Comments Off on When The Experts Don’t Say What You Want To Hear
In WaPo Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) lays out how Congress has become a hollow shell since the years that Rep. Gingrich (R-GA) held the Speaker’s gavel:
Our decay as an institution began in 1995, when conservatives, led by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), carried out a full-scale war on government. Gingrich began by slashing the congressional workforce by one-third. He aimed particular ire at Congress’s brain, firing 1 of every 3 staffers at the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Research Service and the Congressional Budget Office. He defunded the Office of Technology Assessment, a tech-focused think tank. Social scientists have called those moves Congress’s self-lobotomy, and the cuts remain largely unreversed.
Gingrich’s actions didn’t stop with Congress’s mind: He went for its arms and legs, too, as he dismantled the committee system, taking power from chairmen and shifting it to leadership. His successors as speaker have entrenched this practice. While there was a 35 percent decline in committee staffing from 1994 to 2014, funding over that period for leadership staff rose 89 percent.
This imbalance has defanged many of our committees, as bills originating in leadership offices and K Street suites are forced through without analysis or alteration. Very often, lawmakers never even see important legislation until right before we vote on it. During the debate over the Republicans’ 2017 tax package, hours before the floor vote, then-Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) tweeted a lobbying firm’s summary of GOP amendments to the bill before she and her colleagues had had a chance to read the legislation. A similar process played out during the Republicans’ other signature effort of the last Congress, the failed repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Their bill would have remade one-sixth of the U.S. economy, but it was not subject to hearings and was introduced just a few hours before being voted on in the dead of night. This is what happens when legislation is no longer grown organically through hearings and debate.
Of course, it’s important to remember that Pascrell is a Democrat criticizing his opponents. Nevertheless, he is one of the best situated Americans to describe how Congress has changed, particularly in its acquisition and evaluations of information, and his is an important contribution to the conversation. Republicans may assert their favorite argument, that it’s Big Government and Way Too Much Spending, but I think that’s become an argument with some holes in it, given the vast incompetence exhibited by the Republican leadership of the 115th Congress (that’d be the one just concluded a few days ago, when Rep. Pelosi (D-CA) assumed the Speaker’s gavel from retiring Rep. Ryan (R-WI)). Their inability to follow an appropriate process for creating legislation concerning the most important issues facing the nation was, speaking as an independent, simply appalling and inexcusable.
But it can be explained by deliberate actions to cripple our government. No doubt Gingrich would claim – and believe – that he was just rooting out liberals with a distorted view of reality, but in the following decades, it’s become clear that, instead, he and his adherents crippled our government. If lobbyists are indeed often writing legislation via their captured Congresspeople, and then forcing it down the throats of Congress before it can be properly read, much less debated and modified, then Congress has been failing in its duties.
Later in the article, Pascrell claims Pelosi, as the new Speaker, will be trying to repair at least some of the damage. Whether this works out or not, we shall see. I suspect, given the propensity of new generations to lean towards data analysis, the ideology and power fixation of Gingrich and his buddies may be rejected as foolish failure as the youngsters continue to move into government.
But they do have to wake up and start taking an interest in governance.
A reader thinks we need more data points concerning real wage growth, or its lack thereof:
That graph needs one showing income and wages for others. Considering that’s all wiggling around in an area less than 2% wide, it doesn’t really say much.
To my mind, it says it all: blue collar wages, in real terms and to the extent that our inflation measures measure something useful, have remained stagnant since at least 1966. One of the best ways to move up from blue collar is to get a college level education. But what if the cost of higher education is rising faster than the general inflation rate? And, if you believe the Edvisorswebsite, it has from 1977 – 2013:
That has pushed education further and further out of the reach of the blue collar segment. Of course, there are scholarships and grants and loans, but these are basically ways for various groups to control who gets to go to college, and who does not – rather than letting the students decide if they want to go to college or not. I suppose if your decision would be negative anyways, then it doesn’t matter so much.
So this is just one example of the problem of stagnant real wages for blue collar workers – they’re stuck in a hole that it’s difficult, even impossible, to dig your way out of.
Moreover, transplant Centers are managing higher risk transplant recipients that require more complex induction regimens and longer term use of such biologic agents in the context of desensitization or abrogation of de novo antibody mediated injury.
Yeah, I’m not entirely certain of that last bit, either.
The email bag once again has yielded up a bit of right wing propaganda (I get quite a bit of left wing propaganda, which I’ve recently covered), which this time around is rather more subtle than the norm. A good part of the reason is that it doesn’t delve into easily proven or disproven historical claims, but rather into the criminology surrounding our southern border with Mexico: that’s right, it’s pro-border wall propaganda.
I found, while researching the claims made, that criminology concerning these various claims is very underdeveloped. Some statistics are not kept at all, some are in fragmentary form, certain statistics cannot be collected because the victims do not choose to perform them, etc.
Against this background of uncertainty, these claims are made in a very positive format, which is to say, each is made, followed by an exclamatory FACT!, as if they are viable bricks in their unanswerable argument. But let’s talk about them, one by one, for evaluation purposes.
The propaganda itself is not text, but a video. While the mail I received attached it as an mp4 video, I also found it on YouTube, and will add it to the end of this post. I will transcribe the claims and answer them with the data, where available.
The section headers are mine, they are not from the propaganda, and are employed to increase readability. Any bolding in the quotes are mine, not the authors’, unless otherwise noted.
Crime Rates Of Illegal Aliens
… An illegal alien in the state of Arizona is twice as likely to commit a crime versus a natural born citizen.
The closest I could come to verifying this is a study by Dr. John Lott, Jr., who, according to the Washington Times, is President (and possibly the only employee) of the Crime Prevention Research Center. From the study’s abstract:
Using newly released detailed data on all prisoners who entered the Arizona state prison from January 1985 through June 2017, we are able to separate non-U.S. citizens by whether they are illegal or legal residents. Unlike other studies, these data do not rely on self-reporting of criminal backgrounds. Undocumented immigrants are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans.
However, this report has come under heavy criticism. Alex Nowrasteh at the right-wing Cato Institute, for example, believes the entire paper was invalidated due to a data analysis mistake by Dr. Lott.
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.
The interested reader should click through to see Mr. Nowrasteh’s analysis of the error.
Dr. Lott’s study was considered to go quite against the flow of other analyses. Non-partisan FactCheck.org’s characterization of the question of crime rates in the illegal immigrant population in the context of competing claims from Republican President Trump and Senator Sanders (I-VT) may be the most believable I ran across:
President Donald Trump said it’s “not true” that immigrants in the U.S. illegally are “safer than the people that live in the country,” providing several crime statistics he claimed represented the “toll of illegal immigration.” Sen. Bernie Sanders made the opposite claim, saying: “I understand that the crime rate among undocumented people is actually lower than the general population.”
Who is right?
There are not readily available nationwide statistics on all crimes committed by immigrants in the country illegally. Researchers have provided estimates through statistical modeling or by extrapolating from smaller samples. One such study backs the president’s claim, but several others support Sanders’ statement.
FactCheck.org later cites Cato Institute research:
“Illegal immigrants are 47 percent less likely to be incarcerated than natives.” (And legal immigrants are even less likely to be in jail or prison.)
All of which is based on extrapolations, estimates, etc.
This is one of those situations in which biased readers can read their own conclusions into the data, simply by refusing to believe, or disbelieve, in the research methods – and it’s easy to understand their reactions. But this simply reinforces the point I’d like to make, which is this:
Using Dr. Lott’s apparently deeply flawed study in such a positive manner as displayed in the pro-border wall propaganda is intellectually dishonest. The study is not generally accepted by Dr. Lott’s peers, insofar as I can see, and while his study may be congruent with the views of the zealots of the anti-immigrationists, this doesn’t make the study right to cite when it’s methods are flawed.
I might further note, in my own experience, that Dr. Lott’s results are often congruent with the right wing, most often in the area of gun rights, and yet those studies are often disputed and, supposedly, disproven, if I’m to believe my casual reading.
This is not to accuse Dr. Lott of publishing deliberately fraudulent research. Instead, I’d like to suggest that he’s suffering from a form of intellectual error called confirmation bias. This manifests, in my experience as a software engineer, as finding an expected result after developing some software, or an expected coding error when researching a bug, and STOPPING. That is, I found what I expected, I must be right, so let’s stop right here, proclaim victory, and go home. The proper intellectual approach for us flawed human types should be to ask, Where did I go wrong? and if you can’t find an answer to that, maybe you’re right. But, from time to time, there’s some end case you didn’t test that makes your software buggy. You didn’t find it because your test cases all worked – and you never thought of the end case that invalidates your conclusion of perfection.
I suspect Dr. Lott just isn’t as thorough as he should be.
Drug Smuggling Over The Southern Border
… 90% of all heroin and fentanyl come across the southern border.
My estimate is that between 90 and 94 percent of all heroin consumed in the United States comes from Mexico. My estimate is that a very tiny percentage now, perhaps as little as 2 percent to 4 percent, comes from Colombia. And the remainder, which might be somewhere in the 4 to 6 percent category, comes from Asia, the majority of that coming from Afghanistan.
Finding numbers for fentanyl is more difficult, but let’s just stipulate our propagandist has a true fact, because concentrating on whether or not these numbers are accurate leaves the reader open to the mistake of forgetting the context. And what is the context? The conclusion that the wall will help stem the flow of drugs into the United States. In this respect, WOLA, a human rights organization advocating for Central America (Mexico is part of North America, not Central America, in their view, I think), can help:
Misconception 2: “Building a wall would greatly reduce heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and fentanyl trafficking.”
Proponents of a border wall often claim that it would help the United States solve its opioid addiction problem by blocking heroin smugglers from Mexico. This reveals a misunderstanding of how cross-border smuggling works.
The vast majority of the drug that enters from Mexico does so through “ports of entry”—the 48 official land crossings through which millions of people, vehicles, and cargo pass every day. “Heroin seizures almost predominantly are through the port of entry and either carried in a concealed part of a vehicle or carried by an individual,” then-U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske told a congressional committee last year. “We don’t get much heroin seized by Border Patrol coming through, I think just because there are a lot of risks to the smugglers and the difficulty of trying to smuggle it through,” he said.
“The most common method employed by Mexican TCOs [Transnational Criminal Organizations] involves transporting drugs in vehicles through U.S. ports of entry (POEs),” the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) reported in its 2016 National Drug Threat Assessment. “Illicit drugs are smuggled into the United States in concealed compartments within passenger vehicles or commingled with legitimate goods on tractor trailers,” according to the document.
The lesson here is that there are two components to evaluate in just about any argument: the data, and the logic. This propaganda, through its forceful presentation (“FACT!“), attempts a sleight of hand trick by using what does appear to be a true fact and a forceful presentation to force through a conclusion which actually doesn’t follow. The fact is relevant, but the omission of other critical facts, namely the methods for transporting the drugs, renders this propaganda fallacious and untrustworthy.
Finally, there is an implicit assumption to this argument which is, at least in my view, false, and that basis is that the problem is supply, not demand. I treated this fallacious assumption in this post here, but the argument is buried so deeply that it might discourage the reader, so permit me to quote myself for my final rebuttal to this “fact”:
Supply. [Hugh] Hewitt’s argument is that the supply of illegal drugs is the problem. Few economists will find this a reasonable argument, because the true driver is the demand. Demand, demand, demand, repeat it over and over and you soon realize that fentanyl is not the problem, it’s a symptom of a deeper malaise in our society. Whether it’s the inevitable stress of a society transitioning from the arbitrary strictures of divinities to reasoned debate concerning ethics, morality, and law, or the stress caused by manufacturing moving overseas, or the stress of a populace that often does not push itself intellectually and now finds itself in an international competition where intellect is the key to success, it needs to be explored. It may not be a resolvable matter, as sad as that makes me, but it’s important to realize that cutting supply does not eliminate the problem. It’ll be like squeezing an unpoppable balloon, the symptom will just reappear in some other form. The core problem, singular or plural, needs to be identified and, if possible, addressed.
Child Sex Trafficking
… Over 10,000 kids are illegally sex trafficked across the southern border every single year.
Whether the propagandist means the entire southern border, or the Arizona border is unclear. So are the numbers itself. Research on this topic is frustrating, and so I, once again, have a real problem with some dude shouting FACT! as if he has indisputable information. Here’s a chart from CNN on sex trafficking:
Note this isn’t child sex trafficking, this is just human trafficking, and, presuming the former is a subset of the latter, the numbers simply don’t add up.
Of course, an argument can be made that one case is one too many, but this would once again losing focus on the context. Whether or not the numbers are right, why should we believe a wall will be effective? We have reports of people being carried in 18-wheelers, which means crossing at ports of entry. Walls can be tunneled under, they can be climbed.
Even if it’s just one child, it’s a sad situation. But are we building a wall because it’ll stop people who are determined to supply a tragic demand here in our own backyards, or because it’ll satisfy the vanity of a President who promised to build one – and then couldn’t convince his own Party to fund it? This may be the strongest claim of the video, and yet it’s easy to question the facts and the logic it uses to support the wall. Indeed, if we were to build a wall, what would happen to those children who do encounter the wall? Left to die by the traffickers?
Federal Prison Populations
We have 56,000 illegal immigrants in our federal prison system.
The first real fact to remember is that most illegal immigrants do not tramp through the southern border. Most come in legally on visas and then do not leave when they should. This suggests that 56,000 – or whatever might be the true number – is grossly exaggerating the contribution of those who come through the southern border.
That said, Preston Huennekens of the Center for Immigration Studies (“Low-immigratin, Pro-immigrant”) reports, in an article entitled “DOJ: 26% of Federal Prisoners Are Aliens” …
At the end of the first quarter of FY 2018, there were 57,820 known or suspected aliens in federal custody. Within the report itself, the numbers are analyzed respective to the holding entity (BOP [Bureau of Prisons] or USMS [US Marshal Service]).
This is, perhaps, the source of the numbers in the propaganda. How many of them came over the southern border, rather than waltzing in on tourist visas? We don’t know.
Because of lack of reporting of relevant statistics, those in state custody is not known.
But because there are many ways into the United States, we can be fairly sure that 56,000 is far too high an estimate of the number of incarcerated illegal aliens from the southern border.
Federal Prison Costs
135 Billion dollars a year, that’s how much is the financial burden on U.S. taxpayers every single year that illegal immigrants drain from our system.
When it comes to the financial burden of these prisoners, it seems to me that the U.S. Government Accountability Office‘s statistics might be the best source of information. This particular report is dated July 2018, so it’s not out of date.
GAO’s analyses found that the total annual estimated federal costs to incarcerate criminal aliens decreased from about $1.56 billion to about $1.42 billion from fiscal years 2010 through 2015. These costs included federal prison costs and reimbursements to state prison and local jail systems for a portion of their costs. GAO’s analyses also show that selected annual estimated operating costs of state prison systems to incarcerate SCAAP criminal aliens decreased from about $1.17 billion to about $1.11 billion from fiscal years 2010 through 2015. These selected costs included correctional officer salaries, medical care, food service, and utilities.
This is so low that I actually wonder if it’s accurate, but keep in mind this is Federal cost and some State costs. But it remains plain that the experts’ estimate is two magnitudes lower than our propagandists’ estimates. Given the slipperiness with which his other claims have been delivered, a sober reader must give the benefit of the doubt to the folks who are professionals, paid to find the truth – not the propagandist with an agenda to push.
But much more importantly is the failure to bring the entire context to light. Sure, illegal aliens in prisons cost us money. But how about illegal aliens who are quietly working for a living and paying taxes? Our happy little propagandist somehow fails to present the balanced case, but PBS does cover it.
In general, more people working means more taxes — and that’s true overall with undocumented immigrants as well. Undocumented immigrants pay an estimated $11.6 billion a year in taxes, according to the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy.
Comments Off on Trouble In The Troubled Middle East
I’ve been distracted from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s troubles by our own, but his have been continuing without me. They may impact the United States, at least as a distraction from President Trump’s huge troubles. Ben Caspit reports for AL Monitor concerning Netanyahu’s recent nation-wide address, touted as a big announcement:
One minute after Netanyahu began to talk, it was clear that all the drama had been unwarranted. He did not announce peace, declare war or reveal a new existential threat. He presented no achievement in the battle against Iranian nuclearization. Instead, he faced the camera to complain about the way he was treated in the investigations and to demand the right to confront the men who turned state’s witness against him. He even suggested that the face-to-face meetings be broadcast live.
“He lost touch with reality,” one of Netanyahu’s ministers told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity after the broadcast. “He thinks this is a reality show and that he is the director.”
It’s one thing when the opposition claims you’ve lost contact with reality. But one of your own Cabinet ministers? Sounds like a former Secretary we’ve heard from. And with an election coming up very soon …
Netanyahu suddenly understood that he stands to lose the race he started just two weeks ago, when he brought the election date forward, between [Attorney General] Mandelblit’s announcement [of possible indictments on the charge of corruption] and the election. Netanyahu examined surveys that probed the influence of an indictment before the elections and concluded its political impact could be lethal. We’re not talking only about the election results — Netanyahu knows that even if he wins the elections after such an announcement, he would have a hard time assembling a coalition. He would need a miracle that would heighten the power of the far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties to give him a majority, with partners willing to serve under a prime minister who is struggling to prove his innocence in court. It is unclear whether other potential partners would enter a coalition under such circumstances. Even for Netanyahu, that miracle is likely unattainable. He also understands that he is fighting not only for his political life, but for his freedom.
What is especially interesting for me, though, is how this is affecting Netanyahu’s political party, the Likud:
The polls taken after Netanyahu’s appearance revealed that a significant majority of the general public does not believe his version of events or his claims that the proceedings against him are unfair. On the other hand, Netanyahu reaped success among Likud voters, his base, and got them to close ranks. A large majority of them believes him and swallows his version as absolute truth. Still, this limited achievement might not be sufficient for his political survival.
Indicating that, like Trump, Netanyahu has enticed a large number of citizens into placing their leader above truth. A precarious time for Israel, between hostile powers, a potentially corrupt leader, and an opposition that doesn’t appear to sport a plausible replacement for Netanyahu:
Despite all the above and the unprecedented drama, we must remember an important point: Netanyahu still enjoys a large lead in the polls. Even now, when his situation seems hopeless, it is too early to eulogize the man.
Mehmet Ali Buyukkara, a theologian at Istanbul’s Sehir University, said he was hardly surprised by the findings of the KONDA survey. He tweeted, “Those who are pious in terms of language, appearance and perhaps worship have failed the class in terms of morals, probity, sincerity and attentiveness to haram.” According to the scholar, public display of piety have become freer. But the change has not led to greater attraction to religion but to “alienation to a certain extent.”
We happen to have Amazon Prime, and we’ve been watching it via a TiVo unit. We stumbled across Great Greek Myths, and we’ve just been laughing our way through it. Not for the content, but for the consistently awful hash of a captioning effort. We don’t know if it’s being done by a computer tool of some sort, or some poor translator who doesn’t know English. Some of it’s consistently wrong, such as Thebes translated as Thieves except for once, while more difficult Greek names tend to be more variable.
And then there’s the occasional exclamation which correlates with nothing at all, such as “Hermes, No!”
Comments Off on Keeping The Straw In The Mouth, Suckin’ Down The Power
Jerry Falwell, Jr, President of Liberty University, preceded in that position by his prominent father, gave an interview with WaPo a few days ago that has caused a bit of a stir. Elizabeth Bruenig, also in WaPo, uses her interpretation of theology to make this point:
Of course, that doesn’t mean Falwell never cares for Christian principle in American leaders, or that he would actually endorse a misreading of Augustine if it were laid out for him next to a stronger reading. He seems instead to have been reasoning backward, trying to explain in Christian terms why he holds the conclusions he does, rather than beginning from the religion and following it to its own conclusions. Critics of Christianity have struggled for centuries with precisely what Falwell does: That the religion isn’t very good at making you rich or powerful and that it offers very little advice for crushing your enemies or securing your own benefit at the expense of others. “A poor person never gave anyone a job. A poor person never gave anybody charity, not of any real volume,” Falwell claims, in direct contradiction to a lesson shared by Jesus in Mark 12.
Tim Thomas on the right-wing The Resurgentremarks on a disturbing remark by Falwell:
But note what he says in defense of supporting a man who is lacking in the moral realm.
“What earns him my support is his business acumen.”
“A poor person never gave anyone a job. A poor person never gave anybody charity, not of any real volume.”
“ … he’s got African American employment to record highs, Hispanic employment to record highs. They need to look at what the president did for the poor.”
Notice anything in common among these statements? In each case, Falwell relies upon financial arguments to defend the notion of supporting someone lacking morality. The unavoidable impression is that Falwell actually believes improved economic conditions are sufficient to identify policy – and more importantly, that policy’s promoter – as moral.
That part of the actual interview:
You’ve been criticized by some other evangelical leaders about your support for the president. They say you need to demand higher moral and ethical standards. You disagree with them on that?
It may be immoral for them not to support him, because he’s got African American employment to record highs, Hispanic employment to record highs. They need to look at what the president did for the poor. A lot of the people who criticized me, because they had a hard time stomaching supporting someone who owned casinos and strip clubs or whatever, a lot them have come around and said, “Yeah, you were right.” Some of the most prominent evangelicals in the country have said, “Jerry, we thought you were crazy, but now we understand.”
So let’s talk about morality, or ethics. How do we identify morality and immorality? Most folks would point at a code of ethics or a religious canon and, you know, gesticulate a bit before finally saying “Rule #3 forbids incest!” But, as an agnostic, I’m inclined to throw out what appear to be arbitrary lists of rules and begin anew by asking, In the absence of some divine authority inscribing lists, how do moral / ethical systems form? Are they random?
Biologists may object, but I have no problem applying the principles of evolution to human institutions. To illustrate my point, imagine a collection of fair-sized islands in the ocean. Each has a population of humans. As the Creators, we endow each separate population with a distinct ethical system. From time to time, we check in on them, and what will we find?
That some of these societies are in better shape than others. Some will have gone extinct – or, even more likely, their original ethical system will have gone extinct, replaced by something more geared to societal survival.
Now, of course I’ve glossed over numerous points, such as the effects of resources, general health, and other purposes, but I’m simply making the point that your ethical system will substantially affect your outcomes. So when Falwell attempts to use some perceived positive outcomes as justification for supporting Trump, in his remarks there is a serious echo as to how we determine good ethical systems.
Is this to say I agree with Falwell? No.
Backwards reasoning often suffers from mistaking coincidence for causation: This happened and then that happened, they must be related. Well, no. In any environment of even slight complexity, teasing out which factor is causative and which is caused or even coincidental can be quite the feat. Ethical systems evolve over long periods of time, during which, like biological evolution, avenues are explored and those rules which lead to bad outcomes are explored and discarded, while those rules leading to good outcomes are selected. It’s a bloody business, and sometimes the value of a rule, which is to say whether a rule is good or bad, takes a long time to play out. For example, the American / libertarian rule that greed, in the private sector, is a good thing, is a societal rule that is still rather up in the air, in my view, and its occasional leakage from the private sector into other societal sectors proves to be quite problematic. So when Falwell tries to work backwards from alleged good outcomes to Trump’s actions, activities, and policies, he’s committing an intellectual error of mistaking two possibly unconnected results to Trump’s actions. It would not be unfair to suggest that it’s deeply reminiscent of wishful thinking.
Ethical systems evolve to help produce good outcomes for society, and in that they circumscribe behavior, straying outside those circumscribed boundaries signals danger to society. For example, it’s commonly acknowledged that truth-telling is an important part of leading an ethical existence. Thus the importance of fact-checkers in current society, under the common understanding that the more the President, whether the name is Trump, Smith, or Warren, misleads their base, the more they put society as a whole in more danger, because analyzing both past & proposed policies based on fallacious knowledge of current conditions will, in all probability, lead to fallacious, even dangerous conclusions.
All that said, could Falwell be right? After all, I did not demonstrate that he is wrong without doubt, only that there’s a very good probability that he’s wrong. How about supporting, circumstantial evidence?
Unfortunately for Falwell, he misstates facts and mistakes personal certainty for certitude about reality. Let’s look at some of his statements in the interview. In the following, personal pronouns not referring to himself usually refer to Trump.
What earns him my support is his business acumen.
No, just no. By all reports, he’s at best mediocre.
Yeah, Congress, the spending bill that they forced on him in order to get the military spending up to where it needed to be — he said that would be the last time he signed one of those. But he had no choice because Obama had decimated the military, and it had to be rebuilt.
Falwell fails to note Trump’s whole-hearted embrace of the 2017 tax bill, which contributes far more to the sudden ballooning national debt than the false meme that Obama somehow decimated the military. This is misleading and is easily interpreted as self-serving. The cutting of taxes is doing far more to bankrupt the country than anything else – except perhaps the monstrous military budget.
In general, failing to consider all the evidence, particularly that evidence which hurts your cause, is an ethical failure.
… he’s got African American employment to record highs, Hispanic employment to record highs. They need to look at what the president did for the poor.
A statement shorn of context. Add the context that the previous Administration did far more for the blacks than Trump, and Falwell looks really bad. Noting the disparity between blacks and the general populace simply reinforces the perception that this misleading statement is, again, self-serving.
And this last statement…
Only because I know that he only wants what’s best for this country, and I know anything he does, it may not be ideologically “conservative,” but it’s going to be what’s best for this country, and I can’t imagine him doing anything that’s not good for the country.
This should leave commonsense folks aghast. Even the best of us makes mistakes, yet Falwell thinks that any policy Trump decides on will be what’s best for the country? What, is Trump God?
This is one of those idiotic remarks which forces the reader to make a judgment: is the author of the remark really as dumb as a cinder block, or is this as self-serving as the others? Considering that Falwell managed to “inherit” the post of President of Liberty University upon his father’s death (a creepy circumstance deserving its own rant), has kept it for years, and manages to head up a large segment of the Evangelical movement, I think we can assume he has at least average intelligence.
So one is forced to analyze the statement to understand its hidden message, and that message is that, basically, President Trump is another coming of God on Earth, and so you Evangelical faithful had better get in line behind Falwell and engage in the usual unquestioning obedience. And note the remark about some policies
… may not be ideologically “conservative,” but it’s going to what’s best for this country …
This isn’t a throwaway line, it serves as an insulator for Trump against any sort of judgment that might come out negative from the conservatives. Falwell doesn’t care about the liberals or even the moderates, but when it comes to conservatives, he doesn’t want them to even think they can judge Trump. Just accept and, ah, worship.
So, why? Forgive my cynicism, but the Evangelicals have finally gotten their grip on the levers of power, and by God, if you’ll forgive the phrase, certain of them plan to keep their paws on them. It’s clear from his misstatements and his position of intimacy with Trump that his influence over Trump is far more important to Falwell than much anything else, such as the health of the country. Of course, I may be influenced by my observations that the pulpits do tend to attract those who wish to assume powers beyond their abilities, but then I don’t see much reason to doubt that observation.
It was really quite the interesting interview, a portal into the dark soul of the Evangelical movement. For all that Goldwater was a nut, he sure was right on this one, wasn’t he?
Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.
It’s easy to see this interview for what it is: the religious impulse to impute omniscience to itself. They endorsed Trump, and thus he can do no wrong. It’s really an embarrassment to the religious folks to see this mania sweep over this guy.
Steve Benen writing on Maddowblog concerning the revelation that the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) is only providing partial inspection coverage during the government shutdown:
The good news is, this is the kind of story that only affects people who eat food. Everyone else has no cause for concern.
In WaPo Marc Thiessen makes the case that President Trump’s address to the nation was a big win for the embattled President:
And he laid out his solution, which he explained was “developed by law enforcement professionals and border agents” and includes funds for cutting-edge technology, more border agents, more immigration judges, more bed space and medical support — and $5.7 billion for a “physical barrier” that he called “just common sense.” Without naming her, Trump responded to the absurd charge from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that a wall is “immoral.” Democrats voted repeatedly for physical barriers until he was elected president, he noted. If a wall is immoral, Trump asked, “why do wealthy politicians build walls, fences and gates around their homes? They don’t build walls because they hate the people on the outside, but because they love the people on the inside.”
Thiessen, of course, is well-known as a Trump apologist who has twisted himself inside out on occasion to justify Trump’s record. Steve Benen’s reading of the situation is hardly correlational with Thiessen’s:
He probably won’t admit it publicly, but Donald Trump reportedly didn’t even want to deliver his Oval Office address last night.
The New York Times reported, “[P]rivately, Mr. Trump dismissed his own new strategy as pointless. In an off-the-record lunch with television anchors hours before the address, he made clear in blunt terms that he was not inclined to give the speech or go to Texas, but was talked into it by advisers, according to two people briefed on the discussion who asked not to be identified sharing details.”
The president, of course, delivered the speech anyway, and by any objective measure, it was a transparent failure. As became painfully obvious over the course of his nine minutes, Trump has no plan. He has no new material. He has no offer to extend to his rivals. He has no bill to promote or lobby on behalf of. He has no facts, as evidenced by the avalancheof falsehoods he peddled to the nation. He has no support, with polls showing broad American opposition to his demands for a border wall.
Benen, too, reads the events of the day through his prism, and while I have more sympathy for his take on things – and in particular his reference to polls which document the lack of public support for Trump’s wall – it comes to mind that, in reality, it’s better to wait for polls to emerge indicating whether the citizenry was swayed, or not, by the President, by the Democratic response – or if they just didn’t give a shit. Either or both of these writers may hope to sway opinions.
But while I was contemplating the various spins presented, it seems that after these two and more years, one fact about walls finally tapped me on the shoulder and asked me why I hadn’t mentioned it yet. It’s this:
Do walls at zoos exist to keep visitors out? Or the animals in? How about prisons?
Did the Berlin Wall exist to keep the Western hordes out? Or to keep the citizens of Communist Germany IN? If my reader is too young to remember the Berlin Wall, go look up the statistics on how many people were killed by the Communist guards for attempting to go over the wall, and their identities.
For those readers who prefer to interpret reality through the prism of fantasy, consider the purpose of the wall at the Tower of Cirith Ungol.
Now, I’m not really sure how this all applies to our particular situation. Perhaps it doesn’t. But in all the yelling and screaming from both sides, it’s worth remembering that walls can keep people in as well as out. And that’s an infringement on our freedom, now isn’t it?
The problem with party zealots is that they’re useful right up until the point that a compromise with the big bad enemy comes along – and then they scream bloody murder about being sold out. So I read this CNNreport on the development of a potential compromise to break the government shutdown with some hope, of a perhaps dubious sort, but I’m having my doubts that it’ll immediately go anywhere:
Staring at a prolonged government shutdown, Republican senators are privately planning to court Democratic senators on an immigration deal that would give President Donald Trump money for his border wall and include several measures long-sought by Democrats, according to sources familiar with the matter.
After Trump stormed out of a White House meeting with congressional leaders, GOP senators privately gathered in Sen. Lindsey Graham’s office Wednesday to discuss a way out of the logjam. The long-shot idea: propose an immigration deal that would include $5.7 billion for Trump’s border wall along with several provisions that could entice Democrats.
The plan is in its very early stages. Its chances of success are still very uncertain at best, Republicans cautioned.
As an independent, I do not favor Trump’s Boondoggle, and I wonder if it’s better for the Democrats to hold out in hopes of breaking Trump on this issue. As I view Trump and his ilk as a danger to this country’s most important institutions, it might be a wise thing to do.
But compromise is integral to our style of government, and if the Republican Senators are finally going to get off their asses and offer something up, it’s certainly worth at least considering working with them on it. Possibly the best way to handle this is to offer Trump a paltry $1 billion for his wall in exchange for a few Democratic priorities, and then leave it to Trump to either accept it, and risk the wrath of his base and his Fox News handlers, or veto it and face a possible and humiliating veto override, which would sting especially as the Senate is Republican-controlled. That’d amount to a rejection of Trump by the Senators of his own Party.
Trump remains the center of political life in this country, but no longer as a vortex of chaos for the Democrats, but a cancerous wart on the throat of the Republican Party. Faced with this decision, he may find it impossible to swallow his pride and accept it, and thus split the Republican Party right down the middle.
And the Virginia state Senate race that had the DLCC so worried is in and the results are … blowout. Democrat Boysko wins by nearly 40 points. As I noted before, this seat has a history of recent Democratic victories, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise, except perhaps the magnitude. The total votes cast was just over 21,000, which appears to be a trifle on the low side insofar as turnout goes, but not terribly so.
So I think we can classify the DLCC as willing to harvest dollars through mild misrepresentations and emotional manipulation, although admittedly I couldn’t find any polls for this race, so a DLCC claim that they just didn’t know for sure is somewhat believable. Something to keep in mind, especially as their report of their victory also bridges on to the next special election, which they have left unspecified except that it’s located right here in Minnesota, and involves a Republican-held seat. A little research shows this will be for MN state Senate District 11, and has been held by the Republicans by comfortable margins over the last two elections; Ballotpedia has no data before then. The special election is Feb 5, 2019, and should be more interesting than the Virginia special election.
Perhaps most interesting is the magnitude of the victory of in Virginia, which is quite a bit larger than in previous elections for this seat. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that the Democrats are still excited, especially with the government shutdown and resultant tug of war between Trump and the Democrats over the Trump Boondoggle. Will this continue? I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.
A keratometer, also known as an ophthalmometer, is a diagnostic instrument for measuring the curvature of the anterior surface of the cornea, particularly for assessing the extent and axis of astigmatism. It was invented by the GermanphysiologistHermann von Helmholtz in 1851, although an earlier model was developed in 1796 by Jesse Ramsden and Everard Home. [Wikipedia]
For those readers who found the mystery foreign corporation appealing to SCOTUS to void a subpoena titillating, it has come to a disappointing end, according to Politico:
But on Tuesday, the Supreme Court turned down the company’s request to step into the dispute, at least for now. The order in the case came a little more than two weeks after Chief Justice John Roberts put a temporary freeze on the contempt order and the sanctions.
The court’s order Tuesday offered no explanation for its decision and no justice publicly signaled any dissent. The high court did indicate that Roberts referred the issue to the full court and that the short-term stay he ordered last month was now dissolved.
President Donald Trump is tightening his iron grip on the Republican Party, launching an elaborate effort to stamp out any vestiges of GOP opposition that might embarrass him at the 2020 Republican convention.
The president’s reelection campaign is intent on avoiding the kind of circus that unfolded on the convention floor in 2016, when Never Trump Republicans loudly protested his nomination before a national TV audience. The effort comes as party elites like Utah Sen. Mitt Romney are openly questioning Trump’s fitness for the job, and it’s meant to ensure that delegates at next year’s convention in Charlotte, N.C., are presidential loyalists — not anti-Trump activists looking to create a stir.
But what sparked a new thought was this:
Delegate selection will be preceded by an array of elections for GOP state chairmanships, which began last month. Ohio GOP chief Jane Timken, a close Trump ally, is expected to be easily reelected this week. There are also key contests in Florida and New Hampshire.
The winners of those chairmanships will play major roles in determining who becomes a delegate in Charlotte. Trump aides have been making calls to those states in recent weeks to take stock of the contenders and determine how the contests are likely to play out.
“We are monitoring, tracking, and ensuring the president’s allies are sitting at the top of state parties,” Stepien said.
In the months that follow, individual states will determine how to select their delegates. While some state parties will choose their delegates on their own, others will pick them through conventions or caucuses. Some will hold elections where Republican voters decide.
In each case, the Trump campaign is planning on influencing the process — in some instances by organizing at local conventions, and in others by helping Trump supporters wage campaigns for delegate slots.
And what makes for “… the president’s allies …”?
Think about it. It seems reasonable – to me – to presume an ally of President Trump is someone who approves of lying, taking credit when not due, hyperbolizing beyond all rationalization, and a few other character traits which, frankly, I was taught are not desirable in anyone.
Much less a President.
But these allies of the President are now attempting to take over the levers of power. Quite honestly, if I was a moderate Republican, I would be on my way to the mailbox with that envelope containing my GOP membership card and a letter of resignation. After all, a coterie of people who approve of a lying braggart, who probably are themselves the same, are now trying to take over the entire party.
Can this end well for that moderate Republican?
I’m sure the Trump Team can simply claim that they’re wrapping up a nomination as early as possible and that it’s simply good politics, and I don’t doubt they’re being honest about it, because for them, as the old saying goes, Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing. Sadly, this is rarely true, and it isn’t at this time in American politics. Perhaps for Trump, losing would be the end of his political career, but for the American who believes in country over party, this attempt to shield Trump from intra-Party competition damages the country, rather than improves it, because we need the best candidate the Republicans can provide – not an amateur-hour politician who has proven himself to be a weak and easily manipulated man, incapable of learning or even concentrating. He mistakes bluster for strength, random chaos for strategy.
That’s not what America needs.
So I expect this purification effort in what used to be the Republican Party to squeeze more moderates out and move the party ever further into the wastelands of extremism. Look for the theocrats, such as Jerry Falwell, Jr., delighting in their new-found access to power & influence, to find more and more outlandish ways to justify their pleasure in being in proximity to President Trump.
The party will become more of a strait-jacket, and conservatism, in itself an honorable political tradition when practiced with honesty and wisdom, become more and more discredited. That, too, will be unfortunate, but I think almost inevitable when it has the face of such dishonorable people as Trump, McConnell, Ryan, Falwell, and everyone else swearing fealty to Trump.
Admittedly, not compelling on its own. The story, though, is good. In passing, I have mentioned House of Representatives hopeful Mark Harris (R-NC), supposedly a pastor in District 9 of North Carolina, who employed a Republican operative who allegedly illegally collected and discarded absentee ballots from District 9 voters for the 2018 mid-terms. Harris won the contest, but by a small enough margin that those discarded ballots may matter, and the North Carolina Elections Board refused to certify the election. The House of Representatives has stated it’ll refuse to seat Harris without the certification, so he’s kinda stuck at the moment, as the above .
You’d expect he’d be willing to to speak to the press like, oh, any legitimate representative of the people. But, nope, as WSOC TV found out:
To avoid the media, Mark Harris ran down a fire exit staircase. A man tried to prevent us from following but we still did. The alarm went off as he ran out. When media caught up he sprinted across the street to the First Baptist Church of Charlotte's parking lot #NC09@wsoctvpic.twitter.com/vDFca16EYx
That sort of behavior really makes you wonder, especially as it comes from a pastor, who, popular opinion has it, should really be above such behavior.
Of course, Harris had an excuse: he wanted to go watch a football game. Not exactly responsible behavior.
There’s little chance to closely examine these war machines. Maybe we would have giggled rather than shuddered if we had.
The faux documentary War Of The Worlds – The True Story (2012) is a different approach to the classic story (retold in radio and movie forms a number of times). It’s structured as a continuous interview with “Bertie” Wells, an elderly survivor of the Martian invasion of 1896. It recounts, in linear fashion, the landings and subsequent fighting between British Army regiments and the Martian war machines.
I don’t recall ever reading H. G. Wells’ War Of The Worlds, so I’m not sure of the fidelity of this movie to the novel. Taken on its own, as independent from other retellings, is not easy, since I was favorably impressed, many many years ago, by both the Orson Welles radio version as well as the 1953 movie version, but not quite so much by the slicker 2005 version. But let’s give it a whirl, because it’s fun.
That is, this version of the story is fun.
First, the plot is suitably tight. Playing on our perceptions of late Victorian sensibilities, it’s fascinating to see how the butcher with a horse carriage reacts when a 100 foot tall war machine with a laser cannon comes stomping down on him. The courage of the Army regiments, and, later, the self-sacrificing defensive actions of the fictional warship HMS Thunder Child, reminds me of a letter written by the famous British Army officer T. E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, who, upon being informed of the deaths of two of his brothers in the front lines during World War I in Europe, lamented his loss but their gain in, I suppose, honor, at being able to serve their country to the point of losing their own lives. I recall reading that with some surprise, as I do not believe it is a widespread sentiment in current times. The courage depicted in this movie brought that sentiment once again to mind for my musing and fascination.
Despite isolated successes, humanity’s war efforts are generally so ineffective that armed resistance collapses, and the Martian war machines roam the landscape at will, carbonizing some of the fleeing humans, while scooping others up for a quick bite to eat. But all the while, they carry the seeds of their own destruction within them: the bacteria and viruses of Earth are hard at work, as our invisible, sometimes-loathed fellow Earth-dwellers win the day where the science and arms of mankind cannot, and soon the war machines are collapsing as the invaders driving them die from the very treasure they had in their hands. Claws. Tentacles. It’s a satisfying story in that it celebrates persistence, bravery, and a belief that, where there’s a will, there’s a way – no matter how dubious such a belief may be in real life. There’s no need to ask for congruency with reality in this theme, for if we do, then despair overtakes us and we can never hope to survive if we despair. Take that last chance buzzer-beating shot from half-court, even if you have a broken wrist – you can’t hit that shot if you don’t take it.
Equally well done is the presentation of the movie, because I’d estimate 85% of it is not original footage, but borrowed from old film reels of everyday Victorian life as well as war footage from World War I. Yellowed, sometimes out of focus, the creators of this film have deftly intermixed original footage featuring Bertie and, for a short time, his brother, as each struggles with issues of survival and bravery in the face of a power that just doesn’t care about them, with the old newsreel footage, taken out of context, in order to suggest the reactions of Victorians to the hungry Martians. The intermixing is almost entirely well done; only once did I yell “oooops!” As I’ve watched my Arts Editor struggle with issues of integrating old photographs, now digital, with new photographs, I sympathize with the struggle of doing so in video, and this is not really a criticism of the movie, but only an observation.
Oh, and the Martian war machines? I don’t know if they were original to this production or not – but I loved them. Great stuff. The film makers were mostly faithful to Burke’s adage concerning the sublime – never try to show it all.
I see from the Wikipedia page the producers were following in Orson Welles’ tradition of blurring the line between reality and fiction, and I’m not sure I’d agree that they managed to pull it off – but I do celebrate this well thought out attempt.
So, if you like alien invasion movies, and don’t mind a bit of a twist, see this one. Or if you’re tired of Hollywood blockbusters, see this. I can’t quite say it’s generally recommended, but it’ll repay the curious viewer.
Comments Off on Shooting Ourselves In The Hand, The Foot …
This report in WaPo is discouraging, if it turns out to be true:
A secret effort to influence the 2017 Senate election in Alabama used tactics inspired by Russian disinformation teams, including the creation of fake accounts to deliver misleading messages on Facebook to hundreds of thousands of voters to help elect Democrat Doug Jones in the deeply red state, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post.
But unlike the 2016 presidential campaign when Russians worked to help elect Donald Trump, the people behind the Alabama effort — dubbed Project Birmingham — were Americans. Now Democratic operatives and a research firm known to have had roles in Project Birmingham are distancing themselves from its most controversial tactics. …
Recent revelations about Project Birmingham, however, have shocked Democrats in Alabama and Washington. And news of the effort has underscored the warnings of disinformation experts who long have said that threats to honest, transparent political discourse in the age of social media are as likely to be domestic as foreign.
It efficacy has not been ascertained as of yet, but that’s not really the point, because the up front question has to be Is this the right thing to do?
Now, we know what Trump operative and Mueller target Roger Stone would say:
Roger Stone is pleased to be known as a campaign “dirty trickster.” A former Trump campaign aide and Republican operative, he has embraced his past as practitioner of the political dark arts. “One man’s dirty tricks,” he has said, are “another man’s political, civic action. He has warned that “Politics ain’t bean bag, and losers don’t legislate.” Going still further, he has articulated as one of his “rules” for success that “To win you must do everything.” Yet he has also insisted that, “Everything I do, everything I’ve ever done has been legal.” [Bob Bauer, Lawfare]
His bald embrace of the old lie that “all’s fair in politics” is why I think Stone comes across as one of the more loathsome members of our national political soap opera. A willingness to discard social norms, to engage in deception, in the name of victory has a long history of short-term earnings but long-term disaster.
And this, apparently, is a large part of this Project Birmingham, allegedly run in support of underdog Democratic candidate, Jeff Jones, for the Alabama Senate seat of Jeff Sessions, in which Jones very narrowly defeated Republican former Alabama Supreme Court Justice (twice removed for cause) Roy Cooper. If true – and this has not been verified, so far as I understand it – then this willingness to use deceptive tactics pioneered by the Republicans has two repercussions of vast importance.
First, it tars the Democrats, to some extent, with the black, gooey stuff that already obscures so many Republicans. This is tragic because the Republicans have not been showing wisdom in their governance, but rather ideological rigidity, which is to say allegiance to positions that are becoming clearly false, such as lowering taxes will induce riches. Democrats, on the other hand, are willing to investigate and debate new ideas and toss out ideology that has proven false. Tarring themselves with deception can do them no good.
More importantly, though, is the negative impact on the entirety of politics. I’ve been disturbed of late at the FB posts suggesting that all politicians lack the code of ethics we should expect of them (this includes those with the message that term limits should be imposed, which tends to serve the goal of ensuring our legislatures are smothered in well-meaning amateurs, self-centered gold-diggers, and even the odd malevolent entity bought by national adversaries). This is not only unfair to those who do adhere to a plausible set of ethics, but it also leaves large numbers of citizens, especially those in the younger generations, discouraged and even alienated from the idea of public service.
Of course, this can become so toxic that many decide to serve in order to correct the problem, as we saw in the recent mid-term elections. Perhaps some of them will step up to the plate within the Democratic Party in order to ban such efforts in the future. Such a move would result in positive returns as people realize, through aggressive reporting by the press, that only the Republicans continue to engage in deceptive practices in order to win. A useful Democratic tactic might be to ask if the Republicans’ policy proposals are really so discredited that they have to resort to deception in order to win public elections.
But I do remain discouraged at the lack of moral and political sense shown by those operatives who tried pulling the political levers. They really should have known better. “All’s fair in xyz” is never, ever true – in the long run.
Comments Off on Is North Carolina the most Toxic State in the Union?, Ctd
Readers who are aware of the Republican Party dishonorable hijinks in North Carolina will be interested in the report from Mark Joseph Stern of Slate on their latest delaying tactics concerning the elimination of gerrymandering:
GOP lawmakers devised a rather startling theory: They alleged that the plaintiffs were attempting to force North Carolina to violate the Voting Rights Act, the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, and the 15th Amendment’s bar on race-based voter suppression. How, exactly, could an effort to remedy partisan gerrymandering wind up disenfranchising minorities? Republicans argued that if the current map were invalidated, either the North Carolina Supreme Court or the General Assembly would have to draw new districts. And, they insisted, neither could do so without trampling on the voting rights of racial minorities. The argument implies that both legislators and the justices are too racist to be trusted to redraw the maps in a way that wouldn’t violate the Constitution.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Louise W. Flanagan rightly tossed out this embarrassing Hail Mary, sending the case back to North Carolina court. Flanagan noted that she would explain her full reasoning in a later opinion, but it’s easy to see why she kicked out the case: It has no business in federal court, it is built upon a strange and offensive legal theory, and it is obviously just a delaying tactic—a bid to run down the clock so that new maps cannot be drawn before the 2020 election. Flanagan, a moderate conservative appointed by George W. Bush, had no desire to become complicit in the North Carolina GOP’s undemocratic machinations.
And that puts it back on track to end up in front of a Democrat-dominated state Supreme Court, with time to actually redraw the boundaries. Will North Carolina Republicans continue to squall about how redrawing the boundaries in any way but the one that keeps them in power?
And just how did North Carolina Republicans fare in the mid-terms? From Ballotpedia’sreport on the NC Senate results:
Republicans maintained their majority in the North Carolina State Senate in the November 6, 2018, elections, winning 29 seats to Democrats‘ 21. Democrats, however, broke the Republican supermajority in the chamber by keeping them below 30 seats. All 50 Senate seats were up for election in 2018.
Heading into the elections, Republicans had a 34-15 majority. The seat previously held by Republican David Curtis was vacant. Democrats needed to win six seats to break Republicans’ three-fifths supermajority, the margin necessary to override gubernatorial vetoes.
Republicans maintained their majority in the North Carolina House of Representatives in the November 6, 2018, elections, winning 65 seats to Democrats‘ 55. Democrats, however, broke the Republican supermajority in the chamber by keeping them below 72 seats. All 120 House seats were up for election in 2018.
Thus forcing the Republicans to reconsider their extremism, now that they are not the supreme political force in the State. The governor is held by Democrat Cooper, and the judiciary, to the extent that it is political, has a Supreme Court mostly containing judges elected under the Democratic banner.
The Republicans are far from being discredited to the extent that they must reform, but a step has been taken. Now there’s pressure on the Democrats to be wise in the governance they can exert.
And then there’s the corruption which potentially occurred in District 9, in which Republican Mark Harris had apparently beaten Democrat Dan McCready for a seat in the Federal House Of Representatives, but then a controversy arose concerning absentee ballots being illegally collected and discarded by a Republican operative, and the election board refused to certify the election result – unanimously. That corruption may spark more resentment towards the dominant Republicans, leaking away their support among the independents on which they depend.
An exciting, if frustrating, election result, if you’re a North Carolinian.
Comments Off on Suicide Through Fragmentary Information
Will the bluefin tuna, a top ocean predator, survive mankind’s blundering ways? Well, in this report concerning a single, fresh-caught tuna sold for $3.1 million …
Bluefin tuna is highly valued for its taste in sushi restaurants, but decades of overfishing have sent stocks plummeting. …
“The celebration surrounding the annual Pacific bluefin auction hides how deeply in trouble this species really is,” said Jamie Gibbon, associate manager of global tuna conservation at The Pew Charitable Trusts. “Its population has fallen to less than 3.5 percent of its historic size and overfishing still continues today.”
In response to the growing scarcity of the fish, Japan and other governments agreed in 2017 to strict quotas and restrictions on fishing, in an attempt to rebuild stocks from 20 percent of historic levels by 2034.
That has caused considerable unhappiness and some hardship in Oma. …
Hundreds of Japanese fishermen also protested against the new quotas outside the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in June, while Oma also canceled its annual tuna festival in October in protest.
But Gibbon lamented that Japan and other countries were already lobbying for higher catch quotas for 2019, just one year into the 16-year recovery plan, while also noting reports of Japanese fishermen discarding and not reporting dead bluefin to avoid exceeding their quotas. [WaPo]
The immediate question is what will the Japanese do when the tuna are gone? Will they abjectly take responsibility, as it won’t matter? Or will they disavow it?
Or will the Japanese decline in population[1] be rapid enough to save the bluefin tuna from oblivion? Probably not, as I doubt the decline is rapid enough, but it’s worth considering the fact that human overpopulation is the single largest factor in the decline and extinction of many species world-wide – regardless of them being land- or sea-based. If tuna have sentience, I doubt they’re laughing that at least they get to poison those who prey on them with mercury. (I have a friend who, until recently, had dangerous levels of mercury in his body, attributable to his tuna addiction.)
But over-population is not the entire problem. Fragmentary information is also a problem, as if we had perfect information, then we’d realize that this problem is of our own causing, and the fishermen would be collaborating on how to rebuild that population – and not be clamoring to commit industry suicide. That is the most macabrely funny part of this little story of mankind vs the fishes, that the future is not as important as is tomorrow.
And how we’re going to get past that wall in our path is a supremely important question.
1 Another WaPo article which, ironically, explores the damage the Japanese demographic decline is doing to Japan’s economy, if in fact it’s really damage at all:
According to a new report from the Japanese government, Japanese women had 921,000 babies in 2018. That’s the fewest births since comparable records began in 1899 — when the country’s population was a third its current size.
Meanwhile, deaths in Japan hit their highest level in nearly a century. Put together, that means the country’s population is shrinking rapidly, experiencing its largest natural decline on record.
Why does this matter? Well, it’s hard for an economy to grow with fewer workers. And as more people age out of the workforce, a swelling number of retirees must depend on a shrinking number of working people to power the economy. The tax base required to fund public services for those retirees — including health care and elder care — also shrinks.
Perhaps this is the idolatry of the perpetually growing economy. In the more extreme wings of the left side of the political spectrum, this idolatry has been called in question. I would do so simply because it’s so abjectly accepted by the author of this article, who goes on to suggest that if the United States wants to avoid the Japanese problems, then it should begin adopting policies much like those under exploration in Japan. The article seems to completely ignore the problems population growth will bring on, fixating only on the well-known problems of a growing retiree demographic in combination with a static or shrinking worker base.
This is one of the great conundrums of the age, and may not end well at all. I keep hoping for some unexpected solution, though, such as a great leap forward in medicine such that the elderly experience ill health for only a month, and are otherwise healthy and able to work. The other options are far less appetizing; macabre, even.
From Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee in WaPo concerning implantable devices and the FDA:
Although the FDA insists that high-risk devices undergo “stringent” testing to win approval, few actually do. A recent study, for example, found that only 5 percent of the highest-risk implantable cardiac devices were subjected to clinical trials on par with the testing required for drug approval.
In 1976, when medical devices first came under the regulatory control of the FDA, the agency simply grandfathered in all devices that were already on the market. Under this provision, known as the 510(k) pathway, new artificial joints, cataract lens implants and thousands of other devices developed after 1976 can win approval for sale (or “clearance” in FDA parlance) if the product is shown to have “substantial equivalence” to a previously cleared “predicate” device.” Four out of five devices are cleared for sale this way. Of those, at least 95 percent were cleared without clinical studies, according to research by Diana Zuckerman and her colleagues at the National Center for Health Research.
This “predicate” nonsense is especially alarming. Speaking as a software engineer, building a device from the ground-up, and then exempting it from all testing, in particular safety testing, simply because it’s similar to another device, is a sign of sheer madness. It’s a sign of vast incompetence in the FDA, or, more likely, of malevolent influence of the FDA by the industry it’s assigned to regulate. And, in fact, that’s what the article states.
If you’re a candidate for an implantable device, it might be wise to ask the surgeon if the device has been through the rigorous FDA approval scheme and s/he’s read the reports, or if it’s been exempted under the “predicate” protocol. If the latter, request an alternative recommendation of a device which has been fully tested, and that s/he write a letter of reprimand to the FDA, with a copy going to the local newspaper.
The email bag has delivered something non-political that still has gotten under my skin.
Not only is this fantastic technology, but India now makes patches – and complete highway restorations – out of recycled plastic bags, which are holding up better and lasting much longer than traditional macadam. Wow!
High Tech Pothole Repair
Now this is truly inspired, though the public employee unions will never stand for it. It eliminates way too many jobs for guys standing around, leaning on shovels.
Then an mp4 is attached to the mail. Here is a YouTube video which appears to have the mp4 embedded in a story about Moscow’s pothole problem.
What is getting my attention? First, I haven’t heard of this from a real news source; second, the video appears to be a bad CGI video rather than real life. Third, the size of the machine implies so much mass that, in Earth’s gravity field, I expect the city streets on which it works would themselves crumble, as well as the sidewalk when the stabilizers are deployed and end up on the sidewalk, as one of the demos shows.
So I went looking on the Web. That leads to the fourth clue – I didn’t find a site dedicated to promoting this technology and its originator, whoever that might be. Ordinarily, it’d be right at the top of the search results. I found a couple of videos, but the first real results seems to be an article in the Detroit Free Press, which, at least in the past, was a reputable news source. I don’t really regard this as a strong clue, but still it’s the sort of thing that tells me that whoever is pumping this technology, which probably doesn’t exist, isn’t really competent to the task of evaluating the technology. Here’s the tell-tale paragraph.
Besides being James Bond cool, the machine can repair potholes in less than two minutes at a cost savings of 500% versus traditional repairs. The precision plugs will outlast typical poured asphalt solutions by years, and also provide a smooth ride for motorists compared to the uneven patchwork of today. With the new speed, precision, and quality, potholes could be diminished to the point of urban legend instead of major headache.
Did you catch the megablunder? “… cost savings of 500% …” OK, a lot of folks like to hide behind their innumeracy, but, rhetoric aside, I’m quite serious when I say that this should catch every last person’s attention, because this is simple math. Let me explain a trivial method for recognizing the meaning of that blunderous phrase.
If you had a 50% cost savings, that would mean the city is only paying half of what it’s paying now for pothole repair. Amazing! It’s worth checking out!
If you had a 100% cost savings, that means it costs nothing to repair those potholes. Even if you have to pay for the machine, that still implies the materials and power are free. Wait a minute, something’s not right here…
So, by simple progression, if you had a 500% cost savings … well … I think the manufacturer is paying the city to take the machine. Or that rubble they generate during application of the patch is apparently more valuable than gold nuggets. Wait, am I a sucker … ?
In my estimation, not finding anything believable on a quick & simple search suggests this is a hoax. I have no idea why anyone would make this video, unless it’s a school project for their computer graphics class – and then they should only get a ‘B’ on it, because the realism factor is markedly off.
And, yeah, this was just venting. The video on its own? Not worthy of comment. The guy in the Detroit Free Press who has no idea what he’s babbling about, or is a pumper? That irritates me. The editors at the Detroit Free Press should have caught it.
And me venting all over my readers is part of what this blog is all about.
There are, I’m sure, many reports on the swearing in of new members of Congress. I’ll use ursulafaw’s report on The Daily Kos, just because it’s convenient:
Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib asked to be sworn into the House of Representatives using a Koran once owned by Thomas Jefferson in lieu of a Bible and the proverbial s*it hit the fan. To add a comic spin to the proceeding, none other than evangelical wingnut Vice President Mike Pence conducted the swearing in where this (undoubtedly to his mind) heretical request was made.
Etc etc (in the usual progressive patronizing tone of voice). Another new member used a law book, which motivates me to say:
ALMOST, BUT NOT QUITE.
Look, we’re a secular nation, and these folks are taking an oath to defend the Constitution, etc etc. So why the hell aren’t they, that is, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM, taking it on [a copy of] the Constitution? It’d be affirming, far less divisive, and all that rot.
Trump remains the center of political life in this country, but no longer as a vortex of chaos for the Democrats, but a cancerous wart on the throat of the Republican Party. Faced with this decision, he may find it impossible to swallow his pride and accept it, and thus split the Republican Party right down the middle.
