Is the worry about democracy justified? part 2

 (Dec 10: corrected some typos and errors of omission).

See part 1 here.
This here is a case study application of the ideas in Daniel J. Levitin's  A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age.

To recap, the World Values Survey had this question:

I'm going to describe various types of political systems and ask what you think about each as a way of governing this country. For each one, would you say it is a very good, fairly good, fairly bad or very bad way of governing this country?

1. Having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections.

2. Having experts, not government, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country.

3. Having the army rule

4. Having a democratic political system

The original Financial Times graphic shown below misrepresents the information in the survey in two ways:

1. Incompleteness: From FT, you might get the impression that support for a strong undemocratic leader necessarily goes with decreasing support for democracy.  But FT shows only the response to the first part of the four-part question, in which the respondent is not asked to choose or rank the four different systems of government, but rather to rate each one independently.

I show the responses to two parts of the question, and we shall see that it is very common for both the support for a strong undemocratic leader to rise even along with support for a democratic political system.

2. Visual distortion: The lower and upper limits on the y axis help make the trends look strong. 


The original Financial Times graphic:


What the actual data for India looks like - one form of completeness: for India there are four surveys available, from specific years, 1995, 2001, 2006 and 2012 (not 2014), and we show the results for democracy and strong leaders here.  I've labelled the chart "Strong leader *vs* Democracy" but the data in the chart indicates trends for a strong leader *and* democracy.
























What the data for the two questions for the countries in the FT chart look like (another form of completeness); but as you look at the charts, note that:

• All the countries in the chart show an increase in those who think it is good to have a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections. 
• All the countries in the chart except the US and China show an increase in those who think a democratic political system is good.
• In every country the support for a democratic political system is higher than the support for a strong undemocratic leader, though Russia is close. 
• In every country but Russia, the support for a democratic political system is at least 20% higher than support for a strong undemocratic leader.  
• The most dramatic rise in support for a democratic political system in this set of countries is in Russia (25%).  Note that in countries that started with a high support for democracy, such an increase is not possible, it would exceed the bound of 100%.
• Russia and China show the largest rise in support for a strong leader (25+%)
• Only in Russia, India and Turkey the support for a strong undemocratic leader is at a majority or close to it (though for India, see part 1 for how the strong-leader question has been rendered in Hindi that might explain some of it).

The data tables:

Strong leader
Year	Russia	India	Turkey	Spain	US	China	Germany
Y-1990s	42.6	44.2	35.8	25.3	23.7	13.2	13.4
Y-2014	67	56.4	49.8	39.5	34.1	30.7	20.7

Democracy
Year	Russia	India	Turkey	Spain	US	China	Germany
Y-1990s	44.9	71	81	89.1	85.1	73.3	93.6
Y-2014	67.3	79.7	83.2	91.2	79.7	70.5	94.1

Is the worry about democracy justified?

People are going around with their heads on fire, that the popular support for democracy is diminishing around the world, or that people are more in favor of strong, non-democratic leaders than ever before.

Where the data is available, it is worth looking at the survey in full.  The latest "sky-is-falling" is in the Financial Times, based on the World Value Survey. 

The World Value Survey  has data published in six waves.  The question of interest to us is:

I'm going to describe various types of political systems and ask what you think about each as a way of governing this country. For each one, would you say it is a very good, fairly good, fairly bad or very bad way of governing this country?

Having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections.

Having experts, not government, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country.

Having the army rule

Having a democratic political system

I've put together the data for the two countries I care about for only two parts of the multi-part question.  The first two waves don't have both countries represented, and don't seem to have the equivalent question, so the cells are blank. The numbers are percentages. The DNK+NA column is the sum of "Do Not Know",  "No Answer" and the sometimes tiny non-zero percentage of "Did not ask".    I was careful in transcribing the numbers, but if you spot any errors in transcription, do let me know.

Having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections
	India					USA
Wave	Very good	Fairly good	Bad	Very bad	DNK+NA	Very good	Fairly good	Bad	Very bad	DNK+NA
1981-1984
1990-1994
1995-1998	17.2	27.0	13.8	6.9	35.1	3.1	20.6	23.9	47.3	5.2
1999-2004	25.5	17.3	19.3	10.3	27.5	8.4	20.7	37.4	31.9	1.7
2005-2009	18.3	27.3	17.5	8.3	28.6	6.6	25.0	30.7	33.9	3.9
2010-2014	35.3	21.1	13.1	17.4	13.0	6.1	28.0	26.2	37.2	2.5

 

Having a democratic political system
	India					USA
Wave	Very good	Fairly good	Bad	Very bad	DNK+NA	Very good	Fairly good	Bad	Very bad	DNK+NA
1981-1984
1990-1994
1995-1998	38.1	32.9	4.9	1.4	22.7	50.9	34.2	6.4	2.6	6.0
1999-2004	37.8	30.2	3.5	1.5	26.9	50.5	35.3	6.4	4.1	3.7
2005-2009	39.7	30.3	4.5	1.8	23.7	43.2	38.7	10.2	3.5	4.4
2010-2014	53.6	26.1	6.0	2.8	11.5	37.8	41.9	12.2	4.9	3.2

Adding the "Very good" and "Fairly good" columns, the trends for India, past to present, of liking a strong non-democratic leader is 44.2, 42.8, 45.6, 56.4; and of liking a democracy is 71.0, 68.0, 70.0, 79.7.   It would seem that in India both ideas, that of strong undemocratic leader and of a democratic system are more popular than in the past.

For the USA, the strong non-democratic leader trend is 23.7, 29.1, 31.6, 34.1.  The democracy trend is 85.1, 85.8, 81.9, 79.7.

I don't know that one can read a lot into the numbers.  Perhaps we have to wait for the results of the seventh wave.  I note that:

• In the US the trends for democracy and strongmen are in opposite directions; in India they are in the same direction.  
• In the India, the pro-strong-man opinion has crossed 50%.
• Both countries nevertheless are overwhelming in favor of having a democratic political system. 

If you think about it, the interpretation of the questions asked is not as plain as you might think.  In a parliamentary system, a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections might simply mean, to some responders, a leader with a strong single-party parliamentary majority, who does not have to cobble together coalitions, and whose government is not constantly extorted by  constituents of the coalition who threaten to pull out and bring down the government.

In the USA, the President is elected to a four year term and does not have to bother with Parliament, and some respondents might simply be saying they prefer the Presidential system to the Parliamentary scheme.

PS: the WVS survey form in Hindi

The highlighted sentence corresponds to "Having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections."

The Hindi word used for "bother" is "chintaa" (चिंता) But "chintaa" is "worry" or "anxiety" (concern, fear, disquiet), not "bother".  "Chintaa" is the feeling you might have, e.g., when your two school-age children are travelling long distance by themselves for the first time; or when you are short of money to pay your monthly bills.  The "does not have to bother with elections" is not "does not have to be anxious about elections" but rather more like "can dispense with elections".

PPS: part 2.

The best thing I read this morning

Ashay Naik's "Language and Discourse: Why the issue is not merely about Sanskrit or English"

Quote:

Consider, for example, a simple, popular story from the Pañcatantra of a heron who deceived the fishes in a lake and killed them. In the original text, the story typically begins as follows:

अस्ति नानाजलचरसनाथसरोवरः। तत्र एकः बकः कृताश्रयो निवसति।
asti nānā–jalacara–sanātha–sarovaraḥ. tatra ekaḥ bakaḥ kṛtāśrayo nivasati.

There was a lake filled with different kind of acquatic creatures. A heron dwelled there, having taken refuge [at the lake].

This is not merely the setting for a story. There is latent in this simple introduction a whole discourse about human life. The word sanātha ‘filled’ used for the lake suggests that it was like a nātha ‘master’ and the fishes were living within it like a servant takes refuge with the master. The heron, also, we are told, was kṛtāśrayaḥ ‘one who has taken refuge’ with the lake.

In other words, the story is projecting an ecosystem with the lake at its center. It is inhabited by the fishes who are the prey and the heron who is their predator. The fact that they are part of the ecosystem and as such servants of a common master, legitimizes the normal predation of the heron. This is what makes his subsequent deceit so poignant. As members of an ecosystem, he was permitted to catch the fishes, if he could, as the fishes were permitted to escape from him, if they could. But what he was not permitted to do, what manifested his evil was the fact that when he grew old and was unable to catch the fish, he resorted to deceit in order to kill them. You can see just how expressive this simple introduction turns out to be. It also teaches us that our existence on earth is of a similar nature. The earth is our nātha and we are kṛtāśrayaḥ here. Such a profound philosophy is encapsulated in these simple words.

Today many people are making a strong effort to save Sanskrit, to spread Sanskrit, to get as many Indians speaking Sanskrit as possible. But the kind of Sanskrit we find in the Pañcatantra is not the language that is being propagated. If a contemporary Indian who has learnt Sanskrit was asked to write the aforementioned story, he would probably say:

एकस्मिन् सरोवरे अनेकानि मत्स्यानि सन्ति। तत्र एको बकोऽपि निवसति।
ekasmin sarovare anekāni matsyāni santi. tatra eko bako’pi nivasati.
In a lake, there lived many fishes. A heron also lived there.

You see the difference? We may preserve Sanskrit but we have lost its discourse. The discourse in the foregoing words speaks of the fishes and the heron as autonomous beings. The lake is a separate entity, merely a place where they have taken up residence. The sense that they form together an ecosystem is gone. The language is Sanskrit but the discourse is English. The language is ancient but the discourse is liberal-humanist. Therefore, we must persistently pay attention to the fact that it is not just the the language we are trying to save but also the discourse. It is preferable to express the Sanskrit discourse in an English language than to spread the Sanskrit language but use it to express an English discourse.

US Civilian Control of the Military

Retired Army Col. W.P. Lang and his circle who run the turcopolier blog are quite in favor of Trump.  Nevertheless they have concerns, I quote just one:

Mattis lost his job as CENTCOM commander for crowding the Iranians by sending US warships inshore where they were evidently expected to provoke a fight. This was contrary to Obama's policy and Mattis was warned about this behavior before he was replaced. Mattis should be cautioned against exceeding his authorities before being made SECDEF.

General James Mattis was fired by Obama in 2013, the conventional reports don't mention what these military insiders apparently know about that firing.  These reports do agree that the firing was rather unceremonious.

General Mattis is of course Trump's nominee to be Secretary of Defense.

Then there is a matter of a law dating from 1947:

U.S. Code › Title 10 › Subtitle A › Part I › Chapter 2 › § 113
(a) There is a Secretary of Defense, who is the head of the Department of Defense, appointed from civilian life by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. A person may not be appointed as Secretary of Defense within seven years after relief from active duty as a commissioned officer of a regular component of an armed force.

OK, so Congress can give General Mattis a waiver, since he has only three years since active duty, not seven.  The purpose of the law, however,  is to firmly keep the military under civilian control, and if the turcopolier blog writers are correct, General Mattis actually took actions contrary to the President policy.  That is, as a general, he did not show proper respect for civilian authority, and was fired for it (taking turcopolier as true).

Should the law be waived for such a person?

Josh Marshall, at talkingpointsmemo.com,  is not comforting:

This Is Not Normal

We now have three of the four top national and domestic security agencies of the government under the management of recently retired generals. (One might reasonably change the number to five if considered the DOJ which houses the FBI.) We could have a fourth if President-elect Trump chooses David Petraeus as Secretary of State. They are Mattis at the Pentagon; Kelly at DHS; Flynn as the President's National Security Advisor. There is nothing inherently wrong with having retired generals serve in high level administration positions. We've had a number of accomplished retired general presidents—Washington, Jackson, Grant, Eisenhower. Barely more than a decade ago, Colin Powell served as Secretary of State. Brent Scowcroft served as National Security Advisor. Petraeus served as CIA Director under President Obama. But the issue is one of concentration and recency.

All of these men have only recently retired from service. There's a reason why with the Defense Department a retired general is not permitted to serve as Secretary for seven years post-retirement. Mattis is getting a waiver. Concentration is the key issue. I cannot think of any time in history when an administration has been so dominated by retired generals.

This is the time when many precedents are likely to be broken.  Which ones ought to remain unbroken is critically important.

Szilard: The Mark Gable Foundation

A comment from CIP on Peter Woit's blog discussing the "Breakthrough" prizes (which are million dollar awards to big-name scientists, sometimes for ideas that did not work out, scientifically speaking, though they led to huge payouts) led me to this, by John G. Cramer:

Last October I added a Google Analytics link to my online archive of these AV columns. Among other things, this allows me to conduct a "popularity contest" of my old columns. Rather to my surprise, the clear winner as the most popular of my 177 Alternate View columns so far is AV-04, "The Retarding of Science", published in the mid-December 1984 issue of Analog. That column was my only tongue-in-cheek foray into humor in writing these columns, but the surprising interest this 30 year old column seems to have gathered encourages me to do it again.

The December-1984 column was inspired by a Leo Szilard short story, "The Mark Gable Foundation", which described the creation of an endowed non-profit foundation for the specific purpose of slowing the pace of scientific progress. In the story, a physicist emerged from cold-sleep 200 years in the future to find that most of his scientific training was obsolete and that science was progressing "altogether too fast as it is". He enlisted the help of the world's wealthiest man to create a non-profit organization, The Mark Gable Foundation, dedicated to retarding scientific progress.

The Mark Gable Foundation achieved this objective by creating, for each major field of scientific investigation, a panel of distinguished scientists which would meet monthly to award prizes and grants for the best recent scientific work. (The Foundation, as Szilard pointed out, bears some resemblance to the U.S. National Science Foundation.) This plan, it was explained, would keep the best of the older scientists away from their laboratories and busy with unproductive travel, meetings, and report writing and would cause the younger scientists in need of funds to go for the "sure thing" that would be certain to lead to publishable results, thereby filling the scientific journals with trivial results and channeling research in the direction of the safe, the fashionable, and the obvious, and away from the more risky innovations and breakthroughs at the frontiers of knowledge.

The AV-04 article written in 1984, announced a new organization:

The time has come for a new initiative. I would like to announce the creation of a new scientific organization, the American Association for the Retardation of Science and Engineering (acronym: AARSE), dedicated to the retardation of scientific progress wherever it may occur, in whatever field, in whatever place. AARSE is created for the specific purpose of encouraging the retardation of scientific progress and of giving appropriate recognition to those who have done the most in the recent times to further this goal. 

 One of the first awardees:

Finally, we wish to honor those who have been able to substantially retard scientific progress by fuzzing out the distinction between science and non-science. There have been several notable efforts in this area. For example, there has been a particularly effective campaign to associate the word "research" with the act of looking up some bit of information in a book where it happens to be written down. Thus: "I will have to get back to you after I research that in the World Almanac." Equally important is the effort to apply, without regard to training or education, the term "engineer" to anyone who gets his hands dirty in his work. Thus the janitor becomes a "Building Maintenance Engineer" and the garbage man a "Solid Waste Engineer". But perhaps the most significant effort in this area goes to those who have been attacking the meaning of the word "science" itself by labeling certain fundamentalist Christian beliefs with the appellation "Creation Science". This brilliant application of the technique at a stroke confounds the distinction between science and religious dogma and brings scientific research into direct conflict with religion in a way which has been sadly absent since the times of Galileo and Darwin. For this outstanding achievement in the retardation of science we are pleased to present Gold-Plated AARSE Awards to the Institute for Creation Research of El Cajon, California, to the State Legislatures of Arkansas and Louisiana, and to clergymen, laymen, and laywomen everywhere who have contributed to this massive and effective effort. 

Media mess - 2

A story on recode.net:

“Please! Failing? CNN is completing its Hall of Fame year,” John Martin, the CEO of Turner, which owns CNN, said at An Evening with Code Media event in New York Wednesday.

.........

Trump has also been good for business. CNN will book $1 billion in profit this year, and profits could go even higher next year since the network will get higher carriage fees from distributors. It will also see lower expenses from not having to cover a presidential election.

And despite advertising likely being down, a Trump administration could spur audiences to keep tuned to CNN.

“Tough to predict what the ratings will be,” Martin said, “although with the Trump administration, there will be a general fascination that wouldn’t be the same as under a Clinton administration. ... Trump will be a little bit better from a business standpoint.”

 This via Alex Ross at The New Yorker who wrote:

Traditional media outlets exhibited the same value-free mentality, pumping out Trump stories and airing his rallies because they got hits and high ratings. At some point over the summer, it struck me that the greater part of the media wanted Trump to be elected, consciously or unconsciously. He would be more “interesting” than Hillary Clinton; he would “pop.” That suspicion was confirmed the other day when a CNN executive, boasting of his network’s billion-dollar profit in 2016, spoke of “a general fascination that wouldn’t be the same as under a Clinton Administration.” Of the clouds and shadows that hung over Clinton in the press, the darkest, perhaps, was the prospect of boredom.

Martin's interview can be viewed here.

First "Media mess" post here.

PS:

Miami's Aquatic Future

Bloomberg News has an item (video)  "Miami's Luxury Real Estate Battles the Rising Tide".


Investors continue to pour money into Miami Beach and Miami luxury real estate.  The recognition of the occurrence of increased flooding is with raised roads, with new construction in Miami moving a little back from the ocean, with elevated construction, no underground garages, etc.

But the story suggests that people have faith that somebody will step up "to do something".  I guess they expect some King Canute who can turn back the tides.

In the meantime, the climate change deniers are pushing the theory that the land in Miami is subsiding rather than the sea level is rising.

Republican Opposition Research on Bernie Sanders

Kurt Eichenwald writes at Newsweek about the opposition research the Republicans had in case Sanders became the Democratic nominee for POTUS:

I have seen the opposition book assembled by Republicans for Sanders, and it was brutal.

Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders, straight out of the Republican playbook: He thinks rape is A-OK. In 1972, when he was 31, Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men. Yes, there is an explanation for it—a long, complicated one, just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton emails story was nonsense. And we all know how well that worked out.

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”

The Republicans had at least four other damning Sanders videos (I don’t know what they showed), and the opposition research folder was almost 2-feet thick. (The section calling him a communist with connections to Castro alone would have cost him Florida.)

 Some substantiation of this would be useful.

Our parsimonious ancestry

From a previous post:

Paternal haplogroups are families of Y chromosomes that all trace back to a single mutation at a specific place and time.

Similarly, mitochondrial haplogroups trace back to a single mutation at a specific place and time.

Wiki lists 20 major Y-haplogroups. There seem to be a similar number of major mitochondrial haplogroups (e.g., see here.) Since the origin of the haplogroup ultimately traces to one individual, we are all, 7+ billion, ultimately descended from about 20 men and 20 women.

Oh, we are descended from a lot more than the 20 men and women I previously mentioned. For example, all non-Africans have a 1-2% Neanderthal admixture; but there are no Neanderthal paternal or mitochondrial haplogroups among today's humans as far as I know. What we mean is that only about 20 men (and 20 women) who lived long ago have unbroken patrilineal (and matrilineal) lines of descent.

Protecting Trump's Burgeoning Empire

Trump's business interests in Georgia, Argentina, Scotland, India have received boosts after he became POTUS-elect, e.g., in Georgia and Argentina, stalled construction projects have resumed.

Let's say that all that is "normalized".   What happens when someone wanting to hit the US of A targets a Trump property abroad in whose management the POTUS is actively involved? (i.e., they believe that it makes more of a statement to hit a POTUS property than a generic KFC or McDonald's.)  Does the POTUS get to deploy US marines to protect his property?

Media mess

CNN had paid contributors, Donna Brazile for Clinton and Corey Landowski for Trump, who were simultaneously advisers to their respective campaigns.

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough was reportedly advising Trump.

Megyn Kelly's allegations:

In a sit down on Sunday with Fox News colleague Howard Kurtz, Kelly was asked about a passage in her book which claims that media and political journalists tipped Trump off ahead of time about upcoming tough questions in a interview. She indicated more than one network practiced this. Kelly suggests the journalists were trying to preserve their fair and impartial reputation, but, in reality, the interviews were just “acting,” as she characterized it.

CBS CEO Les Moonves (February 29, 2016):

Les Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, celebrated Donald Trump’s candidacy for the second time on Monday, calling it “good for us economically.” Moonves, speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference at the Park Hotel in San Francisco, described the “circus” of a presidential campaign and the flow of political advertising dollars, and stated that it “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS, that’s all I got to say.”

“So what can I say? The money’s rolling in, this is fun,” Moonves continued, observing that the debates had attracted record audiences.

The CBS media executive also riffed briefly about the type of campaign advertising spending produced by such a negative presidential campaign. “They’re not even talking about issues. They’re throwing bombs at each other and I think the advertising reflects that.” Moonves added, “I’ve never seen anything like this and this is going to be a very good year for us. … It’s a terrible thing to say, but bring it on, Donald, go ahead, keep going.”

 Having seen the results of all this, why would I ever go back to the TV and cable channels for news?

PS: Columbia Journalism Review's postmortem includes this striking recollection (my emphasis):

25 August 2015: Univision anchor and journalist Jorge Ramos is ejected from a Trump press conference in Iowa. Other media organizations are later banned from covering Trump events

Jorge Ramos, anchor, Univision and Fusion: In that press conference only two journalists defended me: Tom Llamas from ABC and Kasie Hunt from MSNBC. All the other journalists didn’t say anything. I think that the way we covered Trump at the beginning of his campaign was seriously flawed. The New York Times, the LA Times, Politico and the Washington Post [in September] called Donald Trump a liar. [But] it took 13 months for them to do that. At the beginning, it was seriously inappropriate.

Post-election-day changes

November 8, 2016 is a date that will live in infamy.

My actions since, to cope with it:

• Terminated my 18-year-old New York Times subscription.  Peter Woit's criticism was spot on.
• Subscribed to The Atlantic.
• Subscribed to The New Yorker.
• Revived my subscription to talkingpointsmemo.com
• Zero TV news - cable or network - only weather channel weather news.  I do not intend to return, ever.
• No more sign-in to Facebook until they convincingly fix their fake news problem.
• No more sign-in or posting to the Bharat Rakshak Forum (for its 100-to-14 support of Trump in a straw poll).
• No radio news except for traffic and weather (I will eventually resume listening to WNYC and WHYY public radio, and Bloomberg Radio.   Let the scar tissue form first).

The business of America is Trump's business

As the HuffPo reports:

President-elect Donald Trump told The New York Times Tuesday that laws around conflicts of interest don’t apply to him, and he can simply keep running his businesses from the White House.


“In theory I could run my business perfectly and then run the country perfectly,” Trump said, according to tweets from New York Times reporters interviewing the president-elect Tuesday. “There’s never been a case like this.”

He is technically correct on both counts.

 The Atlantic has a bit of history about how that came about:

What did Trump Voters vote for?

Trumpists clearly voted for Donald J. Trump, the man, not for his policy positions.   Or they selectively paid attention only to that which they wanted to hear.


President-Elect Donald Trump took 141 distinct stances on 23 major issues during his bid for the White House. 

After more than a year and a half of stadium rallies, around-the-clock interviews, sweeping primary wins, and one stunning general election victory, the Republican president-elect has the most contradictory and confusing platform in recent history. This is a catalog of his views over a 511-day span, from June 16th 2015 to November 8th 2016. 

As to Donald Trump, the man, the reports from the off-the-record meeting with the chiefs of the news organizations are:

The overall impression of the meeting from the attendees I spoke with was that Trump showed no signs of having been sobered or changed by his elevation to the country’s highest office. Rather, said one, “He is the same kind of blustering, bluffing, blowhard as he was during the campaign.”

Secretary of State - John Bolton?

The people who hang out at Retd. US Army Colonel W. Patrick Lang's blog Turcopolier greatly dislike Obama, utterly hate Hillary Clinton, but over the years, a lot of vitriol has been reserved for John Bolton.

There is also a danger that the neocon faction among Trump's advisers will succeed in achieving power in his cabinet.  The appointment of John Bolton to State, would be ,IMO, an unmitigated disaster.(W.P.Lang)

This is because apparently Bolton hasn't seen a foreign entanglement he didn't like.  Bolton is most certainly of the school "bomb Iran, don't negotiate with it".

Well, the rumor is that Bolton is the top candidate for Trump's Secretary of State.   Some people hope that since the Democrats in 2005 filibustered his nomination as Ambassador to the UN and Bush had push him through in a recess appointment, he won't get the nod.

But in November 2013, the Senate agreed that no executive appointments or judicial nominees other than those for the Supreme Court can be filibustered; and those rules are still in place.  So the Democrats won't be able to rescue us from a Bolton nomination, it will be up to the Republicans to produce some No! votes.

I think it is only just that Trump supporters be subjected to the same nervousness that the rest of us will be subjected to for the next four years, as Trump brings the dregs of American politics all the way to the top.

Bond sell-off

Just the facts from here:

[Bond] Sellers remained in control on Thursday, and the market was able to take a breather on Friday as it was closed in observance of Veterans Day.
However, sellers are back in charge on Monday. Heavy selling across the complex has yields higher by at least 8 basis points. Here's a look at the scoreboard as of 7:15 a.m. ET:

• 2-year +7.3 bps at 98.8 bps
• 3-year +10.4 bps at 1.27%
• 5-year +11.2 bps at 1.67%
• 7-year +11.5 bps at 2.03%
• 10-year +10.2 bps at 2.25%
• 30-year +9 bps at 3.02%

Several notable developments have taken place amid Monday's destruction. The 2-year yield crossed the 1.00% threshold for the first time since January, and the 10-year is also at levels last seen since the beginning of the year. Additionally, the 30-year yield is above 3.00% and at its highest level since early December. All of this comes as the Fed readies for its first rate hike since December 2015. Fed fund futures data compiled by Bloomberg shows an 84% probability of a 25 bp rate hike at the upcoming meeting.

There is a narrative around all this, which I'm omitting, but the meaning of this market signal is that the market expects inflation.

Climate Change: Modi v Trump

PM Modi delivered the Indian ratification of the Paris Climate Agreement on October 2, Mahatma Gandhi's birthdate. 

The message of Gandhi Ji inspires all of us. India will always work with the world to overcome climate change & create a green planet. https://t.co/IgGDJwPG4m

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) October 2, 2016

Trump doesn't accept the scientific evidence that climate change is real, and wants to dismantle the Paris Agreement.

GOP vs Modi

This is Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's statement:

Why do we need the state? There are five main components:

.. The first is public goods such as defence, police and judiciary.

.. The second is externalities which hurt others, such as pollution. For this, we need a regulatory system.

.. The third is market power, where monopolies need controls.

.. The fourth is information gaps, where you need someone to ensure that medicines are genuine and so on.

.. Last, we need a well-designed welfare and subsidy mechanism to ensure that the bottom of society is protected from deprivation. This especially includes education and health care.


These are five places where we need government.

We do not know where Trump stands, because he has made statements on both sides of most issues; and he has no record of public office.

We do know where the Republicans stand:

1. On defence, police, judiciary - yes, they mostly agree.  However, note that they are in favor of privatizing prisons, even though the American experience so far has been that private prisons are very abusive.  After Trump's victory that has put Republicans in control, the stock price of private prison companies rose more than 40%.  (Defence companies rose by 6% or so.)

2.  On the regulatory system to control externalities that hurt others, the Republicans are utterly opposed, whether it is with the environment or with the financial system.

3. On market power, the Republicans have no desire to control monopolies.  Their hero, Reagan, dismantled much of the New Deal anti-trust controls.

4. On information gaps, this is a mixed bag; but I would rate the Republicans as mostly against the government doing anything to fix information gaps.

5. On the safety net, we know that the Republicans are against any such.

I repeat, on many of these, we don't know where Trump stands; he has made contradictory statements during the campaign, and he has no record of public office.

In any case, policy-wise, PM Narendra Modi is very explicit and clear; the situation with Trump is ambiguous, and there is utterly no basis for comparison of the two men.  It is not apples vs oranges; it is apples vs. BS.

What 325 million Americans did in the 2016 elections

Max Tegmark (@tegmark) made this great graphic:

And an Old Liberal talks about what is going to hit those 325 million Americans.

Some very good articles

The New Yorker: George Packer: Hillary Clinton and the Populist Revolt

The Atlantic: Matt Stoller: How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul

As a side-note, I find it interesting how a history of ideas helps to show us their limits, and at least temporarily, to liberate us.

Pakistani social media birthers Trump

This "news-item" says as per information collected on social media, and contributed to by many, Donald Trump was born Daud Ibrahim Khan in Waziristan and received his initial education in a madrassa there. Daud's father died in an accident, and Captain Stockdale of the British Indian Army on retiring, took him to London.  In 1955 the Trump family adopted him, and brought him to New York. 

PS: (Nov 14) UK's Daily Mail caught up with the story.

Season Finale

There was a (turns-out-not-to-be-funny) joke circulating, of the form "Omg I'm so excited for the season finale of America".

Well Season Finale has arrived.  So what will the next season of this reality show bring?

Having been wrong about so many things, what's a few more among friends?   Here are my prognostications:

1. The world will have to solve the crisis of global warming and climate change without much help and perhaps some hindrance from the US federal government.  I don't know what happens to the Paris Accord if Trump walks the US out of it, as he has said he would do; but the rest of the world should, in my opinion, try to stick with the program.

2. The financial markets will be very volatile until Trump's intentions (and ability to act on them) become clear.  For example, Trump has stated positions against the Dodd-Frank financial industry regulations, but also in favor of the older Glass-Steagal regulations.  What does he mean to do and what will he be able to get through Congress?

3. If the financial markets don't stabilize, then perhaps there will be a US recession.  There will be little to pull the US out of recession and the people who voted Trump in are likely for a bitter disappointment.  Their economic prospects will likely not improve. (I'd be really glad to be disappointed about this.)

4. Obamacare will be repealed, the chokehold the medical/pharma industry has on the US economy will tighten, healthcare will become much more expensive, and less available (again, a blow for the people who voted for Trump, and a prediction I really hope I'm wrong about.)

5. Europe which ought to band together more tightly for its own protection because of the uncertainty of the American umbrella will likely not be able to do so.  They are all in the grip of Trumpist movements of their own.  I expect Europe to be in a prolonged recession, too.

6. Trump might scrap the nuclear deal with Iran, and Iran may resume its climb up the nuclear capabilities ladder.   If this happens, it is almost certain that there will be a war, an attempt to bomb Iran into submission.   I think one side-effect will be that Shia terrorism will also start to globalize (right now only Sunni terrorism is global in scope).

7.  India's hope of export-driven economic growth will simply be dashed with the US and Europe in recession.  India's economic growth will have to be driven internally and thus will be slower than otherwise possible (but perhaps more sustainable?)  With a large chunk of the global economy in recession, India will be able to count on low prices for energy.

8. The Middle East is a major source of employment for Indians (I think annual remittances are of the order of $80 billion per year) and some of India's largest trading partners are in the region.   Things like a US-Iran war will tend to place this in some jeopardy.

9. Back to America - the US will have an extremely conservative Supreme Court for the rest of my lifetime.  We will see more guns, choice taken away from women, the further enshrinement of corporations as people with religious beliefs, free speech rights and so on.   Labor unions are going to completely wither away. Much of civil rights will devolve back to the States, and the cultural divide between the liberal coasts and the Christianist middle and south will intensify. 

10. All in all, the leadership in the world that Americans have pretty much taken for granted is going to evaporate, initially because of the uncertainty of Trump, and later possibly because of the policy Trump and the Republicans enact.


PS: The main immediate issue is the uncertainty.  Trump could boost US economic growth with a massive infrastructure program, but that requires going into deficit, which may not be politically feasible; and Trump also wants to reduce the deficit.  Trump has made a number of promises that are inconsistent, and no one knows which ones he will honor.

Rangoli 2016

Previous years.

USPS Diwali Stamp

The US Postal Service issued a Diwali stamp, a sheet of which looks like this:

Americans on Opioids

This paper from 2012 uses data from 2008 to study the Geographic Variation in Opioid Prescribing in the U.S.

Some excerpts (refer to the original paper for full details):

.....Geographic variation in prevalence of prescribed opioids is large, greater than variation observed for other healthcare services. Counties having the highest prescribing rates for opioids were disproportionately located in Appalachia and in Southern and Western states. The number of available physicians was by far the strongest predictor of amounts prescribed, but only one-third of county variation is explained by the combination of all measured factors......

Wide geographic variation that does not reflect differences in the prevalence of injuries, surgeries, or conditions requiring analgesics raises questions about opioid prescribing practices. Low prescription rates may indicate under-treatment, while high rates may indicate overprescribing and insufficient attention to risks of misuse.....

...Regression analysis was conducted to identify the correlates of prescribing prevalence at the county level....

Chief Arvol to President Obama

From here:

Chief Arvol Looking Horse to Obama: Keep Your Word

Chief Arvol Looking Horse

10/28/16

Mitakuye (my relative),

I greet you with our traditional greeting,

Mitakuye Oyasin – all things are related!

As Keeper of our Sacred C’anupa (Pipe) Bundle of the Lakota/Dakota/Nakota Nation, I address you from our original governance of our people, Woope – Creator’s Law. I am not a member of leadership under any political government, I stand in position as the center of our people, the voice of our traditional government, and so this communication is nation to nation, as indicated by our treaties. Additionally, we have over 300 flags of indigenous nations including other countries supporting our stand, because they are suffering as well.

In our honor ways, when we leave this Unc’i Maka – Grandmother Earth, the only thing we truly own is our word. When you met with our people on your campaign trail in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, you stated that you are a lawyer and understand treaty documents. You told us that you realized our treaties were violated and you would address these violations against our people if you became President. This was your Word. You then took a photo of us together at that time and then I found out you used my photo for your campaign brochure, even without asking me. I accepted you as a man of his word and ignored people asking me if I gave you permission, because I thought you understood Woope - in keeping one’s Word.

Yesterday, October 27, 2016, our Elders stood with their sacred items, including their sacred C’anupa pleading for sanity in a state of distress, and were arrested. Once we stand with our sacred filled C’anupa, we make a commitment to the Creator that we cannot break. We stand under the Freedom of Religion Act of 1978 with our Pipe of Peace and the Treaty of 1851. Our protectors had no lethal weapons, but we were met with an army of lethal weapons. In the middle of our water protectors we found a DAPL worker (infiltrator placed to discredit) who had lethal weapons, stating he was ordered to lay a pipeline, and he would shoot anyone to do just that… when asked if he was planning to shoot women and children. Yet media states he was one of our people, his credentials in his truck were from DAPL when the BIA police arrested him.

You are ignoring our pleas to use your time as President to move us toward sustainable development as fast as possible, because of our Mother Earth – our Grandmother Earth, is sick and has a fever. We as people that want to do Creator’s work to create these changes and are stuck with using oil, because it is all you have allowed to invest in to transport this country.

It is time you stop this desecration of our sacred sites, which have been indicated by our Traditional Cultural Tracker, Tim Mentz. He has been ignored by DAPL, who now have police and National Guard’s protection as they continue to desecrate our sacred places.

I would like to include a statement from our Traditional Elders Council:

We are a part of Creation; thus, if we break the Laws of Creation, we destroy ourselves
We, the Original Caretakers of Mother Earth, have no choice but to follow and uphold the Original Instructions, which sustains the continuity of Life. We recognize our umbilical connection to Mother Earth and understand that she is the source of life, not a resource to be exploited. We speak on behalf of all Creation today, to communicate an urgent message that man has gone too far, placing us in the state of survival. Not heeding warnings from both Nature and the People of the Earth keeps us on the path of self-destruction. These self-destructive activities and development continue to cause the deterioration and destruction of sacred places and sacred waters that are vital for Life.
We respect and honor our spiritual relationship with the lifeblood of Mother Earth. One does not sell or contaminate their mother’s blood. These capitalistic actions must stop and we must recover our sacred relationship with the Spirit of Water

In a Sacred Hoop of Life, where there is no ending and no beginning!

Onipiktec’a (that we shall live).
Nac’a (Chief) Arvol Looking Horse, 19th Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe Bundle.

Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/10/28/chief-arvol-looking-horse-obama-keep-your-word-166266

Two paths through the woods

Ross Douthat, conservative columnist for the New York Times, October 2016, about American conservative intellectuals (don't laugh at the oxymoron) who have lost their way:

History does not stand still; crises do not last forever. Eventually a path for conservative intellectuals will open.

But for now we find ourselves in a dark wood, with the straight way lost.

Mahatma Gandhi, conservative Hindu, September 1929:

"The Shastras have taught us both our ideal dharma and our practical dharma....

"However, we do not seek solutions to [such] problems by regarding them as matters of absolute dharma. Relative dharma does not proceed on a straight path like a railway track. It has, on the contrary, to make its way through a dense forest where there is not even a sense of direction. Hence in this case, even one step is sufficient. Many circumstances have to be considered before the second step is taken and, if the first step is towards the north, the second may have to be taken towards the east. In this manner, although the path may appear crooked, since it is the only one which is correct, it can also be regarded as the straight one. Nature does not imitate geometry. Although natural forms are very beautiful, they do not fit in with geometrical patterns."

 Commentary:  The real world is complicated.  Gandhi acknowledges this, finds it natural.  American conservatives like Douthat do not.

Americans on Amphetamines

 How the first amphetamine epidemic came about (emphasis added):

From 2008:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2377281/
America’s First Amphetamine Epidemic 1929–1971
Am J Public Health. 2008 June; 98(6): 974–985.

The first amphetamine epidemic was iatrogenic, created by the pharmaceutical industry and (mostly) well-meaning prescribers. The current amphetamine resurgence began through a combination of recreational drug fashion cycles and increased illicit supply since the late 1980s. On the basis of treatment admissions data, methamphetamine abuse doubled in the United States from 1983 to 1988, doubled again between 1988 and 1992, and then quintupled from 1992 to 2002. According to usage surveys, during 2004, some 3 million Americans consumed amphetamine-type stimulants of all kinds nonmedically, twice the number of a decade earlier. As noted, 250000 to 350000 of them were addicted. Thus, in terms of absolute numbers, the current epidemic has now reached approximately the same extent and severity as that of the original epidemic at its peak in 1970, when there were roughly 3.8 million past-year nonmedical amphetamine users, about 320 000 of whom were addicted. (Of course, the national population then was about 200 million compared with 300 million today, meaning that in relative terms today’s epidemic is only two thirds as extensive.)

Another striking similarity between present and past epidemics relates to the role of pharmaceutical amphetamines. Although illicitly manufactured methamphetamine launched the current epidemic, in step with rising amphetamine abuse in recent years, the United States has seen a surge in the legal supply and use of amphetamine-type attention deficit medications, such as Ritalin (methylphenidate) and Adderall (amphetamine). American physicians, much more than those in other countries, apparently are again finding it difficult to resist prescribing stimulants that patients and parents consider necessary, or at least helpful, in their struggle with everyday duties. According to DEA production data, since 1995, medical consumption of these drugs has more than quintupled, and in 2005, for the first time exceeded amphetamine consumption for medical use at the epidemic’s original peak: 2.5 billion 10-mg amphetamine base units in 1969 vs 2.6 billion comparable units in 2005. Thus, just as the absolute prevalence of amphetamine abuse and dependency have now reached levels matching the original epidemic’s peak, so has the supply of medical amphetamines.

...

(Of course, the national population then was about 200 million compared with 300 million today, meaning that in relative terms today’s epidemic is only two thirds as extensive.)

and (emphasis added)

Besides iatrogenic dependence and diversion to nonmedical users, there is another way that widespread prescription of amphetamine-type stimulants can contribute to an amphetamine epidemic. When a drug is treated not only as a legal medicine but as a virtually harmless one, it is difficult to make a convincing case that the same drug is terribly harmful if used nonmedically. This is what happened in the 1960s and is presumably happening today. Thus, to end their rampant abuse, amphetamines had to be made strictly controlled substances and their prescription sharply curtailed. Today, amphetamines are widely accepted as safe even for small children, and this return of medical normalization inevitably undermines public health efforts to limit amphetamine abuse. We have not yet reached the point where up to 90% of the amphetamines sold on the street are products of US pharmaceutical firms, as the federal narcotics chief reluctantly admitted before Congress in 1970. But with half the nation’s nonmedical users evidently consuming pharmaceutical amphetamines only, the comments made by Senator Thomas Dodd in those hearings echo strongly today. America’s drug problems were no accidental development, Dodd observed; the pharmaceutical industry’s “multihundred million dollar advertising budgets, frequently the most costly ingredient in the price of a pill, have pill by pill, led, coaxed and seduced post–World War II generations into the ‘freaked out’ drug culture” plaguing the nation. Any effort to deal harshly with methamphetamine users today in the name of epidemic control, without touching medical stimulant production and prescription, is as impossible practically as in 1970—and given historical experience, even more hypocritical.

We have seen a similar opioid epidemic created in a similar way; and opioids are a gateway to heroin. 

Obviously, criminalization is not a solution, but medical normalization, removal of tight regulations, and making it socially acceptable (e.g., the way alcohol is) is not going to help either.  It is not clear to me why society cannot find getting intoxicated/getting high as socially unacceptable as body odor or even perspiration.

Not learning from history: legalization of drugs

History doesn't provide any comfort about the legalization of drugs. Per Alan Schwarz in ADHD Nation: Children, Doctors, Big Pharma and the Making of an American Epidemic, in the 1960s:

Dexedrine had become perhaps the most widely abused drug in the United States—more than hippies' marijuana, more than Timothy Leary's LSD, more than the heroin that would soon kill Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. In the 1960s, doctors prescribed amphetamines so willingly—for weight loss, depression, all but hangnails—that an estimated four billion tablets were dispensed by American pharmacies per year, or enough for every man, woman and child in the United States to have twenty apiece.

The United States military handed out Dexedrine so freely that an estimated 7 percent of its Vietnam forces became abusers and addicts. About eight hundred thousand Americans were dependent on amphetamines, about three hundred thousand of them flat-out addicted—and many of them average housewives. These addicts weren't the young beatniks and hippies so reviled by the establishment; they were, in many cases, the establishment itself.

There was talk in about banning amphetamines in the United States altogether, its medical uses be damned. Instead the federal Controlled Substances Act placed unprecedented restrictions on the handling of addictive pharmaceuticals like Dexedrine and Ritalin. Prescribers were now required to maintain a special government license, fill out much more paperwork, and prescribe no more than a thirty-day supply at a time. Drug companies could not produce such medications in quantities higher than the government deemed clinically necessary.

It was the ultimate buzzkill. US production of amphetamine plummeted an astonishing 90 percent in only a few years. Stimulants could no longer be handed out as mere pick-me-ups for tired professionals, but only for narcolepsy or short-term weight loss. And for a children's malady just now hitting America's living rooms: minimal brain dysfunction.

Minimal brain dysfunction is simply the old name for Attention Deficity Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The author says it is a real malady, but where about only 5% of children are actually affected by ADHD, about 15% are diagnosed with ADHD, leading to a massive over-prescription of drugs. Why?  There are simply too many perverse incentives in the system.

I expect there is a similar story behind opioids and their widespread abuse today; and in a few years, I expect the states busy legalizing pot, whether for medical purposes only or more comprehensively, will have similar findings.

FYI: alcohol use is a leading cause of death in the USA and in the world; but in the USA the deaths due to alcohol are parceled up among many different buckets to disguise that fact.  While Daniel J. Levitin's very timely book A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age does not mention this example, it does mention the template of this lie. Levitin calls it "specious subdividing".

Suppose you work for a manufacturer of air purifies, and you're on a campaign to prove respiratory disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, overwhelming other causes like heart disease and cancer. 

 But respiratory disease is only the third leading cause of death, and doesn't make for an impressive ad campaign.  So subdivide heart disease into categories like rheumatic heart disease, hypertensive heart disease, acute myocardial infarction, and so on, and likewise with the various cancers.

By failing to amalgamate, and creating these fine subdivisions, you've done it! Chronic lower respiratory disease becomes the number one killer.  You've just earned yourself a bonus.

 

Hurricane Matthew

The forecasts are highly uncertain, but since they look highly unusual (from tropicaltidbits.com) to my eye, here they are.  This hurricane could possibly go around in a complete circle and hit Florida twice.