Friday, May 5, 2023

Deferred Thursday Tweets -- sometimes it's easier to sell the solution people know they don't understand

Three good threads from Paul Krugman discussing the administration's options for dealing with the debt limit hostage situation (though you might want to do a little background reading first).



An important aspect of the crisis is that the hostage-takers' demands are so politically toxic that the people making them are simultaneously denying them, which is allowing Biden an opportunity to indulge in a little snark.



Speaking of old guys who are still goddamn sharp.



I've always felt the Kennedys (with the possible exception of Ted) were overrated, but they still deserve better than this clown.



While on the subject of Ukraine...

 


NYT pitchbot should start charging a licensing fee.


The very fact that CPAC meets in Hungary makes further comment superfluous, but we won't let that stop us.

The kids are alright (and that bothers certain people).
To be fair, they can still be good citizens as long as their teachers don't encourage that sort of thing.


SCOTUS Tweets





Why don't we play a game of solitaire...


Briefly checking in on the Tucker defenestration.


 

Meanwhile in Muskworld.






On a more general note, important threads from possibly the most important journalist on the EV beat.



 


Great thread on the tech behind the tech.


We need to talk more about framing.

More on regurgitative AI.



All kidding aside.

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Thursday, May 4, 2023

The Snows of May

Some more notes on the weather...

First off, when this post goes up on the blog, it will be snowing in the mountains to the east. 

Snow levels could level to about 4,000 to 4,500 feet; areas with elevations above 6,000 feet could see 4 to 8 inches of snow, with localized areas getting 14 inches. 
(I believe they got a bit more to the north.)

 April ended with a brief heat wave that had people worried about flooding because there are still over a million foot acres waiting to come down...

 

... but as has happened so often this year, we seem to have caught another lucky break.

California's May forecast could limit dangerous snowmelt by Grace Toohey

Even though March 2023 was the second hottest March globally since record keeping began, temperatures in California have remained below historical averages — a trend that officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say will continue at least through next month.

“We’re actually favoring below-normal temperatures for a lot of the state,” said Scott Handel, a meteorologist with NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

“You have that high snowpack in a lot of the West, including California, and also higher-than-normal soil moisture, and at the same time there’s below-normal temperatures in the ocean right off the coast of California — all of those factors should conspire to limit the chances of above-normal temperatures for [California],” Handel said.

Parts of California’s Central Valley continue to battle flooding after an extremely wet winter. While state water officials have warned residents of treacherous conditions this spring and summer due to increased river flows, NOAA’s outlook raised hopes that the so-called Big Melt might be milder than initially forecast.

“We’re not seeing any very warm periods that would cause concern just yet, and the hope is that when we do see those, or if we do see those, that they will be later in the season when the snowpack isn’t quite as large,” said Andrew Schwartz, lead scientist at UC Berkeley’s Central Sierra Snow Laboratory. “I would say things are looking pretty optimistic in terms of keeping any type of flooding — and the severity of that flooding — light.”

I don't want to dismiss the danger of upcoming floods or the damage we've seen so far, but we've managed to avoid the kind of deluge that the Central Valley is historically prone to. As natural disasters go, the events of the past few months have been minor and we desperately needed the water.

Many Californians with dry wells face long wait for fixes by Ian James

In a neighborhood surrounded by almond orchards and citrus groves southeast of Fresno, large plastic cisterns occupy the yards of many homes, and residents have learned to ration water until the next tanker truck arrives.

Even after major storms have boosted California rivers and reservoirs, many in the unincorporated community of Tombstone Territory continue to rely on state-funded water deliveries. Some of their wells went dry last year, while others have been coping with dry wells for as long as three years.

...

Groundwater depletion has progressively worsened through both wet and dry periods in the Central Valley, and accelerated over the last three years as heavy pumping sent aquifer levels plunging to new lows.

One of the encouraging signs I've noticed this year was that people (the government, journalists, the public at large) are finally getting serious about getting as much water as possible back into the ground. Historically, California infrastructure was built to get as much rain water into the ocean as quickly as possible, an approach that was short-sighted even before climate change kicked in.

Though it may seem counterintuitive, I get the feeling that the recent abundance of water has actually made folks out West think more seriously about conservation and management. The long drought seemed to produce a sense of learned helplessness -- why bother? -- but this winter has reminded us that the only thing worse than doing without is knowing that you're doing without because of wasted opportunity.
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Wednesday, May 3, 2023

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" -- Neom was just the beginning for MBS

“Let’s talk about something other than women driving. The NEOM project, the futuristic city that he (the crown prince) plans to invest half a trillion dollars in. What if it goes wrong? It could bankrupt the country.”
 Jamal Khashoggi, June 2017
 

As mentioned before, we live in a time of mad kings, megalomaniacal sociopaths granted dangerous power through wealth and/or political position, prone to wild schemes of empire and grandeur. Even in this crowded field, the ruler of Saudi Arabia manages to stand out, particularly with his willingness to burn through even the impressive coffers of his country building futuristic boondoggles. 

He's like a self-funding Elon Musk.

Space pods and flying dragons: How Saudi Arabia wants to transform its capital
Nadeen Ebrahim and Dalya Al Masri

At the heart of the project is the "Mukaab," a 400-meter (1,312-foot) high, 400-meter wide and 400-meter-long cube that is big enough to fit 20 Empire State buildings. It offers "an immersive experience" with landscapes changing from outer space to green vistas, according to Public Investment Fund (PIF), the MBS-led $620-billion sovereign wealth fund. The project is due to be completed in 2030.

...

"Back in the day, you would have negative discussions about Saudi Arabia affiliated to human rights abuses," said Andreas Krieg, research fellow at the King's College London Institute of Middle Eastern Studies. "But now they're trying to push new narratives of being a country of development and one that can build futuristic cities."

...

But some have questioned whether the project will even come to fruition. Saudi Arabia has announced similar mega projects in the past, work on which has been slow.

In 2021, MBS announced his $500 billion futuristic Neom city in the northwest of the country, with promises of robot maids, flying taxis, and a giant artificial moon. And last year, he unveiled a giant linear city, the Line, which aimed to stretch over 106 miles and house 9 million people.

...

"The more absurd and futuristic these projects get, the more I can't help but imagine how much more dystopian everything surrounding them will be," wrote Dana Ahmed, a Gulf researcher at Amnesty International, on Twitter.

Saudi officials have insisted that work on the projects is going ahead as planned.


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Tuesday, May 2, 2023

Always take a minute to think about the source of your data




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Monday, May 1, 2023

Marketplace -- brought to you by American Public Media and the good people at the Koch Foundation [Updated]

Before we get started, I just want to go on the record with this: Marketplace is the best daily news show on public radio by a clear margin. Smart, clear, willing to push back against bullshit, attentive to the entire country, but some bad habits are so wide-spread and so entrenched that even the best journalists lapse.

From Why is it so hard for Congress to deal with the national debt? by Kimberly Adams.

And for all the complexities of the U.S. economy, if Congress really wants to address this, the broad solutions are fairly simple.

“On one hand, you can reduce certain types of spending that hopefully will not have these other negative consequences, like increasing poverty, increasing inequality, etc., etc.,” said Mariely Lopez-Santana, who teaches government and politics at George Mason University. “But on the other hand, you just need more money, right? And how do you get more money? By taxing certain types of people. So in that way, the solution might seem very basic.”

But of course, the political pain comes when you have to decide who loses benefits and who pays more in taxes.

“You have politicians who are all incentivized to go home to their constituents and say, ‘Look at all of the goodies I brought you out of the federal coffers,'” said EJ Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Promoting more economic growth can ease deficits, but to make a meaningful dent in the debt, Antoni said both parties need to make hard choices about popular programs like defense spending.

“But on top of that, we also need to have some very serious conversations about entitlements,” he added. This means Social Security, Medicare — the things politicians and their constituents don’t like messing with.

The reporter spoke with sources from two institutions, both coming from virtually identical perspectives, both (particularly Heritage) with somewhat checkered histories, and both funded in the past by the Koch brothers. Predictably, (to paraphrase Dorothy Parker) the range of policy suggestions ran the gamut from A to B, hitting the same old talking points that have been in heavy rotation even before anyone had heard of Simpson-Bowles, hard choices and "very serious conversations about entitlements."

Adams (usually a very good reporter) could have provided some context, pointing out that tax increases poll well with pretty much every group except Republican politicians, or that one party has a much better track on the deficit and it's not the one that gets a lot of support from George Mason University or the Heritage Foundation,

Update: This is Heritage in 2023.
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Friday, April 28, 2023

The prize for best analogy of the week goes to Matt Levine

Actually last week but I'm playing catch-up.

From the April 19th newsletter [emphasis added]

But yesterday’s hearing undermines my view. There are members of Congress who seem to think that crypto is valuable and innovative, that the SEC is stifling innovation, etc., all the stuff that was standard in 2021 and that retreated after the high-profile crypto frauds and failures in 2022. Ahead of the hearing, all the Republicans on the committee sent Gensler a letter “slamming the Commission’s approach to digital asset regulation and attempts to force digital asset trading platforms to ‘come in and register’ under the ill-fitting national securities exchange (NSE) framework.” “To date,” they write, “the SEC has forced digital asset market participants into regulatory frameworks that are neither compatible with the underlying technology nor applicable because the firms’ activities do not involve an offering of securities.”

...

Third, there was pushback against Gensler for not owning or using crypto. “It is hard to understand something without using it,” writes Anthony Pompliano. “The idea that we have regulators who are actively making rules for something that they have never used seems confusing.”

This seems like a simple mistake. Nobody asks the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration if she has ever used meth. “How can you regulate meth if you have never used meth” is a non sequitur. “How can you understand meth if you have never used meth,” similarly, has easy answers: You can look at the science and sociology of how it affects people, decide that it’s bad, and regulate it accordingly. 


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Thursday, April 27, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- Elmo and Sneetches

When we first started mocking the "great news for DeSantis" meme, we were taking a fairly controversial position. Then the winds started to shift and it turned into something of a victory lap, reminding people that we were here first. Now, though, everybody is jumping on the bandwagon, which means:

1. It's not much fun anymore.

2. Pundits are starting to move from prematurely declaring DeSantis the inevitable nominee to prematurely declaring his campaign doomed, which in black swan season is just asking for it.

So no more Ron for a while. Fortunately, we have plenty of Tucker and Elon to fill the gap.

Before we get to the reaction to the defenestration, take a minute to watch this clip and remind yourself of the level of crazy TC was feeding to his viewers.


Tuck was always quick to stand up for his country. That country happened to be Russia but the principle remains the same.








There is no one so despicable on the far right that you can't find a loon on the left to defend them.




Loads of charming details.

SCOTUS News (though not technically 'News')



As noted elsewhere on Twitter, who would have thought we'd have two SCOTUS justices mired in financial scandals and neither of them is named Kavanaugh.


 

More for the bad NYT framing file.





His family must be so proud.


Joe McCarthy -> RFK -> RFK jr. -> Roger Stone


Because Tennessee went so well for them.


Excellent thread, particularly about carriage fees.

At which point I'm contractually obliged to mention...

 

 To understand the dysfunction of the current anti-abortion movement, you have to remember that, while many of the members are motivated by deeply held beliefs about the nature of human life, probably more are driven by exposure to decades of horrifying disinformation.



 

Checking in on Elon.



 


Of all the burns delivered to Elon over the check mark fiasco -- and there have been many -- this may be the best of them all.

Elon being a deepfake would explain a lot.


The latest from ProPublica.


Back on the AI beat.


You come across the most unexpected conversations on Twitter.


I didn't read the article so I can't recommend it, but I love the clip.

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Wednesday, April 26, 2023

Revisiting the Red Tsunami -- in which I (sorta) defend the pundits from Andrew Gelman

(Or at least spread the blame around)

I am, for obvious reasons, reluctant to challenge Andrew on questions about polling and political science, but over the past few years, I've spent an unhealthy amount of time studying and commenting on the coverage of elections which leads me to push back on a number of points in his recent post "No, the polls did not predict “a Republican tsunami” in 2022." [For still another take, check out Kaiser's reaction.]

 

                     We'll just set the Wayback Machine to 2015...

Though it's a bit off the main topic both for his post and this one, let's start with this:

"In the 2016 primaries, the polls were right about Trump having a bi[g] lead over his opponents; it was the pundits who were wrong."

No one hates pundits more than I do, but if you go back and review the coverage, you'll see that the even-at-the-time embarrassing push to deny that Trump was the front-runner came primarily not from pundits but from data journalists. If you're looking for flawed, narrative-serving "Trump won't get the nomination" arguments in the NYT archives, you'll find far more from Nate Cohn than from David Brooks. 

If you're a real glutton for punishment, go back and read the posts we did on the subject back in 2015. One on 538, and two on Nate Cohn. Silver later went back and made a real effort to acknowledge and address his mistakes. As far as I know, Cohn (who was a much more serious offender) never did.


                    There are polls, then there are polls.

The main focus of Andrew's post is this quote from a London Review of Books article by Adam Shatz. 

 The polls, unreliable as ever (this was one thing Trump got right), told us that high inflation and anxiety about crime were going to provoke a Republican tsunami.

 To which Andrew replied:

But that’s wrong! First, the polls are generally not “unreliable,” and it’s particularly wrong to cite Trump here (more on this below). Second, no, the polls in 2022 did not “tell us” there would be “a Republican tsunami.” The pundits in 2022 were off, but the polls did just fine.

For example, here are the poll-based forecasts for the Senate and House of Representatives from the Economist magazine (they should have some copies floating around in the LRB offices, right):


 


 The actual outcomes (Republicans ended up with 49 seats in the Senate and 222 in the House) are close to the point forecasts and well within the forecast intervals.

The polls are not magic—they won’t tell you who will win every close race, and they can be off by a lot on occasion, but (a) they’re pretty good on aggregate, and (b) no, they did not predict a Republican tsunami.

 I found Shatz's piece painfully conventional and largely free of insight (but remember, I hate pundits). That out of the way, the example Andrew gives doesn't address what Shatz actually said. This is going to be a fine point but an important one. Just so there's no possibility of missing context, here are the three paragraphs where Shatz talks about the polls. (Only the first two are relevant to this conversation; I'm including the third just for the sake of completeness.)

I spent much of the night brooding on the impending birth of the United States of QAnon. A Republican sweep seemed inevitable. The president’s party usually gets clobbered in midterm elections. Despite all Biden’s achievements – high employment, investment in infrastructure, a historic climate change bill – his approval ratings were in the low forties, as if the only things Americans could remember about him were his stammering delivery and the chaos of the (otherwise popular) withdrawal from Afghanistan. The polls, unreliable as ever (this was one thing Trump got right), told us that high inflation and anxiety about crime were going to provoke a Republican tsunami. Afterwards, Republican legislators and election-denying secretaries of state (the chief election officials in US elections) would join forces to prevent the Democrats from winning in 2024 – or ever again. The country appeared to be careening towards constitutional crisis, and the other side had all the guns.

...

All of this led Biden to give one of the most sombre and unflinching speeches delivered in recent memory by an American leader. ‘Lies of conspiracy and malice,’ he said on 3 November, had produced ‘a cycle of anger, hate, vitriol, and even violence’. The survival of American democracy, he continued, was now ‘the biggest of questions ... You can’t love your country only when you win.’ Much of his rhetoric sounded old-fogeyish (‘a struggle for the very soul of America itself’), but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t right about the threat. His political calculations were also sound. According to the polls, inflation and crime were the major issues for most Americans, not abortion or democracy. Yet Biden’s insistence that ‘democracy is on the ballot for us all’ resonated with many voters who were fed up with the persistence of minority rule, the furies (and the outsized power) of the far right and the normalisation of violence by political pundits and elected representatives. Whatever Biden’s approval ratings, his warnings in this speech may have helped to set the stage for the Democrats’ strong showing; so, too, did his success in restoring a modicum of civility to American political life. 

...

Why were​ supporters of the Democrats – including seasoned election-watchers – so easily persuaded by Republican triumphalism? The polls were one reason, of course. But susceptibility to Republican hype is more directly a result of the Trump years. There is every reason to fear that Trump, or rather Trumpism, might return. It’s easy to mock MSNBC-watching liberals who rapidly resort to analogies with Germany in the 1930s (especially when analogies with episodes in American history, such as Reconstruction and the McCarthy era, are closer to hand and more illuminating). But there is little doubt that the United States has become more vulnerable to authoritarian challenges thanks to the deterioration of its democracy over the last two decades. The reasons for this decline are many but include the absence of limits on campaign finance and the overwhelming influence of corporate money, the right-wing assault on black enfranchisement and the descent of some quarters of red America into conspiratorial culture-war fanaticism.

 In both relevant paragraphs, Shatz is talking about opinion/attitude polls while Andrew counters with results derived largely (entirely?) from electoral polls. This is an obvious mismatch but it also raises some subtle but far more significant points, but before we get to that, there are a few things we need to get out of the way.


                  When you only look at good polls, the polls are good

In the final days of the election, observers such as Rosenberg (who, like his associate Tom Bonier, came out of 2022 looking really smart) were raising the alarm about a wave of junk polls designed to juice the red tsunami narrative.

Conscientious poll aggregators either gave the junk little weight or ignored it entirely, so the damage on that side was minimal, but when we make blanket statements about "the polls," we can't simply pretend these don't exist.

 

                    Elsewhere in the Economist

At the peak of the campaign, a couple of analyses from the Economist and the NYT rattled everyone's cages.

More 2020 Poll Forebodings
By Josh Marshall
|
September 12, 2022 8:52 p.m.

Over the last couple weeks we’ve seen write-ups pointing to the possibility or probability that polls in 2022 will underestimate Republican strength just as they did in 2020. Now Nate Cohn has one in The New York Times. Cohn’s analysis is particularly interesting to me since he’s been a fairly consistent skeptic of polls in recent cycles in terms of their ability to accurately gauge the strength of the Trump coalition. G. Elliott Morris had a similar write-up in The Economist last week. Philip Bump kicked the tires on Morris’s claims in the Post. While they break down the numbers, the gist is pretty straight-forward: If you take the polling error from 2016 and 2020 and plug it into our current polls you go from Dems being in a strong position for holding and even expanding their senate majority to more like a 50-50 odds of holding the chamber at all. On the House, a GOP majority and maybe a significant one is basically a given.

So what to make of all this? On the specifics these analyses are right. And that is sobering. No question about it. So how likely are we to see a repeat of 2020? I wish I knew. The one thing that stands out to me about both these analyses is that they leave out 2018. That was obviously a good year for Democrats, though more in the House than in the Senate. It was also a midterm. So there’s a decent argument that it’s a more like comparison to this year’s midterm. Morris notes that even though 2018 was a good year for Democrats it had similar polling biases to 2016. When I asked Morris why he excluded 2018, given it’s the best year recently for Democrats, he told me that the point of his experiment wasn’t to predict the 2022 outcome but rather to show a worst case scenario for Democrats. I think that’s a reasonable answer and I suspect it’s Cohn’s too. 

Morris's statements to Marshall are more cautious and qualified than his piece in the Economist (where the phrase "worst case scenario" does not appear, which in turn was more cautious and qualified than were his tweets on the subject. None of this is to suggest that there was anything inaccurate or irresponsible about Morris's analysis, but it's another reminder that the pundits in large part got the impression that we were looking at a red wave because they were reading data journalism in places like the Economist and the NYT.

 

                     Downplaying Dobbs

A number of analyses (most notably this one from Nate Cohn at the NYT) suggested that the impact of abortion would be less than most people were expecting.

Polling suggests an overturning of Roe v. Wade might not carry political consequences in states that would be likeliest to put in restrictions.
Cohn did give himself some wiggle room but on the whole it was a bad analysis as we pointed out at the time. By way of comparison, it would have made more sense to do an analysis showing how little usable data we have on the political impact of an overheated US economy (high inflation/high employment) as compared with stagflation. I don't recall anything like that getting any attention.

But these are minor issues compared with the problems with how pundits, data journalists, and in some cases political scientists talk about polls.


                    Polls do not predict. That's the problem.

Polls (at least electoral polls) look like predictions. You can often treat them as predictions, using them as the sole input for very simple models, but the polls themselves are not making any predictions; they are just tools for measuring beliefs and attitudes, and the ways we need to think about them (and about how they can go wrong) are entirely different than the ways we need to think about predictive models.

Specifically in this case, we need to think about what did and didn't go into the models that made the predictions. As far as I can tell the big inputs were electoral polls, attitude polls, presidential approval polls, the economy, and recent/historic voting patterns. These are all standard and quite reasonable choices when trying to predict elections, and every one of them was holding up a big "RED TSUNAMI" sign.

The absolute certainty that this was going to be a disastrous year for the Democrats entrenched itself early in the election and it did not originate with the pundits; they got it from sources like the Upshot, and you can't really blame them for reading their own papers.

[Obviously, I can blame them -- as mentioned before, I hate pundits -- but in this case we need to take a hard look at the "serious" people, not just the op-ed dwellers.]

It's not like no one saw that there were potential problems with the models. A number of people (including Joseph and I) argued we were so far out of the range of observed data that nothing model based could be trusted. There were also analysts looking into the data who came up with a very different take, most notably, Tom Bonier who staked out a very lonely position based on voter registration numbers, special elections turnout, and early voting data. Ironically, his stuff showed up in the NYT as guest editorials, meaning that the opinion section of the paper actually had better writing about data than what we saw in the data journalism section.


https://twitter.com/MarkPalko1/status/1650233537659031552?s=20

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Tuesday, April 25, 2023

Had to get there before the snowmelt started and you have to worry about flash floods

Finally did some hiking in the Alabama Hills.

 


 That's the east side of Mount Whitney. The estimates I've heard have the melt continuing into June. Even as far south as the San Gabriels, I'm still seeing a surprising amount of snow on the mountains.

It has been an extraordinary year.

(back to very serious blogging tomorrow.)

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Monday, April 24, 2023

Ponderings about ancient Rome

This is Joseph.

So I love analogies with ancient Rome and I love the works of Bret Devereaux, an academic famous for making it clear to me how shallow my understanding of ancient history really is. But I worry about this particular quote:


I think that this must apply to Augustus (also named Julius Caesar because, of course he is) as the original Gaius Julius Caesar was a dictator but did not reign in any real sense of the word. At the time I suspect Augustus would have quibbled with the word "reign" but in retrospect I think we can allow that it was probably an accurate description of his power and influence. 

But what I think Augustus was worried about was an underproduction of elites and not a general decline in population. Both population and population density increase between 14 CE and 164 CE. Rome had a higher fertility than China, which is not evidence of a serious problem. 

In the modern west, I think we have the opposite problem in elite overproduction. That sounds like a oxymoron, but if elite training takes decades and there are insufficient opportunities at the end, people sacrifice decades of income and life for poor outcomes. Look at the issues with academics in the arts. It is a big source of discontent to have people train for ~10 years to end up needing to find a new life plan or to be trapped as adjuncts. 

There are defenders of this system, although notably the defender is from the UK where PhDs are 3 years long and so the opportunity cost is a lot less. It'd also be different if PhD was a job, itself, and not extensive and rigorous training for a job. I will also point out that most people doing a PhD work very hard -- so it is extensive effort for a goal and not necessarily a time of leisure that would make the low salary seem like a good plan. Nor is there a general sense that elites have few children in the US (Elon Musk famously has ten. Donald Trump has five. Joe Biden has four. Bill Gates has three. I don't see a fertility crisis among the elite. 

So I guess I am not certain of the truth, but I do think that shallow analogies are potentially dangerous and could push us in the wrong direction. The fertility challenge for the modern world is the middle class, and I would look squarely at long training phases, expensive housing, and limited childcare if I wanted to confront that. 

Oh, and spoiler alert. Augustus was a long, long way from the fall of Rome. Augustus dies in 14 CE, The Western Roman Empire goes through a golden age for a couple of centuries and lasts until 476 CE. The final fall of the actual Roman Empire takes place in 1453 CE, not precisely an indication of imminent disaster during the time of Augustus. 




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Friday, April 21, 2023

Weekend Movies -- the all time great winter Western noir (plus a bonus flick)

You can still see some snow in the mountains, but the days are getting hot and it won't be there long. The passing of the season got me thinking about one of my favorite winter films, AndrΓ© de Toth's sadly under-recognized Day of the Outlaw featuring Robert Ryan and Burl Ives at the top of their games, with strong support by Tina Louise (who really should be remembered for more than that TV show). Unforgettable last half hour.

It's available free with ads from Pluto.




No snow but a lot of rain in James Whale's The Old Dark House, so I don't have a seasonal excuse for talking about it here, but it was a virtually lost film for decades. It's finally back in circulation, showing up on Svengoolie (who had been trying to get it for ten or twenty years) and on streaming services like the also free with ads Tubi.

Does The Old Dark House live up to expectations? No, but it's difficult to see how it could. Not only does it face the build-up that comes with decades of being a film everyone talked about but nobody saw; it also has to stand up to Whale's other horror films of the era, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and the Invisible Man.
 

Still, taken on its own, it stands up quite well, I'm glad I finally got to check it off my list.





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Thursday, April 20, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- that hollow thump you're hearing is the sound of a narrative imploding

And the hits just keep on coming.

While there's no question Ron DeSantis is having a cruel April, his apparent collapse has less to do with recent developments and more to do with people finally acknowledging how flimsy the original narrative was, a product of motivated reasoning and wishful analytics (which a lot of us called out at the time).

Republicans were looking (as they have been since 2015) for a way to lose Trump and hold onto his supporters. The establishment press (particularly the NYT) was looking for a GOP candidate whom it could cover without embarrassment, perhaps even one they could both-sides without inviting mockery. These strange bedfellows all convinced themselves that DeSantis was the savior they were seeking. 

I can't think of any candidate who received a comparable build-up starting not just before the election but years before the campaign. The idea Trump was basically done and Ron was all but a sure thing became a foundational assumption of the standard narrative. If the pundit class had any capacity for self-awareness, they'd be having a rough April too.

None of which is to say that DeSantis won't get the nomination -- Trump is a spectacularly self-destructive old man with a terribly unhealthy lifestyle and Ron is still next in line -- but the most likely path to the nomination looks nothing like what expert opinion was telling us a few months ago.





Another bit of bad luck for DeSantis came when Disney fired the stupidest CEO in the Fortune 500. With Chapek, Ron could come off as a Trump-style bully (red meat for the base). Now Disney is slapping him around and his response is petulant and weak.




And in other GOP news...



“I was reading a sign high on the wall behind the bar: ONLY GENUINE PRE-WAR AMERICAN AND BRITISH WHISKEYS SERVED HERE I was trying to count how many lies could be found in those nine words, and had reached four, with promise of more...” ― Dashiell Hammett



 

And they call us Arkansans poor white trash.







When defending the indefensible, always start with positive framing (also useful for access journalism).



Remember when Republicans disliked Russian stooges?





 

 Musk/Tesla/Twitter



 

Elon has always been best understood as the sophomore who keeps coming by the freshmen dorm rooms because he can bum their weed and impress them with deep thoughts from the philosophy class he audited.




Nice to find someone who's read the classics.
Speaking of things they should have seen coming.


Step 1: Have a rich daddy.

Swifter than most.


When bad things happen to stupid, annoying people.

 

Back in my teaching days, my classroom was always the one with the chess boards. I feel vindicated.


In AI news...



And for the math nerds in the audience.
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Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Critiquing my own side

This is Joseph.

Sometimes it can be healthy to point out places where your political party falls short. Smart self-reflection is the basis for positive change, after all. So lets talk about the senate and entitlement. Hopefully this is a retrospective, set for being published in the future, and the events discussed are over by now.

The Democrats have the president and 51 senators. One of them has been in the hospital for depression for 44 days. One of them came down with Shingles in February and does not have a return date in mid-April.  Two others are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, meaning that they both now hold the ability to defect and give the opposition a majority, just by not voting. 

Now I think the insane push to put democrat aligned judges on the bench is playing into the Republican supreme court gambit, but I recognize that there is a lack of consensus on better ideas, Why there is this lack of consensus is fair enough -- a diverse party will struggle with organization and strategy. 

"I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat." -- Will Rogers

So execution of strategy is important. The senator with shingles is on the judiciary committee, so her absence blocks forward progress. The Republicans have blocked a measure to substitute her out. She is 89 years old and is within 18 months of leaving the senate. 

So far, so good. What scares me is the defense of this process. See here. See more from Talking Points Memo here:
Senate Dems Look Moronic 
The most generous interpretation of Senate Democrats’ ineffectual effort to get Republicans to help them sideline Dianne Feinstein so they can resume confirming Biden judges is that they needed to go through these motions and have them fail before they could prevail on Feinstein to resign her seat.

I could barely type that without screaming into the void. Because of course that’s too generous by a lot.

Senate Republicans lined up yesterday to declare they’re not going to lend Democrats a hand. Of course not. It was silly to pretend they were going to help, both because this is the modern Republican Party and because … why should they really?

So we’re back to where this all started a week or so ago. Until DiFi resigns her seat, the Judiciary Committee is hamstrung and new Biden judicial nominations will be stalled. It’s true that Senate Democrats can’t make her resign, but the song-and-dance routine of the past week doesn’t inspire confidence that they really get what’s at stake or have coalesced around an effective path forward.

But this defense is shocking: "They all deserve a chance to get better and come back to work. Dianne will get better. She will come back to work.” To quote Unforgiven: "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it."

We saw the same issue with Ruth Bader Ginsburg who stayed until the very end and switched the median vote on the supreme court from John Roberts to Bret Kavanaugh. People talked about how tragic it was that she was participating in the court from a hospital room, ignoring that it was her decision to stay in office during the preceding 8 year democratic presidency. 

The role of an elected official is to represent their people and to advocate for them. Elite offices are not a prize to be won but they are a solemn responsibility to the constituents to be an effective advocate and representative. It is the office that has respect and not at all the person in the office.

I think we should look at these issues through this lens -- how do we ensure that people are properly represented. I think it is obvious that allowing the judiciary to keep being stacked when one side is in power but not the other is a poor strategy and likely to cause issues in the long run. 

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