Unsightly Mental Blemishes

In regards to my commentary on the individual investor and the stock market, a reader remarks:

Oh, I suspect it’s a game — the market is constantly gamed by those in a position to do so, to the detriment of most individual investors. It’s much more like pari-mutuel betting where it’s really your knowledge or guess against the rest of the people investing. Real company fundamentals have far less effect on their stock price these days than they did 30 to 50 years ago. And there’s still a ton of emotion involved.

Short term, yes, there’s pumping and manipulation and a great deal of emotion, and those who think they can become rich overnight are often left shirtless and bewildered. But none of these can carry, or suppress, a stock of a company over the long term.

Nascent:

coming or having recently come into existence • a nascent middle class • her nascent singing career [Merriam-Webster]

I find it odd that this particular word lacked a clear definition in my brain. Noted in “Beyond the Obituaries,” Nancy Knowlton & Jeremy Jackson, The Solutions Journal:

Politically, the implications are clear: success stories rarely just happen–unless a convenient political accident intervenes, such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the consequent reduction of pollution in the Black Sea. Large-scale solutions may be obvious in principle but they don’t get enacted if people don’t care about solving the problem. In some cases, single individuals work tirelessly for a cause and eventually succeed in inspiring others to take action. In other cases, the environments or organisms—for example, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia or whales—are so culturally important that nascent political consensus already exists. For these exceptions to become the norm, global adoption of policies that provide large-scale protection of coastal waters and the open ocean is needed. Only then will overharvested species be able to rebound and coastal ecosystems suffocating in polluted and anoxic waters be able to breathe deeply again.

Beyond The Obituaries:

Fortunately, many students today take a different attitude. Like medical doctors, they want to save their patients, not write their obituaries. Even the media dictum of “if it bleeds, it leads” seems to be losing its grip as the public tires of reading stories of doom and gloom. But is there any good news to report? When we started organizing our “Beyond the Obituaries” symposium at the Smithsonian Institute in 2009, several of our colleagues wondered if we could even fill a program. Yet there is good news—reasons for hope and evidence of positive change—to be found if you hunt for it.

First, all is not lost. Relatively few extinctions have occurred in the sea, so most pieces of marine ecosystems remain. Yes, we have lost the giant auk, the sea mink, and the Caribbean monk seal, but bluefin tunas are still with us, at least for now. Moreover, in some remote places too far from human settlements to be worth exploiting, quasi-pristine marine ecosystems remain. The remarkable trophic structures of the Northern Line Islands and northwestern Hawaiian Islands, dominated by top predators in a way once thought to be energetically impossible, show us what ecosystems look like when people don’t eat everything big. Second, many once-dire situations have substantially improved. Sea otters and some seabirds, whales, turtles, and fishes like the striped bass have increased in numbers, in some cases markedly so. Shellfish beds, also, are coming back in many places, and even a few coral populations are showing signs of rebounding.

Cool name. And a necessary organization.

The Editorial Board of the Charlotte Observer reacts with the appropriate horror at the latest travesty to appear in the North Carolina legislature:

Sen. Bill Rabon, a Republican from Southport, last week filed Senate Bill 698. The bill proposes a constitutional amendment that would cut all regular judges’ terms – from the N.C. Supreme Court to district court judges – to two years. Currently all judges and justices serve eight-year terms, except district court judges, who serve four-year terms. The amendment would also end all 400-plus current judges’ terms in 2018, including those who were elected to eight-year terms less than a year ago. …

This might be legislators’ worst idea yet in their campaign to remake North Carolina’s court system, and that’s saying something. Few moves undercut the reality and the appearance of fair and impartial judges like having them run for office every two years. That would make them permanent campaigners – and year-round fundraisers – much like legislators are now.

Judges are not meant to be politicians. They are not meant to have their decisions influenced by the whim of the voters. They serve the Constitution and the rule of law, and must be insulated just enough to do so.

Any excuse for this execrable proposal?

Rep. David Lewis told North Carolina Public Radio that the thinking behind the bill was, “if you’re going to act like a legislator, perhaps you should run like one.”

Which is to say, I don’t like your latest ruling, so I’m going to screw you over. It’s a little like watching a 4 year old screeching about not getting a treat at the store – you just want to slap them. But you can’t.

We’ve discussed the role of the judiciary before, and I’m not sure I want to repeat myself, especially as the Charlotte Observer’s editorial covers the ground quite respectably. It might be more fun to speculate on the mindset of those who are for this proposal, but I suppose that would be childish.

However, I would like to add a point that the Observer did not explicitly state. By necessity, there are at least two sides interested in every decision a judge is asked to make, and most of the time, one of them is going to be disappointed in the decision. The proposal doesn’t address the question of competency of candidates for judgeships, and how that competency will change as judges and potential judges realize that each decision is potentially a political decision which could cost them their job.

How many really competent potential judges will wish to put up with that extra pressure?

This appears to be a recipe to put second-raters and the power-hungry in the judiciary. The legislature would do well to reject this on its face; and, if black fate should convey this to the Governor’s desk, he should veto it as fast as he can get his fingers on the rejection stamp.

It’s occurred to me that Idle Musings is probably a poor phrase; better would have been Jumping Jacks For The Mind. I’m just following some odd thoughts percolating through my brain concerning prime numbers; I have no expertise in them nor, for that matter, mathematics in general, and I’ve done no research. I’m just messing around here. I’m stretching the brain in unaccustomed ways, and by all accounts this is good for the brain.

Just to be straight.

Perhaps I should email this off to SCOTUS, given the recent dismaying accounts of their mathphobia.

Last time I introduced the idea of using the underlying indexes in P in the calculation of P_n and suggested that a collection of equations would be necessary; this, in popular jargon, is an algorithm. I’m no theoretician, of course, so I will proceed via inspection to explore the creation of an algorithm.

In case you’re wondering, I’ve thought about this a little but my personal memory scratch space is too small for me to push the ideas out beyond the first seven members of P; I’m writing this down as a substitute for paper, as my handwriting is awful. I shan’t even publish this until a tentative conclusion is reached.

In order to discover and refine the algorithm, the first few known members of the infinite set P will be useful. From the Internet:

P_{1,2, …} = { 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97, 101, 103, 107, 109, 113, 127, 131, 137, 139, 149, 151, 157, 163, 167, 173, 179, 181, 191, 193, 197, 199 … }

We assume P₁ = 2 with no justification. Immediately, we can see

P₂ = P₁ + 1 = 2 + 1 = 3

so we place

P_n+1 = P_n + n      (Eq. 1)

in our contingent list of equations; it will be withdrawn soon enough. Let’s see how far this takes us:

P₃ = P₂ + 2 = 3 + 2 = 5    (Eq. 1)   (So far, so good)

P₄ = P₃ + 3 = 5 + 3 = 8   (Eq. 1)   (wrong!)

which is not only wrong, but also indicative of a longer term problem, which is that whenever n is odd, Eq. 1 will be wrong, because, with the exception of P₁, all prime numbers are odd, and adding an odd number n to an odd number P_n will result in an even number. We withdraw Eq. 1 in favor of this:

P_n+1 = P_n + n   when n is even or n = 1  (Eq. 2)

which then leaves us with the question of how to handle odd subscripts. We observe that the wrong answer is an overshoot of 1, so perhaps we can start with that:

P_n+1 = P_n + (n-1)   when n is odd   (Eq. 3)

Continuing to apply our algorithm:

P₄ = P₃ + (3 – 1) = P₃ + 2 = 5 + 2 = 7   (Eq. 3) (that works)

P₅ = P₄ + 4 = 7 + 4 = 11  (Eq. 2)  (that works)

P₆ = P₅ + (5 – 1) = 11 + 4 = 15 (Eq. 3) (fails!)

And Eq. 3 fails in two different ways this time.

First, of course, 15 is not a prime number; however, 17 is a prime number. Let’s make the assumption that there is another algorithm for generating the non-prime members of N (the natural numbers greater than 1). Then we can withdraw Eq. 3 in favor of a slightly modified version of same:

P_n+1 = P_n + (n ± 1)   when n is odd   (Eq. 4)

Where the ‘+’ or ‘-‘ is selected on the basis of whether or not P_n + (n – 1) generates an already generated non-prime number; if it does, then we move to the + 1 variant. Perhaps we’ll discern a better rule later.

But more importantly, the failure case cited above refers, at best, to 17; P₆ is actually 13! Before discussing how to handle this mistake, let’s get the mechanics out of the way, which is to say, replacing Eq. 2 & 4:

P_n + n => P_x  when n is even or n = 1  (Eq. 5, replacing Eq. 2)

P_n + (n ± 1) => P_x  when n is odd   (Eq. 6, replacing Eq. 4)

I write P_x because we no longer know the value of the subscript, I write => to indicate the loss of connection between n and x.

Back to the precipitating matter, it appears clear that we need a generating function for calculating all prime numbers between P_n and P_x. Its behavior should eventually work for P₁ … P₅, of course. As a very contingent first hack, it’s clear that for n = 5,

P_n+1 = P_n + (n / 2)   (Eq. 7)

where the division results in a whole number, rounded down, should suffice. To be clear, we should have a way to know when to apply it, and we don’t. For the nonce, let us say that we first apply Eq. 5 or Eq. 6, as appropriate, and then test apply Eq. 7, and if 7 generates a number larger than the one previously generated, discard the result from Eq. 7. Applied to n = 5,

P₆ = P₅ + (5 / 2) = 11 + 2 = 13 (Eq. 3)

Since we now have P₆ calculated properly, let’s use it.

P6 + 6 => P_x, (Eq. 5)
13 + 6 = 19 => P_x

Which works and we can assign to P₈, as we have already calculated P₇ to be 17. More exploration, keeping in mind that we have not yet ascertained a solid rule for employing Eq. 7.

P₇ + 7 = 17 + 7 – 1 = 23  (Eq. 6, variant ‘-‘)  (correct!)

and using P₈,

P₈ + 8 = 19 + 8 = 27. (Eq. 5)  (Waa-waa!)

So we see the approach beginning to fail, as a core equation yields a wrong value – 27 is not a prime, and the next prime is 29, so we’re off by -2. Modifying Eq. 5 to produce the proper solution seems unlikely, as it must also apply to all previous primes with an even index.

But what’s catching my eye is that, unlike many failing solutions in programming, this one is trying to hang on. Have some patience …

P₉ + 9 – 1 = 23 + 8 = 31   (Eq. 5)  (correct, P₁₁)

P₁₀ + 10 = 29 + 10 = 39   (Eq. 6) (off by +2 instead of -2, P₁₂ is 37)

P₁₁ + 11 – 1 = 31 + 11 – 1 = 41 (Eq. 5)  (correct, P₁₃)

P₁₁ + (11 / 2) = 31 + 5 = 36  (Eq. 7)  (wrong, 37 is correct)

Are we slowly diverging? P₁₂ is off by two by Eq. 5, but generates a prime for Eq. 7, P₁₃ generates a prime properly by Eq. 6. There may be a pattern in the failures, but that would take more calculation, and other duties call.

So this is a mind stretch, which, like jumping jacks, really doesn’t take you anywhere – but does focus the attention on one of those mysteries of mathematics, the prime numbers. Perhaps a slightly more sophisticated set of equations would suffice… the mind does wander down that path sometimes. Even for non-mathematicians like myself.

Steve Benen reports on GOP anger at Senators who honor their duty:

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) reportedly appeared on NPR this morning and said Republican senators who are worried about Trump’s fitness should keep their fears “private,” and discuss their concerns “within the family.”

In other words, if the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has reason to believe the president is dangerously unfit, the important thing is that the public not find out.

In case this isn’t obvious, what policymakers in both parties should be worried about is Trump’s ability to do the job, not public awareness about concerns that the president can’t do the job.

Assuming Senator Thune really did say that (I’ve yet to find the interview on the NPR website), I’d say Senator Thune has disqualified himself from re-election, because the nation needs to know when the President is incompetent for the job – it’s basically a public emergency.

But it’s not that President Trump has become unfit to be President, but that he was never fit to begin with, and that’s the problem Senator Thune has, because it’s really an indictment of the GOP as a valid political party. It has proven vulnerable to a con-man, and the fact that the GOP has voted more or less in lock-step with the incompetent-in-chief, as this partial list from today’s FiveThirtyEight’s TrumpScore Senator page on the right indicates, leaves each of them individually guilty of suppressing their individual judgments in favor of that of the Party, and the latter has proven disastrous.

Such are the fruits of team politics.

So when Senator Thune speaks of keeping it in the family, he’s really trying to put the Party above the country. And that’s really not an acceptable attitude.

Estuary:

Estuaries and their surrounding wetlands are bodies of water usually found where rivers meet the sea. Estuaries are home to unique plant and animal communities that have adapted to brackish water—a mixture of fresh water draining from the land and salty seawater.

However, there are also several types of entirely freshwater ecosystems that have many similar characteristics to the traditional brackish estuaries. For example, along the Great Lakes, river water with very different chemical and physical characteristics mixes with lake water in coastal wetlands that are affected by tides and storms just like estuaries along the oceanic coasts. These freshwater estuaries also provide many of the ecosystem services and functions that brackish estuaries do, such as serving as natural filters for runoff and providing nursery grounds for many species of birds, fish, and other animals.

Estuaries are among the most productive ecosystems in the world. Many animals rely on estuaries for food, places to breed, and migration stopovers.

Estuaries are delicate ecosystems. Congress created the National Estuarine Research Reserve System to protect more than one million acres of estuarine land and water. These estuarine reserves provide essential habitat for wildlife, offer educational opportunities for students, and serve as living laboratories for scientists. [NOAA]

Mentioned by Colbert in reference to the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program this week.

I found myself grunting and muttering in dismay while reading “The stock market is run by wild robots we don’t fully control,” (print: The Money Machine) by Sally Adee, NewScientist (14 October 2017, paywall), which had some poorly articulated concerns about the stock market. For instance, this:

To understand why machines are taking over, it helps to look at how perceptions of the stock market have changed following the financial crisis of 2007-08. It is increasingly clear that for the average person, investing is a mug’s game. Individuals have little hope of picking successful firms to back, while giving your money to investment managers who aim to beat the market often sees any gains being eaten away by a laundry list of opaque fees.

While the mutual fund game is indeed beset by a tide of hurdles to find effective actively managed funds, it’s not impossible to find them. But let’s address the other side, the individual investing in individual stocks.

First of immediate concern is the investment philosophy. The machine algorithms, by and large, are concerned with extreme short-term investing wherein microseconds or even smaller quanta of time are of critical importance and stocks may only be owned for a few seconds. The individual attempting to compete with the machines at this level are indeed mugs, or even madmen.

But while you may think the madness lies in attempting to compete with high speed machinery, that is not my point, even though you’d be right. My point lies in returning to the purpose of stock ownership and the stock market.

Owning stocks is all about having a partial ownership of a company. The stock serves several purposes: it permits the raising of funds for corporate purposes that might otherwise have to be borrowed from lenders at unattractive rates; it dilutes the risk to the owners; etc. The stock market is a way to estimate the future of companies by pricing the companies via their stocks, resulting in a market capitalization. The differences in knowledge and opinion form the basis for the pricing differentials that allow stocks to be traded at all.

But let’s pause here and reflect on a facet that seems to receive short shrift in most stock market summations, and that’s social utility. That is, what activities within the market have social utility, are advantageous to society? Those explicit purposes I mentioned are mutually believed to have social utility.

But what social utility do the algorithms have, stipulating their purposes is high speed trading with low-duration ownership? Answer: I don’t see any. My observation suggests they merely seek to profit from the gaps in information gathering by competitors, buying or selling stocks nano-seconds before prices shift.

In essence, profiting from the long-term success (or failure, for those who short a stock) of firms is not the purpose of the trading firms using these algorithms, and because they’ve discarded these goals, their social utility appears to be approaching zero.

I would be interested to see a discussion of requiring all stocks traded on the American-based exchanges be held for a minimum of a day.

All that said, let me follow the rule of playwrights and mention the name of our lead character for a third time: algorithms are used for short term trading. So what does an individual investor do?

First of all, don’t compete with them. Long-term investment still appears to be not only a viable strategy, but one which is far more successful for the average investor than short term investing. Or so they were saying twenty years ago on The Motley Fool, and I believe they will still tell you the same thing, with the requisite academic references. Algorithms, from what I’ve read, do not compete in the 5 year minimum holding horizon game. The successful investor will buy and hold for the long term, and will choose firms that have a demonstrated view of the future with proven management. Adee’s view is, with all due respect, a pessimist’s view.

Second, this isn’t a game. If you don’t “beat the market” one year, does that make you a miserable failure as an investor? No, of course not. Like any good student, you evaluate what happened, try to decide if you made mistakes, were caught up in some irresistible wave of history, or if this year was just a normal part of the up and down all investors experience. I’ve had a number of investments in which I was “under water” for years, but when the company and its stock caught fire, it really went up and erased my “paper losses” in a matter of months. I’ve acquired the patience to hold on through bad times; my continuing problem is when to sell.

Third, the status of your portfolio at any particular time is meaningless. Many folks invest with their emotions on the line, and that’s disaster. They look at their portfolio, down 30% on the year, and all they can think of is all that money they could have spent on booze and cigs. But portfolios are rarely liquidated en masse, but rather one stock at a time as needs arise. The simple fact of the matter is that a majority of the years of investment could look awful, but because most of the stocks are liquidated as winners, the end result is a successful portfolio over its lifetime.

So the article continues on to a comparison with ecology, suggesting that passively managed funds (i.e., index trackers) are analogous to monocultures, and may have the same vulnerabilities. It’s an interesting thought, I must say, although opposing views are presented, and not being an expert, I’m content to ride along in their wake.

But this whole thing reminds me of the early days of hedge funds, and the near-failure of Long-Term Capital Management. From Investopedia:

The most famous hedge fund collapse involved Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). The fund was founded in 1994 by John Meriwether (of Salomon Brothers fame) and its principal players included two Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economists and a bevy of renowned financial services wizards. LTCM began trading with more than $1 billion of investor capital, attracting investors with the promise of an arbitrage strategy that could take advantage of temporary changes in market behavior and, theoretically, reduce the risk level to zero.

The strategy was quite successful from 1994 to 1998, but when the Russian financial markets entered a period of turmoil, LTCM made a big bet that the situation would quickly revert back to normal. LTCM was so sure this would happen that it used derivatives to take large, unhedged positions in the market, betting with money that it didn’t actually have available if the markets moved against it.

When Russia defaulted on its debt in August 1998, LTCM was holding a significant position in Russian government bonds (known by the acronym GKO). Despite the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars per day, LTCM’s computer models recommended that it hold its positions. When the losses approached $4 billion, the federal government of the United States feared that the imminent collapse of LTCM would precipitate a larger financial crisis and orchestrated a bailout to calm the markets. A $3.65-billion loan fund was created, which enabled LTCM to survive the market volatility and liquidate in an orderly manner in early 2000.

Since this occurred during the Clinton years, I must assume the Clinton Administration was responsible for the mistake of saving LTCM from tasting the bitter ale of failure, one of the earlier examples (for the current generation of government haters) of government interfering to save the rich from their mistakes. Of course, the article suggests this was done for the greater good, but I’d argue that this action was a great mistake in that we only learn from the backlash of our mistakes. If LTCM had been permitted to crater, the subsequent market quivers would have acted as vivid reminders of why permitting firms to become too large is a danger not only to the members of the firm, but to the market as well. I do not know if that was of the factors in embittering the small investor and non-investor towards government, but I would not be surprised if it did.

We took these pictures a week or two ago, as we liked the contrast.

In ongoing coverage of the arbitration issue, wherein private companies usurp the role of the judiciary, the companies have won a victory – temporary as it may be – in their war against anything which may give consumers protection against minor corporate fraud. NBC News reports:

The Republican-led Senate narrowly voted Tuesday to repeal a banking rule that would let consumers band together to sue their banks or credit card companies to resolve financial disputes.

Vice President Mike Pence cast the final vote to break a 50-50 tie.

The banking industry lobbied hard to roll back the regulation, which the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unveiled in July. The rule would ban most types of mandatory arbitration clauses found in the fine print of agreements that consumers enter into when opening checking accounts or getting credit cards.

It appears the Republicans are indulging in bad math:

“The effort to try to characterize this as some devious system that has been created to try to stop consumers from having access to fairness is simply false,” said Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. “We have a very fair system that has been working for over 100 years in this country.”

Crapo said that the average pay-out for consumers in class-action lawsuits against financial companies was just $32 but that lawyers stood to make millions.

Democrats argued that consumers generally don’t have the time and means to pursue claims in arbitration and that because most disputes revolve around small amounts, they typically just give up. They said banks and other financial firms know that, in the end, they won’t have pay a real price for taking advantage of a consumer.

That’s the key – the Republicans holding a dependent variable constant, when the fact of the matter is that a class action suit is far more likely to be pursued than an arbitration claim. I wonder if the Republicans believe what they say. It’s lose-lose for them, for if they believe that, then we can conclude they, and their staff, don’t know how to think, and if they do understand it, well, they’re four-square on the side of the companies and not for protecting the consumers from the predations of the ethically challenged banks and other interested entities.

That is, they’re abandoning their responsibilities.

In fact, there’s a second issue that both sides are ignoring. Will corporate pay attention if they’re forced into arbitration by, say, 5% of their clients over some minor fraud^[1]?

No, corporate won’t give a shit. It’s part of doing business.

But class action suits can exact a real pound of flesh from companies, because that postcard announcing the action arrives in your mail, and I’ll bet more than 50% of those eligible to join the class will actually do so, more if the lawyers are smart enough not to write the note in legalese, but instead in emotionally charged language.

And the kinds of losses that can be exacted in a class action suit are just the kind needed to get corporate’s attention and discourage minor corporate fraud.

Or even major white collar crimes.

It’s not so much the actual punishment as the potential punishment which is important here – and the GOP is completely ignoring it by focusing on the numbers. And it appears the Democrats have let themselves be mislead, although I don’t know that NBC has given us the complete story here.

So I’m seeing the C-suite denizens waiting at their telephones for their lobbyists to report victory when Trump signs the bill, then turning to authorize the first scalping of their victims clients.

I wonder if my bank – one of the smallest in the state, I should imagine – well, no, not according to this list, I guess having a grand total of two branches is a poor way to estimate – is involved in this mess. I wonder if they’d tell me if I called and asked.

¹For corporate fraud, 5% seems a likely number, although I’m really just hand-waving  here.

The hotter it gets, the cooler you are. NewScientist (14 October 2017) reports on a new house paint:

The paint the team came up with has an outer layer that filters out some of the sun’s rays and an inner one that absorbs heat and emits higher-frequency light, cooling itself below the ambient temperature.

The material has passed tests in the lab. “Heat could be absorbed and re-emitted as light,” Shenhav says. “As long as the sun is shining on it, it would be continuously cooled.” Simulations show that a room on the top floor of a house will feel up to 10°C cooler with the paint applied to the roof than without it. The team now plans to conduct pilot tests on buildings within two years.

Although existing cooling paints are used to scatter and reduce the amount of heat buildings absorb, they can’t actively lower the temperature inside. SolCold’s paint can, says Eran Zahavy at the Israel Institute of Biological Research. But it isn’t cheap, costing about $300 to coat 100 square metres. Shenhav and his team think the early adopters will be shopping malls and stadiums.

A fascinating material. I’m not sure a mass consumer product is the proper venue for a material which may still require analysis as to its negative effects on the environment – for example, what does it decay into?

But the odd things you can do with materials these days!

Another batch of fall colors, fresh from the distribution center.

Andrew Sullivan is just full of bad news:

And then the worst news on this front all year: “Nearly half of voters, 46 percent, believe the news media fabricate news stories about President Donald Trump and his administration.” That rises to 76 percent of Republicans. Twenty-eight percent of all voters — and 46 percent of Republicans — believe that the government should be able to remove the licenses from outlets that criticize the president. The First Amendment lives; but the beliefs and practices and norms that buttress it are atrophying very fast.

Which is flabbergasting, and suggests the people have lost track of what has made the United States great throughout all these years – freedom of the press.

And on what evidence do these doubters of the media base their opinions? Can they point at massive fraud at newspapers with decades of experience and prestige?

Has it ever occurred to them that just because they don’t like the news, it doesn’t mean it’s fabricated?

Many of them may think they’re tough conservatives, but from here, all I see are lazy sods who are too weak to accept that we do have an incompetent Administration bent on enriching the head honcho while kowtowing to extremist sensibilities. These tough guys want to come forward with some evidence of fraud? Fine, leap forward with it. Maybe you’ll convince someone.

But it must be done with a willingness to be convinced themselves.

I do appreciate Andrew equating the left and the right when it comes to curtailment of free speech:

Or look at what happened to a speaker from the ACLU at the College of William & Mary in Virginia a couple of weeks back. She came to give a talk about — yes! — free speech, only to be shouted down by the usual mob, who were at least honest enough to chant: “Liberalism Is White Supremacy,” and “The Revolution Will Not Uphold Your Constitution.” They physically prevented the speaker from even talking one-on-one with those who were interested in a dialogue.

The unity of the far left and the Trump right on this is as striking as it is depressing. What they share is a contempt for liberal democracy. Truth to both of them is merely an instrument of power. Instead of relying on an open exchange of ideas in order to determine the always-provisional truth, both sides (yes, both sides) insist that they already know the truth and need simply to acquire the power to impose it on everyone else. Somewhere, Thomas Jefferson weeps.

Which is reminiscent of Michael Gerson’s WaPo editorial of yesterday. If we discard one of our unifying principles, then when shall the rest go? Will the replacement unifying principle be He with the biggest mob in the street wins? How does that improve all of our lives?

It doesn’t. It pleases those demagogues and master manipulators who are pulling the strings, but it will irretrievably ruin the lives of those who they pretend to lead. The great achievement of liberal democracies is moderation, the great enemy of the power-hungry, the zealot, and the absolutist. For decades these sorts of unhappy people have been mostly suppressed, not by the government so much as the willingness of reasonable citizens to examine the arguments this lot have put forth, and give it the belly laugh it largely deserves. Add in the gatekeepers that so many have railed against, and those whose lust for certainty or power were left with bitter failure.

But no longer. Many Americans, perhaps faced with so much information and choices supplied by the Internet that they’re worn out, have chosen to belong to tribes, where they may think they’re thinking, but in the end they’re just sopping up the soggy white bread, full of milk, for their intellectual sustenance, and occasionally stampede here and there at the hint of their hidden masters.

A sad depth to which the far right and far left have fallen. But you can take this as a signpost in the barren wastes – if you feel sympathy for the positions of the far left or right, then it’s time to limber up the mind again. How to do this? Pick that issue of which you’re most certain, and try to pick it apart. Don’t be shy or slothful about it, really go at it. Take that shovel to the foundations on which it rests and ask yourself how to falsify those foundations. Really try to persuade yourself that you’re wrong.

And if you can’t do it, don’t take it as encouragement that you’re right. Tomorrow, do it again with a different issue.

And again.

And so long as you fail to change your mind, I’ll tell  you again and again and again – you’re intellectually failing. You’re a wussy tribe member. You receive your orders and you march on them because you’re intellectually atrophied.

And do you know how I can say this with complete certainty^[1]?

Because there are so many issues out there that it’s inevitable that you’ll be able to persuade yourself to change your mind on one of them. Sound weak? It’s not. It’s the truest thing in the world – managing in the modern world is hard and we often get things wrong. Even the big things.

And the most important part of this exercise isn’t changing your mind.

It’s learning uncertainty. It’s realizing that we can’t be certain about many things, so compromise is not a bad thing – it’s the sign of mature adult minds coming to an understanding.

And that’s really the point of this entire post. Compromise is not weakness. Whoever said that should have his fingers broken. Compromise is the acknowledgement that the modern world, for all that we aren’t dying of tiger attacks, scarlet fever, or smallpox, is still a hard place to navigate, and not all the lessons you learned at your never-wrong leader’s knee are actually right.

So go out there with that jackhammer and whack away at your most cherished beliefs. I try to do this all the time, and it’s quite invigorating. I’ve been changing my mind about gun control over the last decade, for example, from anti- to some form of pro-gun control.

And you can make those changes, too. If you’re willing to return to being a thinking American, instead of retreating into tribalism and spinning on command.

Let me know how it goes.

¹Yes, go ahead and chuckle.

Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) has chosen to retire rather than engage in a 2018 primary tussle with Kelli Ward. From CNN come his and other Senator’s remarks:

“If I have been critical, it’s not because I relish criticizing the behavior of the President of the United States,” Flake said. “If I have been critical, it is because I believe that it is my obligation to do so, as a matter of duty and conscience.”

He continued, “The notion that one should stay silent as the norms and values that keep America strong are undermined and as the alliances and agreements that ensure the stability of the entire world are routinely threatened by the level of thought that goes into 140 characters — the notion that one should say and do nothing in the face of such mercurial behavior is ahistoric and, I believe, profoundly misguided.”

He is following his colleague Senator Corker (R-KY) to the retirement door. The reaction from his colleagues:

McCain and Corker were both in attendance of Flake’s Senate floor speech Tuesday and gave him a standing ovation at conclusion of his remarks — as did Wyoming Republican Sen. John Barrasso.

“One of the greatest people I’ve served with,” Corker said after the speech, describing Flake and adding later, “He’s what I would call a real conservative.” …

Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia left the floor in tears following Flake’s speech, calling it “depressing.”

“When someone as good and decent a person as Jeff Flake does not think he can continue in the body, it’s a very tragic day for the institution,” Kaine said.

While I have very little opinion of Senator Flake, I do note he has a Trump Score of 90% as of this writing, and he was not one of the Senators who broke the GOP‘s disgraceful boat of healthcare “reform” on the rocks of honor – so he’s not entirely the most decent of the GOP Senators, an honor that goes to McCain, Collins, and Murkowski.

However, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t redoubled the pressure on the GOP Senators to return to a generally honorable manner of conducting business. He’s basically declared that he may join the Democrats in voting against legislation which is developed in an inappropriate, dishonorable manner.

And that can only be a good thing.

But I am puzzled that someone who has at least Senator Kaine’s respect is choosing to bow out rather than fight the good fight. Of course, there may be family illnesses and that sort of thing operating behind the scenes, but to leave the field open to right-wing extremists is a discouraging move by someone who at least is saying the right things, even if he’s not backing this up with words.

Conservative Michael Gerson writes about the damage Trump is inflicting on the GOP in WaPo:

But here is the cost. When there is no objective source of truth — no commonly agreed upon set of facts and rules of argument — political persuasion becomes impossible. There is no reasoned method to choose between one view and another. The only way to settle political disputes is power — determined by screaming mobs or because “I’m president and you’re not.” Politics becomes an endless battle of true believers, conditioned to distrust and dismiss every bit of evidence that does not confirm their preexisting views. The alternative to reasoned discourse is the will to power.

This is the frightening direction of Trumpism. It is the corruption that good men such as White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly are enabling. And it is a source of enduring shame for many conservatives. “Sycophancy toward those who hold power,” said Bloom, “is a fact in every regime, and especially in a democracy, where, unlike tyranny, there is an accepted principle of legitimacy that breaks the inner will to resist. . . . Flattery of the people and incapacity to resist public opinion are the democratic vices, particularly among writers, artists, journalists and anyone else who is dependent on an audience.”

I don’t know how much Michael has written on this, as I don’t read WaPo much. He is, of course, right, as long time readers know I would say, having written on the effects of such mendacity since Trump won the nomination.

But I do notice Michael doesn’t want to go too far with this. For example, he continues to laud the nomination of Gorsuch to SCOTUS, along with various other judges to Federal seats, with nary a thought as to how Trump’s polluted thought processes may have resulted in the selection of people unfit for their positions – as has been thoroughly documented in a number of places and for a number of those so nominated and, tragically, confirmed.

So while it’s good to see a conservative recognize the long-term ill effects of Trumpism, it’d be good to see them acknowledge all of the problems, and not give those issues they favor a pass.

More of our local fall colors.

Hey, ya wanna go out for a drink after this scene? Say ‘yes’, or I’ll force another retake!
Gods can be such jerks.

It’s a fight between a would-be god and a couple of humans in Lord of Illusions (1995), folks. Substituting blood for a plot clever enough to keep us engaged, and gore for the sense of humor such a ridiculous fight is going to require, this story bumbles along from incident to incident. We’re with private detective D’Amour, sent to Los Angeles from New York to keep tabs on some guy, but when the guy goes to see a fortune teller and leaves as if shot out of a cannon, D’Amour has to investigate. The dying man he discovers in the fortune teller’s den leads him into the tangled web of a ruptured, insane cult, out for revenge for the loss of their leader-god.

Besides the silly, yet not silly enough, violence, the problem is that victory or defeat in each incident appears to be random. No one is particularly clever nor stupid, so it’s difficult to nod and feel a connection, positive or negative, with each crash-bang-thud. How do the good guys defeat the dude who’s a God in the end? It actually beats the shit out of me. Maybe he just tripped and fell down a hole. Or something.

Remember our affection for Dr. Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)? It wasn’t his aura. or his charisma, or his good looks – it was his persistence, his flashes of self-deprecating humor, and his cleverness – even when that cleverness failed – that made us root for him. But the story tellers of Lord of Illusions don’t gift D’Amour with any real feature to admire, and as the only character who we might have sympathized with, it fairly much leaves the audience with a single, dull theme.

Don’t get involved with an insane religious cult, or bad things will happen to you.

And we all knew that already.

If you want to see a young Scott Bakula, this might be worth your time. Otherwise, all I can give it is a bit of a positive on the makeup; between a bad set of characters, some choppy editing (perhaps a result of the random requirements of television), and a complete lack of sense of humor, it’s really a total waste.

Once again, someone has decided to try to drag our society towards militarism and away from peaceful democracy. Unfortunately, this mail is a picture, rather than text, so I’ll reproduce the picture and then address the points en masse, as I can’t interject them.

Let’s start with the petty and mundane. First of all, how many folks are we talking, and how much cost is involved? Something to keep in mind that it’s not just going to be pay, but also housing (which most military personnel get free).

Second, even for the 20 year career soldier, they’re getting out of the service in their forties. How long do you want to pay them?

Third, at least in the United States, they have access to the GI Bill, which helps pay the educational bills, as well as has other benefits. My Dad used this to get his electrical engineering degree. And many veterans come out with skills useful in civilian life.

Fourth, currently those with honorable and medical discharges have free medical care via the Veterans Administration. Additionally, those who are badly injured in American service do get lifelong compensation. An uncle of mine had 100% of base pay, due to a heart attack. My father had something like 60%, due to a heart infection.

But let’s step back and ask ourselves what else would happen if something like this proposal did pass; that is, what are the societal impacts? In my mind, we’d be creating an officially privileged set of people who, through 20 years of service, will then be paid even out of service and therefore will no longer be … citizen-soldiers. See, that’s what gives our society something that resembles cohesion, the idea that we can go into the service, do some work for the polity, and then come back out and be normal citizens. That’s one of our great traditions, the idea that going out and work in defense is something we all can do, through service full time or part time.

And then not be relegated to being peasants if we choose not to do so. Make no mistake, that’s what this is all about – elevating and materially rewarding, open-ended, a group of people for a limited service. That’s a setup for opening a division of mutual dislike between those who have served, and those who chose not to, whether for selfish reasons (such as President Trump), or reasons of principle, such as pacifists.

I’ll not ignore the point concerning those who serve in Congress getting 100% of their pay as a pension, but I’ll also note many of these folks are in the latter portions of their lives when they retire from their positions, so the strain on the Republic may not be great, while on the other hand their sacrifice of working for the Republic – now a full time job – may have eliminated them from contending for full time jobs once their Congressional career has ended. I would like to see those who are independently wealthy decline their pensions, of course, as a matter of honor, but in the end I find it difficult to be upset over this bit of controversial waste when they number so few in comparison to the military members.

I think this is a proposal which should be declined as deleterious to our Republic.

In 1955, after Eisenhower’s poor health required extended hospitalization, the president called on Congress to clarify the mechanisms for handling succession and disability. As the National Constitution Center notes, the Cold War made the possibility of a president who could not discharge the executive powers an even more frightening prospect and may have spurned Congress to act.

– Matthew Kahn, “How ‘Unraveled’ Does Trump Have to Be? Presidential Disability and the 25th Amendment,” Lawfare.

Hmmmm. Maybe he meant “spurred”. The other one only brings on visuals originating from my more incoherent nightmares.

Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com has a cautionary message concerning Amazon looking to create a secondary headquarters:

It’s almost abusive. After shipping all their retail dollars and after years of losing jobs, sales taxes and so much else to Amazon, Cities are lining up to say hit me, hit me again! Amazon demands incentives to offset the initial costs and ongoing costs, tax credits, relocation grants, fee reductions. They want a “business friendly tax structure.”
The cities want growth. They want the jobs and the well-paid workers. But as Greg Leroy writes in Fast Company, there is no such thing as free growth. Particularly in some of the poorer, rust belt type cities that praying that Amazon will give them a new lease on life, they will have to bulk up on infrastructure and resources to cope.

More families arriving means more teachers to hire; more classrooms, roads, water mains and sewerage to build; more public safety to provide; and more trash to pick up. All of those things cost money. But if Amazon is paying no sales tax, no property tax, no income tax, and is getting cash gifts from its employees and/or the state treasury by selling tax credits, then Amazon won’t be bearing those new costs. Instead, there will be a huge burden shift: Either everyone else’s taxes will have to go up, or the quality of public services will have to go down, or some of both. There’s no such thing as free growth.

This is much like the Foxconn bribe that Wisconsin has issued, and I continue to wonder about the wisdom of trying to lure large companies via tax breaks and other incentives by cities and even states. After all, it really devalues and disrespects the local workforce, because it says We need to bribe these companies to come work in the local area – as if all workforces are interchangeable cogs in the great world-wide machine, or even inferior.

Which is most definitely not true. When education & experience levels and societies differ, inevitably the capabilities of the workforces will also differ – and there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that. For example, in the computer industry there’s a widespread impression, possibly out of date, that the Chinese are good at replicating technologies and products, but innovation is not their forte. Assuming this is true, and it may not be, does it makes sense for an innovator to setup an office in a Chinese city? Of course not.

But – does it make sense for a company to try to get the best offer they can? You’d think so. Many follow this model. And so it’s incumbent on cities to

1. not permit themselves to get caught up in this whirlwind.
2. develop an able and distinctive workforce.

These are non-trivial undertakings, as the first requires an understanding of how corporations work – often not easy for government officials who may not have corporate experience.

The second is even more difficult in the face of easy nation-wide transport. Back when it was walk, ride a horse, or take a train, workforces would stay put; these days, a sufficient number of similar employers in a single location can attract the desired work force from all over the country – or the world. Meanwhile, cities don’t move and cannot restrain movement, which suggests more indirect strategies must be used, such as provision or encouragement of cultural institutions, entertainments (preferably peculiar to the area), etc.

For those cities which are losing population, this can be a real challenge. But trying to bribe companies to come to their town will have their inevitable – possibly fatal – costs.

And while most of my readers are in the Twin Cities area and so are experiencing the same colors, I can’t resist putting them online. These are all local to our domicile.

Nonce:

noun
1. the present, or immediate, occasion or purpose (usually used in the phrase for the nonce).
adjective
2. (of a word or phrase) coined and used only for a particular occasion: nonce forms such as “paintrix,” meaning “a female painter.”.

[Dictionary.com]

I recently used it and realized I wasn’t quite sure of its definition.

Andrew Sullivan believes the Democrats are in the process of throwing away the 2020 election because of how they are handling the immigration issue:

This is, to be blunt, political suicide. The Democrats’ current position seems to be that the Dreamer parents who broke the law are near heroes, indistinguishable from the children they brought with them; and their rhetoric is very hard to distinguish, certainly for most swing voters, from a belief in open borders. In fact, the Democrats increasingly seem to suggest that any kind of distinction between citizens and noncitizens is somehow racist. You could see this at the last convention, when an entire evening was dedicated to Latinos, illegal and legal, as if the rule of law were largely irrelevant. Hence the euphemism “undocumented” rather than “illegal.” So the stage was built, lit, and set for Trump.

He still tragically owns that stage. …. The most powerful thing Trump said in the campaign, I’d argue, was: “If you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country.” And the Democrats had no answer, something that millions of Americans immediately saw. They still formally favor enforcement of immigration laws, but rhetorically, they keep signaling the opposite. Here is Dylan Matthews, also in Vox, expressing the emerging liberal consensus: “Personally, I think any center-left party worth its salt has to be deeply committed to egalitarianism, not just for people born in the U.S. but for everyone … It means treating people born outside the U.S. as equals … And it means a strong presumption in favor of open immigration.” Here’s Zack Beauchamp, a liberal friend of mine: “What if I told you that immigration restrictionism is and always has been racist?” Borders themselves are racist? Seriously?

And if the left has, in fact, taken up this position, I’d argue it’s intellectually wrong, and I’d suspect it’s a matter of group-think, although the latter is only a suspicion based on the use of the word racism. No one on the left, and few on the right, want to be tarred and feathered with that word. Ever. So you pick a position, associate the opposition with racism, and begin the campaign with your strategy already set out for you.

And the right, and much of the independents, won’t buy it. Indeed, it may repulse the right-inclined independents, who fiercely believe in a United States, but can’t stomach the craven failure of the GOP. That’s the political evaluation of this strategy.

It’s intellectually fucking lazy. If nothing else, nations serve as experiments in how to run societies, and immigrants to tend to mar the experimental parameters.

BUT SET that aside. Let’s analyze this from a more systematic point of view. Let’s try some analysis that doesn’t have us crossing our eyes to stare painfully at the speck on the tip of our nose. I think Andrew missed a bet. The left missed that same bet. The far right’s too incoherent to accuse of missing a bet, it would be unfair. (The moderate right – or true conservatives – I lump with the independents for the nonce.)

The real question to ask is Why is there an immigration issue? What is going on to force people to leave their homelands and come to a foreign land where they have to start all over again, illegally?

Political repression? Asylum is a legal option, so we can toss out those immigrants, who numbered about 25000 in 2014.

How about the rest? Mostly, it’s about economic distress. So what’s causing that?

Could it possibly be … the United States?

This isn’t an attack on the United States, but rather another rendition of the law of unintended consequences.. I recall reading, maybe 25 years ago, about several analyses of the impact of American agricultural exports on the agricultural sectors of the countries receiving these exports. It was apparently quite devastating, especially when those exports received financial support in order to give them a better chance at enduring success.

I’ve done some poking around, but haven’t found much to indicate this research continued. There is this report from The New York Times in 2003:

The more than $10 billion that American taxpayers give corn farmers every year in agricultural subsidies has helped destroy the livelihoods of millions of small Mexican farmers, according to a report to be released on Wednesday.

Prepared in advance of critical trade talks next month, the report by Oxfam International argues that the subsidies given American corn farmers allow them to sell their grain at prices far below what it costs to produce. That has led to cheap American corn flooding the Mexican market and pushing the poorest Mexican farmers out of business, the report said.

”There is a direct link between government agricultural policies in the U.S. and rural misery in Mexico,” according to the report entitled, ”Dumping Without Borders: How U.S. agricultural policies are destroying the livelihoods of Mexican corn farmers.”

I found it hard to find current corn crop subsidies for the current year, which surprised me. And then the export subsidies also must be part of the equation.

So our exports devastate the economies of our neighbors by destroying their agricultural sectors. Should it be a surprise that the result is a tide of economically distressed workers searching for a way to restore their economic fortunes?

Of course, this is all handwaving on my part. My information is old, possibly out of date – and the causal chain may still be up for debate. But stipulate it, and then what do you do? As an engineer, you look at stopping farm subsidies, but the political screams would send our politicians scrambling from rocks to hide under. Ban ag exports?

I think I’d be assassinated.

But I’d rather fix a problem at its source, rather than twist myself into a fatal knot, as the left may be doing.

Sometimes all it takes is a simple arrangement of facts to suggest a slightly different interpretation. I often see endorsements as the endorser actually approving the endorsee, usually for their ideological position, although sometimes simply for competency, and,  yes, I do understand that some of my readers probably consider me naive for it.

But these two notes from Steve Benen, separated in neither time nor space, sort of brought the alternative interpretation to the fore:

* As some Republican incumbents fret over possible even-further-to-the-right primary rivals, Donald Trump has reportedly assured three Republican senators — Nebraska’s Deb Fischer, Mississippi’s Roger Wicker, and Wyoming’s John Barrasso — that he’ll support their re-election bids.

* On a related note, though Deb Fischer is not seen as a vulnerable incumbent, Steve Bannon has reportedly been in contact with former state Treasurer Shane Osborn about a possible GOP primary.

It really sounds like Trump and Bannon are competing for loyalty from these various elected officials. Now, I know this isn’t anything new, but this looks like a big chess game going on out there on the extreme right.

And the question is whether or not the Democrats can find a way to take advantage of this (dare I say it?) inevitable discord on the right.