Tuesday, July 11, 2023

An incredibly well-kept and badly kept secret

Picking up from where we left off with

Extraordinary claims (used to) require extraordinary evidence OR the gray lady and the little green men

and

There were lots of red flags with the NYT UFO story


Here's another hard to swallow aspect of the whole thing. 

The proposed conspiracy is, at the same time, both an incredibly well-kept and badly kept secret. We'll talk about the first part at length later in the post, but as you're reading this remember there are, according to both the primary sources and the team of reporters from New York Times, lots of people in the government who insist that they've gotten second hand-accounts of these programs. Officials not on a need to know basis are routinely getting access to  and sharing the most highly classified information and documents imaginable (though never the physical evidence they assure us is out there).

Despite these recent security lapses, for almost a century, numerous governments have supposedly been hiding extensive physical evidence of what is probably the biggest secret any government in history has tried to conceal, and they have managed to do so despite the secret frequently getting out in a limited way.

From Wikipedia:

[David] Grusch elaborated on his claims in a subsequent interview with the French newspaper Le Parisien on June 7. He said that UFOs could be coming from extra dimensions; that Pope Pius XII had "back-channeled" the existence of a UFO crash in Magenta, Italy in 1933 to the United States, the remains of which were kept by Benito Mussolini's government until the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), coordinating with the Five Eyes, procured it in 1944 or 1945;[20][21] that he had spoken with intelligence officials whom the U.S. military had briefed on "football-field" sized crafts; that the U.S. government transferred some crashed UFOs to a defense contractor; and that there was "malevolent activity" by UFOs.[18]

As a quick side note, conspiracy theorist love to throw in the Vatican whenever possible, so that's a bit of a red flag but we'll put that aside for now.

You can keep dormant secrets almost indefinitely but keeping an active secret for a long time is extremely difficult. Any government that has access to such potentially world changing technology is not going to store it away in a Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse. Keep in mind, Grusch describes this as an ongoing race. 

Think about the sheer number of people who are read into this. We are talking about multiple countries around the world all maintaining large operations to detect possible crashes and recover their wreckage, then to transport, store, and maintain what was found. Other teams to analyze the partial and intact spaceships and to study the alien bodies, both of which requires big cross-functional groups of researchers. You also have the surrounding bureaucracy, not to mention the witnesses to these numerous crashes.

It gets worse. This isn't just one conspiracy, it is one conspiracy for each country and institution. If any one of these gets careless, the game is over. On top of that, remember that this collection implicitly includes the Soviet Union and explicitly includes Italy, two governments which have collapsed in the interval we're discussing. We should probably add Germany to that list. It's possible that Italy kept the secret to itself, but if you had access to technology that could turn the tide of the war in your favor, wouldn't you want Von Braun and Heisenberg seeing what they could do with it?

A bit more on the USSR. For starters, Soviet spies were devastatingly successful during the post-war era, particularly in the UK. Remember, Grusch claimed that the US got its first non-human spacecraft through the Vatican and the Five Eyes, an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, so the Brits knew about this before we did and the Soviets would certainly have known shortly after. Add to that what they would have gotten from the German scientists who ended up in Russia.

While the USSR was big, the Soviet sphere of influence was huge. Add to that formidable naval presence and experience with deep sea salvage.  Remember, one of the key claims was that there were multiple crash sites where wreckage and bodies have been recovered. A lot of those crashes would have been in areas of Soviet control. If we accept the story, we pretty much have to assume Moscow got its share.

Think about the chaos at the end of WWII and at the collapse of the Soviet Union, and yet despite hundreds of people with direct knowledge and tons of evidence, no artifact or photograph or credible account made it to the public. And in the 60s and 70s, when books like Chariots of the Gods were selling millions and spin-off lucrative "documentaries" and TV shows, no underpaid government scientist ever managed to cash in. The biggest secret ever kept under the worst possible conditions.

It's almost hard to believe.


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Monday, July 10, 2023

Once you told us you have aliens' bodies and spaceships the size of football fields, it's hard to get excited about some tiny metal balls

But the press is giving it their best shot.




 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

      

 Avi Loeb, is one of the world's leading astrophysicists, but recently (with the help of the press) he's been feeding his reputation into the wood chipper.

In December 2017, Loeb cited ʻOumuamua's unusually elongated shape as one of the reasons why the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia should listen for radio emissions from it to see if there were any unexpected signs that it might be of artificial origin,[40] although earlier limited observations by other radio telescopes such as the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array had produced no such results.[41] On December 13, 2017, the Green Bank Telescope observed the asteroid for six hours. No radio signals from ʻOumuamua have been detected.[42][43]

On October 26, 2018, Loeb and his postdoctoral student Shmuel Bialy submitted a paper exploring the possibility of the interstellar object ʻOumuamua being an artificial thin solar sail accelerated by solar radiation pressure in an effort to help explain the object's non-gravitational acceleration.[44][45][46] Other scientists have stated that the available evidence is insufficient to consider such a premise,[47][48][49] and that a tumbling solar sail would not be able to accelerate.[50][51] In response, Loeb wrote an article detailing six anomalous properties of ʻOumuamua that make it unusual, unlike any comets or asteroids seen before.[52][53]

On November 27, 2018, Loeb and Amir Siraj, an undergraduate student at Harvard College, proposed a search for ʻOumuamua-like objects which might be trapped in the Solar System as a result of losing orbital energy through a close encounter with Jupiter.[54] They identified four candidates (2011 SP25, 2017 RR2, 2017 SV13, and 2018 TL6) for trapped interstellar objects which could be visited by dedicated missions. The authors pointed out that future sky surveys, such as with Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, could find many more.[55]

In public interviews and private communications with reporters and academic colleagues, Loeb has become more vocal regarding the prospects of proving the existence of alien life.[56] On April 16, 2019, Loeb and Siraj reported the discovery of the first meteor of interstellar origin.[12] Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, a popular science account concerning ʻOumuamua, written by Loeb,[57] was published in 2021.

 

As with Oumuamua, Loeb's latest argument for evidence of alien technology comes in three parts:

1. Data indicate that the object is interstellar;

2. The object appears to have some anomalous properties;

3. I reallyreallyreally want to believe this. 

 "It has material strength that is tougher than all space rock that were seen before, and catalogued by NASA," added Loeb, "We calculated its speed outside the solar system. It was 60 km per second, faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun. The fact that it was made of materials tougher than even iron meteorites, and moving faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun, suggested potentially it could be a spacecraft from another civilization or some technological gadget."

It seems like most of the heavy lifting on this project was done by the grad student Amir Siraj, whose account in Scientific American is considerably more sober. Perhaps, still being in his twenties, Siraj would like to keep his reputation in one piece for a few more decades.

The story began in April 2019, when I found what’s thought to be the first known interstellar meteor, hiding in plain sight in publicly accessible data sourced from the U.S. government. Called IM1, this object had burned up in the atmosphere and rained fragments down into the ocean off the coast of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, five years prior, registering as an anomalously speedy and bright fireball in the sensors of secret spy satellites operated by the U.S. Department of Defense. Working with my then-adviser, the Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, I analyzed the U.S. government data to show how the trajectory and other properties of IM’s fireball were consistent with the meteor having an interstellar origin.

...

 In the months leading up to the expedition, which would take place aboard a ship called the Silver Star, I focused on the scientific planning while Avi concentrated on funding and logistics. Using archival seismic data from terrestrial instruments that had picked up the sonic boom from IM1’s fireball, I was able to pin down the resulting debris field to some 50 miles offshore of Manus Island, in an arc of open water seven times smaller than the area provided to us by the Department of Defense. This localization would allow for a chance, albeit slim, of success in realizing my dream of holding a piece of history—a bona fide interstellar object—for the very first time.

...

These spherules are tantalizing, especially given that many of them show compositional anomalies relative to typical ones. Could some of them represent the first material ever recovered from an interstellar object? Or do they belong to the background population of spherules from “local” solar system meteors, which have accumulated on the seafloor over geological time? Or were they produced by humans, through high-temperature processes like welding?

A definitive answer will emerge from studying the isotopic signatures embedded within the spherules. Compared to spherules from run-of-the-mill meteorites, an overabundance of rare isotopes (or an underabundance of common isotopes) in the ones collected from our search region would be compelling evidence for IM1’s interstellar origin. This isotopic analysis is currently underway at the University of California, Berkeley, and will soon begin at Harvard University.

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Friday, July 7, 2023

Spoilers for NetFlix's the Diplomat (Big Spoilers -- you are warned)

This is Joseph.

At the end of Game of Thrones, I was shocked out of the political thriller by a decision to appoint a very poorly set up character as king and the complete lack of any political calculation of anybody around this person. Bret Devereaux skewered the bad politics here. His post is a classic of needing to be realistic in how you think about how other players would act.

The diplomat has a core plot that is destroying my enjoyment of another otherwise excellent series. The issue is that the husband of the vice-president stole a $7 million research grant from the NIH. HAHAHA. The writers have never been near a university grants management office. The idea that this is doable is . . . dubious to begin with. A reporter is on the trail and sometime (i.e., in exactly six months) they will need to replace her. So they ship an effective diplomat to be ambassador to the UK to groom her for the role, knowing she hates speeches, pomp, and such but is good in a crisis. 

This is from the 25th amendment:  
Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

Ignore the insanity of the timing (the reporter will take six months), a small cabal of insiders (which does not actually include the president) are going to skip over his whole list of political allies to appoint an outsider so she can help craft foreign policy. An old president with serious health issues. Carefully note that an outsider with no independent political support would be easy to vote against. The people voting against her will either be from the Opposition Party (which controls the house in the actual script) or members of his own party (who might want the job). 

This is absurd.

Even worse, it is actually the wrong job. You want this paragon as secretary of state. That would actually drive the plot forward and make the current secretary of state's animus make a great deal more sense. Unlike the VP, who has almost no formal powers, they have an entire department dedicated to exactly the activities that they want her to do. Or, it is is minding the president, that job is called Chief of Staff. This is a lot of work for a short period of this person as VP. 

Now, the other reason for your protagonist to be VP, is that they would then succeed the president. Tom Clancy used this trick. But doing this for a junior diplomat is just silly. It made a tiny amount of success as the president was the driver for Jack Ryan to be nominated. Maybe a new and popular president with a great deal of political capital could get an end of career and extremely connected member of government promoted.

But an outsider who is not a confidant of the current president and who hates the important parts of the job (it is a political job) and who lacks a dense network of supporters? Keep in mind, everybody else notes "old and sick president" too as well as the advantage that being a VP would bring. Plus, the current VP could either resign early, or simply take the innocent spouse route. It seems unlikely her own party would agree to impeachment because her spouse became a crook. 

Anyway, it is unfortunate because the acting is good and the plot is interesting. But this whole VP thing just feels insanely unlikely. 


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Thursday, July 6, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- there is no joy in Muskville


 

If you know the story up till now. this is perfect.


If not, Josh Marshall will catch you up.

The ups and downs of social media platforms aren’t usually a focus of my writing. But they interest me to the extent they intersect with politics and public conversation in this country. You may have heard that over the weekend Twitter went into a kind of extended meltdown, rapidly introducing a series of “rate limiting” restrictions because the platform was having a hard time staying online. Behind the jargon of “rate limiting,” this essentially meant the site was forced to start rationing Tweets and the ability to engage with them, an ominous move for a company whose business is literally selling engagement. The site’s owner, Elon Musk, later claimed that this was in response to various online bad actors overwhelming the site’s infrastructure. The site’s (for the moment) CEO later claimed that it was all done out of the blue to catch the online bad guys unaware and off guard. Giving any advanced warning (even to employees, it turns out) would have given the online bad guys a heads up and allowed them to escape.

This is all such transparent nonsense that it beggars belief that even a company as chaotic and mercurially managed as Twitter under Elon Musk would try to claim it with any kind of straight face. We don’t know the precise details of what happened under the hood at Twitter. But the big picture is pretty clear. And you don’t need to be too versed in tech to understand it at that level. Think of it this way: You have an amusement park with 10,000 visitors a day. You cut staffing and ride maintenance so you can only accommodate 5,000 visitors a day. What happens is elementary: Things start falling apart and you’re forced to limit how many people can come in the front gate. That’s your “rate limiting,” rationing tweets.

 

It should be noted that many saw this coming (and that a few did not).






For the first few days, Twitter's titular CEO was noticeably silent,



Let me get out my Niall Ferguson decoder ring.





And it wasn't even erotic.


On to politics.








Looks like it's time to reread Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism"



This is how you do it, folks.


 

The PayPal Mafia's favorite military analyst...



 

 

Not entirely sure context helps your case here.




One hell of a damning thread, mostly in Vogel's own words.


 



How to lie with...













We had a neighbor who (we learned rather suddenly) kept his ammo with his propane so I'm hard to impress, but this is pretty good.

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Wednesday, July 5, 2023

Yes, the New York Times owns the UFO fiasco

Though we've talked about this before in

Extraordinary claims (used to) require extraordinary evidence OR the gray lady and the little green men

and

There were lots of red flags with the NYT UFO story

 I don't believe we ever stopped for an overview.

Just to recap, this all started when the New York Times hired Leslie Kean, a paranormal true believer with a questionable track record to cover the UFO beat along with the veteran Ralph Blumenthal who presumably was supposed to keep his younger partner in check, a bit like Scully and Mulder, with roughly the same outcome. The result was a run of sensationalistic and badly reported articles. Eventually the stories the reporters were handing in got so over the top that the NYT put the brakes on at which point Kean and Blumenthal went to an obscure publication on their own with hearsay claims of extraterrestrial crash sites and alien technology.

You might think this was as bad as it could get but, just as the NYT had been holding back its reporters from some of the craziness, it turns out that the reporters themselves were doing the same with their source. Once David Grusch hit the interview circuit, the shit really and truly hit the fan. Now we didn't just have stories of interstellar spaceships sitting in warehouses somewhere, we had an international conspiracy dating back to the 1930s and involving not just modern-day countries but the Axis powers and the Vatican.

Grusch elaborated on his claims in a subsequent interview with the French newspaper Le Parisien on June 7. He said that UFOs could be coming from extra dimensions; that Pope Pius XII had "back-channeled" the existence of a UFO crash in Magenta, Italy in 1933 to the United States, the remains of which were kept by Benito Mussolini's government until the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), coordinating with the Five Eyes, procured it in 1944 or 1945; that he had spoken with intelligence officials whom the U.S. military had briefed on "football-field" sized crafts; that the U.S. government transferred some crashed UFOs to a defense contractor; and that there was "malevolent activity" by UFOs.

The smart thing to do at this point would be to completely disavow this clown, but people are too invested. The reporters have staked their reputations on this guy and the NYT, (the paper with perhaps the strongest and most entrenched corporate culture of any major non-partisan news publication, which absolutely hates to admit it was wrong) has spent years ignoring questions about these two star reporters.

As far as I can tell, the paper has taken no serious steps to distance itself from this fiasco and, if we can take Ezra Klein as representing the company line (usually pretty good bet), the paper is approaching this obvious bullshit with the same" just asking questions," "keeping an open mind," "important if true" framing that they previously brought to the hyperloop, crypto and nfts, and the metaverse.

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Tuesday, July 4, 2023

A 4th of July musical interlude





































Listening to Cohan, it's easy to forget how controversial going to war in Europe was.






And finally, something appropriate from the great Jerry Goldsmith.





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Monday, July 3, 2023

Notes on Titan

This was originally going to be part of an earlier Thursday Tweets, but that post was written and scheduled on Wednesday and the fate or the Titan was still in question, and I didn't want the it to go out on the same day that some bad news was breaking including some potential scenarios that were even worse than what appears to have happened. 

It is important that we show an appropriate level of respect for what was the equivalent in terms of human life of a bad two-car crash, at the same time, it is also important to have some perspective. Even in terms of aquatic disasters, this one was dwarfed by recent events. Furthermore, it's bigger importance lies not in the tragedy itself but in the familiar story behind it. 

I've got another post or two coming on this, but the tl;dr version is another comes-from-money Elon wannabe buys into the VC/Silicon Valley/radical libertarian tales of Randian supermen held back from greatness by timid, nanny-state regulators and envious, short-sighted regulators.  As was spelled out by Ben Taub in his excellent New Yorker piece, the result was a craft with so many critical flaws that the question wasn't if it would catastrophically fail, but when.

First, though, a reminder that the fate of the Titan was far from the most horrifying thing that happened on the oceans that week.

 

With that bit of context in mind,  here was some of the real-time commentary on Twitter.






 


 

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Friday, June 30, 2023

Tweets -- "“I would totally kick your ass, but my mom won’t let me." or "I wanted to be prepared for when I have my first psychotic break"

(Sometimes you just can't decide on a title.)

More fun with RFK jr (including the inevitable crypto moment).


It's always sad when someone you admire espouses positions you find crazy, stupid or offensive. Fortunately, I've always considered Millar a talentless, third-rate Frank Miller wannabe and all around hack, so I'm pretty cool with this.
 

 

And speaking of anti-vaxxers...




How about some politics?

 

The fundamental flaw of the run-to-the-right-of-Trump strategy.

 

Coming from the Bible-belt, MAGA's apocalyptic tendencies have long been on my radar.







Yeah, that Turtledove.






Good point from Taleb.

Sad Sacks and friends




 

Never cared for the show, but I have to admit this is a great tweet.


 

Today in tech with Grady Booch.





And one for the 4th of July weekend.

 

 

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Thursday, June 29, 2023

A few thought's on Mark's post

This is Joseph.

Mark has an excellent post. Go read it, this reply will wait.

Ok, I have a couple of thoughts here. One of them is that the electoral college is actually a surprisingly good design. I know, I know -- it did create 2016. But that was a sin of many parents. But in a more general sense, I am not sure that the benefit of precise representation is ever as clear as one would like it to be and no system follows the popular vote perfectly.

In the US the congressional districts are supposed to be evenly divided by population, but both the largest and smallest deviations in 2020 were in the same state. In Canada, which has no elected head of state, the difference in riding size is as big as a factor of eight, as the government tries to allow sparsely populated hinterlands to have some say in government (the US uses the Senate for this purpose). 

What is nice about electoral districts is that challenges to an election will hinge on state by state recounts. There is no way to discover a huge bolus of votes in one state that changes the national total. Outstanding votes are only impactful in a handful of places. Further, it tends to increase margins of victory. The margin with electoral votes is often much larger than with actual votes, making it easier to discern a victor.

The place that this went really wrong was in 2000. There it really was a single state and a small number of votes (in absolute terms) that made the difference and this is always going to be a problem. But imagine how much worse this would have been with a national popular vote in 1888. The vote total was 5,443,892 to 5,534,488 (a 0.8% margin). But votes take time to arrive. Vote by mail, military ballots, absentee ballots, and provisional ballots all take time to process. If the vote was extremely close, one could imagine issues with just how closely ballots were studied.

But here comes another advantage. Elections are run by states. The states partisan control is likely very correlated with their presidential vote bias. So padding the vote in California, now, isn't really helpful because this isn't going to change the likely allocation of presidential votes. A last minute ruling on post-marks isn't going to change anything. But with 50 separate elections processes, the potential for an "appearance of impropriety" is actually higher. 

Now you could make presidential elections and election boundary drawing federal tasks. But that is a big change. The system will always be vulnerable to close elections in swing states. 

Now, Bush vs Gore has two parts.  The 7-2 decision is actually not all that bad -- the process in Florida had fallen apart. What I object to is the 5-4 decision certifying the election for Bush on equal protection grounds. No person is entitled to an electoral office and having an unelected court decide the issue was a problem. The constitution has a process for this, which was used in 1824, where congress votes for the president (with the winner of the most electoral votes not winning the one time this happened). It is not a great process, but it has the virtue of elected politicians needing to weigh in, who can be held accountable by their voters. 

In any case, I don't think Mark and I will agree on the electoral college but it is good that the blog has a diversity of opinions. But that's my defense of the electoral college. It is true that we could be like France and it would probably be ok, but my question is whether this is the point where reforms are most urgently needed. The, uh, imperial supreme court is looking like a much bigger deal in my view these days. 
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Wednesday, June 28, 2023

Five years ago at the blog: unfortunately, this isn't as relevant now that the hype storm over AI has passed

 Tuesday, June 26, 2018

I'm afraid even the Brothers Grimm would have found Bitcoin a little too fantastic

I'm edging closer to the notion that the tools which we would normally use to critique journalism are no longer up to the task of discussing the 21st century technology narrative. Instead, the appropriate methods are probably those of the folklorist. We are rapidly approaching the realm of the myth and the tall tale. Why not start thinking in those terms?

It is standard practice when discussing something like a Jack tale to list the Aarne–Thompson classification. For example, Jack in the beanstalk fall under the classification AT 328 ("The Treasures of the Giant"). We could do something similar with the vast majority of tech reported. TakeTheranos. This and other accounts of college dropouts supposedly coming up with some amazing innovation can be classified under "wayward youth finds magic object."

 I've been getting quite a bit of thought recently to how magical heuristics have come to dominate the conversation about technology and innovation, but the idea of actually treating the narrative as folklore didn't hit me until I read this:
The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment described by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. It illustrates the existential risk that an artificial general intelligence may pose to human beings when programmed to pursue even seemingly-harmless goals, and the necessity of incorporating machine ethics into artificial intelligence design. The scenario describes an advanced artificial intelligence tasked with manufacturing paperclips. If such a machine were not programmed to value human life, then given enough power its optimized goal would be to turn all matter in the universe, including human beings, into either paperclips or machines which manufacture paperclips.[4]

    Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.
    — Nick Bostrom, "Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence", 2003

Bostrom has emphasised that he does not believe the paperclip maximiser scenario per se will actually occur; rather, his intention is to illustrate the dangers of creating superintelligent machines without knowing how to safely program them to eliminate existential risk to human beings. The paperclip maximizer example illustrates the broad problem of managing powerful systems that lack human values

Suddenly it struck me that this was just the magic salt mill ever so slightly veiled in cyber garb. In case you're not up on your folklore...

It is Aarne-Thompson type 565, the Magic Mill. Other tales of this type include The Water Mother and Sweet porridge.

Synopsis

A poor man begged from his brother on Christmas Eve. The brother promised him, depending on the variant, ham or bacon or a lamb if he would do something. The poor brother promised; the rich one handed over the food and told him to go to Hell (in Lang's version, the Dead Men's Hall; in the Greek, the Devil's dam). Since he promised, he set out. In the Norse variants, he meets an old man along the way. In some variants, the man begs from him, and he gives something; in all, the old man tells him that in Hell (or the hall), they will want to buy the food from him, but he must only sell it for the hand-mill behind the door, and come to him for directions to use it. It took a great deal of haggling, but the poor man succeeded, and the old man showed him how to use it. In the Greek, he merely brought the lamb and told the devils that he would take whatever they would give him, and they gave him the mill. He took it to his wife, and had it grind out everything they needed for Christmas, from lights to tablecloth to meat and ale. They ate well and on the third day, they had a great feast. His brother was astounded and when the poor man had drunk too much, or when the poor man's children innocently betrayed the secret, he showed his rich brother the hand-mill. His brother finally persuaded him to sell it. In the Norse version, the poor brother didn't teach him how to handle it. He set to grind out herrings and broth, but it soon flooded his house. His brother wouldn't take it back until he paid him as much as he paid to have it. In the Greek, the brother set out to Constantinople by ship. In the Norse, one day a skipper wanted to buy the hand-mill from him, and eventually persuaded him. In all versions, the new owner took it to sea and set it to grind out salt. It ground out salt until it sank the boat, and then went on grinding in the sea, turning the sea salty.


I realize Bostrom isn't proposing this as a likely scenario. That's not the point. What matters here is that he and other researchers and commentators tend to think about technology using the specific heuristics and motifs people have always used for thinking about magic, and it worries me when I start recognizing the Aarne–Thompson classifications for stories in the science section.
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Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Zombie Alert -- the Electoral College and the 2000 Election



 "Routinely"   in this case means once in over 130 years.

    I know a lot of readers are shouting "2000!" at the screen, but you cannot use what happened twenty-three years ago as an example. Al Gore won the popular vote and may well have been on track to win the electoral college as well. We will never know because the Republicans staged a successful attempt to prevent a fair election, done with the cooperation of the courts and to a large degree the mainstream media.

    There has been a huge and for the most part successful attempt by the press to shove what actually happened in 2000 down the memory hole. This is not exactly surprising given that it was such a shameful chapter in American journalism. Faced with the subversion of a presidential election, pretty much everyone just went along and pretended everything was okay. This tacit approval of Bush V Gore laid the groundwork for much of what has gone wrong with his country in the following years.

   The relevant comparison here is not between 2000 and 2016; it's between 2000 and January 6th and while there are tremendous differences between the two events, the most important was that the attempt to overturn the election in 2000 succeeded.

    The Establishment press would go on to be largely silent and in some cases openly supportive of the buildup to the Iraq War, the swift-boating of John Kerry, Citizens United, McConnell refusing to allow a duly elected president to appoint a Supreme Court judge, and various other attacks on democracy. By 2016, we actually saw a collaboration between the New York Times and Steve Bannon in promoting Clinton Cash. 

    Yes, the Electoral College is an awful system (though we may see a differing opinion on that in the not-too-distant future [here's the link. -- MP]) and you could argue that it helped the Republicans steal the election 23 years ago, but as threats to our democracy go, it does not rank that highly. Furthermore, the one aspect of the EC that has caused the most trouble over the past 30 years is the easiest to fix. Not only is All or Nothing apportionment of votes not in the Constitution, it isn't even universally practiced among the states. Taking that away would greatly reduced the likelihood of another president losing the popular vote by a substantial margin and still winning the presidency.

    In its current state, the debate over the Electoral College consists almost entirely of performative concern, pseudo-seriousness, and handy excuses for not addressing real threats, the kind that require some measure of courage to take on. Apologies for using the same paper in two different examples, but when the New York Times did an article on voter suppression, they gave both sides of the argument above the fold then took over 20 paragraphs get around to pointing out that all of the evidence and data contradicted the GOP's claims.

The Electoral College is a bad system and was a necessary factor in the disastrous outcome of the 2016 election (though Lord knows there's lots of blame to spread around for that one) but journalists and political scientists need to stop blaming it for the 2000 election and they need to start taking responsibility for all the other more dangerous and more immediate threats to democracy they've been giving too little attention. For all the hand wringing over the possibility of normalizing Trump, everyone seems to forget how much norm breaking the press has already overlooked.

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Monday, June 26, 2023

Bardak

Apologies for running tweet-heavy for a while, but the weekend's craziness in Russia when the fog of war combined with the fog of mutiny to bring visibility pretty close to zero for a while was one of those moments where Twitter at its best (which still exists despite Musk's efforts) is invaluable. 

If you can follow the right people, you sit in the corner while some of the sharpest experts in the field discuss the situation and point you to the best reporting. The hard part is finding these people, fortunately, Josh Marshall has taken care of that.

You can of course read write-ups in the standard publications. But what I’m doing is watching these two curated lists I created more than a year ago to follow the Russo-Ukraine War. Here’s one on the conflict generally and here’s another focused specifically on military analysts. While this current situation is not the Ukraine War proper, you want to hear from the same people generally. And of course it is deeply related to it.


First off, a reminder that this is war criminal on war criminal violence.

 

Which is why no winners seems like a pretty good outcome


 

 Also, a reminder that any mutiny/coup where the people attacking the government get to walk away does not send a message of strength.

 

 Parody site, but still...








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