Courtesy Gloria Copeland:
An evangelical minister who advised President Donald Trump’s campaign sparked an uproar Tuesday by suggesting that Christian faith makes people immune from the flu.
Texas minister Gloria Copeland, who sat on the Trump campaign’s evangelical executive advisory board, denied the country is in the midst of a severe flu outbreak in a Facebook video that went viral because, “Jesus himself is our flu shot. He redeemed us from the curse of the flu.”
Only because I mentioned Notre Dame’s reaction to changes to the ACA before do I bring this to your attention:
Notre Dame has decided to ban “abortion-inducing drugs” from third-party-provided insurance plans. It will also begin providing coverage for “simple contraceptives” in the university plan.* The move was announced in a letter from its president, Father John Jenkins, to the university community on Wednesday. …
Many students and faculty were angry when Notre Dame indicated it would end coverage for birth control, arguing that it would create an enormous financial burden for them. Likewise, many conservative Catholic alumni and community members were outraged when the school agreed to continue coverage, pointing out that the use of birth control is against Church teachings; one advocacy group called it “a dark time for Notre Dame.” The latest decision likely won’t leave critics on either side happy, since it limits access to certain drugs but reaffirms the decision to allow coverage of birth control—and moves coverage under the authority of the university, rather a third party.
Notre Dame sees this latest move as a compromise. It will discontinue the government provision of drugs through a third-party administrator, and it will also provide funding for natural-planning options. While ending access to all contraception “would allow the university to be free of involvement with drugs that are morally objectionable in Catholic teaching,” Jenkins wrote in his letter, it would place a burden on many people who rely on the school for health-care benefits. [The Atlantic]
They say that a good compromise leaves no one happy, and that’s a good thing. It occurs to me there’s another positive to compromises that leave everyone unhappy – it gives everyone a chance to evaluate whether those portions of their policy preferences that are implemented actually lead to positive results, and, analogously, if the opposition’s implemented portion lead to negative results.
In other words, it’s a very crude laboratory experiment.
But there is a constraint: this only works in situations where people connect their policies with projected tangible results. Notre Dame is connected with the Catholic Church, a religious institution, and it’s never been entirely clear to me if the ban on abortion, which apparently is not mentioned in the Bible (according to this HuffPost article), is called for as a propitiation of Jehovah, the Christian God, or as some sort of positive result in American life. The latter would be testable; the former, from my point of view, just gobbledygook.
It also requires honest search for truth, rather than blind adherence to rules, and perhaps an interesting argument over whether some particular change in society is good, bad, or just random.
In any case, I really only meant to mention that the University of Notre Dame continues to do the dance of compromise in connection with the ACA.
Readers continue to react to stock market gyrations:
I watched Mad Money with Jim Kramer last night. He blamed the blowup on VIX (volatility index funds). Sounded to me like total vapor ware. They make money not by buying real stocks, but by buying VIX ETFs. Basically betting on volatility of stock trading.
Maybe it’s like popcorn volatility. The stock market crashes so I have popcorn more often (emotional eating) and I figure many other people do the same thing. This creates a greater demand for popcorn. So I should buy popcorn stock.
Makes sense. I’ll mention that to my financial advisor. There are days when I wonder if the stock market is ever used for its original purpose. Another:
Wild stock market drops don’t just hurt the big money wall street types (when they even do that, since many are hedged or short, etc.). A lot of small people have savings, retirements, etc. in the market, including me.
Roughly 50% of Americans are thought to have money in the stock market, and so we’re all riding the waves. Thing is, since the Great Recession we hadn’t seen a correction, so those investors who started since then haven’t had the visceral reaction of watching 10% – or more – of their investment funds disappear. The first time that happens can be quite disturbing, especially if you (generically speaking) didn’t follow the general rule of investing only money that you won’t need in 5 years.
Yesterday? The Dow was all over the place, but closed up 1.38% for the day.
You may have heard of the Rob Porter scandal, the guy who apparently abused his two wives big-time, and then was hired by the Trump Administration and, despite their knowledge of the accusations and divorces and myriad evidence to back the allegations, marked him for promotion, a fair haired boy.
You may not have yet heard this:
Rachel L. Brand, the No. 3 official at the Justice Department, plans to step down after nine months on the job as the country’s top law enforcement agency has been under attack by President Trump, according to two people briefed on her decision.
Ms. Brand’s profile had risen in part because she is next in the line of succession behind the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, who is overseeing the special counsel’s inquiry into Russian influence in the 2016 election. Mr. Trump, who has called the investigation a witch hunt, has considered firing Mr. Rosenstein. [The New York Times]
Both of these are significant. Ms. Brand, as she’s been appointed by both Democratic and Republican Administrations, may be considered one of those people we really need in government, ideologically-neutral in her job and understanding the importance of being so, along with being a highly competent lawyer, etc etc. Her loss is a signal of the deterioration of the Trump Administration.
But there may be something more to the Porter scandal than we’ll ever know, if you’ll permit me to transition into paranoia mode. Here’s the central question puzzling everyone: Stipulating his ex-wives contentions and that key players in the Administration, possibly but not necessarily including the President, knew of the accusations, then the central question is Why was he selected for such an important position (staff secretary handles darn near everything and acts as a gatekeeper to the President)?
Let’s take a hint from the troubles the Administration was having obtaining a security clearance for him. What was the problem? His wives were telling the FBI that he was violent enough that the very violence he had inflicted on them could be used as blackmail in order to control him.
Roll those words around in your mouth and feel them: control him. Blackmail.
I could very easily see those currently in control of the GOP seeing Porter not as a liability, but as a very useful tool: young, smart, proper training and credentials, ambitious, perhaps charismatic – and a real character flaw that could be used to control him.
What a catch. (What dicks!)
Fortunately, this all came public and his public career is probably – almost certainly – finished. Unless some damn fool Congress lets Trump rewrite the libel laws.
Does this all sound far-fetched to you? It’s not as far-fetched as a failed real estate developer and successful reality-show host becoming President by subverting the most overtly moral group of Americans despite infidelities, lies, and none-too-humble boasting.
OK, you make up a story to answer that central question.
There’s two things I like about Greg Fallis’ latest composition. First, his use of semi-stochastic (sorry, real scientists) unplanned composition:
I walk a lot. Most days, I try to take a lazy two or three mile walk. During that walk I’ll occasionally shoot a photo or two with my phone. I usually delete them. Last week, as I was deleting photos, I noticed I’d taken two shots with similar framing–looking straight down at stuff near my feet.
Nothing out of the ordinary there; I’d guess almost everybody who’s ever held a camera has taken that same basic photo. On a whim, instead of deleting the photos, I used a simple app to lay one image over the other–a sort of faux double exposure. And I liked the result.
Second? Knuckles Dobrovic.
Gimme da backstory!
In NewScientist (27 January 2018, paywal) comes a report on an AI that has managed to crack a couple of ciphers with just about as much information as a human gets:
Without any prior knowledge, an artificial intelligence algorithm has cracked two classic forms of encryption: the Caesar cipher and Vigenère cipher. As translating languages is similar to decoding a cipher, the approach may improve translation software.
To break the ciphers, Aidan Gomez and colleagues at the University of Toronto and Google used a type of algorithm called a generative adversarial network. The GAN started with no knowledge of ciphers or language, but by analysing thousands of English sentences and lines of coded text, it was able to start switching between the two. The texts were in no way related. For instance, the GAN could have started with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in English and To Kill a Mockingbird in cipher text.
After analysing the texts, one part of the algorithm makes guesses about the cipher and another part determines whether the result makes sense based on what it has learned about English. If it doesn’t, the algorithm updates its next guesses accordingly. This process was then repeated thousands of times, until the GAN reached near perfect accuracy on coded text generated by the Caesar cipher, named after Julius Caesar, who used it, and the Vigenère cipher, invented in the 16th century (arxiv.org/abs/1801.04883).
The Caesar cipher you may have learned as a kid, as it’s the classic and trivial static change to each letter of the same offset. An example is A=C, B=D, C=E, implying an offset of 2. The Vigenère cipher is an enhanced version:
The Vigenère cipher (French pronunciation: [viʒnɛːʁ]) is a method of encrypting alphabetic text by using a series of interwoven Caesar ciphers based on the letters of a keyword. It is a form of polyalphabetic substitution. [Wikipedia]
I don’t know anything about advanced encryption, but I think this is a cool approach – building a model of the source language and applying the discovered heuristics to crack the admittedly simple codes.
But now there’s talk about using this for translation services:
When learning to translate, it is usually easy to get plenty of examples of the two languages: just raid a library or scrape text off the internet. The tricky bit is working out how to switch between the two.
The best current translation software learns from pairs of translated sentences. For example, Google Translate originally learned to translate between French and English by analysing thousands of professionally translated documents from the United Nations and European Parliament.
But such accurate translations don’t exist for many language pairings. So translation engines normally use English as a stepping stone, first translating to English and then to the actual target language.
As the new approach doesn’t require paired sentences, the stepping stone could be ditched. This process, called unsupervised translation, is something that Facebook and Google are also exploring. “Unsupervised translation is super-hot right now,” says Gomez. “It’s not just an interesting idea, it’s getting really impressive results.”
Hmmmmmmmmm!
A. Barton Hinkle of the Richmond Times-Dispatch has no problem noting how extremists will do anything to pardon extremism – even becoming like their own hated enemies:
But the real metamorphosis has occurred on the right.
It is no new insight to note the extent to which Republicans, who once were horrified by Bill Clinton’s sexual improprieties, now dismiss or even defend Donald Trump’s. A few days ago, after news of Trump’s dalliance with a porn star broke, the Rev. Franklin Graham argued that while Trump is not “President Perfect,” he “does have concern for Christian values.” High praise indeed.
Many conservatives also have decided that defending Donald Trump is more important than defending the FBI against his attacks. In certain right-wing media, the Deep State controls the levers of power in D.C., and the FBI is now little more than a conspiracy of leftists dedicated to electing Hillary Clinton and bringing down Donald Trump. The evidence for this theory is laughably thin — a couple of text messages, former FBI director Jim Comey’s recommendation against charging Clinton with a crime, and … um … hang on a sec while they find their notes. Gotta be around here somewhere.
After more fun …
All of this might be funny if not for the menace at the edges. Although mainstream conservatives abjure and even revile them, the elements of the alt-right have gained a dismaying foothold in contemporary politics (see: Breitbart and Steve Bannon). And as the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville this past August shows, the alt-right is willing to resort to violence — for which it will be partly excused by the president.
Indifference to sexual libertinism. Pro-Moscow sympathies. Paranoid conspiracy theories. A violent, radical fringe. Hatred of the G-men at the FBI, along with the rest of The Corrupt Establishment. Four decades ago such markers defined the radical left — and everything about liberalism that conservatives loathed. Now, they increasingly define the American right — all thanks to Donald Trump.
Parallels I completely missed – although perhaps I’m a bit young to see them. I liked the column, and I suspect there are more useful insights to plumb.
Regarding the market, a reader remarks:
When one tunes in CNBC on a day like today one hears experts of all strips scream “Buy, buy, buy!” Don’t panic! All the other experts are wrong. Listen to me!
I say buy popcorn!
Sit back with lightly salted, buttery popcorn. Hard to go wrong, I suspect. If you have cash, keep an eye on your favorite company’s stock, and if seems abnormally low, buy it.
Hard advice to follow, isn’t it? Where is the bottom of this correction, anyways?
My understanding is that we’ve entered 10% decline territory, also known as a ‘correction,’ which the experts say is well overdue. Could be right. But my thought is this: the history of the market does not include the full effect of high-frequency trader (HFT) algorithms. Of many different sorts. In the last few years, the media has documented some abnormal stock movements thought to be due to various HFTs interacting in various ways. Now, an HFT is an algorithm which necessarily imperfectly implements a human’s desires about the market, where a desire is some well-defined (or not) tactic for accumulating money – buy and hold (rare for HFTs, by their nature), buy and sell within moments, go short, others more arcane.
But these are trees. Let’s talk about the forest.
The forest is an artificial soup of an ecology, populated with non-self-aware (I hope!) algorithms (I so want to write ‘life-form’) which perform, and then on a periodic basis are evaluated, and then retired, allowed to continue, or modified and reintroduced. The goal of all is profit. It’s not unlike a real ecology with evolution, although some elements are missing. But my point is that it’s a young soup. The creatures are imperfect, sometimes irrational.
And that takes me back to my starting point. 10% territory? But just how much further down will we go? I think it’s a little harder to predict than our experts think – or at least will let on. Suppose a poorly made algorithm which happens to control a substantial portion of some large company’s stock starts selling it in response to some indicator which was poorly chosen. Other HFTs will respond by buying, but this is a signal, which means other HFTs will analyze the signal, its presence and magnitude and direction.
And do … what? If it’s a bad signal, do HFTs evaluate for ‘bad signal’? I don’t work in that area, so I don’t know. It’s all quite secretive. Some do, I’m sure, and some don’t.
And that may cause chaos for a while.
About the only advice I’d care to give is don’t leverage and don’t step out at the bottom.
This chart from WaPo is sardonically disturbing:
Only three quarters of voters understand the Democrats are to the left of the Republicans on just about every issue? That leaves me a little stunned. Is it really a participatory democracy?
The market continued to be lumpy and dumpy today. James Dorn of the Cato Institute thinks he knows why, via CNN:
The long stock market rally since 2009 was fueled in large part by the Federal Reserve’s unconventional monetary policies. By promising to keep its policy rate (the federal funds rate) near zero “for a considerable period of time” and engaging in large-scale asset purchases, known as “quantitative easing,” the Fed hoped to boost asset prices and stimulate the economy.
A law of the market is that when interest rates fall, asset prices rise. As long as markets believe the Fed will support asset prices by keeping rates low, stocks will be the investment of choice, rather than conservative, low-yield saving accounts, money market funds, or highly-rated bonds.
Ah, laws of the market. I’ve seen those before. Quantitative Easing was supposed to result in runaway inflation because the government was basically printing money and injecting it into the economy by buying bank shares.
Ummm, no inflation. Sorry, please play again.
Now, I have no idea if Dorn was one of that bank of pundits, but then this really caught my eye:
The only sure path toward future prosperity is to let free markets determine interest rates and the allocation of credit. Private saving finances productive investment that increases future real income and consumption. That linkage is an iron law of economics.
Mr. Dorn must be a man of faith, because there’s an article of faith behind this statement – that a capitalistic economy has a stable rest state which can be achieved if, just if … name your economic blasphemy is corrected. The Cato Institute is listed as being libertarian, so this article of faith is unsurprising, as the libertarians spend a lot of time trying to prove it. When I gave up on REASON Magazine, their current lead on the subject was Veronique de Rugy, who frequently sped off into incoherency trying to prove her points. (She later showed up briefly on Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish, but my memory of her appearance was that it was quite brief – or she didn’t make much of an impression.)
To be honest, there are few iron laws of economics; it’s called the dismal science for good reason. In any transaction there are many motivations explicit and implicit, and if any of them are non-economic then the iron laws predicated on cost and value go by the ways. Even perceptions of trustworthiness can chew these iron laws into trinkets. I would argue “brand loyalty” makes them into chump change. I’m an LG guy myself.
Perhaps in a lab it’ll work. And in that lab there are no hostile countries ready to eat you up. That’s a problem because the concept of hostile countries isn’t going to appear in these “perfect economic models”.
So I wouldn’t pay much attention to Mr. Dorn. He doesn’t seem to know about the real world. Economic management isn’t evil, it’s merely necessary. The evil comes in the implementation, and that means the evil is optional.
And the Dow Jones Industrial Average? Down 4.15%. Probably has something to do with the new Fed Chairman. Trump’s pick, right?
I’ve puzzled over responses to President Trump’s desire for a military parade, but I’ve finally decided to ignore it, as Aaron Blake of WaPo seems to suggest:
It will be one massive troll, complete with tanks and flyovers and marching soldiers. And it will be thoroughly Trump.
Trump is a thoroughly unimaginative man, and as Aaron notes elsewhere, Trump’s motivation is to have a bigger one than France or North Korea. This the best Trump can come up with. We should impeach him for not reaching the proper intellectual levels, sigh.
I left out a piece of chocolate without eating it.
That’s a bad sign.
Stomach’s tender. Bladder infection? Pulled muscle? Trapped gas? Giant bacteria waiting to eat my arms.
Stay tuned. Been sick since Sunday.
But we know better, don’t we?
Another annoying clot of lies and misdirections, designed to bring anger to those who don’t know the facts, or don’t read carefully. Long time readers know what this is all about – I carefully take the mail apart so all my friends can have a good laugh at it.
This time around I’m actually having to take it apart and reassemble it, as it’s a bunch of pictures. For most, maybe even all of them, I’ll have a reaction. Maybe one will even be approving! Here we go:
Funny how he looks demonic when he says that. Heck, I don’t even actually know if he said that – whoever he is. But it’s actually the most interesting of the lot, because there’s a few bad assumptions. Let’s talk about them, and I will promise that none of the other entries will be as long as this – none of them are as interesting.
The flag represents the idealization of your country. If the current government is going to shoot you right at the port you come in to, why would you want to go back? It’s easy to see loving your country but hating the government. The GOP did that every day for 8 years, no? Hell, that’s the position this sniveling manipulator of an author has taken, now hasn’t it? Either that, or he just plain hates America.
Several web sites I surveyed indicate ol’ TJ said nothing of the kind. Some even said, No, TJ never said that. I think I’ll classify that as a lie until someone can show me different. That’s the big out and out lie of the mail, expended on TJ – a sentiment he’d be unlikely to express. He’d be far more wary of monarchies and, perhaps, radical Revolutionaries (think France at this time period).
Favorite habits of the GOP, and if you think that’s flippant, go examine the fiscal behavior of the GOP dominated Congress during the Bush years – or the recently passed tax change bill, or even this agreement to avert the imminent government shutdown. Then there’s the endless GOP-initiated wars, money-till-busting military budget, Senator Tom Price (he who seems to have manipulated pharmaceutical companies to his benefit) … Still, the anti-government flavor of this quote is disturbing in itself, because, unlike Rome, the American government is OUR government. You don’t want to see endless wars, etc? Don’t elect the GOP, and proctor the Democrats. It’s our government, not some monarchy, so we need to examine our candidates, only vote for those who are acceptable (voting the Party ticket, whether it’s the oliphants or the asses is how we got into this mess), and be willing to honestly proctor the winners. Given the record of the two parties since 2000 (I’ll go back to 1990, even, although it doesn’t mean much, given the passage of years), I think the Democrats have earned the right to foul things up.
The mistake of stripping context. Several other weather events, such as steadily warming temperatures, other hurricanes, higher CO2 concentrations, etc, add the necessary context to look at that last hurricane and state that while it may have come regardless of CC, CC made it worse.
Call it a false call to common sense.
Hillary kicked butt in the Benghazi hearings. Who can’t remember a damn thing?
Jeff Sessions. You should see the hearing he’s had regarding the Russia investigation. You think if they’d shown him his wife, he’d say he couldn’t recall who she was. Seriously.
But I do find it interesting how the Republicans are still desperate to run against… Hillary Clinton. The next Presidential campaign should be very interesting as the GOP candidates desperately try to run against…. Hillary Clinton. I wonder, once she passes away, if they’ll try to resurrect her into… zombie Hillary Clinton.
But I know my reader didn’t twitch when he saw some half-wit’s words in Kermit’s mouth. Right? Too smart.
Well, look at that – it’s true, Billy-boy did say that. So what? Is Buckley God or something? He wouldn’t even be considered a Republican in today’s environment – they’d run him out for being too liberal. You don’t think so? They ran Senator Richard Lugar out of office, one of the brightest and most respected Senators of the 20th century, because he was no longer conservative enough. Bill would be a proud independent these days.
Goodness, the things you learn doing research – Buckley endorsed a legal ban on tobacco. Wow.
You WANT to see her rapping her husband’s knuckles and telling him what to cook for dinner? But, seriously, why the love for your vanquished foe? Is it too hard to spatter mud over someone new?
The definition of DREAMER is someone brought into America illegally at a very young age and now grown up. Kick them out of the United States now, and they’d have nowhere to go, no familiarity with anywhere – but here. Mental disorder? Please. It’s compassion. You know, the stuff they’re supposed to teach at church?
Here’s some classic misdirection – it’s not the liberals or Democrats or progressives clamoring to rewrite the Constitution.
It’s the conservatives. Shaking your head? Here’s just one story among many on the subject. It’s not even possibly fake news, because you can go look it all up. It’s all of legal record.
And the propaganda there is a lovely sentence, isn’t it? Gets the reader stirred up, as the Constitution is about as sacred as it gets, outside of a religion.
Except a few conservatives hate it. I can guess why, but I’m tired of writing. So, sure, get stirred up – and then consider who really wants to take away your Constitution, your Bill of Rights, and all those other things that have made this country one of the finest the world has ever seen.
And, if you’re a GOP voter, or even a member – just how far right has GOP gone to even consider such an option? To throw away a system of proven worth, for private, selfish reasons. What have you to lose if the Constitution is slipped into a back-alley garbage can – and the amazing GOP marketing machine rumbles into life to tell you that life with the Constitution was a horrid nightmare of skittering monsters, of immigrants slitting everyone’s throat, and that the authors of that Constitution were really all pedophiles.
You don’t think that won’t happen? I hope you’re right. But I’ll be betting against you on that one. If they can call one of their own an ISIS supporter, they could easily call Ben Franklin a pedophile.
And when, pray tell, were guns made into people? That’s what this goof wants you to miss.
If you like it to be a bit more tangible, a gun sitting around unused isn’t worth much. An immigrant, however, is working his ass off, picking fruit, hauling garbage – a number of jobs that Americans won’t take are filled by immigrants. Be glad of it, else your supermarket’s produce section might be a lot smaller. Or more expensive.
Ah, another false analogy, energetically beaten to a pulp. Brings life to the world!
Criticism is how institutions are improved. Or do you think happy faces are the only way we know things are good?
Easy. The poorly educated are less productive. Society derives far more benefits from investing in them. Indeed, it raises the question of why tuition rates keep going up. Why should society get the free ride of all the benefits that college graduates bring them? And, I assure you, it’s quite a lot. Conversely, what do we lose when someone looks at tuition, shakes their head, and heads off to clerk at the convenience store?
I’ve written on this subject before. The misdirection lies in believing only the potential student will benefit from college education. Society? Never comes up. Oh, it’s brought up, but it gets ignored.
Someone should do a study, but then everyone who hoards their cash against the day they die would scream that it’s All. Fake. News. Because that lets them not help further society. It’s hard to touch and feel, but in reality, college grads help society.
Well, another round of kicking a poisonous snake in the mouth is over with, and I hope you played along with me. This email was meant to roil you up, but I hope your roiling has been directed at the truly deserving target.
The author of it.
Representative Devin Nunes (CA-R), chairman of the House Intel Committee and purveyor of various vacuous spectacles, appears to be indulging in another such, according to CBS News:
In a sign of increasing partisan hostilities, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee plan to construct a wall – a physical partition – separating Republican and Democratic staff members in the committee’s secure spaces, according to multiple committee sources. It’s expected to happen this spring.
For now, some Republican committee members deny knowing anything about it, while strongly suggesting the division is the brainchild of the committee’s chairman, Devin Nunes, R-California.
“I’m not part of that decision,” said Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas. “You’ve got to talk to Devin. I don’t know what they’re trying to do one way or the other.”
“I swear to God I didn’t know that,” said Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Florida, when asked about the plan. While acknowledging a wall might not be constructive for the committee’s work, he said, “The level of trust and the level of everything down there is – it’s poison. It’s absolute poison down there.”
Rooney said one reason for the tension is an erosion of trust, exacerbated by an ongoing ethics investigation into the “entire Republican staff,” including “the woman up front that answers the phone” for alleged leaks. He later added that the matter was being handled by the Office of Congressional Ethics.
After some thought, though, I suspect this could dovetail quite neatly with the supposedly small kerfuffle in which Trump ended up accusing the Democrats of being traitors for not clapping at his State of the Union address. Many pundits wrote it off as being light-hearted banter with the crowd – accusations of treason? – but that’s a bit hard to swallow.
So this might be the next step. Remember back when America agreed that we always show a united front to foreign adversaries? The House Intel Committee was considered to be part of that united front, and members of the committee made a special effort to drop partisanship when appointed to this prestigious, if somewhat secretive, committee. Partisanship should stop at the borders, or so the feeling went.
That went by the boards after the infamous letter to Iran by the GOP Senators.
But the reputation of the Committee still exists. Nunes’ move, assuming it’s a good report and it comes to fruition, is a signal useful to the GOP propaganda arm to say that the Democrats are not to be trusted, that they are traitors.
Given the recent clownish behavior of Nunes, this might catch the Democrats by surprise.
1With apologies to Sondheim and Lapine, this is a misquote from Into The Woods. The actual quote:
When first I appear I seem mysterious, but when explained I’m nothing serious.
And now Steve Wynn , former RNC Finance Chairman, has stepped down as CEO of Wynn Resorts:
Billionaire casino magnate Steve Wynn stepped down as CEO of Wynn Resorts, the company said Tuesday.
Wynn, who has donated millions to the Republican Party, was accused of sexual misconduct by several people who have worked at his Las Vegas casinos, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal in late January. The article detailed a pattern of behavior that spans decades and included accusations by employees that they were coerced by him to perform sex acts.
“It is with a collective heavy heart that the board of directors of Wynn Resorts today accepted the resignation of our founder, CEO and friend Steve Wynn,” Boone Wayson, non-executive director of the board of directors, said in a statement. [NBC News]
Steve Benen asks:
This would ordinarily be the point at which the RNC announces that it’s giving up the money it received from Wynn, but that’s apparently not the case.
A Wall Street Journal reporter noted yesterday that an RNC spokesperson said Wynn stepping down as his company’s CEO “doesn’t change” the party’s position on keeping his contributions.
RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel recently said she’s willing to return the money – if an investigation launched by Wynn’s company finds compelling evidence of wrongdoing.
And, ya know, technically I can see McDaniel’s point. Wynn’s announcement simply noted that he felt he could no longer be effective, given the negative publicity.
But, as Benen points out, the Republican Governors Association (RGA) did return the money. That complicates matters.
This is looking more and more like the idolatry of money has taken deeply hold in some Republicans. Which, I suppose, is no surprise. But it takes money to run national campaigns, and that’s the RNC‘s business, not the RGA‘s. Given the low standing in which the current GOP Congressional members are held, it’s no surprise they’d prefer not to give up this billionaire’s money, because it’s going to take an avalanche of slick advertising to hold back this particular tide.
Perhaps the GOP should think about what they’re doing before putting their foot into it. I’m talking about such foolishness as trying to replace the ACA, the silly Nunes memo shit, and in fact all of the amateurism and incompetence on current exhibit in Congress.
Including their amateur President.
The wily plans of the oil companies – also known as survival plans – will have to contend with similar instincts from everyone else, and the latter are more aligned with the survival of current civilization rather than corporate survival. FTN News has a report on EuroStar, the company that runs the rail line between Paris and London via the Channel Tunnel:
Targeting a 50% reduction in plastics by 2020
Reducing waste is central to Eurostar’s Tread Lightly programme which is focused on minimising waste on board and identifying innovative alternatives to traditional packaging. Over the next three years, Eurostar has committed to halving its consumption of plastics and usage of paper tickets.This drive to remove plastics has been launched with the elimination of plastic straws onboard Eurostar trains and in its business lounges which is the first in a series of planned initiatives.
Sami Grover on Treehugger notes the short time allocated to this goal of 2020 being important, and this:
It’s also worth noting that achieving such goals is no longer pie-in-the-sky ambitious. The falling cost of renewables, electric vehicles and other such technologies means that companies that really set their minds to it can move very quickly towards sizable carbon savings. I’m willing to bet, also, that they’ll do pretty well out of it in terms of cost savings too.
And, I’d add, along with adding to the cessation of demand for plastics, adding to the demand for renewables and greener technologies will motivate the markets to provide them, and at cheaper costs. This should help sooth those who are outraged at the thought of Big Oil going away – most likely the elected government representatives Big Oil has bought, rather than the libertarian free marketers, who are a little more pure in their devotion to markets and capitalism.
I’ve talked in the past about how the RINO phenomenon in combination with the team politics concept would seem to lead to the inevitable transmutation of the GOP from a center-right political party to a far-right party embracing positions that can only hope to be described as eccentric – and are more likely to be most accurately described as fallacious and ridiculous. CNN has the story:
Rep. Lou Barletta, an immigration hardliner running in a crowded US Senate primary in Pennsylvania, came in contact over the years with fringe organizations and individuals with views far outside the mainstream of American politics, a CNN KFile review of his public appearances over the past decade reveals.
Prior to serving in Congress for the last seven years, Barletta was the mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, where he enacted tough measures to crack down on illegal immigration, including an act that allowed the city to impose fines on landlords who rented to undocumented immigrants and deny permits to businesses who employed them (the ordinance was struck down in federal court).
So he’s solid right-winger? Not so fast.
As mayor, Barletta did an interview with a fringe publication that promotes Holocaust denial and headlined a rally where a political activist and musician who has questioned the Holocaust and promoted conspiracies about the September 11, 2001 attacks also spoke and performed. As a congressman, Barletta appeared on a panel put on by the controversial Youth for Western Civilization and spoke at an event hosted by a journal that pushes extreme anti-immigrant views.
Now he’s a Representative, and wants to be a Senator:
Barletta’s positions on immigration and his associations with some of the more extreme elements of the anti-illegal immigration movement will face intense scrutiny in the coming months, particularly if he wins the six-candidate GOP primary to face incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey. A race between the two would in part be a referendum on Trump’s immigration policies and rhetoric in a state Trump won by a narrow margin.
Of course:
“Of course Lou was not aware of these individuals’ background,” a spokesperson for Barletta’s campaign said.
Wny not?
Food for thought. Under color of a political party that still pretends to be part of the American mainstream, some guy who talks to Holocaust-denial publications and either exhibits xenophobic tendencies or plays to those of his constituents is reaching for the stars. Makes me wonder how many current GOP Senators have the same tendencies.
Since I mentioned The Los Angeles Times just a short while ago, this news item caught my eye:
The owner of the Los Angeles Times has reached a deal to sell the paper to biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, bringing the paper back under local control for the first time in nearly two decades.
Tronc, the Chicago-based company formerly known as Tribune Publishing, will sell the Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune and the rest of its California News Group to Soon-Shiong for $500 million in cash, plus the assumption of $90 million in pension liabilities, the company announced Wednesday morning.
The $500 million price tag is twice what Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid for the Washington Post when he bought that paper in 2013, and more than seven times what Red Sox owner John Henry paid for the Boston Globe that same year. [CNN]
What this might bring for the Times remains to be seen. CNN adds a biographical note on the new owner:
The major question now is what the Soon-Shiong era will mean for the beleaguered paper. Known as “the world’s richest doctor,” Soon-Shiong is a controversial figure in the healthcare industry and on Wall Street. Shares of his biotech companies, NantHealth and NantKwest, have both fallen by more than 80% since he took them public. An initiative he launched to eradicate cancer by 2020 was described by STAT News as “an elaborate marketing tool” for his businesses. (Through a spokeswoman, Soon-Shiong responded to that story in two statements, saying the initiative had made “remarkable progress.”)
Well. Could be interesting. Does he have the necessary capital to pump into the business in order to make it profitable enough? I’ve never heard of this guy before.
Kevin Drum assesses a research result:
A new paper with access to Uber’s massive database of driver records concludes that female drivers earn 7 percent less than male drivers. Why? Mostly because women drive more slowly than men.
There are a couple of other factors as well that are tied to experience, and that’s interesting enough by itself. But the authors call their result “surprising,” and I think that’s the wrong conclusion. The proper conclusion is that in a job that pays via algorithm and has no special rewards for working long hours, the gender gap is only 7 percent. That’s what you get when there’s no opportunity for discrimination.
Without knowing anything about Uber’s “algorithm,” I think Kevin is committing an indiscretion when he assumes an algorithm is gender-blind. The press (NewScientist, I’m sure, although I don’t happen to have any links handy and I’m feeling lazy today) has reported several instances of machine learning algorithms returning results which are not gender-blind. This happens because the data on which these algorithms are trained reflect society’s biases, and the machine learning algorithm is incapable of compensating for such biases.
I’d also like to say that it’s possible the authors of the study were surprised because, well, it makes for more publicity if you’re surprised.
I wonder if this judge realizes just what he’s letting his profession in for. From The Oregonian:
A California bakery can continue its refusal to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, a judge in Kern County has decided — the opposite legal result that Oregon bakers faced after declining in 2013 to provide a cake for a lesbian couple.
The Gresham, Oregon bakery, Sweet Cakes by Melissa, became a cause célèbre for the conservative “religious liberty” movement. In December, the Oregon Court of Appeals upheld the state labor commissioner’s $135,000 fine against the bakery.
On Monday, California’s Kern County Superior Court Judge David Lampe issued a preliminary injunction. The ruling allows Tastries Bakery owner Cathy Miller, an evangelical Christian, to continue her refusal to bake a wedding cake for Mireya and Eileen Rodriguez-Del Rio.
And the basis for that ruling? The wedding cake has been classified as ‘art’, and an artist cannot be compelled to create art. I wonder how many other pursuits are going to be classified as ‘art’ – and how many times judges are going to be asked to confirm or deny that classification.
But the bigger shame, of course, is the refusal to deliver a wedding cake to a same-sex couple. It is a deeply divisive decision in American society because it’s based on a mistaken assumption, that a civil marriage is also a religious marriage, and, worse, it’s aimed at a class of Americans.
It’s one thing for an artist to be unable to come to an equitable fee arrangement with a client, or refuse to execute a particular artistic expression. It’s quite another to refuse to sell to a class of customers. In this instance of intolerance comes the principle of limited rights – where does my right to buy something end, and where does someone else’s right to sell a product of their own making end?
So I may think the judge messed up, but I also think it’s a hard question and can see Judge Lampe finding it a frustrating case.
Applying thoughts about sectors might help, if we stipulate an “art sector”. Certainly most artists will affirm that the need to make money in order to keep body & soul together is a serious burden on their time and energy, and some become grant-writing experts par excellence, as my Arts Editor has noted on several occasions in the past. In fact, the point of art is neither to make money, nor to produce art of any kind. The point is the ill-defined notion of self-expression.
And that is only occasionally conducive to collecting the money we use in this capitalistic system required to buy food, lodging, and artistic facilities.
This is only to give some context to the problems of the artist.
One final thought: If the decision had gone the other way, and a Satanist had requested a wedding cake of the baker in question, would the bakery be required to bake it?
I recall the name John Lott, PhD. from my twenties or thirties. Reports on his work were published in the libertarian rag REASON Magazine, generally finding research support for NRA positions regarding the practice of generally carrying guns. In one study, he claimed to detect a decrease in the crime rate around those municipalities which had lightened up on gun control laws. I was favorably impressed at the time.
Since then, on rare occasion I run across his name – usually in a poor light. I put it down to the writer in question not liking him or his conclusions. But now I see Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, claims he has caught Lott out in a paper on illegal immigrants:
Economist John R. Lott Jr. of the Crime Prevention Research Center released a working paper in which he purports to find that illegal immigrants in Arizona from 1985 through 2017 have a far higher prison admissions rate than U.S. citizens. Media from Fox News to the Washington Times and the Arizona Republic have reported on Lott’s claims while Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) have echoed them from their positions of authority. However, Lott made a small but fatal error that undermines his finding.
Lott wrote his paper based on a dataset he obtained from the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) that lists all admitted prisoners in the state of Arizona from 1985 to 2017. According to Lott, the data allowed him to identify “whether they [the prisoners] are illegal or legal residents.” This is where Lott made his small error: The dataset does not allow him or anybody else to identify illegal immigrants.[i]
The variable that Lott focused on is “CITIZEN.” That variable is broken down into seven categories. Lott erroneously assumed that the third category, called “non-US citizen and deportable,” only counted illegal immigrants. That is not true, non-US citizen and deportable immigrants are not all illegal immigrants. A significant proportion of non-U.S. citizens who are deported every year are legal immigrants who violate the terms of their visas in one way or the other, frequently by committing crimes. According to the American Immigration Council, about 10 percent of people deported annually are Lawful Permanent Residents or green card holders—and that doesn’t include the non-immigrants on other visas who were lawfully present in the United States and then deported. I will write more about this below.
Too bad for Lott. Kevin Drum’s feelings are on display concerning Lott in a post entitled “John Lott Makes a Mistake. Again. News at 11.”:
Last week, John Lott released a working paper showing that illegal immigrants in Arizona “are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans.” I didn’t bother reading it or reporting on it because Lott is spectacularly dishonest and unreliable in his work and it’s not worth the time to pore through his dreck to find out how he tortured the data.
Source: Alex Nowrasteh
In case you were wondering about proper figures, it appears precision is impossible due to the nature of the dataset (not to mention human error in data entry, etc), but Alex does provide a nice graph of estimates,
which suggests immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than natural born Americans.
What’s the lesson here? Be careful who you admire when you’re young, perhaps. And, to justify the title of this post, I have to say that seeing he’s a gun-rights advocate, and, given his apparent right-ward tilt, probably anti-immigrant, leaves a taste in my mouth. The taste of someone who wants a particular conclusion and will search for it until he gets it.
Real scientists let the evidence tell the story, dictate the conclusion. If, in fact, Lott just tries to prove his preferred conclusion, then despite his Ph.D. and various prestigious academic positions, he’s just a fraud.
HuffPo notes that 314 Action has a horde of scientists running for seats during the mid-terms:
More than 60 researchers and technologists are running for federal office in 2018 as part of a historic wave of candidates with science backgrounds launching campaigns.
At least 200 candidates with previous careers in science, technology, engineering and math announced bids for some of the nation’s roughly 7,000 state legislature seats as of Jan. 31, according to data that 314 Action, a political action committee, shared exclusively with HuffPost.
The group, which launched in 2014 to help scientists run for office, said it is talking with 500 more people and is pressing about half of them to run. An additional 200 such candidates are running for school boards.
“The sheer number is really astonishing,” 314 Action founder Shaughnessy Naughton told HuffPost. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”
This is the largest number of scientists to run for public office in modern history. If any of them win, it could dramatically multiply the number of scientists in Congress beyond Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.), the lone Ph.D. scientist, a physicist.
A waterfall of rationality? Against a sea of madness? Ah, bad poetry, it is.
But I certainly wish them well. I don’t know if any of them are running in Minnesota.
CNN is reporting that SpaceX‘s Falcon Heavy had a successful liftoff today:
The pioneering rocket firm just pulled off the unexpected, and carried out what appears to be a seamless first-ever launch of its massive new rocket, called Falcon Heavy.
That makes SpaceX the owner of the world’s most powerful operational rocket.
Falcon Heavy took flight Tuesday around 3:45 pm ET from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
About two and a half minutes after launch, the two side boosters on the rocket detached and headed back to Earth.
The rocket is built by SpaceX, the game-changing company helmed by billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Thousands of onlookers could be heard cheering on the company’s livestream.
In the run up to launch, it wasn’t at all clear whether the rocket would work.
“People [came] from all around the world to see what will either be a great rocket launch or the best fireworks display they’ve ever seen,” Elon Musk said in an interview with CNN’s Rachel Crane.
Wow. I was just reading about the complicated plumbing that goes into these monsters, because they’re really multiple rockets strapped together. Two of the boosters made it back down and landed safely; news on the third is not available. And you have to like this:
On board the rocket that’s now headed deeper into space is Musk’s personal Tesla (TSLA) roadster. At the wheel is a dummy dressed in a spacesuit, and the car is blaring David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on an endless loop. Cameras on board the car showed it still headed deeper into outer space. Musk plans to put the car into orbit around the sun.
That’s called testosterone, I do believe.
Benjamin Wittes and Jonathan Rauch have a message for all conservatives in The Atlantic, a message which directly contradicts their usual thoughtful message:
We’re proposing something different. We’re suggesting that in today’s situation, people should vote a straight Democratic ticket even if they are not partisan, and despite their policy views. They should vote against Republicans in a spirit that is, if you will, prepartisan and prepolitical. Their attitude should be: The rule of law is a threshold value in American politics, and a party that endangers this value disqualifies itself, period. In other words, under certain peculiar and deeply regrettable circumstances, sophisticated, independent-minded voters need to act as if they were dumb-ass partisans. …
One more nonreason for our stance: that we are horrified by the president. To be sure, we are horrified by much that Trump has said and done. But many members of his party are likewise horrified. Republicans such as Senators John McCain and Bob Corker and Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse, as well as former Governors Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, have spoken out and conducted themselves with integrity. Abandoning an entire party means abandoning many brave and honorable people. We would not do that based simply on rot at the top.
So why have we come to regard the GOP as an institutional danger? In a nutshell, it has proved unable or unwilling (mostly unwilling) to block assaults by Trump and his base on the rule of law. Those assaults, were they to be normalized, would pose existential, not incidental, threats to American democracy.
Future generations of scholars will scrutinize the many weird ways that Trump has twisted the GOP. For present purposes, however, let’s focus on the party’s failure to restrain the president from two unforgivable sins. The first is his attempt to erode the independence of the justice system. This includes Trump’s sinister interactions with his law-enforcement apparatus: his demands for criminal investigations of his political opponents, his pressuring of law-enforcement leaders on investigative matters, his frank efforts to interfere with investigations that implicate his personal interests, and his threats against the individuals who run the Justice Department. It also includes his attacks on federal judges, his pardon of a sheriff convicted of defying a court’s order to enforce constitutional rights, his belief that he gets to decide on Twitter who is guilty of what crimes, and his view that the justice system exists to effectuate his will. Some Republicans have clucked disapprovingly at various of Trump’s acts. But in each case, many other Republicans have cheered, and the party, as a party, has quickly moved on. A party that behaves this way is not functioning as a democratic actor.
And there are more sins they consider. It’s an article worth your time as they lay out their own backgrounds, and then the problematic behaviors besetting the Republicans.
I read Wittes from time to time on Lawfare, and his status as a national security professional, a traditionally non-partisan position, plus his generally sober analysis leads me to trust him.
I am not particularly familiar with Rauch.
Me? I plan to consider all candidates for offices for which I’m eligible to vote, in the belief that a sober, old-line Republican that can move the party back to the center is better than a fringe Democrat.
But I don’t expect to be confronted with such a choice. The Minnesota GOP went flying rightward 25 years ago, and I have yet to see any evidence of a return to sobriety. Indeed, a friend who recently had gone to work for them dropped out and, well, I didn’t dig into his withdrawal, but he seemed a little shell-shocked. I know he wasn’t voting for Trump, so perhaps the upset was, uh, upsetting for him.
I doubt a groundswell of support will appear for this article, especially among conservatives still caught in the tribal trap, but it’s worth a try.
And one more thing they mention:
… but recently the Democrats have made up for lost time by moving rapidly leftward.
That’s definitely a concern to me. Radical parties are threatening entities, which makes it easier to herd people into voting for other radical positions.
Not that radical positions aren’t eventually adopted by a party – but moving rapidly? That’s not a great sign.
