GOP's Dream Scenario

I tend to have an overwhelming dislike and distrust for any piece of news analysis built around a tweet, particularly an anonymously sourced tweet, but I might just make a limited exception to this one, at least partly because it's an excuse for some Friday videos but also because it dovetails nicely with an ongoing thread.

Here's the tweet:

prediction just in from top R strategist: Trump resigns "once Mueller closes in on him and the family," Pence makes Rubio VP, "GOP recovers"

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) August 19, 2017

One thing to get out of the way before we get to deeply in. This looks very much like a trial balloon directly or indirectly coming from an interested party, or as Dave Weigel of the Washington Post put it:

Was the source named "Darco Lubio" and was he wearing a fake mustache? https://t.co/hDfwzVlLVE

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) August 20, 2017

Of course, the presence of sources with ulterior motives does not rule out good reporting. You'd probably be hard pressed to find a major investigative story that didn't rely on such sources. In this case, the ulterior motives are perhaps the most interesting part of the story, but more on that in a moment.

If you have to get a story from an anonymous "top R strategist," someone like Harwood is a good place to turn. He's been working this beat since he became White House correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in the 1991. He's not above floating a trial balloon, but he is not likely to accept one from someone not in the know.

Does this mean that highly placed people in the GOP know that something big is about to go down with the Mueller investigation? That's possible, but I suspect it's more likely that this is a combination of planting some seeds and wishful thinking.



For well over a year now we have been discussing the central dilemma that the Republican Party faces with Trump. The man is dangerous, erratic, vindictive, and has no personal ties to the party. The leaders (both official and unofficial) mostly have wanted to have him disappear from the moment he went from useful rabble-rouser to actual candidate. The trouble is that there are very few ways to get rid of Trump without alienating a large enough segment of the base to devastate the party.

Impeachment or falling back on the 25th amendment would trigger an intraparty war if Trump decided to go down fighting (and that's how the smart money should bet). A resignation that left the GOP with reasonably clean hands is perhaps the only plausible resolution that leaves the party essentially intact.

That last phrase in the tweet is enormously telling. "GOP recovers" suggests that the party not recovering is not necessarily a given. Furthermore, there is at least an implication that resignation is a necessary condition for recovery.

How likely is the scenario laid out in the tweet? I wouldn't begin to speculate. Between the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns, committing to an estimate would be a fool's game, but what we can say with a little more confidence is that, based on this and other evidence, some of the top people in the Republican Party are pushing this scenario at least in part because they really want to believe it.

I suppose I should've known it would involve Tesla

I've been meaning to revisit the ddulite thread for a while. I coined the term (derived from Luddite) to refer to those people whose love of technology (or, more precisely, what they perceive as technology) makes them prefer newer and more "sophisticated" tech even when it has inferior functionality.

Recently the always solid Jason Torchinsky of Julopnik supplied us with perhaps the perfect example.

Possibly the most controversial design decision of the Tesla Model 3, even beyond its Renault Caravelle-like grille-less face, is its instrument panel, which consists solely of a center-mounted landscape-oriented LCD screen. This tweeted video showing how the climate-control air-direction system works is one of the first real looks we’ve had at the Model 3's UI, and I really can’t say I’m impressed.

That puts me in pretty direct opposition to noted rich guy Bill Lee, the Tesla investor who posted the video of the HVAC control interface, who called it “genius.”

…

These controls are invoked by pressing the small fan icon at the bottom of the display, which then opens a window in the lower right corner of the screen. That window is divided into two panes, the left one having the basic climate controls—fan speed, temperature, face/feet airflow, etc—and the right pane containing the interface to adjust where the air flows.

That’s the focus of this little video, so let’s focus on that as well. The interface consists of a horizontal bar, which I guess is supposed to represent the dash’s vent bar, and an oblong ‘thumb’ that can be positioned anywhere on the panel, and can also be split in two via a little button at the lower right.

…

First, that thumb is needlessly low-contrast; why do a light gray control on a slightly less light gray background like that? Is there a reason not to make it more visible, maybe use the blue color that’s also in this UI design?

The whole idea of the oblong is weird. I don’t normally think of airflow as hitting a given point in space; airflow is more of a directional vector—it flows out from a source, in some direction. Picking a ‘point’ like that for where the air goes is not very natural feeling.

Then, there’s the question of how is this to operate while you drive? The nature of a touch screen, drag-to-position interface is that it is entirely visual. There’s no tactile feedback, and you need your eyes to focus on the control to drag it about with your finger.

With conventional physical vent controls, you never needed to take your eyes off the road; that interface was entirely tactile. You could actually feel the flow of air, and you used your hand to direct vanes to redirect the air. Feedback was instantaneous and immediately understandable.

…

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that the Model 3's HVAC solution isn’t “genius” at all; it’s stupid. Perhaps there’s some manufacturing cost savings with the one long mono-vent; making the controls in software could be cheaper, but it also necessitates some sort of electric actuator to direct the airflow. Which is another thing, buried deeply and expensively inside that dashboard, that can break.

I want to be clear that there are things I like about Tesla’s approach here, and I’m not some traditionalist stuck in the past. I very much appreciate that they’re not falling into the usual trap of faking analog gauges, and I think an LCD screen can be designed to be a very effective instrument panel.

Physical vent controls and vanes aren’t ‘clumsy’ as Bill Lee suggests. They’re really quite elegant. They take no extra power, they give direct and immediate feedback, they don’t require taking eyes or attention off driving, they allow for greater flexibility of airflow directions, and they’re non-modal, and don’t lock out any other controls of the car.

The Tesla Model 3's solution is less effective in every possible way. That’s a weird idea of “genius,” if you ask me.

Narrative bias at NPR

One of the points we keep coming back to on this blog is that, while liberal ideological bias has long been held up as a bogeyman by critics of the mainstream media, it is both trivial and rare, at least in the way it is generally presented. You certainly have ideological and particularly partisan bias around the fringes, especially in conservative outlets such as Fox News, and you can find individual issues where the MSM displays strong biases. Entitlement reform, education reform, and gun control are all prominent examples, though it should be noted that only the last is particularly liberal.

That's not to say that biases don't exist and are not a problem – – given recent events, I list them as threats to the republic – – but the forms those biases take have little to do with left/right and everything to do with laziness, cultivating sources, driving traffic, intellectual conformity, and one that gets so little attention that there's not even a widely accepted name for it, narrative bias, selecting subjects and tweaking details to create a "good story" according to certain unstated but fairly standard criteria.

This piece by Carrie Johnson is a depressingly good example.

Robert Mueller May Not Be The Savior The Anti-Trump Internet Is Hoping For

In Procrustean fashion, it forces the facts to justify two decrepit clichés. The first is the Internet angle. For reasons too complex to delve into here, reporters and editors continue after about a quarter century to believe that framing something as an online phenomenon somehow gives it modern sheen.

In this context, you could pretty much substitute "Internet" with "carbon-based life forms." Since most journalists are active on twitter, quoting a few tweets is not evidence of an "online community." What's worse, of the four tweets she cites, one is from a cable news personality, one is from the formerly print-based publication the onion, and the third is from a writer for the still in print magazine the New Yorker.

The second and arguably even more threadbare cliché is the "not so fast" reversal which starts out by depicting a piece of supposed conventional wisdom then claiming to undercut it. In order to fit the narrative to this genre, Johnson has to cut lots of corners. For starters, while Trump opponents are certainly encouraged by the investigation and annoyed by the unavoidably slow pace of the process, it is not clear how many are "counting on" him to be their "savior." Trump resigning as part of a plea bargain would certainly be seen as a happy outcome by most administration critics (and a substantial number of Republicans who see this as the exit strategy least likely to devastate the GOP) but it is not the only happy outcome and perhaps not even the most hoped-for. Trump's critics (particularly his non-Republican critics) are arguably more focused on the Democrats retaking the house and starting impeachment hearings, preferably with the Senate also changing hands. There is also a lot of talk about the 25th amendment. Johnson has to underplay these aspects in order to set up the premise of the narrative.

Then there is the conclusion. This requires downplaying the potential amount of damage this investigation can do. In this case, that means relying on perhaps the most unreliable source imaginable.

Three months into the job, however, it's not clear what, if anything, investigators may uncover about the president, who has repeatedly denied any improper contacts with people in Russia and has called the special counsel probe "a witch hunt."

"They're investigating something that never happened," Trump told reporters last week. "There was no collusion between us and Russia. In fact, the opposite. Russia spent a lot of money on fighting me."

Putting aside the fact that three months does not seem like very long at all given the scope and complexity of this investigation, framing it in terms of Donald Trump's denials is simply unjustifiable. For starters, people under investigation virtually always start by claiming "there's no there there." Even if we were dealing with a normal politician, these declarations of innocence wouldn't count for much, but Trump is no normal politician. Among high-ranking elected officials, he has a unique-in-living-memory record of dishonesty and fabrication both directly and through his surrogates. On top of that, the statement actually ends with a demonstrable lie about Russia trying to undermine his election. If anything, a denial this ridiculous should arouse disbelief in readers and, more to the point, in reporters.

Keeping with the narrative, Johnson further understates the danger to the administration.

Another complicating factor: Mueller is using grand juries in Alexandria, Va., and Washington, D.C., and grand jury information is rarely made public.

"It is going to be hard and frustrating to get this information out," said Peter Zeidenberg, a lawyer at the Arent Fox firm who worked on the special counsel team investigating the leak of a CIA operative's identity in the George W. Bush administration.
…

In his leak investigation, a lot of information eventually became public through the prosecution of former vice presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Absent a decision to charge someone with a crime, investigations in Congress may be the best way for people to understand what happened and why in last year's election interference.

A couple of important points here, one of which is badly understated, the other omitted entirely. First, big investigations like this do tend to produce criminal charges, often of people not immediately involved with the primary case (just ask Jim Guy Tucker). When you start digging into any sufficiently complex scenario involving great money or power, you will generally find that someone broke some law. Second, and this very much affects the previous point, the legitimate scope of this investigation is huge. Of the quid pro quo being investigated, only the middle piece is reasonably well contained.

After Trump lost access to conventional funding due to his habit of screwing over business partners, he had to rely on disreputable sources. Much, perhaps most of the time, those sources had direct or indirect ties to Russia. This means that a thorough investigation will need to closely examine the financing of every project Trump was involved in for perhaps the past 10 years. It is highly likely that the grand juries will find something to charge someone with. And we haven't even gotten into the hacking of the election itself.

None of this means that Trump or a member of his inner circle will be indicted. It doesn't even necessarily mean that anyone will be indicted (though that second one seems a bit improbable). What it does mean is that, like the "anti-Trump Internet" premise, the facts have been stretched or truncated to fit the genre.

The Republicans' 3 x 3 existential threat

I've argued previously that Donald Trump presents and existential threat to the Republican Party. I know this can sound overheated and perhaps even a bit crazy. There are few American institutions as long-standing and deeply entrenched as are the Democratic and Republican parties. Proposing that one of them might not be around 10 years from now beggars the imagination and if this story started and stopped with Donald Trump, it would be silly to suggest we were on the verge of  a political cataclysm.

But, just as Trump's rise did not occur in a vacuum, neither will his fall. We discussed earlier how Donald Trump has the power to drive a wedge between the Republican Party and a significant segment of its base [I wrote this before the departure of Steve Bannon. That may diminish Trump's ability to create this rift but I don't think it reduces the chances of the rift happening. – – M.P.]. This is the sort of thing that can profoundly damage a political party, possibly locking it into a minority status for a long time, but normally the wound would not be fatal. These, however, are not normal times.

The Republican Party of 2017 faces a unique combination of interrelated challenges, each of which is at a historic level and the combination of which would present an unprecedented threat to this or any US political party. The following list is not intended to be exhaustive, but it hits the main points.

The GOP currently has to deal with extraordinary political scandals, a stunningly unpopular agenda and daunting demographic trends. To keep things symmetric and easy to remember, let's break each one of these down to three components (keeping in mind that the list may change).


With the scandals:

1. Money – – Even with the most generous reading imaginable, there is no question that Trump has a decades long record of screwing people over, skirting the law, and dealing with disreputable and sometimes criminal elements. At least some of these dealings have been with the Russian mafia, oligarchs, and figures tied in with the Kremlin which leads us to…

2. The hacking of the election – – This one is also beyond dispute. It happened and it may have put Donald Trump into the White House. At this point, we have plenty of quid and plenty of quo; if Mueller can nail down pro, we will have a complete set.

3. And the cover-up – – As Josh Marshall and many others have pointed out, the phrase "it's not the crime; it's the cover-up" is almost never true. That said, coverups can provide tipping points and handholds for investigators, not to mention expanding the list of culprits.


With the agenda:

1. Health care – – By some standards the most unpopular major policy proposal in living memory that a party in power has invested so deeply in. Furthermore, the pushback against the initiative has essentially driven congressional Republicans into hiding from their own constituents for the past half year. As mentioned before, this has the potential to greatly undermine the relationship between GOP senators and representatives and the voters.

2. Tax cuts for the wealthy – – As said many times, Donald Trump has a gift for making the subtle plain, the plain obvious, and the obvious undeniable. In the past, Republicans were able to get a great deal of upward redistribution of the wealth past the voters through obfuscation and clever branding, but we have reached the point where simply calling something "tax reform" is no longer enough to sell tax proposals so regressive that even the majority of Republicans oppose them.

3. Immigration (subject to change) – – the race for third place in this list is fairly competitive (education seems to be coming up on the outside), but the administration's immigration policies (which are the direct result of decades of xenophobic propaganda from conservative media) have already done tremendous damage, caused great backlash, and are whitening the gap between the GOP and the Hispanic community, which leads us to…



Demographics:

As Lindsey Graham has observed, they simply are not making enough new old white men to keep the GOP's strategy going much longer, but the Trump era rebranding of the Republican Party only exacerbates the problems with women, young people, and pretty much anyone who isn't white.

Maybe I am missing a historical precedent here, but I can't think of another time that either the Democrats or the Republicans were this vulnerable on all three of these fronts. This does not mean that the party is doomed or even that, with the right breaks, it can't maintain a hold on some part of the government. What it does mean is that the institution is especially fragile at the moment. A mortal blow may not come, but we can no longer call it unthinkable.

That's not to say that sleeping around can't be a plus

Over the past few years I have gotten in the habit of making a quick (or, to be honest, often not-so-quick) visit to Wikipedia when I read something that seems curious and I've spotted some common threads. For example, when a US representative makes a particularly clueless reactionary remark, I will give you excellent odds that he or she comes from a white flight district. I have found this to be the best predictor of far right extremism for politicians at the municipal or district level. Growing up in such a neighborhood is also strongly correlated with journalists and pundits holding these views.

Another curious phenomenon that I think I may have largely explained via Wikipedia is the mysterious rise of young, highly successful incompetents. You know what I'm talking about. You see someone with no apparent ability or qualifications who has raced up the career ladder, or has just been handed a huge check to start a company with a dubious business plan or has landed a high profile gig at a big-name publication. These are incredibly competitive fields and yet some manage to race past countless peers who are smarter, more talented, and better qualified.

The standard joke response is "who did that person sleep with?" but a little digging online provides a better explanation, or at least a highly suspicious pattern. If you look up the bio of a bizarrely successful incompetent, you will notice that the overwhelming majority come from an elite university and, in a truly remarkable number of cases, a ridiculously selective and expensive prep school. Wealth and family connections often figure prominently as well, but they are not as essential. Spending a decade or so in the company of the rich and powerful seems to be sufficient.

Just to be clear, I'm not making a blanket statement about the intellect or abilities of people who come from these schools. There are a lot of smart, capable preppies with degrees from Harvard out there. What I am saying is that the connections and prestige that comes with this kind of education provides enormous advantages, advantages so large that they often swamp the qualifications we like to think determine success.

With that in mind, the following raises disturbing implications:

"Access to colleges varies greatly by parent income," writes Raj Chetty of Stanford University and four co-authors. "Children whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those whose parents are in the bottom income quintile." 

Employer sponsored Health Insurance

This is Joseph

Via Mike the Mad Biologist was this gem:

Even people who do not switch jobs are vulnerable to losing their health insurance under the employer-sponsored system. For the health insurance market to actually work like a market, participants need to be prepared to change their insurer every single year. Employers need to constantly rethink what insurers they should contract with to provide benefits. And when open enrollment comes around, employees and those on the Obamacare exchanges are supposed to reassess their options and switch to the best insurer on offer. Put simply: a well-functioning private health insurance system requires people to frequently change their insurance situation, which is precisely the evil that Krugman says we need to avoid.

I think that this is an under-appreciated point.  Insofar as "continuity of care" is an important part of medical care, shopping around is discouraged.  Just think of how long intake medical appointments take, and thus impose a cost on patients switching providers.  Some degree of switching of providers is inevitable in any health care system (people move or retire).   But this stickiness undermines one of the major assumptions behind how markets are supposed to work.

Now this doesn't necessarily limit the options all that greatly, but it is a good reason to be cautious about too strong of a status quo bias when considering the current health care system.  There are some great aspects to the current system but also some real costs that need to be considered as part of any policy-reform.

Feeling stressed? Overwhelmed? Give me three minutes of your time.

Just hit play [Assuming you can read this in under twelve seconds.]

War on science (outsourced)

This is scary:

Any resident in Florida can now challenge what kids learn in public schools, thanks to a new law that science education advocates worry will make it harder to teach evolution and climate change.

The legislation, which was signed by Gov. Rick Scott (R) this week and goes into effect Saturday, requires school boards to hire an “unbiased hearing officer” who will handle complaints about instructional materials, such as movies, textbooks and novels, that are used in local schools. Any parent or county resident can file a complaint, regardless of whether they have a student in the school system. If the hearing officer deems the challenge justified, he or she can require schools to remove the material in question.
...

But Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Council for Science Education, said that affidavits filed by supporters of the bill suggest that science instruction will be a focus of challenges. One affidavit from a Collier County resident complained that evolution and global warming were taught as “reality.” Another criticized her child's sixth-grade science curriculum, writing that “the two main theories on the origin of man are the theory of evolution and creationism,” and that her daughter had only been taught about evolution.

“It's just the candor with which the backers of the bill have been saying, 'Yeah, we’re going to go after evolution, we’re going to go after climate change,'" that has him worried, Branch said.

But I do have to admit the music is catchy.

Sometimes threads collide and you don't even know it

Over the past few years I written quite a bit about Taylorism, that early and largely discredited school of scientific management that has managed a sustained presence thanks to management consultants and MBA programs and which became the guiding principle of the education reform movement. I've also been working for a long time on a series of long-form pieces on the way that the huge spike in technological progress around the late 19th and early 20th centuries affected and continue to affect our perception of innovation and the future.

I don't know, however, that I ever really made the connection between the two before now. We tend to think of the era in quaint terms, a simpler, slower-moving time, but it was in reality a period of explosive change. Contemporary accounts tell us that people were not only aware that they were living in a revolutionary age; they were fascinated by the process. The promise of Taylorism  – – that scientific and engineering principles could revolutionize the human aspect of work the same way they had revolutionized virtually every other aspect of the world – – was immensely appealing and eminently sensible to the audience of the 1890s and early 1900s. It is hardly surprising that people even attempted to apply the approach to child rearing.

From  Uncovering The Secret History Of Myers-Briggs by Merve Emre

Although Barb invokes Jung's name with pride and a touch of awe, Jung would likely be greatly displeased, if not embarrassed, by his long-standing association with the indicator. The history of his involvement with Myers begins not with Isabel, but with her mother Katharine Cook Briggs, whom Barb mentions only in passing. After the photograph of Jung, Barb projects onto the screen a photograph of Katharine, unsmiling and broad necked and severely coiffed. "I usually don't get into this," she says, gesturing at Katharine's solemn face. "People have already bought into the instrument."

Yet Katharine is an interesting woman, a woman who might have interested Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem or any second-wave feminist eager to dismantle the opposition between "the happy modern housewife" and the "unhappy careerist." A stay-at-home mother and wife who had once studied horticulture at Michigan Agricultural College, Katharine was determined to approach motherhood like an elaborate plant growth experiment: a controlled study in which she could trace how a series of environmental conditions would affect the personality traits her children expressed. In 1897, Isabel emerged — her mother's first subject. From the day of her birth until the child's thirteenth birthday, Katharine kept a leather-bound diary of Isabel's developments, which she pseudonymously titled The Life of Suzanne. In it, she painstakingly recorded the influence that different levels of feeding, cuddling, cooing, playing, reading, and spanking had on Isabel's "life and character."

Today we might think of Katharine as the original helicopter parent: hawkish and over-present in her maternal ministrations. But in 1909, Katharine's objectification of her daughter answered feminist Ellen Key's resounding call for a new and more scientific approach to "the vocation of motherhood." More progressive still was how Katharine marshaled the data she had collected on Isabel to write a series of thirty-three articles in The Ladies Home Journal on the science of childrearing. These articles, which were intended to help other mothers systematize their childcare routines, boasted such single-minded titles as "Why I Believe the Home Is the Best School" and "Why I Find Children Slow in Their School Work." Each appeared under the genteel nom de plume "Elizabeth Childe."

The GOP needs the crazies more than the crazies need the GOP.

The following is not really a voting paradox, but it is kind of in the neighborhood. You have three stockholders for a company. A holds 48% of the shares, B holds 49%, and C holds 3%. Assuming that any decision needs to be approved by people holding a majority, who has the most power? The slightly counterintuitive answer is no one. Each shareholder is equal since an alliance of any two will produce a majority.

Now let's generalize the idea somewhat. Let's say you have N shareholders whom you have brought together to form a majority. Some of the members of your alliance have a large number of shares, some have very few, but even the one with the smallest stake has enough that if he or she drops out, you will be below 50%. In this scenario, every member of the alliance has equal veto power.

I apologize for the really, really basic fun-with-math explanation, but this principle has become increasingly fundamental in 21st-century politics. At the risk of oversimplifying, elections come down to my number of supporters times my turnout percentage versus your number supporters times your turnout percentage. Arguably the fundamental piece of the conservative movement has been to focus on ways to maximize Republican turnout while suppressing democratic turnout. (Yes, I'm leaving a lot out but bear with me.)

There are at least a couple of obvious inherent dangers in this approach. The first is that there is an upper bound for turnout percentage. This is especially worrisome when the number of your supporters is decreasing. Sen. Lindsey Graham was alluding to this when he observed that they weren't making enough new old white men to keep the GOP strategy going.

There is, however, another danger which can potentially be even worse. When you need nearly 100% of your supporters to show up to the polls in order to win, you create a situation where virtually every faction of your base has veto power. One somewhat perverse advantage of the large base/low turnout model is that groups of supporters can be interchangeable. You have lots of situations where you can alienate a small segment but more than make up for it elsewhere. In and of itself, this allows for a great deal of flexibility, but the really important part is the power dynamic. You have to represent a large constituency in order to wield veto power.

Probably since 2008 and certainly since 2012, pretty much every nontrivial faction of the GOP has held veto power which means the question is no longer who has it, but who is willing to use it. The Tea Party was the first to realize this. Now the alt-right has caught on to the dynamic as well.

Even with increasingly aggressive and shameless voter suppression techniques, Republicans tend to get fewer votes. It is true that they have, through smart strategy and tactics, managed to get an extraordinary number of offices out of those votes, but it is a precarious situation. We can debate how many people really believe in shadowy Jewish banker conspiracies or Martian slave labor camps, but it is almost certainly a large enough group to sway some close elections if the crazies collectively decided to go home or, worse yet, opt for a third party.

Ed Kilgore (whom I follow and generally respect) had a badly ill-informed post Trump Should Emulate Buckley and Tell Racists: ‘I Don’t Want Your Vote.’ That simply won't work for Trump or the GOP. They need the crazies more than the crazies need them.

Yes, I am planning on making this another food stamps post

Admittedly, the cases described here are extreme, but they do remind us of the cost of early childhood malnutrition can be devastating.

From the World Bank:

Brain imaging in Bangladesh. Nelson also shared findings from a study using neuroimaging tools (EEG, fNIRS, MRI) to study cognitive development in children 6 and 36 months old exposed to multiple types and levels of early adversities in Dhaka, Bangladesh. For both cohorts, results show reduced cognitive outcomes for those children growing up in the most adverse conditions. Factors such as maternal education, inflammation, and stunting due to chronic malnutrition mediate these poor outcomes. As the figure below shows, these kids’ brain anatomy, metabolism and physiology are all impacted by adversity, particularly stunting.

Some days you just need some Rube Goldberg

I know we've done some of these before, but these days it can be an enormous relief to see absurdity that's intentional.

For those unacquainted with the concept...

Rube Goldberg's cartoons became well known for depicting complicated devices that performed simple tasks in indirect convoluted ways. The example on the right is Goldberg's "Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin", which was later reprinted in a few book collections, including the postcard book Rube Goldberg's Inventions! and the hardcover Rube Goldberg: Inventions, both compiled by Maynard Frank Wolfe from the Rube Goldberg Archives.[3] The "Self-Operating Napkin" is activated when soup spoon (A) is raised to mouth, pulling string (B) and thereby jerking ladle (C), which throws cracker (D) past parrot (E). Parrot jumps after cracker and perch (F) tilts, upsetting seeds (G) into pail (H). Extra weight in pail pulls cord (I), which opens and ignites lighter (J), setting off skyrocket (K), which causes sickle (L) to cut string (M), allowing pendulum with attached napkin to swing back and forth, thereby wiping chin.






We've already shown one clip from the Japanese educational series PythagoraSwitch, but I think this one is even better.

The Significance of "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"

For what seems like decades, I have been collecting notes for an essay on how the huge technological advances of the late 19th/early 20th Centuries and of the postwar era shaped and eventually distorted our perception of progress. One of the points I plan on hitting is the way that scientific frontiers came to replace geographic frontiers in the American imagination.

That particular argument pretty much has to start with the opening of this seminal essay:

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: "Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports." This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

"The Significance of the Frontier in American History"
Frederick J. Turner. 1893


I don't want to get too caught up in the rightness of Turner's thesis; what's important here is its resonance. People responded to the idea that the frontier was the defining influence on the country. It struck them as sensible and profound and it was something they wanted to talk about.

From Wikipedia:

Turner's emphasis on the importance of the frontier in shaping American character influenced the interpretation found in thousands of scholarly histories. By the time Turner died in 1932, 60% of the leading history departments in the U.S. were teaching courses in frontier history along Turnerian lines.

One frontier that had obsessed and arguably defined the nation closed just as another frontier that would do exactly the same thing was opening. I'd argue that this deepened the mystique of technology, but that's a point for a future post.

On the bright side, he's probably not smart enough to be a Russian agent

The fringe is a strange beast. Almost by definition, it consist of splinters, belief systems that are highly diverse and often mutually exclusive, seemingly sharing only improbability. Furthermore, the members of those groups are often incapable of functioning at what we would generally call a normal level of competence. The very idea of a coherent fringe that can be channeled and useful directions would seem to be absurd.

But contradictory beliefs often mask similar, or at least compatible, personalities. It is remarkably difficult to reconcile flat earth and alien invasion theories, but adherents of both can frequently find common ground in their sense of isolation and, more to the point, persecution by society in general and the scientific and academic establishment in particular.

I'm not sure it makes much sense to impose a left/right ideological framework on fringe groups before, say, 1980. Not only do you find them at every point on the political spectrum, most of them can't really be described in those terms at all, like rowing complex numbers into a discussion that requires real solutions. After the Reagan era, however, the conservative movement started making consistently effective use of these groups. The movement was fundamentally and often explicitly Straussian, misinforming the base to drum up anti-goverment feelings was a logical step.

The system works great until the misinformation starts flowing in the wrong direction. Here's how we put it earlier.

I know we've been through all of this stuff about Leo Strauss and the conservative movement before so I'm not going to drag this out into great detail except to reiterate that if you want to have a functional  institution that makes extensive use of internal misinformation, you have to make sure things move in the right direction.

With misinformation systems as with plumbing, when the flow starts going the wrong way, the results are seldom pretty. This has been a problem for the GOP for at least a few years now. A number of people in positions of authority, (particularly in the tea party wing) have bought into notions that were probably intended simply to keep the cannon-fodder happy. This may also partly explain the internal polling fiasco at the Romney campaign.

Which leads us to this piece from Ars Technica by Eric Berger

On Thursday, the space subcommittee of the House Science Committee held a hearing to look into NASA's forthcoming big-ticket planetary exploration missions. Those missions include a Mars 2020 rover, a Europa flyby mission, and potentially a follow-up lander to the Jovian moon Europa.
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[California Republican Dana Rohrabacher ] asked, "You have indicated that Mars was totally different thousands of years ago. Is it possible that there was a civilization on Mars thousands of years ago?"
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 [Kenneth Farley] calmly answered, "So the evidence is that Mars was different billions of years ago. Not thousands of years ago."

"Well, yes," Rohrabacher says. As if duh, of course he knew that.

"And, umm, there would be, there's no evidence that, uhh, I'm aware of," Farley continued, gamely trying to answer the question.

"Would you rule that out? See, there's some people... Well, anyway."

"I would say that is extremely unlikely," Farley responds.

That exchange would be troubling enough on its own, but Berger goes on to speculate that the cryptic “some people” might have referred to this.

On Thursday (June 29), a guest on Alex Jones' radio show named Robert David Steele claimed that Mars is inhabited — by people sent to the Red Planet against their will.

"We actually believe that there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20-year ride, so that once they get to Mars, they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony," Steele told Jones, the founder of the controversial InfoWars website.
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 "Look, I know that 90 percent of the NASA missions are secret, and I've been told by high-level NASA engineers that you have no idea," Jones told Steele, who the show billed as a "CIA insider." "There is so much stuff going on."

Jones went on to add that "clearly, they don’t want us looking into what is happening; every time probes go over, they turn them off."

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that Rohrabacher got this directly from Jones, but that informationn from sources like Jones are likely to flow in unexpected directions, which is, in many ways, worse.

Charter school movement reaches the every faction for itself phase

Jennifer Berkshire  points us to this article from Chalkbeat:

Has the charter school movement gone awry? A new book says yes, and it’s causing a stir
By Matt Barnum

It's an interesting discussion, but one that arguably tells us more about the debaters than about the nominal topic. Until recently one of the fundamental characteristics of the education reform movement was the way various factions saw it as the coming fulfillment of their often very different and sometimes mutually exclusive desires. It would close the achievement gap, bring back old-fashioned rigor, fix the economy, remove the yoke of excessive government. The optimistic assumption of each group was that, if everything changed, it might just change in their favor.

There were always two dominant factions. The first was technocrats. These were scientific management types whose specific ideas and general worldview owed everything to MBA programs and corporate culture (with a dollop of freshwater economics added.) It was no coincidence that the man who was arguably the founding father of the movement, David Coleman, came from a background not of education but of management consulting.

The second group was antigovernment, anti-regulation, antiunion (in many cases, socially reactionary). A nontrivial segment of this faction had started out in the pro-voucher movement until that had crashed and burned years earlier.

In many ways, the goals of the two factions were diametrically opposed. One was economically focused and socially progressive, looking not just to close the achievement gap but to end poverty through innovation and technology. The other was focused on tradition conservative goals. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective), the two groups shared a libertarian tilt and a great faith in market-based solutions. Perhaps more importantly, though, both saw the tremendous buzz and bipartisan support for education reform as the best chance they had to advance their objectives.

Along with entitlement reform and balancing the budget, education reform was the sacred cow of public policy initiatives, one of the very few issues that respectable publications like the New York Times could and would present only the pro side for.

Of course, that was then. Topics like charter school initiatives, standardized testing, and common core have become highly controversial, and the result has been a fraying of alliances within the movement.

Which brings us to this

The book, a collection of essays edited by the Center for Education Reform’s Jeanne Allen and Cara Candal and the Manhattan Institute’s Max Eden, makes the case that the charter school movement has gone awry: it’s over-regulated, hyper-focused on tests, and dismissive of families.

They appear to have an ally in U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. In a recent speech to charter school leaders, DeVos criticized lengthy charter applications, warning that “many who call themselves ‘reformers’ have instead become just another breed of bureaucrats.”

What’s needed now, the book’s authors say, is more innovation and less of a focus on test results. That argument prompted Checker Finn, the former president of the Fordham Institute, a right-of-center education think tank, to call the book “idiocy.” In an email exchange among a number of well-known education reformers, Allen shot back, saying Finn was “catching the same disease that befell Diane Ravitch,” the school choice advocate-turned-reform-critic.
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Allen and Eden say charter school advocates can be divided into two camps.

In one corner are “system-centered reformers,” who, in the authors’ telling, trust tests to measure school performance and trust themselves to oversee those schools.

In the other are “parent-centered reformers.” They want to see a system “where educational entrepreneurs are freer to open new schools and parents decide which schools should close and which should expand based on whether they want to send their children there.” DeVos — who appeared at a private reception held by Allen’s Center for Education Reform in June — has described her vision in similar terms.
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Eden and Allen close the book with recommendations that include expanding the number and type of charter authorizers, ensuring charters are not bound by teacher certification rules, and reducing charter school regulations.

One interesting point here is that neither side is taking a particularly popular stance. Rather they are dividing up the unpopular parts of their once shared platform.

The excessive amount of time spent both directly and indirectly on standardized testing has become highly controversial, as has the use of test scores for the promotion or firing of teachers, the allocating resources, and the closing of schools. The backlash has led to, among the things, an opt-out movement that threatens the entire system. Likewise, the technocrats other favorite policy, Common Core, has reached punchline status.

But the positions on the other side have no great popular support either. The term "deregulation" scores high with fellows at the Cato Institute, but it doesn't have much resonance with the public. What's worse, when you dive down into the specifics, you quickly get to things like the mistreatment of the disabled, corruption/self-dealing and excessive compensation for founders and executives. There is no powerful grassroots movement pushing for kicking LD kids to the curb or giving million-dollar bonuses to the CEOs of charter schools. And, contrary to what the authors may think, it is remarkably difficult to find a parent who wants to see fewer certified teachers in his or her child's school.