The war on data revisited -- Again, Trump says the quiet part out loud

Eight years, we made the following argument.

To coin a phrase, if the masses can't handle the truth and need instead to be fed a version crafted by the elite to keep the people happy and doing what's best for them, the public's access to accurate, objective information has to be tightly controlled.

A lot has changed since then. What was a tightly controlled narrative has taken on a life of its own and the delegitimizing of the of science and trustworthy data sources has been fully internalized, and not only by the GOP's cannon fodder.

Trump: Biden will "listen to the scientists" if elected https://t.co/iI87WTaqxb pic.twitter.com/lq8WqGvFCR

— The Hill (@thehill) October 19, 2020

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Strauss and the war on data

The most important aspect of Randianism as currently practiced is the lies its adherents tell themselves. "When you're successful, it's because other people are inferior to you." "When you fail, it's because inferior people persecute you (call it going Roark)." "One of these days you're going to run away and everyone who's been mean to you will be sorry."

The most important aspect of Straussianism as currently practiced is the lies its adherents tell others. Having started from the assumption that traditional democracy can't work because most people aren't smart enough to handle the role of voter, the Straussians conclude that superior minds must, for the good of society, lie to and manipulate the masses.

Joseph and I have an ongoing argument about which school is worse, a question greatly complicated by the compatibility of the two systems and the overlap of believers and their tactics and objectives. Joseph generally argues that Rand is worse (without, of course, defending Strauss) while I generally take the opposite position.

This week brought news that I think bolsters my case (though I suspect Joseph could easily turn it around to support his): one of the logical consequences of assuming typical voters can't evaluate information on their own is that data sources that are recognized as reliable are a threat to society. They can't be spun and they encourage people to make their own decisions.

To coin a phrase, if the masses can't handle the truth and need instead to be fed a version crafted by the elite to keep the people happy and doing what's best for them, the public's access to accurate, objective information has to be tightly controlled. With that in mind, consider the following from Jared Bernstein:

[D]ue to pressure from Republicans, the Congressional Research Service is withdrawing a report that showed the lack of correlation between high end tax cuts and economic growth.

The study, by economist Tom Hungerford, is of high quality, and is one I’ve cited here at OTE. Its findings are fairly common in the economics literature and the concerns raised by that noted econometrician Mitch McConnell are trumped up and bogus. He and his colleagues don’t like the findings because they strike at the supply-side arguments that they hold so dear.

And with Sandy still on everyone's mind, here's something from Menzie Chinn:

NOAA's programs are in function 300, Natural Resources and Environment, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and a range of conservation and natural resources programs. In the near term, function 300 would be 14.6 percent lower in 2014 in the Ryan budget according to the Washington Post. It quotes David Kendall of The Third Way as warning about the potential impact on weather forecasting: "'Our weather forecasts would be only half as accurate for four to eight years until another polar satellite is launched,' estimates Kendall. 'For many people planning a weekend outdoors, they may have to wait until Thursday for a forecast as accurate as one they now get on Monday. … Perhaps most affected would be hurricane response. Governors and mayors would have to order evacuations for areas twice as large or wait twice as long for an accurate forecast.'"

There are also attempts from prominent conservatives to delegitimize objective data:

Apparently, Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric, is accusing the Bureau of Labor Statistics of manipulating the jobs report to help President Obama. Others seem to be adding their voices to this slanderous lie. It is simply outrageous to make such a claim and echoes the worrying general distrust of facts that seems to have swept segments of our nation. The BLS employment report draws on two surveys, one (the establishment survey) of 141,000 businesses and government agencies and the other (the household survey) of 60,000 households. The household survey is done by the Census Bureau on behalf of BLS. It’s important to note that large single-month divergences between the employment numbers in these two surveys (like the divergence in September) are just not that rare. EPI’s Elise Gould has a great paper on the differences between these two surveys.

BLS is a highly professional agency with dozens of people involved in the tabulation and analysis of these data. The idea that the data are manipulated is just completely implausible. Moreover, the data trends reported are clearly in line with previous monthly reports and other economic indicators (such as GDP). The key result was the 114,000 increase in payroll employment from the establishment survey, which was right in line with what forecasters were expecting. This was a positive growth in jobs but roughly the amount to absorb a growing labor force and maintain a stable, not falling, unemployment rate. If someone wanted to help the president, they should have doubled the job growth the report showed. The household survey was much more positive, showing unemployment falling from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent. These numbers are more volatile month to month and it wouldn’t be surprising to see unemployment rise a bit next month. Nevertheless, there’s nothing implausible about the reported data. The household survey has shown greater job growth in the recovery than the establishment survey throughout the recovery. The labor force participation rate (the share of adults who are working or unemployed) increased to 63.6 percent, which is an improvement from the prior month but still below the 63.7 percent reported for July. All in all, there was nothing particularly strange about this month’s jobs reports—and certainly nothing to spur accusations of outright fraud.

We can also put many of the attacks against Nate Silver in this category.

Going back a few months, we had this from Businessweek:

The House Committee on Appropriations recently proposed cutting the Census budget to $878 million, $10 million below its current budget and $91 million less than the bureau’s request for the next fiscal year. Included in the committee number is a $20 million cut in funding for this year’s Economic Census, considered the foundation of U.S. economic statistics.

And Bruce Bartlett had a whole set of examples involving Newt Gingrich:

On Nov. 21, Newt Gingrich, who is leading the race for the Republican presidential nomination in some polls, attacked the Congressional Budget Office. In a speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Gingrich said the C.B.O. "is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated."

Mr. Gingrich's charge is complete nonsense. The former C.B.O. director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, now a Republican policy adviser, labeled the description "ludicrous." Most policy analysts from both sides of the aisle would say the C.B.O. is one of the very few analytical institutions left in government that one can trust implicitly.

It's precisely its deep reservoir of respect that makes Mr. Gingrich hate the C.B.O., because it has long stood in the way of allowing Republicans to make up numbers to justify whatever they feel like doing.

...

Mr. Gingrich has long had special ire for the C.B.O. because it has consistently thrown cold water on his pet health schemes, from which he enriched himself after being forced out as speaker of the House in 1998. In 2005, he wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Times berating the C.B.O., then under the direction of Mr. Holtz-Eakin, saying it had improperly scored some Gingrich-backed proposals. At a debate on Nov. 5, Mr. Gingrich said, "If you are serious about real health reform, you must abolish the Congressional Budget Office because it lies."
...                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Because Mr. Gingrich does know more than most politicians, the main obstacles to his grandiose schemes have always been Congress's professional staff members, many among the leading authorities anywhere in their areas of expertise.                                                                                                                                                                                                

To remove this obstacle, Mr. Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it. When he became speaker in 1995, Mr. Gingrich moved quickly to slash the budgets and staff of the House committees, which employed thousands of professionals with long and deep institutional memories.

Of course, when party control in Congress changes, many of those employed by the previous majority party expect to lose their jobs. But the Democratic committee staff members that Mr. Gingrich fired in 1995 weren't replaced by Republicans. In essence, the positions were simply abolished, permanently crippling the committee system and depriving members of Congress of competent and informed advice on issues that they are responsible for overseeing.

Mr. Gingrich sold his committee-neutering as a money-saving measure. How could Congress cut the budgets of federal agencies if it wasn't willing to cut its own budget, he asked. In the heady days of the first Republican House since 1954, Mr. Gingrich pretty much got whatever he asked for.

In addition to decimating committee budgets, he also abolished two really useful Congressional agencies, the Office of Technology Assessment and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. The former brought high-level scientific expertise to bear on legislative issues and the latter gave state and local governments an important voice in Congressional deliberations.

The amount of money involved was trivial even in terms of Congress's budget. Mr. Gingrich's real purpose was to centralize power in the speaker's office, which was staffed with young right-wing zealots who followed his orders without question. Lacking the staff resources to challenge Mr. Gingrich, the committees could offer no resistance and his agenda was simply rubber-stamped.

Unfortunately, Gingrichism lives on. Republican Congressional leaders continually criticize every Congressional agency that stands in their way. In addition to the C.B.O., one often hears attacks on the Congressional Research Service, the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Government Accountability Office.

Lately, the G.A.O. has been the prime target. Appropriators are cutting its budget by $42 million, forcing furloughs and cutbacks in investigations that identify billions of dollars in savings yearly. So misguided is this effort that Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma and one of the most conservative members of Congress, came to the agency's defense.

In a report issued by his office on Nov. 16, Senator Coburn pointed out that the G.A.O.'s budget has been cut by 13 percent in real terms since 1992 and its work force reduced by 40 percent -- more than 2,000 people. By contrast, Congress's budget has risen at twice the rate of inflation and nearly doubled to $2.3 billion from $1.2 billion over the last decade.

Mr. Coburn's report is replete with examples of budget savings recommended by G.A.O. He estimated that cutting its budget would add $3.3 billion a year to government waste, fraud, abuse and inefficiency that will go unidentified.

For good measure, Mr. Coburn included a chapter in his report on how Congressional committees have fallen down in their responsibility to exercise oversight. The number of hearings has fallen sharply in both the House and Senate. Since the beginning of the Gingrich era, they have fallen almost in half, with the biggest decline coming in the 104th Congress (1995-96), his first as speaker.

In short, Mr. Gingrich's unprovoked attack on the C.B.O. is part of a pattern. He disdains the expertise of anyone other than himself and is willing to undercut any institution that stands in his way. Unfortunately, we are still living with the consequences of his foolish actions as speaker.

We could really use the Office of Technology Assessment at a time when Congress desperately needs scientific expertise on a variety of issues in involving health, energy, climate change, homeland security and many others. And given the enormous stress suffered by state and local governments as they are forced by Washington to do more with less, an organization like the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations would be invaluable.

You could argue that 2020 was scary enough as is

I realized that I haven't done any Halloween posts this year so here are some outstanding chillers from the Golden Age of Radio.

 

 Starring William Conrad, William Conrad, and William Conrad. Narrated by William Conrad.

And a must listen for Vincent Price fans.

John Houseman once said that Orson Welles convinced himself that he had written everything he appeared in with the possible exception of the works of Shakespeare. Lucille Fletcher would probably agree.

History buffs will want to check out the War Bonds pitch at the end.

And perhaps Lucille Fletcher's high point (featuring America's best actor according to Welles).

Repost -- checking in on the work-from-home thread

From Marketplace:

 “I think it’s also … this newfound freedom for many people that now can work from anywhere,” Schuler said. “They’re picking up and moving wherever they want to, for the first time ever, where they’ve had this ability to do so.”

In the Marketplace-Edison Research Poll, nearly half of people who had moved or thought about moving said the ability to work from anywhere was a factor.

 

Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Will Covid-19 finally bring knowledge work practices into the Twenty-first Century?

I don't have numbers but I'm reasonably certain this is the largest number of Americans working from home since the advent of the internet and the smart phone.

There's no good technological reason why most knowledge workers need to live within a hundred or even a thousand miles of where they work. The obstacles are cultural but they are still formidable. Despite a tight job market and a growing housing crisis centered around a handful of overcrowded and overpriced cities, employers have been slow to consider alternative models.

Now new models are being forced upon everybody. New things will be tried. Adaptations will be made. Bugs will be worked out. Attitudes will shift.

Fifty years from now, this might be what Covid-19 is remembered for.

Friday, November 10, 2017

Why do we still have cities?

Following up on "remembering the future."

Smart people, like statisticians' models, are often most interesting when they are wrong. There is no better example of this than Arthur C Clarke's 1964 predictions about the demise of the urban age, where he suggested that what we would now call telecommuting would end the need for people to congregate around centers of employment and would therefore mean the end of cities.

What about the city of the day after tomorrow? Say, the year 2000. I think it will be completely different. In fact, it may not even exist at all. Oh, I'm not thinking about the atom bomb and the next Stone Age; I'm thinking about the incredible breakthrough which has been made possible by developments in communications, particularly the transistor and above all the communications satellite. These things will make possible a world where we can be in instant contact with each other wherever we may be, where we can contact our friends anywhere on earth even if we don't know their actual physical location. It will be possible in that age, perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London. In fact, if it proved worthwhile, almost any executive skill, any administrative skill, even any physical skill could be made independent of distance. I am perfectly serious when I suggest that someday we may have rain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand. When that time comes, the whole world will have shrunk to a point and the traditional role of a city as the meeting place for man will have ceased to make any sense. In fact, men will no longer commute; they will communicate. They won't have to travel for business anymore; they'll only travel for pleasure. I only hope that, when that day comes and the city is abolished, the whole world isn't turned into one giant suburb.

Clarke was working with a 20 to 50 year timeframe, so it's fair to say that he got this one wrong. The question is why. Both as a fiction writer and a serious futurist, the man was remarkably and famously prescient about telecommunications and its impact on society. Even here, he got many of the details right while still being dead wrong on the conclusion.

What went wrong? Part of this unquestionably has to do with the nature of modern work. Clarke probably envisioned a more automated workplace in the 21st century, one where stocking shelves and cleaning floors and, yes, driving vehicles would be done entirely by machines. He likely also underestimated the intrinsic appeal of cities.

But I think a third factor may well have been bigger than either of those two. The early 60s was an anxious but optimistic time. The sense was that if we didn't destroy ourselves, we were on the verge of great things. The 60s was also the last time that there was anything approaching a balance of power between workers and employers.

This was particularly true with mental work. At least in part because of the space race, companies like Texas Instruments were eager to find smart capable people. As a result, employers were extremely flexible about qualifications (a humanities PhD could actually get you a job) and they were willing to make concessions to attract and keep talented workers.

Telecommuting (as compared to off shoring, a distinction will need to get into in a later post) offers almost all of its advantages to the worker. The only benefit to the employer is the ability to land an otherwise unavailable prospect. From the perspective of 1964, that would have seemed like a good trade, but those days are long past.

For the past 40 or so years, employers have worked under (and now completely internalized) the assumption that they could pick and choose. When most companies post jobs, they are looking for someone who either has the exact academic background required, or preferably, someone who is currently doing almost the same job for a completely satisfied employer and yet is willing to leave for roughly the same pay.

When you hear complaints about "not being able to find qualified workers," it is essential to keep in mind this modern standard for "qualified." 50 or 60 years ago it meant someone who was capable of doing the work with a bit of training. Now it means someone who can walk in the door, sit down at the desk, and immediately start working. (Not to say that new employees will actually be doing productive work from day one. They'll be sitting in their cubicles trying to look busy for the first two or three weeks while IT and HR get things set up, but that's another story.)

Arthur C Clarke was writing in an optimistic age where workers were on an almost equal footing with management. If the year 2000 had looked like the year 1964, he just might have gotten this one right.

 

 

 

 

"The stakes are too high..."

 A few more from '64.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

US Supreme Court

 This is Joseph

The US Supreme Court has been a source of odd thinking, lately 

Josh Marshall has a post about how a reader suspects that John Roberts might decide to retire from the supreme court in order to preserve institutional legitimacy. I think this shows just how deranged the thinking about the supreme court has come. Is there anything that makes people think that judges voluntarily give up power?  

He is 65, way younger than Sandra Day O'Connor (around 78) or Anthony Kennedy (around 82). It just makes no sense that he'd give up influence on the court and the ability to advocate for legitimacy unless there was an external reason. 

Similarly, there is an odd sense of ownership of Supreme Court seats. People seem to think we should honor Ruth Bader Ginsberg's wish that her seat not be filled until after the election. There are a ton of very good reasons to not fill the seat quickly: recent past precedent (Scalia's replacement), lack of time to do a thorough vetting, and an ongoing pandemic creating the need for focusing on helping economic and medical victims all come immediately to mind. The idea that the seat is a feudal inheritance that the current occupant has any control over how it is filled in the future is not a good thing for the health of the republic.

Finally, the fact that covering pre-existing conditions is coming back up to the court, one more time, suggests that judicial rulings are becoming deeply unserious. The US has an insurance system that is based on churn as people change jobs many times over their careers, often without a whole lot of choice. Prices are opaque and systematically higher for people without insurance (the system is not set up for negotiation). Covering pre-existing conditions is simply a prerequisite for having the system function at all. That a seat flipping could credibly threaten this act, twelve years after it passed and after repeated judicial review, is . . . well, hard to credit is the nice way to say this.

Another easy litmus test. As a Canadian, I cannot name a single Supreme Court justice. I kind of remember the chief justice if I really think about it. I can name every single US justice, and give a quick summary of their politics. I worry that the politicization of the court will end in tears. 

Another sign of the process being broken is noted here. 

Amy Barrett is a former law professor and sitting judge. She does not have any idea about whether Medicare and social security are constitutional? Not hedging and saying that she is unaware of any grounds on which they could be. What is the point of the hearing if the justice is completely ignorant (or pretends to be ignorant) on law and policy? Not even to comment on the grounds on which these laws are currently based? What did she teach students? There are laws and nobody can tell if they are compatible with the constitution nor have I read any precedent? 

From Dennis the Menace to Vlad the Impaler

You might call this the flip-side of our Trash, Art and the Comics post. There we talked about  gaining insights into a period through its pop culture. Today's post is about how modern audiences often miss the point older works because they don't catch the obvious.

Though largely lost on today's readers, for those picking up the book in the 1890s, the contrast between Dracula's Transylvania and modern day London was obvious and explicit.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) October 12, 2020

In the the 1890s, people quite rightly thought of themselves as living at the height of a period of unprecedented scientific and technological breakthroughs. (I'd argue still unprecedented, but that's a topic for another post.) The characters in Dracula are well aware of the incongruity of a vampire roaming a contemporary metropolis. They discuss it at length through the book. Their leader, Dr. Van Helsing, explicitly frames the conflict as modern science versus an ancient supernatural force. 

Needless to say, most of this subtext never makes it to the adaptations, but even for readers of the original, I suspect most are likely to miss the point because we tend to underestimate grossly the period's sophisticated awareness of how science and technology was changing their world.

Tuesday Tweets -- if you held a gun to Werner Herzog's head...

Watch the whole thing.

In which Werner Herzog gives the an incredible answer when asked how many languages he speaks pic.twitter.com/BOdUwiImi8

— Séamas It Ever Was (@shockproofbeats) October 7, 2020

 Not really up on total factor productivity (assuming that's what they're talking about) but this can't be right.

Really mixed feelings about a metric that's supposed to be driven by technological innovation that peaks in the late thirties rather than the post-war era.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) October 6, 2020

Cool.

Meet the scutoid, a geometrical shape new to math, but not to nature — is the form that a group of cells in the body takes in order to pack tightly and efficiently into the tricky curves of organs https://t.co/K17sVjlGi2 pic.twitter.com/rbatgVLdvP

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 7, 2020

Even cooler.

Actually half the writing team, but it still counts.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) October 9, 2020

Newman!

Ahead of #WorldPostDay, we have a very important message from your friendly local mail carrier. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/hUIsqzXJc5

— PACRONYM (@PACRONYM) October 8, 2020

And finally

That debate was the worst thing I've ever seen & I was in The Star Wars Holiday Special.

— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) September 30, 2020

The alternative theory is that they're making a big play for those three DC electoral votes

One of the many dirty little secrets of the major studios is that a nontrivial share of the advertising budget goes not to actually promoting a movie or series but to keeping a star happy. (Yeah, I split that infinitive. Want to make something of it?) It is not unheard of for all of a show’s outdoor marketing spend to go billboards placed where the star will see them.

We are seeing something analogous in the presidential campaign.

There must be a stronger English word than "pathetic" to describe this. https://t.co/2pd8UmdPZQ

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) October 9, 2020

To get a sense of how seemingly crazy this would seem to be you have to consider where the Trump campaign is being forced to cut back.

From the LA Times.

Trump’s retreat from Ohio, Iowa and New Hampshire reflects his struggle to change the dynamics of a race that polls suggest he is on track to lose. In the six weeks since his party’s national convention, Trump’s campaign has yanked more than $17 million in ads he’d previously booked in those states.

Two of them, Ohio and Iowa, are must-wins for the Republican president. Polls show him running almost dead even with the former vice president in both. Trump’s withdrawal of advertising in those states — despite the risk — is a sign of his campaign’s poor financial condition.

“It seems the Trump campaign has reached the point where they have to do some triage,” said Travis Ridout, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political ads. “They don’t seem to have enough money to run ads everywhere.”

I've suspected for years now that political analysts have underestimated how much of the GOP's messaging has been primarily focused on keeping Trump calm, particularly on the part of loyal soldiers like Graham. The strategy hasn't prevented erratic behavior from the president but it is reasonable to assume it has reduced it.

Now, though, the need for calm extends through the entire party. This is the point of the stag hunt where not only does a successful kill seem unlikely, but where the very possibility of making it back home safely is in question.

Trump and the Republicans are running these DC ads for the same reason that small children repeatedly tell themselves that there is nothing under the bed. The main difference here being that for the GOP this monster is quite real.

Trash, Art and the Comics

[If you haven't already, you owe it to yourself to read the original.]

If you're trying to get a feel for a historical period, not seek out profound insights into the times, but just get a sense of what things were like, you are often better off opting for what Kael would call the good trash rather than the first rate art of the period.

Great art is of a time but timeless. Its creators see further, deeper. They have a unique vision, The works connect with audiences in entirely different ways as the years pass. It would be a mistake to assume we see Lear in the same way groundlings did four hundred years ago, just as it would be a mistake to assume Shakespeare was a typical Elizabethan.

All of this is problematic when you just want a picture of an era. For that, you'll probably be better off going with something competent and popular in its time that has aged badly. John O'Hara instead of William Faulkner. Dennis the Menace instead of Peanuts.

Hank Ketcham seldom pushed boundaries but he and his assistants were solid cartoonists and sharp observers who, probably unintentionally and more in the background than the foreground, caught all sorts of interesting details.

The following panels are from 1960 and 1961.


Note the bench seat and the small child standing on it while his father drives. Unsafe at Any Speed was years away.

Though they were a ubiquitous part of American life for almost one hundred years, I wonder how many people reading this know what trading stamps were

























Even in the safest escapist entertain, 1961 was a scary time.

More on the great unwinding -- the post-Trump GOP is probably inevitable but still unimaginable

Just to reiterate a few points we've been hammering for a few years now.

1. Trump has become more and more toxic to a growing majority of the country. If things continue going the way they're headed, he will be the ultimate example of von Hoffman's rat on the kitchen floor for the Republican Party.

2. But unlike with Nixon,  the base is personally loyal to Trump, not to the GOP.

No flight to Berchtesgaden for this loyal man—he's staying in the bunker https://t.co/jlZf09aIlA

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) October 6, 2020

3. It is difficult to describe what we're seeing as anything other than a cult of personality, complete with the Soviet style propaganda images, the assumption of mental and physical perfection and the messianic overtones.

4. Even if the base were to continue to support the party, the Republicans absolutely must broaden its appeal. After 1988, they have won the popular vote for the presidency exactly once and that was the special case of a wartime reelection.

5. But the base will not tolerate disloyalty to either Trump or his message. Keeping them happy while broadening support is impossible, but the alternative is to find a way to go from a minority to a majority party while trying to make up for the loss of around half of your supporters. 

Are there scenarios where this does happen relatively quickly? Sure, but there are no obvious paths that don't require some deus ex machina plot twist. Which leads to the final and most important point.

6. With a handful of possible exceptions like the extraordinarily sharp Josh Marshall, observers are almost all underestimating the chances of profound and unexpected changes to the way American politics works. I'm not saying what's going to fall or which direction it will tip, but things are going to be different.

From Marshall

But don’t take your eyes off this broader calculus – one separate from Trump, his state of mind, one that is above all rational. Yes, everyone should give their 110%. Everybody get out to vote. The stakes for a second Trump term are too high to take anything for granted. But for those gaming out their own moves and post-January realities, Trump’s defeat is starting to look very likely. Under normal circumstances that would lead congressional Republicans to cut Trump loose and pitch their reelection as a check on the power of a Democratic President. That would be a great card to play for a number of endangered Republican Senators at the moment. But it’s all but impossible since loyalty to Trump is now the centerpiece of Republican identity. And any move away from him would trigger a fatal backlash.

A year ago today at the blog

There are a few things I'd change if I were writing this today. The big one is that, between the pandemic and mail-in ballots, Straussian ideas and tactics were about cause massive loss of life and threaten democracy.

The rest I'm comfortable letting stand.

Monday, October 7, 2019

Out with the Wages of Strauss, in with the Great Unwinding

We have reached a point in the show which always makes the fans a little nervous. we have decided that one of our oldest and biggest storylines is starting to come to a natural conclusion so we need to begin wrapping up the loose ends and introducing the next one.

For years now, when it came to politics, the big recurring story was what you might call the wages of Strauss. we pushed the we pushed the idea that either the main cause or the essential context of almost every major political development over the past couple of decades came from the conservative movements relatively public conclusion that their agenda, while it might hold its own for a while and perhaps even surge ahead now and then, was destined to lose the battle of public opinion in the long run.

This left them with two choices, either modify their ideas so that they could win over the majority of the public, or undermine the Democratic process through a Straussian model, an approach based on controlling most of the money and increasing the influence that could be bought with that money, changing government so that an ever smaller part of the population had an ever-larger role in governing the country and creating a sophisticated three-tiered information management system where trusted sources of information were underfunded and undermined, the mainstream press was kept in line through a combination of message discipline and incentives with special emphasis placed on working the refs, and the creation of a special media bubble for the base which used spin, propaganda, and outright disinformation to keep the canon fodder angry, frightened, and loyal.

For a long time this approach worked remarkably well, but you could argue that the signs of instability were there from the beginning, particularly the difficulty of controlling the creation and flow of disinformation, the vulnerability to what you might call hostile take over, and the way the system lent itself to cults of personality.

We've had a good run with this storyline for a long time now, but it seems to be coming to a resolution and it has definitely lost a great deal of its novelty. (Lots of people are making these points now.)

The next big story, but one which we believe will dominate American politics for at least the next decade or so will be how the Republican party deals with the unwinding of the Trump cult of personality. Dismantling such a cult is tremendously difficult under the best of circumstances where the leader can be eased out gently, but you have with Donald Trump someone who has no loyalty to the party whatsoever and who is temperamentally not only capable but inclined to tear the house down should he feel betrayed.

If Trump continues to grow more erratic and public disapproval and support for his removal continues to grow, then association will be increasingly damaging to Republicans in office. However, for those same politicians, at least those who come up for election in the next two to four years, it is not at all clear that any could survive if the Trump loyalists turned on them.

But this goes beyond individual candidates. Trump's hold on the core of the base is so strong and so personal that, if he were to tell them directly that the GOP had betrayed both him and them, they would almost certainly side with him. They might form a third party, or simply boycott if you elections, or, yes, even consider voting for Democrats.. I know that last one sounds unlikely but it is within the realm of possibility if the intraparty civil war got bitter enough.

Obviously, if Trump survives this scandal and is reelected in 2020, all of this is moot, but if not, then how things break will be a story we’ll be glad to have been following.

Tuesday tweets -- the great unwinding (plus a really cool snowball fight)

We have been arguing for a while now that the fate of the GOP probably depends on how well it can disentangle itself from a cult of personality that not has reached the level of Soviet era Stalin worship but has also embraced some the most delusional conspiracy theories on record. 

The past few days have brought these issues into high relief.

Immediately made me think of this. (“Sitting in the Kremlin, Stalin worries about each one of us.”) pic.twitter.com/k3P29NoyAV

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) October 5, 2020

QAnon signs starting to show up here outside Walter Reed pic.twitter.com/5e5zfzmVOx

— Josh Lederman (@JoshNBCNews) October 4, 2020

"The President is working with documents!" was the stock phrase Yeltsin's staff used whenever he was at his dacha in Barvikha unconscious from drinking or feeling the aftereffects of a binge.
It was such a commonly used, thinly veiled excuse, it became a running joke in Russia. https://t.co/mAWzazBDtm

— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) October 3, 2020

We are now at the point where what used to be a Chuck Norris joke is now used by Republicans to suck up to their Great Leader. pic.twitter.com/6WXVu4Fhy5

— J.P. de Ruiter (@JPdeRuiter) October 6, 2020

‘God-tier genetics’: A stunned MAGA world offers blame, adulation after Trump’s diagnosis https://t.co/2RBd9F1Kky via @politico

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) October 3, 2020

COVID stood NO chance against @realDonaldTrump! pic.twitter.com/GtNPOHkDqF

— Kelly Loeffler (@KLoeffler) October 5, 2020

It’s like house of saddam https://t.co/4YjOGp9vVa

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 6, 2020

2016, 2020 pic.twitter.com/xx6kL1Z72V

— Dave Weigel, Re-Animator (@daveweigel) October 2, 2020

Disturbing but importanthttps://t.co/bfpciXStLT

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) October 3, 2020

But rather than leave you with these ugly thoughts, here's something charming to close the post. 

Snowball fight in 1896.
Lyon, France. Louis Lumière. #DeOldify pic.twitter.com/dnoE4KHRKe

— Joaquim Campa (@JoaquimCampa) September 30, 2020

Two years ago today -- well, that worked out

I was working on a post about silly but persistent notions about Mars colonies but I realized I wouldn't have time to get it and everything else I had put off until Sunday done, so I decided to do "_____ years ago today" dodge.

Here's what popped up.

Friday, October 5, 2018

If you're tired of the Mars rants, just skip to the Rocket Man cover

This Neil Degrasse Tyson segment from the Tonight Show was amusing – – both he and Stephen Colbert are good at this sort of thing and play well off of each other – – but I'm including it because it hits on a point that I've alluded to in previous conversations of space exploration and the vanity aerospace industry.

Much, arguably most, of the 21st century discussion of man's expansion into and utilization of outer space is based on an implicit and often explicit colonial era framework. This includes such respectable news organizations as the New York Times, NPR, the BBC, and most recently and egregiously the Atlantic.

Any time you see the term "Mars colony," you know you are in trouble. Almost inevitably what follows will assume that the second half of the 21st century will basically just be a remake of the 17th and 18th, despite causes and conditions being all but completely non-analogous. I have neither the time nor the knowledge to go into detail here, but if you will forgive the oversimplification, the original system was based on habitable, arable lands which generally offered significant potential for trade and were easily accessed and conquered and which required a great deal of labor in order to pay off for the colonizing power.

None of this applies to Mars or any other body in the solar system. Outside of certain research questions, there are for the foreseeable future very few economically sound arguments for a human presence in space. Even if something like Martian mining proves viable, any work on the surface of the planet will be done largely, perhaps entirely, by autonomous and semiautonomous robots. This is true now and it will certainly be more true with the AI and robotics of 2050. Based on purely practical considerations, there will be no way to justify more than the most minimal of human presences on the red planet.

This leaves us with various romantic arguments about man's need to reach out to strange lands. [Insert super cut of inspirational Star Trek speeches here.] 100 or so years ago, you might have been able to make a reasonably convincing argument for the explore and settle model. Multiple high profile polar expeditions dominated the news while scientist were for the first time probing the depths of the ocean with dredges and other specialized instruments. The idea of cities in previously inhospitable or even impossible places captured the public imagination.

But this is not 1918. This is 2018 and, as Neil Degrasse Tyson points out, no one is lining up to colonize Antarctica, nor do we have undersea settlements or subterranean metropolises. Hell, we have trouble getting people to move to North Dakota.

Events have gotten ahead of me

Much to think about at the moment.

Maybe we should all lighten up -- more Thursday tweets

Be honest, couldn't you use some aliens, giant robots and Doobie on Murray action about now?

Turn it upside down and it's an alien reading Torah. You're welcome. pic.twitter.com/JbAcCY1etW

— Rabbi Yisroel Bernath (@montrealrabbi) September 21, 2020

Bill Murray receives a legal demand from the Doobie Brothers. And it’s everything you’d want it to be... pic.twitter.com/R1L99yZSBj

— Eriq Gardner (@eriqgardner) September 24, 2020

Mad respect for King George III's long game. https://t.co/oMw3T6jaHU

— Berny Belvedere (@bernybelvedere) September 25, 2020

My dad built a tensegrity office toy :) pic.twitter.com/pcy8YrFwqb

— Luis Batalha 🇵🇹🇺🇸 (@luismbat) September 27, 2020

Wow! Impressive, how did these go-getters find such success?

Oh, pic.twitter.com/qUQOXllnJt

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) September 27, 2020

Car kept jamming on the brakes thinking this was a person 🤦‍♂️ The NN was dreaming @greentheonly pic.twitter.com/ARQn23oXLl

— Electric Future (@electricfuture5) September 26, 2020

A giant robot resembling the 1970s anime figure Gundam has been tested in Yokohama, Japan. The robot stands at nearly 60 feet tall and weighs 24 tons. https://t.co/TXvXUPjucl pic.twitter.com/wd3Uv0mhaj

— CNN International (@cnni) September 26, 2020

More on omnicompetence

Spending so much time on the subject of how money influences entertainment and entertainment journalism got me to thinking about Pauline Kael's prescient 1980 essay on the changing business model of the film industry, "Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers."

This passage is a bit off topic for that thread, but it does fit nicely with another, what happens when successful assholes buy their way into an industry they know nothing about, convinced of their own omnicompetence. [Emphasis added.]

There are direct results when conglomerates take over movie companies. Heads of the conglomerates may be drawn into the movie business for the status implications—the opportunity to associate with the world-famous. Some other conglomerate heads  may  be  drawn  in  for  the  women,  too;  a  new  social  life  beckons,  and  as  they become  social,  people  with  great  names  approach  them  as  equals,  and  famous  stars and producers and writers and directors tell them they’ve heard from other studios and about ideas they have for movies. The conglomerate heads become indignant that the studios they run have passed on these wonderful projects. The next day, they’re on the phone raising hell with the studio bosses. Very soon, they’re likely to be directors and suggesting material to them, talking to actors, and company executives what projects should be developed. How bad is the judgment of the conglomerate heads? Very bad. They haven’t grown up in a show business milieu—they don’t have the instincts or the information of those who have lived and sweated movies for many years. (Neither do most of the current studio bosses.) The corporate heads may be business geniuses, but as far as movies are concerned, have virgin instincts; ideas that are new to them and take them by storm may have failed grotesquely dozens of times. But they feel that they are creative people—how else could they have made so much money and be in a position to advise artists what to do? Who is to tell them no? Within a very short time, they are in fact, though not in title, running the studio. They turn up compliant executives who will settle for the title and not fight for the authority or for their own tastes if, in fact, they have any. The conglomerate heads find these compliant executives among lawyers and agents, among television executives, and in the lower echelons of the companies they’ve taken over. Generally, these executives reserve all their enthusiasm for movies that have made money; those are the only movies they like. When a director or a writer talks to them and tries to suggest the kind of movie he has in mind by using a comparison, they may stare at him blankly. They are usually law school or business school graduates; they have no frame of reference. Worse, they have no shame about not knowing anything about movies. From their point of view, such knowledge is not essential to their work.Their talent is being able to anticipate their superiors’ opinions; in meetings, they show a sixth sense for guessing what the most powerful person wants to hear. And if they ever guess wrong, they know how to shift gears without a tremor. So the movie companies wind up with top production executives whose interest in movies rarely extends beyond the selling possibilities; they could be selling neckties just as well as movies, except that they are drawn to glamour and power.

Revisiting a post from 2017

New this morning - Senate Majority PAC is spending $$ in South Carolina for the first time, launching a $6.5 million campaign against @LindseyGrahamSC in a sign that Dems see this race as winnable https://t.co/qgkBqGo7bf

— Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) September 28, 2020

Thursday, March 2, 2017

There will be safe seats. There are no safe seats.

In 2017, we have a perfect example of when not to use static thinking and naïve extrapolation.

Not only are things changing rapidly, but, more importantly, there are a large number of entirely plausible scenarios that would radically reshape the political landscape and would undoubtedly interact in unpredictable ways. This is not "what if the ax falls?" speculation; if anything, have gotten to the point where the probability of at least one of these cataclysmic shifts happening is greater than the probability of none. And while we can't productively speculate on exactly how things will play out, we can say that the risks fall disproportionately on the Republicans.

Somewhat paradoxically, chaos and uncertainty can make certain strategic decisions easier. Under more normal (i.e. stable) circumstances it makes sense to expend little or no resources on unwinnable fights (or, conversely,  to spend considerable time and effort deciding what's winnable). The very concept of "unwinnable," however, is based on a whole string of assumptions, many of which we cannot make under the present conditions.

The optimal strategy under the circumstances for the Democrats is to field viable candidates for, if possible, every major 2018 race. This is based on the assumption not that every seat is winnable, but that no one can, at this point, say with a high level of confidence what the winnable seats are.

I have to admit, it’s kind of a pleasant change to be making fun of trivial things again…

And you don’t get much more trivial than the Emmys.

First off, any show with Eugene Levy or Catherine O’Hara is doing god’s work and having the two work together is going above and beyond. I haven’t gotten around to Schitt’s Creek yet, but I have no doubt it’s a deserving show which certainly makes this a feel good ending:

In 2020, the sixth and final season was nominated for 15 Primetime Emmy Awards. This broke the record for the most Emmy nominations given to a comedy in its final season. During the 2020 Emmys, the show became the first-ever comedy or drama series to sweep the four acting categories (Outstanding Lead Actor, Outstanding Lead Actress, Outstanding Supporting Actor, Outstanding Supporting Actress) and one of only four live action shows, along with All in the Family, The Golden Girls, and Will & Grace where all the principal actors have won at least one Emmy Award.

If anything, this understates how unprecedented the sweep is. If you look at the other shows mentioned here (All in the Family, The Golden Girls, and Will & Grace), you’ll see that they had Emmy wins or nominations every year they ran. Schitt’s Creek had never won a single statue before this year. Until 2019 (note that date), it hadn’t even gotten a nomination. The Television Academy is notorious for playing favorites. To go from nonentity to “honor just to be nominated” to powerhouse in two years goes against the industry’s laws of nature.

The sudden rise in popularity is often credited to a “Netflix bump” from when the streaming service picked it up in January of 2017 (another date to note). Left out of almost all reporting on these bumps is the role of marketing and PR. Netflix spends billions a year on promotion and while it prioritizes its “originals” (which brings up other interesting points), it still has enough for some fairly generous “Now on Netflix” campaigns.

That said, shows getting a ratings boost from syndication has been a recognized and well-documented phenomenon since the business model was established in the seventies. There’s no question that Schitt’s Creek got a bump, but just how big was it? Though not perfect, Google trends can provide a pretty good picture of the interest in a show.

Post-Netflix numbers were certainly better but after settling down, they remained relatively flat for well over a year then, around the fourth quarter of 2018, at which point they started a remarkable climb. On a related note…

In [May] 2018, Debmar-Mercury, a division of Lionsgate, acquired the U.S. syndication rights to Schitt's Creek. The series is scheduled to debut in syndication on Fox Television Stations throughout the U.S. during the Fall 2020 television season. The series is also began airing reruns of series on Comedy Central on October 2, 2020.

Despite its low cool factor, television syndication remains a tremendously lucrative business. For a fairly obscure cable/Canadian show like Schitt’s Creek, awards and media buzz can greatly increase marketability. It would be shocking if Lionsgate, a company with billions in revenue and a substantial PR budget, didn’t launch a major campaign and, given the Q2 acquisition and time to plan the campaign, we’d expect the money to start flowing in October, 2018.

In 2020, this PR push was followed by an aggressive Emmy campaign.

I don’t want to get carried away – this is just one metric (a noisy one at that) and some anecdotes – but the standard narrative (check this Vanity Fair piece for an example that adheres strictly to the form) doesn’t really fit we we see here, neither with the Netflix bump nor with finding an audience. Instead, we have another example of how PR departments shape things like awards and media coverage, and unfortunately not just on trivial matters.

Mono-causal explanations

This is Joseph

One thing that drives me a little nuts is how people want to have things happen due to a single cause. In most of life, things are never so simple. Mark noted this in a previous post. Many things can contribute to an event occuring, in a combination of necessary and sufficient causes.

The triggering event for this was a tweet on oral anti-diabetic medications suggesting that diet and lifestyle should be tried. I think that everyone prescribing medications would prefer that lifestyle changes would be wonderful. But the real world is complicated. For example, if it is Type 1 diabetes there are no lifestyle changes that will help -- before the development of insulin this was a certain death sentence.  Even for Type 2 diabetes, where the medications are most likely, it will not always be the case that lifestyle is sufficient to cause remission. Instead a combination of lifestyle and medications, together, are likely to be more effective than either alone. 

But this concept applies to all sorts of other conditions. For example, when a person leaves a job there are almost always a series of causes. Some of it could be salary whereas location or family could matter more for others. As a result you can never infer anything about a workplace from a couple of people leaving, but a string of attrition looks like a bad sign. 

As Mark noted, this also comes into play with all sorts of political systems. People like single explanations for why a specific person wins a race. The truth is that there is probably a wide range of motivations for specific votes -- ranging from random chance to fierce interest in a specific policy. 

But more important, we should discipline ourselves not to conflate risk factors with causes. Obesity might increase the risk of a deep vein thrombosis, but many non-obese people have these events. The counter-factual person (same person just not obese) might well have had one regardless of obesity. 

Looking for a simple explanation always suggests you are missing important information. 

Still working my way through Deadwood, though

I was going through some old posts and I came across this reply on the subject of manipulating crime statistics.

Or watch the Wire

Well, it took me ten years, but I did get around to it and the show lives up to the hype. It still comes in second to NYPD Blue for me (Almost impossible to match the combination of Sipowicz's arc and Franz's performance stretching over a decade), but it's close to the top of my list and this is coming from someone who has watched way too much television.

And yes, statistics and their abuse are a huge part of the story, particularly in the police department and the schools (having taught in high poverty schools, urban and rural, I can tell you this is possibly the best depiction I've seen). Campbell's law rules here.

Lots of familiar voices in the opening credits, including Steve Earle, who has a small but important recurring role on camera.

“There was only one good thing about the fire. It made people talk about the things that really concerned them.”

Recent events have got me thinking about the Ross MacDonald novel the Underground Man which takes place against the backdrop of a massive wildfire and gives us some idea how Californians thought about fires fifty years ago.

Though critics now tend to hold MacDonald's late Fifties books in higher regard, this novel and its predecessor, the Goodbye Look represented the peak in the author's literary standing. Friend and admirer Eudora Welty wrote this in her review in the New York Times.

Time pressing, time lapsing, time repeating itself in dark acts, splitting into two in some agonized or imperfect mind— time is the wicked fairy to troubled people, granting them inevitably the thing they dread. While Archer's investigation is drawing him into the past, we are never allowed to forget that present time has been steadily increasing its menace. Mr. Macdonald has brought the fire toward us at closer and closer stages. By the time it gets as close as the top of the hill (this was the murder area), it appears “like a brilliant uniform growth which continued to grow until it bloomed very large against the sky. A sentinel quail on the hillside be low it was ticking an alarm.” Then, reaching the Broadhurst house, “the fire bent around it like the fingers of a hand, squeezing smoke out of the windows and then flame.”
Indeed the fire is a multiple and accumulating identity, with a career of its own, a super character that has earned it self a character's name—Rattlesnake. Significantly, Archer says, “There was only one good thing about the fire. It made people talk about the things that really concerned them.”

West Coast wildfires -- Marketplace gets it right

At first glance, this shouldn't be that difficult. You just have to hit the following points clearly and emphatically.

1. While climate change contributes to the wildfire crisis, the much larger and more immediate cause is the result of decades of excessive Western fire suppression.

2. We desperately need to address this crisis as soon as possible, primarily through controlled and managed burns.

3. The scientists studying forests are in absolute agreement on both these points and have been warning us about this crisis for years.

4. However, a combination of governmental inaction, perverse incentives and the short-sighted self-interest of various parties has kept us from avoiding catastrophe.

Not one in ten articles on the subject meets these standards, but perhaps we shouldn't be that surprised. Telling a story that grows out of the facts, fighting the urge to bend it to fit popular narratives, keeping the focus on the genuinely important. These are things that require journalists to have both skill and courage.

Which is part of the reason why Marketplace is the best daily news show on public radio.

And it's hard to get more boring than charcoal

Sometimes it feels like the more practical and promising an approach to addressing global warming is, the less interest it generates. Personally, for this and most other urgent problems, I'm pretty much only interested in boring solutions based on existing technology.

I'm not sure if there's a way to scale this to address our twin crises of  too much fuel in our forests and too much carbon in our atmosphere, but it's an intriguing thought.

From Wikipedia:

 The burning and natural decomposition of biomass releases large amounts of carbon dioxide and methane to the Earth's atmosphere. The biochar production process also releases CO2 (up to 50% of the biomass); however the remaining carbon content is stable indefinitely. Biochar presents a stable way of carbon storage in the ground for centuries, potentially reducing or stalling the growth in atmospheric greenhouse gas levels. Simultaneously, its presence in the earth can improve water quality, increase soil fertility, raise agricultural productivity, and reduce pressure on old-growth forests.

Biochar can sequester carbon in the soil for hundreds to thousands of years, like coal. Such a carbon-negative technology would lead to a net withdrawal of CO2 from the atmosphere, while producing consumable energy. This technique is advocated by prominent scientists such as James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis, for mitigation of global warming by greenhouse gas remediation.
 

More important, none of the new tunneling machines are as cool as the Sigafoos.

Today in Hyperloop non-developments

The “incremental changes” currently being made in tunnelling technology will not be enough to generate the reduction in costs needed to make hyperloop tunnels affordable, according to a new British Tunnelling Society (BTS) report.

The Hyperloop Challenge report – authored by tunnelling consultant Bill Grose – says the changes will continue to be made but more needs to be done.

“Current proven tunnelling technology will not in itself generate the savings that are necessary to meet the wished-for step change in tunnelling costs that is thought to be necessary to make hyperloop in tunnels economically viable,” the report says.

Which gives me an excuse to repost more cool Turn of the Century tech.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2017

The Sigafoos Tunneling Machine

With all this discussion of hyperloops and tunneling technology, I thought this would provide some interesting context (and an excuse to post a couple of cool pictures). I found the last paragraph particularly interesting. Notice how even more than a hundred years ago, people recognized the tremendous potential of fast, cheap tunneling.

Like the poor, new ideas for tunneling through rock and doing away with drilling and powder and dangerous blasting, are forever with us. Since 1853 there have been no less than sixty-nine patents granted on tunneling machines, and of this number but three have progressed beyond the blue-print stage. One was constructed and used with some slight success in the East, but owing to lack of funds or disputes among its builders, all progress was stopped. The second was built in Colorado, and at the present time is installed in a tunnel near Boulder. This machine does the work claimed for it, but the cutting is very irregular, numerous breakdowns are constantly happening, and in the course of over six months the machine has penetrated but a few hundred feet.

The third machine, here illus­trated, was invented by Mr. Sigafoos, of Denver, long associated with many eastern manufacturers until of late, when he turned his mind and labor toward western mining fields. Mr. Sigafoos built his first model three years ago, and until the present day it is on exhibition in his offices. Even this little working model, barely two feet long, has eaten through solid granite quite as easily and determinedly as a hungry earthworm.

Early in January of this year the first regular-sized machine was constructed in the East and shipped complete to Georgetown, Col., where the first contract was let and its behavior eagerly watched. The utmost secrecy was observed, for the first trial, and the author was extremely fortunate in being allowed to witness the test. In every instance the rotary proved its value, and came up to the highest expectations. Mr. Sigafoos stands ready to take contracts with his machine, in any and all rock, and will guarantee to cut five feet an hour, twenty-four hours a day.
...

It may not be amiss to state that the famous Moffat road will probably use these large rotaries in cutting its great tunnel through the mountains. In places today where the road ascends and descends mountains, it is expected within a short time to eventually bore through them, cutting down the time from coast to coast fully twenty-four hours. The contractors, before learning of the new machine, allowed ten years for the completion of this gigantic undertaking; but today, with a sufficient number of tunnel rotaries at work, two years will not be an impractical limit. The immediate uses to which this machine can be put to work are innumerable. Subways that formerly took five years to construct can now be run for half the expense in one-tenth the time. Water in unlimited quantities can be brought through the mountain walls, and the vast arid areas of the deserts will be made to blossom as a wonderful garden. If the claims made for it continue to be substantiated in practice, Mr. Sigafoos may well be considered a world's benefactor in giving us this marvelous rotary tunnel machine. 

OK, I'll admit it. The post I was working on is taking a bit longer than expected.

So here's a video recommendation to fill your time.

Trailers from Hell is a mixed bag, sometimes diverting, often disappointing. John Landis can be counted on to deliver entertaining comments with a nice mix of irreverence and knowledgeable affection, but their best presenter is probably the wry, erudite and perfectly named Brian Trenchard Smith.

The wildfire conversation we need to have right now.

In the longer run the question of global warming is the biggest environmental threat we face, but in the immediate term here in the West, our highest priority has got to be returning our forests to their natural equilibrium, which means finding a way to start burning off tens of millions of acres starting as soon as possible.

The conversation now needs to focus on finding the best, fastest and safest way to burn this fuel off, and on identifying and addressing the obstacles preventing us from taking action.

From Nature (Published: 20 January 2020):

Barriers and enablers for prescribed burns for wildfire management in California
Based on interviews, personal and public concerns regarding prescribed burns create risk-related barriers that prevent potential burners from beginning the burn planning process (Supplementary Table 3). First, all interview groups stated that liability laws place financial and legal responsibility for any escapes on the burners, resulting in a risk-averse culture that needs legal changes. Private landowners concerned about potential bankruptcy thus avoid burn-ing on their property. Within the federal government, interviewees described an absence of praise or rewards for managers who used prescribed burns, but punishment for any escapes. Second, fed-eral and state government employees claimed that negative public opinion remains a challenge, although opposition diminishes with education. Non-profit representatives believed that public tolerance for smoke or escapes is limited, and avoiding burns entirely can pre-vent any complaints (Table 2).

… 

Additionally, according to interviewees, resource- and regula-tions-related barriers create an implementation gap between acres planned and subsequently burned across landowner types (Fig. 3 and Table 2). First, the USFS, with its large, uninterrupted swathes of land, dedicated fire crew and agency approval of prescribed and managed burns, could burn hundreds of thousands of acres annually (Supplementary Table 4). However, wildfire suppression has historically diverted federal funding from wildfire prevention. Federal government employees and academics recommended stra-tegic resource allocation between wildfire suppression and preven-tion. Non-profit representatives listed inconsistent funding for fuel treatments and an emphasis on private mechanical thinning as limitations on prescribed burns in national forests. In many areas, overgrowth demands mechanical thinning pretreatments before prescribed burns, although financial constraints may limit follow-up burns. Second, interviewees across non-state government groups recognized a need for federal workforce rebuilding and training pro-grammes. Active burn programmes have ended when experienced burn managers retired. An ageing federal workforce without newly trained burners has limited the use of prescribed burns. On the reg-ulations side, the California Air Resources Board may establish nar-row burn windows based on local weather conditions, restricting when or how many acres landowners can burn. Changing weather conditions may result in less burning than planned because burns cannot continue safely over consecutive days. 

Across interview groups, interviewees reported that land managers and air boards blamed each other: land managers claim that air boards do not offer enough burn days, but air boards claim that they offer more burn days than are used (Table 2). Similarly, federal government employ-ees, legislative staff and non-profit representatives noted that local air boards may prohibit burning that would exceed air quality stan-dards based on local weather conditions. These barriers remain. 

State and private burners face two distinct resource- and regu-lations-related barriers identified by interviewees that contributed to a gap of 4,138 acres (6.86%) that were planned but not burned in PFIRS between 2013 and 2018 (Table 2 and Supplementary Table 4). First, all interview groups agreed that limited burn crew availability and prescribed-burn training or certification pro-grammes restrict when and where burns can occur. Before 2018, California had no official prescribed-burn training or certification programme. Private landowners therefore had few opportunities to practice burning safely, exacerbating liability apprehensions. Many CAL FIRE crews are seasonal rather than full-time employees hired during the worst wildfire months rather than the best prescribed-burn months. CAL FIRE can divert crews from conducting planned burns to extinguishing wildfires in other regions of the state, limit-ing the use of VMP contracts. 

Second, interviewees from all groups except academics identified state and cross-jurisdictional regula-tions as slowing or preventing fuel treatments. Burners receiv-ing federal or state funds must undergo environmental reviews mandated by the National Environmental Protection Act or the California Environmental Quality Act. Burn managers who miss the window of approval by these potentially expensive and time-consuming reviews must redo the process, preventing an otherwise planned burn from occurring. For example, VMP contracts may expire before plans receive CEQA approval. Interviewees com-plained that these laws, intended for determining environmental impacts of major projects or actions, are not applicable for pre-scribed burns, which should occur regularly. These barriers broadly remain, although a new state-level training and certification programme may increase private burning.

Welcome to the post-Gawker world

One of the reasons why things got as fucked up as they are today is that the establishment, particularly the parts of the establishment that are supposed to stand watch have become corrupted with complacency and arrogance. No where is this more true than with the New York Times.

Gawker and the publications it spawned were a gang of bomb throwers who took great pleasure in in calling out bullshit and afflicting the comfortable, whether it Silicon Valley billionaires with god complexes or venerable institutions like the NYT.

When the comfortable came for Gawker, the New York Times decided it was important that Peter Thiel had a chance to tell his side of the story. In case you've forgotten, Thiel is a reactionary so extreme that he has argued against women's suffrage.

We can't say for certain but if the respectable mainstream media had put aside the times Gawker had hurt their feelings, had instead stood in defense of journalism, things might be different today.

Here's Josh Marshall (one of the journalists who actually did stand up):

I just started reading this Buzzfeed article about Facebook board member and Trump backer Peter Thiel’s relationship with racist fringe groups. Thiel seems like an outlier in Silicon Valley because of his high profile support for Trump. But he is actually part of a rising tide of neo-authoritarian thought in the tech world which argues that democracy has failed and must be replaced. This reminded me of something I’ve been coming back to again and again with greater clarity and understanding its greater significance as the years have gone by.

...

If the case really had just been Hogan suing out of anger and embarrassment perhaps it would have ended there with impact and significance not much beyond Gawker itself. But Thiel had greater ambitions. And Donald Trump had a lifetime of secrets to hide, money and starting only a few months later unimaginable power.

So of course it didn’t end there. The lawyer Thiel found for the job was Charles Harder. It was Harder who adopted a novel legal strategy which destroyed Gawker, an end-run around much free speech jurisprudence. Before the Hogan suit, Harder’s gig had been representing wealthy celebrities in invasion of privacy suits – ones in which the defendants are seldom terribly sympathetic characters. The Hogan suit was also nominally an invasion of privacy case. But the formal similarity betrayed a critical difference in purpose. And from Gawker onward Harder shifted his business to helping the very powerful overawe and destroy news publications. And he found a new number one client: Donald Trump.

And not just Donald Trump but Melania Trump, Jared Kushner, Roger Ailes. Harder became the go-to lawyer for the Trump family and coterie around him threatening ruinous lawsuits and trying to prevent the publication of books. It was Harder who went to court nominally on behalf of Trump’s late brother Robert Trump to prevent the publication of niece Mary Trump’s recent memoir about the Trump family. Notably, the Trump campaign’s biggest legal expenditures hasn’t been to campaign or campaign finance lawyers – how campaign’s normally spend money on lawyers. It’s been to Harder’s firm – to sue publications as part of an organized strategy of disciplining critical coverage.

Has all of this had any real effect? Many of these suits and threats of suits – some against The New York Times and CNN – have been obviously frivolous. Some never progressed beyond high profile threats and press releases. But is it more than that?

I can tell you: yes. It’s made a big, big difference, a veritable sea change in First Amendment law. How do I know this? Partly just as someone who follows the journalism because but much more as the owner of a news publication and as someone who frequently talks to libel lawyers to evaluate risk.

In the libel, journalism and risk world there’s the pre-Gawker suit world and the post-Gawker suit world. Some of difference is actual changes in case law. But it’s not mostly that. It’s also the climate of uncertainty created by the outcome of the Gawker case – a major publication really was sued out of existence without even the ability to appeal the judgment or get a review on the law. The case was funded by a billionaire who wanted to retaliate for coverage he didn’t like. It is also because of novel legal strategies and the increased willingness of the extremely powerful to use the courts to get the press to heel.