Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Ten years ago at the blog -- the topic remains relevant and I really like this title


Friday, July 19, 2013

First assume a fairy godmother...

This is one of those stories illustrates just how bad journalists have gotten at covering life in the bottom quartile. Here, from Marketplace, is the set-up:
The fast food chain teamed up with Visa to create an online budget guide for its employees. And most of the criticism is directed at the fact that the company's budget doesn't list 'food' or 'heat' as monthly budget items. 
...
"Helping you succeed financially is one of the many ways McDonald's is creating a satisfying and rewarding work environment," the McDonald's site's about page states. "So you can take the next step towards financial freedom." 
To do that, the guide suggests journaling daily expenses, setting up a budget and outling a savings goal. Sound reasonable? 
One problem: the sample budget offered by McDonald's (below) doesn't mention money for basic necessities like food, heat, gas and clothing. 
The budget also assumes a worker will need to maintain two jobs in order to make roughly $24,500 a year.

[The original post had a copy of the actual document, but that one seems to have fallen into an internet wormhole. -- MP]

A heated debate has broken out over whether it's possible to live on $24,500 a year. This is not a question that would perplex a group pulled at random from the general populace. People do it all the time. I've done it myself (and yes, I'm adjusting for inflation). I even have a musician friend in New York City who's doing it now.

You eat lots of beans and potatoes. You get a prepaid phone. You buy a set of rabbit ears (which, as mentioned before, would actually give you more channels and better picture than the basic cable the WP article suggests). You live day-to-day. You constantly worry about money. You're one one bad break away from disaster but with exception of the health insurance and heating items, nothing in expenses, including rent, is that unreasonable.

There is, in fact, only one completely unrealistic item here:

Second job: $955

Angry Bear, which does get it, explains just how much work we're talking about.
Besides skipping certain expenses and skimping on others; to meet the income levels portrayed in the budget, McDonalds suggests associates to work not one but two jobs. A full time job at McDonalds and a part time job elsewhere totally 62 hours per week (if the worker resides in Illinois where the minimum wage is $8.25/hour). If perchance, the worker resides in one of the other 48 states; the total hours needed to hit the suggested income level jumps to 74 hours/week due to a lower minimum wage (the equivalent of a second full time job). 
And Marketplace explains how unlikely that 74 is:
At the same time, there’s been a sharp drop in the number of people who are holding down multiple jobs, and most of those are likely to be part-time, since there are only so many hours in a day. The number of multiple job-holders is down by more than 500,000 since 2007.  So, there are more people in part-time jobs, but fewer people able to cobble together two or more of those jobs to make ends meet.
...
This trend to more part-time work could be permanent. Employers like the flexibility, and the low cost. Benefits in many part-time jobs -- health care, retirement -- are slim to none.

But there’s a complication. For job-seekers, it’s now harder to find and keep multiple part-time jobs. “Among low-wage employers -- retail, hospitality, food service -- employers are requiring their employees to say they’re available for a full-time schedule, even when they know they’re never going to schedule them for full-time,” says Stephanie Luce at the City University of New York’s Murphy Institute.

Luce is a labor sociologist who studies union movements around the world. She co-authored, with the Retail Action Network, a study based on surveys of retail workers in New York, Discounted Jobs: How Retailers Sell Workers Short. “Managers are asked to schedule based on customer-flow, on weather, on trends in the economy, and to change the schedule day-to-day,” says Luce. “They don’t want employees that are going to say ‘I can’t come in, I have another job.’ They want employees that’ll say, ‘OK, I’ll come in if you need me. I won’t come in if you don’t need me.’” 

 

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Tuesday, July 18, 2023

Psychologists run more rigorous experiments than physicists*

*when the experiments are about psychology.

OK, I'll admit n = 1, but you have to admit it's a striking example.

From APA's Monitor Vol 5, No 2 (as excepted by James Randi in the Magic of Uri Geller):

by Jules Asher

About that last point, Randi adds:



The person who drops into an entirely new field can often come up with some new insights, but they are seldom worth anything without curiosity and a strong dose of humility.

In these situations you constantly have to remind yourself that relevant expertise is, you know, relevant and that while you (an economist, or a physicist, or a tech bro who stumbled onto a fortune in Silicon Valley) might know something those experts don't, they certainly know things that you don't.

Targ and Puthoff (both still living) are highly intelligent and extraordinarily accomplished in their original  fields, but as Randi points out, these are often the easiest people to fool, in part because they have so much confidence in their own perceptions. Add to that a strong predisposition to believe and you are basically asking for disaster.


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Monday, July 17, 2023

There was a time when serious people took Uri Geller seriously

Picking up from here.

One key element most 21st Century articles on Uri Geller miss is just how much belief in Geller had become respectable by 1973. Researchers and sober intellectuals were treating his supposed powers as a valid area of scientific inquiry. Word of successful RCTs was getting out. Papers were being submitted to major journals. 

When you hear about winning the battle against the debunkers, remember that Randi and company took Geller from this to punch line in the space of three or four years. The "mystifier" continued to make money, but his critics had discredited not only him but, to a large degree, the entire field of para-psychology. 

From NATURE Volume 246  12/7/1973 [emphasis and, yes, double emphasis added.]

It needs to be said, however, that not everyone is convinced that Mr Geller is other than a great illusionist and that there seems to be somewhat more scepticism in Israel and the United States than has yet developed in Britain. For a fairly cool assessment Time of March 12, 1973, should be read. Nevertheless he has clearly created a prima facie case for further investigation and it is to be hoped that the proposal by the New Scientist that he submit to examination by its panel will be taken up, even though he has already been examined extensively by a team at Stanford Research Institute. 

...

The second challenge to scientists will arise if investigations continue to turn up signs of psycho-kinetic powers, and with the present evidence this certainly cannot be ruled out. It would then be urgently necessary for the scientific community to come to terms with something totally beyond its powers of explanation-indeed something which in a religious context would be called a miracle. Just as the public wants scientists to validate Mr Geller, it would also want them to explain him and, however awkward this question may be, it should not be avoided. If Mr Geller indeed possesses extraordinary abilities it is immaterial whether he is an isolated unrepeatable phenomenon or whether a large number of people can be taught the skills, and it is immaterial that he manifests the abilities in ways up to now better known to music-hall illusionists than to scientific investigators. The challenge would still exist-that well established scientific laws as apparent to laymen as to scientists are not inviolate under the influence of some presumed mental process. 

It is difficult to see how research into the causes of such extraordinary happenings could proceed. One suspects that any approach which involved extensive instrumentation would end unsuccessfully. Technology has an unerring ability to suppress human skills. [The idea that true psychics might be unable to function as well in clinical settings was one of the standard excuses used by Geller supporters to explain away failure. It's a bit surprising seeing it used in a Nature editorial -- MP] Nevertheless a boost for psychical research would be very welcome. There are too many loose ends lying around for comfort, and psychical research has not yet been able to shake off its mildly eccentric character and its ability to attract fierce criticism. 

 

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Friday, July 14, 2023

Deferred Thursday Tweets -- in appreciation of the New York Times Pitchbot

If anything Marshall undersells his point. As far as I can tell, no one in a similar position has ever gotten anywhere near the early build-up  that DeSantis did from both the right wing and the mainstream press.


 






This is an oversimplification, but not by that much.

Fallows' tic analogy is remarkably perceptive.

As is this.





 For those who just walked in, Elon really does talk like this...

And like this...




(The Wire is on my short list for greatest show, period.)

 






"In the West, whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting over."











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Thursday, July 13, 2023

Ten years ago at the blog: for a while it looked like this tweet was going to age badly

 The mid-teens were not a good time to be a Disney skeptic. The company had a very good run and to be honest, I might have been a little less eager to repost this under the heading "Five years ago at the blog." For a while there it looked like they really could let their budgets increase without apparent limit, safe in the knowledge that no matter how much they spent, the box office and the merchandising would more than keep up. Now, though, we're getting some indication that there still are upper bounds. (Except, possibly, for James Cameron.)

 Disney’s Harsh New Reality: Costly Film Flops, Creative Struggles and a Shrinking Global Box Office

 

Monday, July 15, 2013

Call me suspicious...

But I've gotten to the point where I look for signs of manipulation in all business news and brokers' recommendations. Case in point, Disney had a bad week recently. As you've probably heard, the Lone Ranger reboot is on track to lose a lot of money (the figure $100 million keeps being tossed around), but that doesn't cover the full drop in expected value. Disney was shooting for another Pirates franchise (complete with the same writers, director, producer and star). The first four installments of that series have done almost four billion in box office and the fifth and sixth chapters are in the works. And that box office total doesn't include toys and tee shirts and all of the other ways Disney could make money off something like this. Investors who had priced in the possibility of this being another Pirates will need to recalibrate.

Disney is a huge company, but even there the old saying applies -- "a billion here... a billion there... pretty soon you're talking about real money." Not enough to threaten the company but worth taking into account when thinking about stock price. Fortunately for Disney, this terrible news was balanced out by quite a bit of good (enough to bump the price up a bit). Credit Suisse analyst Michael Senno estimated a global take of $1.2 billion for Star Wars Episode VII and Motley Fool* ran a string of positive stories arguing that Disney was adding value to Marvel and that "Buena Vista Pictures is earning as much as ever." That second claim was supported with a year over year comparison:
Disney won't be as fortunate with The Lone Ranger, which is why so many are comparing this flop-in-the-making to John Carter, last year's $250 million box office bomb that effectively ended the Disney career of former studio chief Rich Ross. 
If only he knew then what we know now. John Carter, for as big a disaster as it was, did nothing to diminish the House of Mouse's theatrical prowess. Here's a closer look at the year-over-year numbers from Jan. 1 through June 30: 
Buena Vista Year-Over-Year Comparison
                                    YTD 2013          YTD 2012          Change  
Number of films            10                       12**                   (2)
Total U.S. box office    $886.8 million      $949.8 million     (6.6%)
Per-film average           $88.7 million        $79.2 million       11.9%
Source: Box Office Mojo.
** Includes a 3D rerelease of The Lion King. 
After achieving $800 million in domestic box office receipts only once since 2000 (in 2010), Disney has done at least that in both 2012 and this year. Impressive may be too timid a word for how well Buena Vista is doing right now.
Notice anything missing? How about budgets, marketing costs, performance of comparable films from other studios? Keep in mind that in absolute numbers, John Carter did pretty well:
John Carter earned $73,078,100 in North America and $209,700,000 in other countries, for a worldwide total as of June 28, 2012 of $282,778,100.
In relative terms, not so much:
Paul Dergarabedian, president of Hollywood.com noted, "John Carter’s bloated budget would have required it to generate worldwide tickets sales of more than $600 million to break even...a height reached by only 63 films in the history of moviemaking"
(According to the New York Times, the Lone Ranger would have to hit $800 million to break even.)

How about Disney adding value to Marvel? The only real example I saw in the article was the willingness to cough up extra money to hold on to talent like Whedon and Downey. Probably a good investment but old news and a case of maintaining, not adding, value.

And that incredible prediction for the Star Wars reboot? Not credible about covers it.

Perhaps I'm too cynical, but given the low quality but excellent timing of these analyses, I have to believe that some folks at Disney have really been working the phones.

* I'm going by the Motley Fool posts and not the videos that accompany them. If anyone out there wants to take one for the team and watch them, let me know if anything of value is said.

Thanks

 

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Wednesday, July 12, 2023

The bad news is that the NYT is still credulously accepting Uri Geller's dubious version of events; the good news is that the rest of the latest article is so terrible that this part no longer seems so bad.

It's going to take more than one post to describe just how bad David Segal's profile of fake psychic Uri Geller is, lousy with pseudo-profundity and cheap zeitgeisty asides, leaving out essential context that completely changes the story, with a central thesis that simply isn't true. We'll get to those gems later. For now, we'll start with one we've covered before, the claim that Randi and the other debunkers actually made Geller a star.

It’s a fortune he might have never earned, he said, without a group of highly agitated critics. Mr. Geller was long shadowed by a handful of professional magicians appalled that someone was fobbing off what they said were expertly finessed magic tricks as acts of telekinesis. Like well-matched heavyweights, they pummeled one another in the ’70s and ’80s in televised contests that elevated them all.

Geller has been pushing this line for years (see below). It's not difficult to see why he favors this version; it preserves his dignity and even paints him as a winner, but there's no reason to accept it and considerable reason not to. Before Randi starting exposing his tricks, Geller was being taken very seriously.

From the foreword to the Magic of Uri Geller:

 Leon Jaroff, 1975

Thanks largely to James Randi, Geller would never again be studied seriously or courted by the military and other big players. Instead, by the late 70s, he would start the long slide toward post-celebrity celebrity. Despite the story he would tell later, he clearly saw his leading debunker as a threat and launched a barrage of harassment suits that would end up costing Randi nothing in damages but hundreds of thousands in legal fees.

Friday, October 23, 2020

The standard narrative on the Uri Geller/Amazing Randi conflict comes from the New York Times, which apparently got it from Uri Geller

RIP Randall James Hamilton Zwinge

James Randi, a magician who later challenged spoon benders, mind readers and faith healers with such voracity that he became regarded as the country’s foremost skeptic, has died, his foundation announced. He was 92.

The James Randi Educational Foundation confirmed his death, saying that its founder succumbed to “age-related causes” on Tuesday.

 ...

On a 1972 episode of “The Tonight Show,” he helped Johnny Carson set up Uri Geller, the Israeli performer who claimed to bend spoons with his mind. Randi ensured the spoons and other props were kept from Geller’s hands until showtime to prevent any tampering.

The result was an agonizing 22 minutes in which Geller was unable to perform his tricks.

 

 

 

 

For Randi, those 22 minutes of magic tricks not being done would ironically become the high point of the magician's biography but there was one more twist in the story

Adam Higginbotham writing for the New York Times Magazine in 2014.

“I sat there for 22 minutes, humiliated,” Geller told me, when I spoke to him in September. “I went back to my hotel, devastated. I was about to pack up the next day and go back to Tel Aviv. I thought, That’s it — I’m destroyed.” But to Geller’s astonishment, he was immediately booked on “The Merv Griffin Show.” He was on his way to becoming a paranormal superstar. “That Johnny Carson show made Uri Geller,” Geller said. To an enthusiastically trusting public, his failure only made his gifts seem more real: If he were performing magic tricks, they would surely work every time.

 It's a great tale except that there's little reason to believe it actually happened that way. Start with the fact that Geller seems to be the main source, which should have raised some red flags for Higginbotham.

 How about the appearance on the Merv Griffin Show? Wasn't he invited shortly after the Carson debacle? Not exactly. He was invited back. 


From IMDB:

The Merv Griffin Show (1962–1986)
Alfred Drake, Pamela Mason, Uri Geller, Captain Edgar Mitchell
TV-PG | 1h | Comedy, Family, Music | Episode aired 19 July 1973

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962–1992)
Ricardo Montalban/Eskimo-Indian Olympians/Uri Geller
1h 45min | Comedy, Talk-Show | Episode aired 1 August 1973

The Merv Griffin Show (1962–1986)
Eartha Kitt, Richard Dawson, Michelle Phillips, Uri Geller
TV-PG | 1h | Comedy, Family, Music | Episode aired 15 August 1973

 [Late Edit: He'd also made appearances on Jack Parr's show before doing the Tonight Show -- MP]

 Geller's telling makes it sound like it was the Carson appearance that got him on Griffin, but he was a returning guest and there's no reason to believe he wasn't invited back simply because he had done well a couple of weeks earlier.

Nor is there evidence that Geller's career took off in late 1973.



If anything, it looks like Randi's debunking of Geller starting with the Tonight Show and culminating with 1975's The Magic of Uri Geller was what brought the charlatan down.

Journalists love people-are-stupid narratives, but, while I believe cognitive dissonance is real, I think the lesson here is not "To an enthusiastically trusting public, his failure only made his gifts seem more real" and is instead that we should all be more skeptical of simplistic and overused pop psychology.

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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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