As I said above, there only three elements to “get” to get this story. First, there’s the blackmail element. According to the 35-page dossier, Russia (supposedly) prepared blackmail material on Trump but isn’t using it.
But it’s clear that American intelligence services certainly are using it, or using the threat of using it, and doing so very publicly
This article and the links that are in it get to the seriousness of what is going on here. It may all unfold before the inauguration on Friday. This is going to be an interesting week.
This simulation looks at ranked-choice voting (a.k.a. instant runoff voting, hare method, alternative vote). In particular, it looks at how voters still get punished for ranking their honest favorite as first.
The video is interesting. It would take me too much time at the moment to study it closely enough to find the fly in the ointment, but I suspect there is one. In the example of the problem with rank choice voting, I think he made a couple of questionable assumptions, First, on a bell shaped curve it is not the width of a segment, but its area that counts. If you take a wide segment that includes parts of the curve with a low height, then the area will not be comparable to the width. Second is the assumption that the blue segment being squeezed out from below would all go red. In the current election I found some voters who were truly torn between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. So there may be people on the far right who would also vote for some one who is pretty far out on the bell curve to the left. In the world of infinities, sometimes the far left merges with the far right.
These are my suspicions, but I would really have to write my own computer model to test my suspicions. I have the skills to do it, but not the time or inclination right now.
I want to keep track of the link to the video because it does point out that it is complicated to figure out what voting method is “best” in all cases if there even is one that is “best” in all cases. The other reason for keeping track of it is that when I have time to write my own model, I might find out that this video is correct.
January 15, 2017
Found the Fly in the Ointment
First, the video plots people in a bell shaped curve along a political spectrum. That in itself is a fantasy with no real-life meaning. There is no tight correlation between a place in a political spectrum if you could even define what that means and how a person would vote for one of three candidates. If you could find a valid way to plot people along a political spectrum, you could not bunch together all the people who voted for one of three candidates along the whatever that measure was that you came up with to judge their place in the political spectrum.
Second, the example where a shrinking middle of blue people who are on the left side of the middle put a red candidate as their second choice, you cannot say that they failed to get their preference when the red candidate won. If they voted the red candidate as their second choice, then that has to be who they deserved to get as their second choice. If they did not understand how the voting rules worked and they voted a red candidate as their second choice when the green candidate was really their second choice, then that is the equivalent situation of the butterfly ballot in the 2000 election in Florida. By a fluke or a trick many people did not vote for the candidate they wanted. That is an issue that is entirely separate from ranked choice voting versus the current system.
You have to be suspicious when pseudo-science enters the realm of human behavior. In this case, making a choice between three candidates just does not fit on a smooth, continuous bell shaped curve. To plot it this way is to put mathematical precision on something that is not even measurable. To then have to misuse the meaningless plot to prove your point, you must really not have a valid point to make.
The New York Times can dish it out, but it seems to have its own problems taking it.
They try to dismiss the one thing that really gets their goat.
Mr. Trump likes to dismiss the “failing New York Times,” but he clearly reads it closely.
I actually think that Trump is right about The New York Times. It fails to live up to its belief that it is a newspaper of record as far as reporting the truth. Some people (not I) listen to Faux Noise despite knowing that it is faux and just noise. They do it to see what the crazies are saying lately.
The one thing that I find heartening about all the things that Trump has reportedly tweeted is the following:
My people will have a full report on hacking within 90 days!
Of all the reports that Trump may have caved in to the “intelligence” communities false story that it has proof of “Russian” “hacking” this quote seems to indicate that he will look at this issue again when the “intelligence” community it no longer under the control of the Obama administration. I have no delusion that Trump is necessarily any more honest than Obama is, but at least the new report will show how fast the “intelligence” community can reverse itself on what is true depending on who is the President.
Before critiquing what I have said, please read my words carefully. I have chosen them carefully to convey what part of the “Russian” “hacking” I dispute, and what I don’t dispute. To be clear, I dispute that the “intelligence” community has published proof. They may or may not have proof, but what they have published so far is not proof. I have no opinion on whether or not Russia has or has not done what the “intelligence” community claims.
Worth watching and wondering if we aren’t being too clever by half to think we can use politicians like Elizabeth Warren to further our goals when she has shown she does not care about us any more? Who do you think is more adept at using people, we using politicians, or politicians using us? I think playing it straight and not trying to be devious is the road to success in the long run. When you are devious, you eventually destroy your own credibility.
We can also learn from Sanders’ example about handling Trump. If we keep disparaging Trump voters, that will not help unite them with us to fight on the issues that need fighting. Where I disagree with Sanders is that the constant harping on the issues we used to disparage Trump voters may be counter-productive. I am not saying to ignore these issues. It is just that I think their must be a better way of winning the hearts and minds of people than disparaging them all the time.
Two generations ago, almost every economist knew what a catastrophe a deficiency of effective demand could create. And in a real crunch, they knew what to do about that. They realized you couldn’t push on a string, so somebody — the government — had to borrow and spend when private markets would not. From the 1980s on, though, the fundamental Keynesian point — the Principle of effective Demand —disappeared in a cloud of statistical double-talk that, when you deconstruct it, turns out to imply estimating potential output as a lagged function of whatever foolish policy is being pursued.
Of course I like this article. This is what I have been trying to tell people for more than the 10 years I have been publishing this blog. I have been waiting for someone to talk about pushing on a string so I could quote them, and not pretend that I invented the phrase.
Running across this article is a rather fortuitous bit of luck given my previous post Deficits Matter, Paul Krugman Doesn’t. Paul Krugman is one of those economists who learned his economics two generations ago like I did. Krugman’s problem and my good fortune is that he made a living being a noted economist while I had to work as an electrical engineer. He had the privilege of being on top of the economic thinking of the 1980’s to participate in making “the fundamental Keynesian point — the Principle of effective Demand — disappeared in a cloud of statistical double-talk.” Since I was too busy earning a living in my profession, I failed to realize that what I had learned about economics in college was being dismissed by the professionals. Now that I am retired and can pay more attention to economics, and it has become obvious that what I learned in college was correct, I can be ahead of the game compared to some of the professionals that sold themselves a bill of goods.
In his latest anti-knowledge drivel of January 9, 2017, Count Krugula apparently decided that he wants to make a total fool of himself in public yet again. Only this time, he wants it to be a sort of career-ending effort. As I said, in that effort, Paul Krugman has succeeded.
MarianneB brought this article to my attention. She wanted my opinion because I tend to read and understand articles like this one.
I have read varying amounts of the critique and the article to which it refers. The critic is closer to the truth than Krugman, but they both tend to gloss over subtleties.
Deficits do and don’t matter in ways too subtle for either of them to cover. The money the FED put out there is sitting in the hands of people who won’t put it into the economy right now. To make deficits work, the money has to be put in the right hands to match the circumstances. What the fed has done to get it into the wrong hands might need retraction if we start getting money into the right hands. Winningham glosses over the potential problem.
I am being too subtle too. When I use phrases such as “right now” and “match the circumstances”, you are supposed to understand that in other times other than “right now” things could (and will) be different. I can leave it to your imagination as to what could be different, but that would be a deriliction of the duty of an expert. The chances that the uninitiated would guess the differences that would change the economic prescription are not that great. Neither writer helps with that matter. This essay would be way longer than it is, if I were to go into the explanation, but at least I have warned you that there are holes in the arguments if these details are not discussed.
1. The primary purpose of the declassified report, which offers no evidence to support its assertions that Russia hacked the U.S. presidential election campaign, is to discredit Donald Trump.
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2. The second task of the report is to bolster the McCarthyist smear campaign against independent media, including Truthdig, as witting or unwitting agents of the Russian government.
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3. The third task of the report is to justify the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization beyond Germany, a violation of the promise Ronald Reagan made to the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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4. The final task of the report is to give the Democratic Party plausible cover for the catastrophic election defeat it suffered.
When the corporate media and other establishment figures set out to write a new history for us all to believe they rarely fail in the short term. In the long term, they will be writing new fake histories before most people wake up to this one. At the same time people are discovering how fake this story was, they will be swallowing, hook, line, and sinker, whatever new fantasy our fearless leaders are trying to sell us.
The age of Barack Obama may have been our last chance to break from our neoliberal soulcraft. We are rooted in market-driven brands that shun integrity and profit-driven policies that trump public goods. Our “post-integrity” and “post-truth” world is suffocated by entertaining brands and money-making activities that have little or nothing to do with truth, integrity or the long-term survival of the planet. We are witnessing the postmodern version of the full-scale gangsterization of the world.
The reign of Obama did not produce the nightmare of Donald Trump – but it did contribute to it. And those Obama cheerleaders who refused to make him accountable bear some responsibility.
I agree with that sentiment and more. Cornell West went on to say
The top 1% got nearly two-thirds of the income growth in eight years even as child poverty, especially black child poverty, remained astronomical.
I was just thinking again today how this oft quoted factoid doesn’t even tell the half of what has happened. If we look at changes in wealth, it would be far worse than the picture painted by looking at income. Lots of people tout the growth of the Dow Jones Industiral Average of stocks during Obama’s reign. Since much of the top 1%’s wealth depends on stock prices, this growth has been a tremendous boon to them. Remember that growth in the value of stocks you own but do not sell, is called unrealized capital gains. Until you sell your stocks and realize the gain from their increased price, your gain in paper wealth is not counted as income. So, the realized gain in wealth that is counted as income is but a small part of your gain in wealth. When you include the drop in residential real estate prices, there is a big component of unrealized losses for the bottom 99%.
I forgot to mention that even realized gains in tax deferred accounts such as 401ks and IRAs do not count as income until you withdraw the money. My own net-worth this year has gone up three times more than my taxable income this year, and that includes the fact that I am retired and have been spending some of my income on yearly expenses.
I have not seen any numbers published, but the shift in paper wealth from the bottom 99% to the top 1% must be truly astounding compared to the income numbers. Of course, the income numbers alone are truly horrible.
Forget for one moment everything you’ve been told about September 11, 2001. 9/11 was a crime. And as with any crime, there is one overriding imperative that detectives must follow to identify the perpetrators: follow the money. This is an investigation of the 9/11 money trail.
There is no reason to believe this preposterous story unless you have started to question our government over its false story of Russian hacking of the elections.
We have seen how they can sell us a story by claiming they have evidence that they can’t reveal. When they do finally reveal their evidence, you find upon investigation that there is nothing in what they published that remotely looks like evidence of what they are claiming. As soon as you point out the holes in that evidence, they swear that they have other evidence. Who would have expected that when releasing their evidence that they would have thought “Let’s start with the least convincing evidence we have, and slowly build up to a clincher.”?
Then you have President Obama swearing up and down that the TPP will be good for the average citizen, and that all those people pointing to the truly bad stuff just don’t know what they are talking about. Given how hard our government tried to prevent any outsiders from finding out what was in the TPP, you have to wonder what they thought they needed to hide.
So, no this story about 9/11 is just too preposterous to believe despite all the propaganda tricks they used to convince you otherwise.
There is some sarcasm in some of what I have written above. I leave it to your biased minds to figure out which is sarcasm and which is what I really believe.
Mike Papantonio, host of America’s Lawyer on RT, joins Thom Hartmann to discuss voting rights and voter suppression in the United States today, and how it contrasts to what the corporate media is trying to push.
I’d like to take this opportunity to explain my observation of why so much of this stuff comes from RT. I used to watch many of these hosts and visitors, Thom Hartman, Mike Papantonio, Lee Camp, and many others on various other outlets. All these other outlets have been squeezed out, probably by the corporate media, so that the only outlet open to these voices is RT.
I don’t watch RT because I blindly want to believe everything that comes from RT. I don’t believe that for an instant. I listen to what I hear and form a judgment as to whether or not it makes sense given what else I know. When I judge a source as making sense (most likely telling a story that is more close to the truth), then I decide to listen. Of course, I sometimes listen to sources that I know darn well are not telling the truth, just to see what false threat is the topic of the day. Comparing the two sides of a story also helps sort out what is believable and what is not. What is actually true is something we may never know.
