much to my relief, I tracked it down on the web site. It’s Northern Pacific 2156. Here’s part of a side view of this baby:

This is most of the front half of 2156; I apologize, but my back was against another engine, and it was hard to really get the scale of this thing in here. And yet, from the web site:

Steam locomotive 2156 is a light 4-6-2 “Pacific,” built in 1909 to help handle the Northern Pacific’s increasing passenger business. Based on the successful Q-1 class, Q-3 engines 2148-2170 were constructed by Baldwin (2148-2157) and Alco (2158-2170.) They were well-liked by the crews, capable of cruising at 95 mph. Vital stats: 200 psi superheated steam, 236,000 lbs engine weight, 69″ drivers, 22″x26″ cylinders, 31,000 lbs tractive effort.

Light? Wow. This looked like a monster to me. Here’s the other half of the side view:

You can see the tires to be changed out. Just think of this monster barreling along at 95 MPH!

And one more gratitudinous pic just for fun.

No doubt the front missing end, off for rehabilitation, contributes to the effect of an immobile cannon. It has a raw, primal feel this way, as if it usually wears a civilized mask and this evening we walked in with its mask hanging on the door handle, its ravening nature revealed for by mistake.

Remember the Presidential Address, and questions raised about Trump’s terrorism statistics, subsequently addressed by Ellingsen and Daniels? Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare suggests that either it was an out and out lie on Trump’s part – or the Department of Justice delivered false data to him.

I’m going to be very blunt here: I not only believe that the White House made up “alternative facts” about the substance of this matter in a Presidential address to a Joint Session of Congress, I don’t believe that the National Security Division of the Justice Department provided any data or analysis to the White House that could reasonably be read to support the President’s claim. In other words, I believe the President was lying not merely about the underlying facts but about his own Justice Department. Or, in the alternative, I believe it’s possible that the Office of the Attorney General may have supported the White House’s claim. But I think it extraordinarily unlikely that the folks at NSD actually provided data in support of this presidential statement.

Here’s why I believe this: I know a lot of people at NSD, and they are not the sort of people who grossly mischaracterize facts in order to make political points. Indeed, I believe that the folks there have the integrity to raise internally the very issues that Ellingsen and Daniels raised in these pieces.

And what is Ben going to do about this? He’s filing an Freedom of Information Act request. This should prove interesting.

Source: NASA

A mark of a great movie is that you leave the theater thinking you can do great things, too, and that’s how I felt after watching Hidden Figures (2016). The biographies of three NASA computers, as people who carried out calculations were called before the modern term computer referring to a programmable calculating machine, these black woman are shown chasing their dreams – engineering, computer programmer, mathematician for trajectory calculations, children, husbands – and a god damn women’s bathroom that a colored woman can use that’s not a mile away.

It helps to be aware of the civil rights movement of the 1960s in the United States, and its motivations – the segregation and sometimes outright hatred that had existed ever since the American Civil War, despite the sacrifices and dedication of generations of African-Americans in all the major wars, despite the general racism of whites in the armed services.

And the dance around that racism is part of the charm of this movie, the acknowledgment of reality on the ground – and the determination to succeed, because by succeeding they fulfilled their potential, and determined to be full members of society, despite the barriers raised against them.

Of course, we know how the story ends for the official mission, the Friendship 7 flight, which is all the termination of the movie, so there’s little tension. But how the primary character, Katherine Goble (later Johnson), the computer for the mission, reacts when the mission nears catastrophic failure, makes up for that knowledge – and the reaction of a bunch of white pot-bellied engineers and mathematicians is also instructive.

I could go on and on about this film, really, but I shan’t. Just go see it. Or rent it. Do it with friends, and talk about it afterwards.

Strongly Recommended.

So I took a couple of close ups.

Kevin Drum points at this fascinating Gallup poll result:

Note the Republican reaction to the elections of Bush, Obama, and Trump – big up, a somewhat less pronounced down, although it continued downward through Obama’s Administration, and then a rather frenetic up, respectively. Kevin’s thoughts:

Republican views of the taxes they pay improved substantially when Bush and Trump were elected—even before any actual changes were made to the tax code—while Democrats had essentially no reaction when Obama was elected. Likewise, Republican views declined sharply when Obama was elected, but Democratic views didn’t decline when Bush and Trump were elected.

But perhaps we should attend to other possible events that might have triggered changes in the perceptions of the nation-wide citizenry. I can think of a couple:

1. The terrorist attack of September 9, 2001 – threaten someone’s safety and, in most cases, they’ll be happy to fork over more cash to fight a common enemy.
2. The Great Recession – taking place in 2007-2008, the event was at least partially blamed on the government, and the government response of stabilizing a number of companies, rather than letting them go bankrupt, was deeply resented by a citizenry who did not receive similar support when a wave of foreclosures hit.
3. The debate and passage of the ACA – resented by a GOP base told that it was being forced down their throat by a tyrannical Democratic majority (no, it was actually debated for a long period of time, but the GOP refused to participate in the important responsibility of governance) and that it was the socialization of medicine (this time the No is delivered with a great laugh), it’s no surprise that they considered the taxes they paid to be ill-spent.
4. The mendacity of the right wing media during the Obama Administration. Long time readers already know the argument; for those who don’t, see Bruce Bartlett here. That influence, gobbled up by an audience eager to be outraged at the feckless liberals, naturally increased their dissatisfaction with the work of their taxes.

But these still leave the puzzle that Republicans, Democrats, and Independents have heightened sense of fairness of their taxes as Trump is elected. Now I indulge in pure speculation. First, the cause is not unitary. The Republicans finally have won the Presidency, as dissatisfying as that may turn out, and so feel better at the thought that they can spend more on the military, rather than helping their fellows who may have fallen on hard times.

Democrats and Independents, on the other hand, have had an abrupt and rude political awakening. Rather than being something they might discuss once a month with no research, now they know a bit more, they’re willing to go out and learn more, because Trump’s erratic actions and frighteningly awful nominees have gotten their attention and focused them on learning just what the hell happened – and how they can fix it,

And part of that process has been to learn just where their taxes go – and they’re happy about it. Perhaps Trump’s Administration doesn’t like the EPA, Planned Parenthood, NEA, and all the other programs on the chopping block. But they do.

This missive was received from an unnamed cetacean research center. I include the attached note directly.

The highly speculative translation contained herein will not be published in any research journal, due to the uncertainty of the accuracy of the translation, as well as the explosive nature of the contents. Internal dissension in the research team prevents even the association of researchers’ names with the paper.  Nevertheless, the content is considered important enough that it must be shared. There are unanswered questions implicit in the material, for which we have not yet found answers; those have become the focus of our next research.

The few footnotes are our own, consisting of interpolations of passages which may not be removed without leaving the content in chaos.

Within this sacred medium through which we move, let it be known to one and all, the strainers and the toothed, the breachers and the lurkers, even those who munch upon their cousins and all those who sing throughout the seas, that a tale from our recent plague has come within our realm of understanding, and through assiduous study we, the blues, have partially deciphered it.

They call this tale of horror and heroism Moby Dick^[1]. We will treat upon this shocking name later.

This macabre story records, finally, the motivations of those who are merely parasites upon our oceans and swimmers of same, those who left and never returned, whose ancient forbears grew legs to walk upon the land.  Following an unattached male of this species, a transcriptor of the tale and one with which we confess some feelings of brotherhood, we see, through repeated usage, how they name the individuals of their species; the rivalries of the males, fighting for dominance in more physical ways than our melodious competitions; the rhythms of their life, their groupings, the long separations of the mated pairs as well as the desperate lives of those unmated. It brings to the fore the pressures of survival, and how they have molded their species into conformance with the niche chosen for it.

The tale is literally bathed in horror, but the novelty of the tale obscures the atrocity until it is brought to the fore. The singer of this tale seeks a quiet place to rest his mind, some place to find a holy cessation of thought. He is introduced to just such an eddyless cove and seeks the blessed state, but is almost immediately interrupted by the intrusion of a similarly intentioned cousin. This one, unlike the tale-singer, has decorated his hide with scarrings, blackened patterns of stories, no doubt beyond our ken, brought into stark relief by the light of a single lamp.

And so the singular song of evil begins.

The very lamp that lights their resting place is fueled by our holy blanket against the cold depths^[2], liquified through heat, then lit afire to decant its brilliance for the convenience of these… parasites.

For those of our cousins uncertain as to the visual aspect of such a lamp, consider the tales told of the mountains of the deep, spitting liquid rock, the lifeblood of the holder of our medium; this is fire, and this emits light. As proof of the holiness of our blankets, the oil rendered from them is set afire in order to emit light. But not for holy reasons unless, as we debate, they have a reverence for the brilliant orb in the sky.  But this tale is not a time for philosophy.

The tale then describes, from novel visual angles, an early specimen of those contraptions which they build to float upon the surface of our sacred home, and this may be considered instructive as to their methods. But the scholarly mood of the tale is quickly broken in the most monstrous way, as the men in their “ship” encounter one of us.

They set upon a venerable male as he rests upon the surface, gulping down the sacred air to resuscitate himself for his hunt.  And now the old one has himself become the hunted. Cruel shaped and purified metal, called harpoons and lances, are driven into our brother, and as we watch, he soon spouts out his life force and gives himself back to the great living sea.

But even this last selfless act is denied to him. In a scene so repulsive that many of us turned away our eye, veritably damaged at the atrocity, our cousin is callously butchered, hauled onto the vessel, and there chopped and cooked until his very blanket of life has become an oil.

The oil for their infernal lamps.

With effort, we strive to see this from their side: through these efforts, this loathsome harvest, the males accumulate resources and prestige. We do not know how females also accumulate the necessary prestige that presages mating; we only see a bit of that for the male of the species. Or so we tentatively predict; our store of knowledge is relatively small.

But all this is swept away in the horror of the tragedy. However, in some ways, the following scenes have an abominable aspect that’s even worse, as they chronicle the state of mind (as we think they have such) of their leader, and it’s an unreasoned hatred of our kind. True, he has incurred some injury that is accounted to us, but as it was suffered during their hunting of our kind, what of it? The righteous creature does not expect to escape to the next stage unscathed; it is the badge one bears in the great hunts, just as some of our cousins hunt the great many-arms, and suffer for it. This leader, this Captain Ahab, as they call him, is diseased in the mind and dangerous, having lost the true way. Indeed, in a scene in which his kind call out to him for succor, he refuses his aid, for such is his immoral rage, his anger at the just realities of being, that he must pursue the one who brought him injury, even though the injury was nobly inflicted, as if the injury was an insult to a holy creature.

At this juncture, we look to to our own mythos, and return to a point we earlier bypassed. We believe this tale is, indeed, named for one of our mythic great male rogues, Moby Dick^[3], a prodigious and furious white who turned the clam inside out, hunting the very parasites who hounded him, and in his lonely pursuit, acquiring many grievous wounds and scars. But, as our forebears have passed down the tale, for Moby Dick it was not a fury at the honorable pricks of the hunted, but their unslaked hunger for death and more death; ruthlessly taking calves, mothers, and males all. This act concentrated his fury until all he lived for was the death of these parasites, and so he became a great defender of our kind, rampaging until he met his end in some lonely, unchronicled ocean.

We speculate upon the purpose of the parasite’s tale, for in the end Moby Dick triumphs, a few more scars in his holy hide, leaving only the carrier of the tale to survive and convey it to the rest of his kind. Is it cautionary? Let not thy pride, thy conception of self, drive you to murder your prey in defiance of the ways of your kind?

But we have a balm for our grief.  The sight of Moby Dick, however crudely rendered, destroying the hated parasite, reminds ourselves that even a rogue, an unmated male made of fury and storm, has his role in the great song of life.

¹A guess based on the content of their missive; further, but with less confidence, we suppose the movie of 1956, as the novel would be less likely to survive in their context, and some material they mention suggests the 1956 version.

²This must be a reference to the blanket of blubber all whales grow.

³A phonetic rendition is impossible, nor are the constituent elements of the nominative other known words, such as Baker; we substitute the human name to retain cohesion.

Fusee:

• 2 :  a red signal flare used especially for protecting stalled trains and trucks [Merriam-Webster]

Seen at the Minnesota Transportation Museum in St. Paul, as depicted below:

Appropriation art:

I blame Richard Prince. If you’re not familiar with Prince, he was the first photographer whose work sold for more than a million dollars. What made that amount even more staggering is his work was also the work of commercial photographer Sam Abell. Does that sound confusing? That’s because it is.

Sam Abell photographed the famous Marlboro Man advertisements. What Richard Prince did was re-photograph some of those advertising images. He removed the text, printed them very large, then presented them as a comment on American culture.

Some folks would call that theft; Prince called it appropriation art. The idea is that by removing the image from its original context, new layers of meaning can be attached to the work. Abell’s original photograph was intended to create an association between Marlboro cigarettes and the robust life of a manly cowboy living and working in an idealized vision of the Old West. It was, in effect, a lie. A double lie, in fact. It not only associated smoking with a healthy lifestyle, it also invoked a nostalgic vision of an American West that never really existed. It was a lie used to sell cigarettes.

Richard Prince removed the Marlboro Man from that original context. In doing so, he gave the photograph a radically different interpretation and a different meaning. It became a comment on commercialism. The viewer has a different experience when looking at the re-photographed photograph — he’s no longer being sold a product, he’s being introduced to the idea of using romance as a marketing tool. Prince would argue that this, in effect, makes it a different photograph.

That concept — that simply by shifting the context of an image it can be turned into an entirely new image –fascinated me. It still does, in fact. I’m appalled that Prince made millions of dollars off Abell’s work, but I have to admit that even though the photographs of Abell and Prince are essentially the same, they DO have a different meaning — and Prince’s image is more interesting. [“the integrity of theft,” Greg Fallis, gregfallis.com]

Andrew Sullivan indulges in a therapy vent concerning President Trump:

What on earth is the point of trying to understand him when there is nothing to understand? Calling him a liar is true enough, but liars have some cognitive grip on reality, and he doesn’t. Liars remember what they have said before. His brain is a neural Etch A Sketch. He doesn’t speak, we realize; he emits random noises. He refuses to take responsibility for anything. He can accuse his predecessor and Obama’s national security adviser of crimes, and provide no evidence for either. He has no strategy beyond the next 24 hours, no guiding philosophy, no politics, no consistency at all — just whatever makes him feel good about himself this second. He therefore believes whatever bizarre nonfact he can instantly cook up in his addled head, or whatever the last person who spoke to him said. He makes Chauncey Gardiner look like Abraham Lincoln. Occam’s razor points us to the obvious: He has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. Which is reassuring and still terrifying all at once.

Like I said, Trump is well outside the norm. Andrew also has a whack at Clinton, which accords with my thought that the wife of Slick Willy was perhaps the least slick Presidential candidates of modern times.

The balls were good, no? But this one just made me laugh.

Kenneth Anderson on Lawfare wades into the problem of statistical comparisons:

What’s “The Bathtub Fallacy,” according to [Justin] Fox? Following a terrorist incident or government counter-measure, he says (quoting a recent Financial Times (paywalled) column by its principal political columnist, Janan Ganesh), statistics are “dug out to show that fewer Westerners perish in terror attacks than in everyday mishaps. Slipping in the bath is a tragicomic favourite. We chuckle, share the data and wait for voters and politicians to see sense.” ..
The conclusion that terrorism is different relies importantly on Fox’s characterization as a “fat-tailed distribution” of risks.  Fox cites Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s (of Black Swan fame) extensive writing on this, but then moves on to an interview Fox conducted with Carnegie Mellon University professor Baruch Fischhoff in researching this column.  Who’s Baruch Fischhoff, you ask? Well, among (many) other things, Fischhoff is a “past president of the Society for Risk Analysis, past member of multiple national and international commissions on the risks of terrorism and other bad stuff, and author of lots of books with ‘risk’ in the title.”  Also, Fox adds, he was Daniel Kahneman’s former research assistant at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the early 1970s, and thus someone “present at the creation of the school of psychological research that has shown how bad we humans can be at processing probabilities.”

“People who just look at the average are doing the analysis wrong,” Fischhoff tells Fox.  Fischhoff does not think, either, that “it’s irrational to fear terrorism more than falling in the bathtub.” Why? It’s different in terms “of the uncertainty and the shape of the distribution, how well we understand it and the possibility of these large-scale events.”  Moreover, Fischhoff adds, in another deceptively simple observation, that “people tolerate risks where they see a benefit.”

Seems to me that when comparing statistics this way, the magnitude of the difference in the standard deviations of the two averages will be a measure of the incommensurability of the comparison, taken as a ratio to the average value.

That is, a big standard deviation indicates the importance of the average value as a predictive tool is very low; a small standard deviation indicates the value of the average as a predictive tool is quite high, as compared to the actual value. As a species, we do value predictability, so when the deviation is high, we need to be more concerned about the phenomenon in question.

And I’m sure all the risk analysis and statistical nerds are already chanting We knew that already. Ah, but I didn’t.

Great sense of self. I have virtually none, by the way.

The dust settles in Kansas, as Republican Ron Estes defeats Democrat James Thompson in the 4th district in the race to replace Mike Pompeo, now the CIA Director, in the US House of Representatives. It’s interesting to read the spins on this. First, President Trump via the Kansas City Star:

President Donald Trump congratulated Kansas’ newest congressman Wednesday morning, but also misstated information about the unusually close special election in the Wichita region.
“Great win in Kansas last night for Ron Estes, easily winning the Congressional race against the Dems, who spent heavily & predicted victory!” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning after Republican Ron Estes beat Democrat James Thompson by 7 percentage points in a district that Republicans won by more than 30 points in November.

Estes, the Kansas state treasurer, will replace Mike Pompeo, who gave up his seat in the 4th congressional district in January to serve as Trump’s CIA director.

Neither the state, nor national Democratic Party predicted a victory in the race at any point. However, Thompson was quoted in some outlets as saying that his campaign was winning during the final days of the campaign.

Contrary to Trump’s tweet, Democrats did not spend heavily on the race.

From the progressive wing of the Democrats is David Nir on The Daily Kos:

In an extraordinary political earthquake, Kansas Republicans held on to a dark red House seat in the Wichita area night by just a single-digit margin on Tuesday night, throwing into question whether the GOP’s majority can survive next year’s midterm elections.

Republican Ron Estes, the state treasurer, had been universally expected to easily win the special election in Kansas’ 4th District to replace Mike Pompeo, who left to become Donald Trump’s CIA director earlier this year. But instead, Estes found himself struggling in a district that Trump carried by a dominant 60-33 margin and Pompeo won by more than 30 points last year.

I suppose at this point, President Trump’s followers are just hoping we should just accept he lies about everything, but it remains unacceptable.

Therefore, I request and require President Trump retract the lies embedded in his communication congratulating Ron Estes and promise never to do that again.

So how does Republican dominance look in the 4th district? This gives me a chance to play with a charting tool:

Data Source: Ballotpedia

While a 7 percentage point loss actually sounds like a lot, compared to the tighter races we’ve seen of late for President, the chart does clearly indicate a change in the mood of K4 voters, especially over a 5 month period. Will this continue?

I think it’ll depend on three factors. The two obvious factors are President Trump and the GOP. The former has been flip-flopping on his radical positions, and of late some of his positions approach reasonableness – although I suspect this is only random chance, as one White House faction or another gets his ear – or which world leader he talks to next. He may be the least important factor in the 2018 race for Kansas 4th.

The GOP, on the other hand, have been a consistent bunch – advocates of extreme positions, users of highly dubious reasoning, and vessels of damaged ethics, if we’re to judge from the current Administration nominees’ behaviors. Attempted revocation of the ACA damaged the GOP brand, yet they have returned to talking about the same action – acting as if the electorate was four-square behind them, which is not true.

That and a number of early missteps symptomatic of a party drifting well out of the American mainstream may damage their chances in K4.

But the biggest factor may be … Estes himself. I know very little about him, so I can’t guess how he’ll perform in the House of Representatives – will be be relatively independent, thus isolating himself from the more damaging effects of the GOP behavior patterns, but also from influence? Or will he be another yes-man, and thus vulnerable if the GOP manages to misread the situation completely and disappoint the Independents who hold the key to the next election?

Thompson, the loser on Tuesday, has stated he will run again. The time to start is now – to borrow the mildly loathesome phrase from the private sector, it’s time to build your brand. More accurately, now is the time to formulate positions and show why they are preferable for K4 residents – and point out how it’s conservative ideology wrecking the formerly great State of Kansas.

[EDIT Fixed typo 10/30/2017]

Urtext:

the original text (as of a musical score)

Seen in “The Bathtub Fallacy and Risks of Terrorism,” Kenneth Anderson, Lawfare:

The urtext of ordinary accident/terrorism comparisons might be the 2009 book by political scientist John Mueller, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them.

Nicholas Weaver on Lawfare puzzles over the latest dump of stolen NSA cyber-tools by the Shadow Brokers group:

The real mystery here is why the Shadow Brokers released this data. Ordinarily, a hostile intelligence service wouldn’t tip their hand by showing that they had obtained this information but there are some clear strategic benefits to that kind of signalling. Releasing the vulnerabilities themselves goes a step further. It ensures not only that the NSA is unable to use the Windows 0-days against targets, but that you aren’t either. It is a matter of short time before these tools are patched, and thus unavailable to anyone. These are tremendously valuable tools to just burn that way, so it does make one wonder (and worry): what exactly is the intended payoff here?

Steve Benen on Maddowblog gets a bit het up about President Trump’s changes in position:

One of Donald Trump’s most important early flip-flops came just 11 days into his presidency. As a candidate, Trump broke with Republican Party orthodoxy and endorsed lowering prices on prescription drugs by using Medicare’s negotiating power. That, however, did not last.

On Jan. 31, after a meeting with executives and lobbyists from the pharmaceutical industry, Trump denounced the idea he used to support, calling it a form of “price fixing” that would hurt “smaller, younger companies.” Trump had one set of beliefs, he heard conflicting information, so he adopted a different set of beliefs. …

Now, however, Trump is adopting an entirely different set of opinions on many issues, not as part of some grand ideological rebranding, but because some folks gave him new information he found compelling. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) explained this yesterday by saying, “Some of the things that were said during the campaign, I think he now knows simply aren’t the way things ought to be.”

That’s an exceedingly polite way of saying, “Trump had no idea what he was talking about when he ran for the nation’s highest office, but a variety of people are now guiding him new directions.”

Some sympathetic figures may find all of this vaguely encouraging. Perhaps it’s a good thing, optimists will argue, that the president is acquiring new information and drawing new conclusions. It’s at least preferable to him ignoring evidence and sticking to old assumptions that never really made any sense.

All of which brings up the question of how and when someone should change a position. Generally speaking, everyone takes positions on issues that are wrong. In the science community, these are called hypotheses, used to attempt to explain some observation. Scientists then attempt to falsify, that is, disprove their hypothesis. Those hypotheses which survive numerous such challenges are accepted on a contingency basis, that basis being that it may still be disproved in the future, but for the moment we’ll go with it.

Transferring this to the non-scientific world isn’t that much of a stretch, but for one thing – we tend to attach our egos, our prestige, into our hypotheses. Scientists are not immune to this problem, although the better ones manage to disconnect it. But outside of the science community, the prestige that goes along with backing a given position on an issue is inevitable. It’s not even necessarily a bad thing. After all, if someone comes up with one good position on an issue, maybe they’ll have more. Sure, give them prestige.

But when a hypothesis fails, then what? The ego and prestige resist being wrong, of course. A prominent example is the Kansas economic disaster, brought on by Governor Brownback’s position that lower taxes will spark an economic Renaissance. He wants Trump to replicate his position on the Federal level – and then surely heaven will follow.

It’s a choice bit of madness for a former star of the GOP who is beginning to lose the support of his own party. I suspect he’ll disappear – or at least should – into the swamp once he’s a former governor. Unfortunately, like the economist he relied on, Arthur Laffer (one of the great nominative determinism examples), he’ll probably linger on and assume an air of respectability, unearned in reality, but still palpable.

But I digress.

The proper response when a position on an issue results in an unpredicted (and negative, of course) result is that the position should be changed. This is what a mature adult human should do.

But President Trump is outside of this model of human behavior. During the campaign, he didn’t hesitate to promise whatever would please his audience most, without regard to realities on the ground. Now that he’s discovering issues are far more complex than his shallow knowledge base encompassed, he changes his positions.

It sounds reasonable, but it’s not. From Steve:

The Wall Street Journal noted a similar shift this week on the U.S. Export-Import Bank.

During the campaign, Mr. Trump was skeptical of Ex-Im Bank, which funds U.S. trade deals, calling it “unnecessary.” The bank has been a target of Republican criticism, which Mr. Trump seized on.

But that view changed earlier this year after he talked to Boeing Co. CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who explained to him what role the bank plays, according to people familiar with the matter.

Explaining his new position, Trump told the Wall Street Journal this week that he “was very much opposed” to the Export-Import Bank, but “it turns out [that] lots of small companies will really be helped.”

The problem is that he simply goes with his latest information. Boeing is the primary beneficiary of the Bank. Sure, they’ll present a positive case. And for all that he once opposed the Bank, now Trump wants it.