Category: Politics

“They don’t understand how it works.” Information Technology and the Queasy Underbelly of Democracy

Politicians low on the tech learning curve

Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, and chief architect of the Trump-assisting “defeat crooked Hillary” campaign, commenting on his testimony before the (U.S.) House Intelligence Committee, said “They’re politicians, they’re not technical. They don’t understand how it works.”

The exploits of Cambridge Analytica in suppressing votes and unleashing torrents of misinformation and flat-out falsities upon the data rivers of social media got (as usual, excellent) coverage by The Guardian in this piece dated March 21, 2018: Cambridge Analytica’s Assault on Decency For more on Nix, the Facebook data breaches, and the “crooked Hillary” campaign.

This echoes a theme emerging from previous U.S. Congressional hearings dealing with social media: politicians are way out of their depth in advanced information technology. As Nix, says, they simply do not understand how it works.

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Whose Children Are Getting Shot?

NOTE: THIS POST IS CURRENTLY INCOMPLETE (AS OF FEB. 28). I POSTED IT BEFORE FINISHING IT,  BUT I DID NOT WANT TO TAKE IT DOWN.  PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK! 🙂

Mass school shootings – much less than half the story of gun deaths of children in the U.S.

As tragic as the most recent school shooting in Parkland was, the debate over assault weapons, bump stocks, and high capacity magazines is missing the much broader problem of gun deaths in the U.S.

Of course every possible effort should be made to stop mass school shootings. But the fact is that mass school shootings, on average, account for only 0.9% of child deaths by firearms in the U.S.

Here’s how it plays out in the U.S., for children 1-17 years old, by the numbers:
 –  child deaths by firearms, annually (2012-2014) : 1,297*
–  child deaths by suicide, annually: (2012-2014):  492
– child deaths by homicide, annually: (2012 – 2014) : 687
– child deaths by accident, annually: (2012 – 2014): 77
– child deaths by law enforcement, or undetermined,           annually:  2012-2014):  41
–  child deaths by mass school shootings, annually (2012-2017):  12**

Therefore, to figure out how and why all these kids are getting gunned down, we have to look elsewhere than mass school shootings.

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What’s Missing in the Gun Debate – What Works and What Doesn’t

Bad assumptions: myths and mistaken intuition

Some of what you may believe about gun violence is probably wrong. I refer first to an op-ed that appeared in the October 6, 2017, Washington Post, entitled “Five myths about gun violence.”  Five Myths about Gun Violence

In case you are kept out of the Post by a paywall, the Five Myths are:
(1) Gun violence in the U.S. is at an all-time high. (The peak was almost twice as high in 1993.)
(2) Background checks save lives. (What seems intuitively obvious fails, partially as a result of an inconsistent system. Requirements for licensing of purchasers might turn this around, but these are lacking or seldom enforced.) 
(3) Mental illness is behind most gun violence (Research indicates that only about 4% of violence against others [presumably gun violence as a subset] is caused by symptoms of serious mental illnesses.)
(4) Right-to-carry laws decrease crime. (As of October 2017, no armed civilians had halted a mass shooting. “Unarmed civilians are more than 20 times as likely to end a mass shooting than are armed civilians.”)
(5) Mass shootings are random.

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Yes, There is a There There: Now, What to Do?

Trump Inaction on Russia: the Clincher

For a long time, some of us were willing to give Donald Trump the slim benefit of a doubt as to why he is actively trying to smother the three investigations (DOJ, House, and Senate) into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.  The benefit was to accept that Trump couldn’t acknowledge the charge against Russia because it would have cheapened his electoral victory.

As disgraceful as the vanity explanation was, at least it tended to let Trump off the hook for being played for a fool by Vladimir Putin, or, more seriously, being compromised by involvements with Russian oligarchs and business interests and/or the Kremlin itself.

Now that he has, grudgingly, admitted that Russia did meddle in the elections, he has taken to excoriating Obama for not doing more to stop it. That has been the pathetic extent of his leverage against Moscow.

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Is It still a Man’s World? Exhibits B-G: Recognition of Women’s Excellence

More women prominently in the news in politics, STEM, and business

News Item: Kim Jong Un’s sister Kim Yo Jong represented North Korean leadership at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. It was she who communicated to the South Korean government an invitation to highest-level talks in North Korean capital Pyongyang.

News Item: the School Community Council of Salt Lake City decided to rename Andrew Jackson Elementary School to Mary Jackson Elementary School. (A poll had shown the public heavily in favor of the change.) Note this took place in the heart of Mormon country.

  • President Andrew Jackson was infamous for his racism (e.g., chasing escaped black slaves into Spanish Florida) and genocidal persecution of Native Americans.
  • Mary Jackson is famous for  becoming NASA’s first female black engineer, whose career included 34 years at NASA, and authoring or co-authoring 12 technical papers for NASA. Her character is one of the stars of the book(s) and movie Hidden Figures, which celebrate the key role black women played  in the space race.

News Item: in Virginia state elections in 2017, women won 11 of the 14 seats picked up by Democrats.

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Is It Still a Man’s World? Exhibit A: John Kelly

John Kelly’s working assumption on Rob Porter: what’s the problem?

Months ago, Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly guaranteed that he would eventually bring down upon himself the ire of feminists and pro-feminists, when he allowed wife-beater Rob Porter to continue working in the White House. He did this despite having been warned by the FBI that allegations of domestic abuse made Porter a target for blackmail, and therefore he should not be given a permanent security clearance.

If Kelly thought that he could keep the allegations against Porter permanently under wraps, then he is even more politically naive than he has already shown himself to be on several occasions.

However, I hesitate to attribute even to Kelly that level of political clumsiness. Rather—as we now know from Kelly’s fulsome praise of Porter even after Porter’s terrorizing two former wives had been made public—Kelly had taken the news from the FBI  with an attitude that boiled down to “so what?”   It seems very likely that Kelly did not consider Porter’s spousal abuse a disqualification for a position in the White House—after all, Donald Trump himself had bragged about assaulting women, and then gotten elected President of the United States.   And maybe, just maybe, the women were lying.

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Another Tick in the Doomsday Clock – Tactical Nuclear Weapons

Modernization means escalation

It’s hard to say what is the most disturbing thing president Trump said in his State of the Union address, but there’s one that was not just disturbing, but frightening—the idea of “modernizing” our nuclear arsenal.

“Modernization” means, for starters, modifying our strategic force (i.e. big bombs, 100 kilotons of TNT equivalent yield on up) to make it more flexible and deadly.  Sounds bad, right?  Exactly what Donald Trump wants–as always, he wants to be the biggest and baddest dude on the planet. Whatever the cost.  The cost in dollars, of course, will ultimately be measured in hundreds of billions.  The increased risk of strategic nuclear exchanges will be immeasurable.

For a look at what modernization portends, read the executive summary of the latest Nuclear Posture Review to be found here.

On the strategic side, the upgrading will be a bolstering of our forces of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) with Russia.* 

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Cyclists More Law-Abiding then Drivers? Maybe.

Strictly law-abiding cyclists?  Not a majority!

As a generally law-abiding cyclist, I am reluctant to criticize a study that gives cyclists high marks for law-abidingness, but responsibility requires that I call out distortions, such as. . .

As reported in Outside magazine, a study by the Florida Department of Transportation tried to assess whether cyclists are more law-abiding than drivers, and concluded in the affirmative.

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National Insecurity

My thing is bigger than your thing.

The bigger, more powerful button.  The Wall. The exclusion of immigrants. Increased defense spending.  All of a piece in the vision of “America First.”

Donald Trump’s latest descent into juvenile posturing, the warning to Kim Jong-un of how he, the world’s mightiest leader, has a larger, more powerful nuclear button than “Rocket Man,” is the latest manifestation of not just Trump’s insecurity, but the insecurity of many who elected him. That’s those who see foreigners as jackals circling us,  tearing off—or ready to tear off at the first opportunity—the choicest pieces of America, feasting on our nation’s wealth and power in a torment by a thousand bites.

This may remind you of Richard Nixon’s characterizing the U.S. as a “pitiful, helpless giant,” as a justification for launching new military spending programs, which were later expanded under Reagan.

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Will Work for Crumbs: Why Republicans May Hold the House

Pocketbooks will fatten just enough to get scammers on the congressional Right re-elected

It couldn’t be more transparent, that the middle class has been bought off with token tax relief in the Republican tax bill, while billionaires and corporations continue to top up their coffers with still bigger tax breaks.

But the transparency doesn’t mean much, since the cynical middle class has had to resign itself to getting Something rather than Nothing for the last few decades.  They’re inured to it. Now a few crumbs tossed to ordinary folks will suffice to keep Republican politicians in the House afloat for at least another year.  That’s because elections usually turn on pocketbook issues, and if by November the average taxpayer has received $1,500 worth of reductions  in withholding, then s/he will settle for the status quo. (Even a status quo with Trump at the helm, as long as he does not actually start a major war.) Put that together with gerrymandering, and seeing that the House Republicans would have to lose 46 seats to lose majority, I imagine they will hold it.  Especially because there are bound to be more rounds of attempting to repeal the ACA—even though McConnell is now loathe to touch it in the Senate—which will rally the conservative base.

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