It looks like the memo is declassified. Fox is starting to report…. I’m sure others will too. I’m waiting for a link to the memo itself which should be soon.
Admittedly, Fox tends to lean one way. Still, it’s the first discussion I saw today on Twitter. I haven’t seen others so I can’t “balance”. We need a thread to discuss this.
Update:
The House Intel Memo On FISA Abuse Was Just Released. Read It Here
It names people: All names I recognize. (Comey, Carter Page, Lisa Page, Storz, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates ad so on.)
The claims naming would be a national security issue were clearly wrong.
I walk away with this:
.
1. FBI knew but didn’t disclose on FISA warrant and renewals:
A. DNC Clinton campaign funding of dossier
B. Fusion GPS employment of Steele
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2. FISA warrant and renewals used news leaks by Steele to corroborate Steele dossier?
does it actually say that, or does it just imply it?
I read that it cites news stories and assesses Steele did not directly provide info.
Did the FBI know this at the time?
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3. FBI was aware of Steele bias.
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4. Ohr’s wife was involved with opposition research, handed over to Ohr. Did not disclose to FISA court.
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5. McCabe testified that Steele dossier info was essential to seeking surveillance warrant.
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6. Mention of the texts and bias of Strzok and Lisa Page. I don’t follow the significance of the mention of information about George Papadopoulos triggering Strzok’s investigation. So what?
.
So. I get the idea. It looks like the FBI/DOJ didn’t fully disclose info that might have impeded their ability to get surveillance. Why did they not disclose. Well, at least in Ohr’s case, it’s not unreasonable to assume he had a motive – his wife was ‘cultivating’ opposition research on Trump.
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First look, I think this provides reasonable evidence of bias or an agenda on the part of [at least some high ranking] FBI/DOJ against Trump.
An aside – IMO it’s a pretty serious flaw in the process, expecting people who are seeking a FISA warrant to “include information potentially favorable to the target of the FISA application that is known by the government” voluntarily and completely. That seems silly to me, to think that’s not going to get abused.
mark
I don’t know if they were required to include the potentially favorable info or not. What we know is (a) they did not. And (b) if they aren’t required to do so, this incident shows how it’s entirely possible to concoct a reason almost out of thin air.
Like it or not, the intention of FISA is to prevent agencies from just decideng who the heck they want to spy one for reasons of their own. In this situation it looks like:
1) Enemies or adversaries of Trump put together a “dossier” full of unreliable, unverified salacious information.
2) The same people gave it to the FBI.
3) The same people leaked it.
4) The FBI knew the info was unreliable information.
5) It appears the FBI either had an inkling or knew the provenance.
7) The FBI used it to get a warrant on an American using the news stories based on “the leak” as “verification”. And it would appear they knew (or should have known) the news stories weren’t independent verification.
If this was the way it worked, one has created a “recipe” to be able to spy on any American citizen you want. Just create a “dossier” that might be a tissue of lies, leak it. And BINGO! You’ve got evidence to wiretap someone.
Whether legal or not, that’s not right.
Lucia,
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Sure looks that way.
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I’m sort of interested in hearing the response to this. I’m hoping somebody asks the relevant parties ‘So, why didn’t you mention any of this on the FISA warrant application?’
I’d also like to hear Adam Schiff ‘put this in context’. Heh.
mark bofill,
Presumably, sometimes context is required. Othertimes… not so much. 🙂
My read:
1) Mark Bofill’s prediction was spot on.
2) The people objecting to the release of the memo look foolish. I see no secrets that needed protecting.
3) I think Nunes is being dishonest and he doesn’t believe Steele lied to the FBI, but rather that the FBI is lying about what Steele told them. This goes along with Grassley’s referral of Steele for prosecution. In other words, FBI team, Ohrs/Strzok/Page/McCabe was using Steele to stop Trump and were OK with media contacts.
Possibly.
Obviously, if Steele did not lie to the FBI, then the FBI looks worse. That would then explain why they didn’t charge Steele with lying.
I suspect we’ll learn more.
MikeN,
:> No great insight on my part. While nobody was specifically saying what the memo contained, they explained what issues the memo would touch on – only one way to read that, really.
What I don’t understand is it says Carter Page’s FISA warrant was issued in Oct 2016.
These are 90 day surveillancem that was reauthorized three times.
Oct 21, 2016 Warrant issued
Jan 21, 2017 Reauthorization/ Inauguration
Apr 21, 2017 2nd reauthorization, Comey has been fired
Jul 21, 2017 3rd reauthorization
How did Comey sign 3 of these?
It looks like Comey was fired May 9’th 2017.
May ninth is after April 21. Why does your list indicate Comey has been fired by April 21?
Here’s a fun idea that I have absolutely no factual basis for whatsoever. Just occurred to me.
Maybe the FBI and so on have another source, or think they’ve got another source that corroborates Steele?
That would explain all the wringing of hands and the accusations of weaseling and misrepresenting and so on and so forth. Mebbe Nunes knows this perfectly well and puts this memo forward knowing that the Trump Resistance or whatever in the DOJ/FBI can’t refute the implication that the surveillance had an improper basis because they don’t want to reveal the rest of their hand?
I think it’s a fun idea. I have no reason whatsoever to believe it’s true; just my imagination running away with me. 🙂
In general, at least, intentionally leaving material facts out of a search warrant application is a Fourth Amendment (unreasonable search) violation, as noted in this article.
And per this case, “a search warrant is invalid if the affiant deliberately or recklessly omitted facts that if included would have precluded a finding of probable cause.”
To my mind, “the leaked story we used to bolster the dossier actually came from the person who wrote the dossier we’re trying to bolster with the leaked story”…is a pretty material fact. Something a judge would like to know before issuing a warrant, and something the Defense would be jumping all over in the event of a prosecution.
I was thinking he was fired in March. Seems strange they did all these reauthorizations while Congress was asking for documents.
The issue with not revealing detail on Steele, is because the dossier was largely unverified. They were relying on Steele’s reputation, which is solid with his prior work with the FBI. His working for the Clinton campaign prevents them from counting on him as a reliable source.
SteveF (Comment #166829): “According the Glen Simpson’s testimony, Steele provided information from his opposition research to the FBI in July 2016. The dossier was not complete at that point …”
Wasn’t the original attempt to get a FISA warrant denied in July? Then, just by coincidence, a piece of opposition research gets brought to the FBI. Hmm. It is almost like there was two-way communication between the FBI and the Clinton team (or should I say “a different part of the Clinton team”?)
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mark bofill (Comment #166814): “4. Ohr’s wife was involved with opposition research, handed over to Ohr.”
So was this Ohr person involved in the FBI investigation? And his wife was in the middle of the Clinton campaign? So that was the likely two-way communication channel?
MikeM,
.
Yeah, it’s looks like it was all pretty cosy.
[Edit: In fact, this cosyness helps explain Strzok and Page texting ..uninhibitedly. They knew perfectly well their texts were captured and subject to review. But. Review by whom?]
Mike M,
“Yeah, it’s looks like it was all pretty cosy.”
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Understatement of the century. Of course there was unlawful coordination between the criminal actors…. but they will skate. The only question is if there is any possibility of real reform among the politically inclined deep state actors. Short of criminal prosecution of bad actors, I see no way to keep the deep state at bay.
There is no mention of a rejected application in the memo. Clapper said the dossier was used for a reauthorization, which would suggest a successful application in July.
ConservativeTreehouse points out a detail in the memo. It is a Title I warrant, not a 702 warrant that Congress was voting on. So FBI was presenting to the court that they believed Carter Page to be a Russian agent. Anyone he was in contact with would then be available for surveillance, presumably including previous contacts. If this was originally attempted in July, it would mean they were targeting the Trump campaign. Note no one bothered to tell Trump you have a Russian agent on your team. They did tell the Clinton campaign when Russia tried to get someone close to her.
How much of the dossier was the FBI using in their application? Different parts have different dates, including the penultimate one at Oct 19. Was this written up just for the FBI to use in its application?
There are four names listed who could be targets of wiretaps- Trump, Manafort, Page, and Michael Cohen, as well as Source D and Source E. If there was a four person wiretap rejected, I would guess it was for Manafort, Page, Cohen, and Stone.
If Oct 21 was a reauthorization of a July warrant, then it would destroy the entire argument of the Nunes memo.
Correction to above, the reauthorization would have been Jan 19, before Trump took office and I think when NYT reported that Trump is under surveillance. Interview of Papadopoulos was 8 days after this reauthorization.
Several of the issues raised above are dealt with very well here:
https://www.steynonline.com/8431/un-candid-in-camera
FBI agent resigns with NYT op-ed:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/opinion/leaving-the-fbi.html
Boy, talk about missing the point. Trust us, we’re the FBI. Hah! It’s more like: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” If the FBI wants to avoid partisan criticism, they should avoid obviously partisan investigations. Saying the Full Investigation of the Trump campaign couldn’t be partisan because, well, it’s the FBI, simply won’t cut it. Any agent that can’t see this is clearly so naive that he ought to resign.
The released Nume’s memo focused on the FBI. Nunes said yesterday another memo is coming that will focus on DoJ.
This could explain why the Nellie Ohr -> DoJ connection was not spelled out more in detail. The one thing in the memo that left me hanging was the statement that Nellie Ohr had turned over all her research to the FBI – but no date given of when this occurred. Why no date?
Was her information what sustained 3 subsequent FISA renewals?
DeWitt,
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I agree with you. Boo Hoo, Boo Hoo.
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I’m starting to believe people join a religion when they join the FBI. It’s like the marines in Gitmo from the movie ‘A Few Good Men’.
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Frankly, I think this ..mysticism? fanaticism? not sure what the right word is.. contributes to the problem. [But] I once thought Comey was basically an honest guy. I have come to believe that career FBI develop an overriding loyalty to the institution that can impede them doing the right thing when necessary [including Comey]. Why? Because they don’t want the Bureau to get a black eye. Noble cause corruption.
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Take Rosenstein trying to prevent names from being released in the memo. There was absolutely no security reason to keep those names secret. It was just a matter of FBI leadership trying to protect FBI leadership.
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Spare me, Special Agent Campbell.
Not to mention that it’s a crock to begin with. If ‘Andy’ was discussing ‘insurance policies’ in his office with Strzok and Page, that’s FBI leadership meddling in partisan politics and nothing else, pure and simple. Too bad Campbell. The guys in charge didn’t have to do this, they chose to. You can plead with the American people to excuse it because the noble FBI is a force for good in our world. They still stepped in crap deliberately and that the FBI does good things does not excuse it.
[Edit: I said Rosenstein above. I should’ve said Wray probably, I’ll go check that.] [Edit2 : No, both of them did.]
No, it was Wray. (I know, I know, nobody cares, OK I’ll shut up now! hmmpfh!)
Mark Bofill,
As of Feb 2012, there were 12,778 special agents at the FBI. Got to believe there are more today. So one agent resigning with much fanfare for ‘progressive’ political reasons doesn’t seem to me surprising. I’ll take note when the number of agent resignations reaches 1,000.
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WRT the agent’s editorial in the Gray Lady, he got at least one thing right: if a large fraction of the population doesn’t trust the FBI to be apolitical, then the FBI will become less effective. Of course, the agent is wrong about why a lot of people no longer believe the FBI is apolitical…… people do not think they are apolitical because they have obviously been acting in very political ways since at least the start of the Hillary Clinton email scandal. Hillary should be sitting in a federal penitentiary, not endlessly caterwalling that the FBI was out to get her; the FBI saved her sorry butt from the serious jail time she and her lawless posse of hacks deserved.
Steve,
True that.
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I know people forget. Still, right now, it seems inconceivable to me that with all that’s come out about the rotten basis for the Russia investigation that Trump should ever be impeached for any of this. I think it would cause a serious crisis of government here.
Of course, Trump could always do something incredibly stupid. Wouldn’t surprise me.
The FBI has 12000+ agents?
I think some issue with not releasing memo is because of FISA warrants not mentioned. Perhaps Carter Page had another renewal in Oct 2017 making him still under surveillance as the memo was written. Perhaps there were warrants on others who would not be aware of it right now.
The judge in the Michael Flynn case recused. He is a FISA judge and may have been involved in the approval of one of these warrants.
mark,
Impeachment isn’t conviction and removal from office. Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were both impeached by the House. Neither one was convicted in the Senate, although it was a closer call with Johnson. Both impeachments were seen at the time by the majority of the public as partisan moves. If the Democrats take the House in this year’s election and vote for impeachment with zero Republican support, it won’t mean much as long as the Republicans hold more than a third of the seats in the Senate. I would say that it might actually make Trump’s re-election in 2020 more likely.
DeWitt,
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Good point. Removal from office is what I meant, not impeachment.
MikeN,
Yep. As of 2/29/2012 according to the FBI’s own site, there were 13,778 special agents employed by the FBI. Total employment was 35,664. Scary, isn’t it.
Steve,
However, if 1000 resign it wouldn’t make much difference to me. Heck, if every last agent turned in their resignation it wouldn’t legitimize the FBI surveilling a Presidential candidate by abusing the FISA process and conspiring against him. If it bugs the FBI that a large segment of the American people are not OK with this then maybe the FBI shouldn’t continue. I don’t care how much good anybody thinks the FBI does, the guardian does not guard us from himself. No amount of excuse, justification, or rhetoric changes that in my view.
mark,
Trump isn’t going to be removed from office without broad public support. Even with such support, the probability that a Republican Senator that voted for conviction would be committing political suicide would be, IMO, quite high. Nixon, who likely would have been convicted if impeached, had the grace to resign.
Btw, the current situation is, IMO, really much like Watergate, only with the party’s reversed, Russia replacing Cuba and better optics. The FISA option, for example, wasn’t available at the time of Watergate.
On a side note, the Nixon Oval Office tape transcripts had a lot of [expletive deleted] entries. It kind of puts Trump’s alleged s……e comment in perspective.
DeWitt,
Sure. There are political considerations that mean Trump is safe unless the public is substantially against him. This is why the memo was important though. In the court of public opinion, Trump may have gained some ground.
I don’t imagine in fact that the memo will have much impact otherwise. I don’t think Mueller is going to say ‘oh well; might as well pack it up now’ or anything like that. I hope Trump doesn’t take it upon himself to start directly trying to shut Mueller down, thinking he’s in the clear.
Anyway.
I would be curious to know if the FBI special agent who resigned had ever read the book or watched the A&E TV adaptation of Rex Stout’s The Doorbell Rang. Stout’s famous sedentary detective Nero Wolfe had a low opinion of Hoover’s FBI. At the end of the story, he wouldn’t even admit Hoover to his house.
I think I’ve made it clear that I don’t think the management culture at the FBI has changed a lot for the better since then.
DeWitt,
I’ve never read it. I’ve got this Barnes and Nobles gift card sitting around from Christmas, maybe I’ll pick it up. 🙂 Thanks.
WSJ reports four different FISA judges approved the warrants. There are only 3 judges from DC. They must have been shopping to get a new judge each time.
Carter Page had left the campaign in Sept. So if Oct was the first attempt at surveillance, it would not have been targeting of Trump campaign, unless they are allowed to expand surveillance to other people without going to a judge. I think he said his office connects to Trump tower.
MikeN,
No, Oct definitely wasn’t the first try. Steve linked this yesterday. First try was in the summer, it was denied.
This memo makes no mention of a rejected application. I doubt the committee would have missed it.
On the other hand, the committee released:
https://www.scribd.com/document/370616574/HPSCI-FISA-Memo-Release-Charge-and-Response
CHARGE: DOJ and FBI had good reason to suspect Carter Page of being a Russian agent.
RESPONSE: While many unverified claims have been made by both Christopher Steele and
Committee Democrats, the focus of the memo is not Carter Page. The focus of the memo is
the Steele Dossier.
Thanks for the link MikeN.
Taking a closer look at the dates in the Steele dossier, it looks like Steele filed a report just to support the warrant.
is Oct 18 report has another source confirming a meeting with Carter Page and Sechin.
It also makes an offer of a share in a company in exchange for dropping sanctions against Russia, and that Page accepted the offer on behalf of Trump.
Michael Cohen’s name is also mentioned as a key player, then something is redacted.
This is Tuesday. FISA application on Friday.
There is another report Thursday that includes Cohen in Prague.
This report references another company report on Wednesday that also talked about Cohen in Prague but is not included in the dossier.
If Jake Tapper is to be believed, then there was a different Michael Cohen with the same birthday that traveled at that time to Prague. So someone looked up Michael Cohen’s travels to include him in this dossier.
1) Russian disinformation to Steele
2) Steele himself thru British contacts
3) FBI sources feeding Steele
FBI would have figured out the Steele info is false very quickly, calling into question the source and making the whole warrant impossible. Indeed, they likely would have found the other Michael Cohen and realized they were being set up. Yet this never happened in the few days before getting the warrant, or in the nine months since.
Another detail, since the Steele dossier is the primary basis for the warrant on Carter Page, then looking at what Steele has written about Page means that the FBI was saying to the court they had probable cause to believe Donald Trump is a Russian agent. The source on Page said that Page was an intermediary for Manafort who was handling communications on behalf of the Trump-Russia conspiracy.
MIkeN
The memo doesn’t say it was primary. Only that (a) it was used when asking judge for warrant and (b) without it, the warrant would not have been sought.
So it doesn’t mean it was the “primary” basis. Only that whatever was “primary” they felt probably wasn’t enough. It could have been the proverbial thousandth straw.
The memo relates things that are troubling about some people at the FBI and the FISA process. But it’s best not to over-interpret.
We are going to see more memos that clarify further. I”m sure.
Luica,
“We are going to see more memos that clarify further. Iâ€m sure.”
.
Well, only until Jan 2019 if Democrats gain control of the House and Senate this November. Considering how long it took for this information to be released (glacial is a very generous description), there may not be as much information released in the future as you might think. Release of the underlying ‘classified’ documents (to refute claims of inaccuracy and misrepresentation) looks just about impossible… even though I wish those would all be released immediately.
Various outlets and persons have been alluding to more memos. Pence, Monica Crowley on Fox (here and here) in the queue. Don’t know how long it will take. Don’t know how interesting they will be. Sounds like Pence wants to look into the Dept. of State.
[Edit: First in the queue is probably the Democrat memo responding to the Nunes memo.]
[Edit: Hmm, my link doesn’t support the idea that Pence wants to look into the State Dept. I thought I read that someplace, but perhaps I was mistaken. I’m not going to try to chase it down right now.]
Something that has always bothered me about the idea that Diveykin offered Page Hillary Clinton’s emails on Page’s visit on July 7-8’th. Wikileaks started releasing Hillary’s emails three (3) days earlier, on the 4’th. Page doesn’t need the Russians to get this for Trump; it’s already out there. Perhaps he needed the Russians to give him a link to WikiLeaks…
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Perhaps there were other emails we never saw, in which case, Shame on the collaborators for not making better use of the material! /sarc.
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[Edit: I get the timing for my claims from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#2016
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/11/a_timeline_of_carter_page_s_contacts_with_russia.html
]
Mark,
You should not confuse the DNC emails (which were hacked via a simple password phishing ploy) and Hillary’s emails on her personal server. AFAIK, nobody has published Hillary’s emails.
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That doesn’t mean they were not hacked or intercepted, just they have not been published.
lucia (Comment #166872): “The memo doesn’t say it was primary. Only that (a) it was used when asking judge for warrant and (b) without it, the warrant would not have been sought.”
That is true, but MikeN is likely correct in asserting that the memo was the primary basis for the warrant. According to this article http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-answering-3-key-questions-about-the-house-memo/article/2648048
“it appears the FISA surveillance application relied on five categories of information: 1) the dossier; 2) a Yahoo News article based mostly on the dossier; 3) the George Papadopoulos case; 4) Page’s history; and 5) a general survey of Russian bad deeds.”
But it seems that no evidence was given of a direct connection between Papadopoulos and Page; so 3) seems to have been window dressing. 4) refers to the fact that a few years before, some Russian agents attempted, and failed, to recruit Page. So that also looks like window dressing. 5) would seem rather obviously to be window dressing. So that leaves the Steele dossier as the basis for the warrant.
Thanks Steve.
I didn’t think I was. But now that I delve into it there does seem to be some confusion.
Here are Sec State Clinton emails:
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/
but these were released March 16’th 2016 apparently. No spying or hacking or leaking; these were FOIA’d. So what is wikipedia referring to here:
??
I’ve got stuff to do today, maybe later tonight I’ll look at this and try to sort out what the discrepancy is about.
Ooohh. I see now. Maybe the Russians offered Page the 32K emails Hillary never turned over; the ones Trump tweeted that Russia should find on July 27’th.
I got it now. Never mind.
[Edit: How could I have forgotten? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bspbQJqI-h4%5D
Mark Bofill,
The tradegedy here is that Felonia von Pantsuit skated, in spite of her grotesque flouting of the law on handling of secret government information.
The secondary tradegedy is that the machininatitions of Felonia von Pantsuit’s supporters at the FBI and DOJ have corrupted the normal transfer of power between one administration (a bunch of evil fools) and another.
.
A robust house cleaning in the upper levels of both the DOJ and the FBI is desperately needed.
SteveF,
Yeah. But replacing liberal goonies with conservative goonies isn’t the answer. I mean, great; yay team for my team, but the underlying problem remains. I can’t help but think FISA is a big part of the problem.
I hope it’s worth it. I hope they are foiling terrorist plots routinely, by the week or day or hour due to FISA, ’cause it makes our politics a real mess.
From the Hill, some light on the procedures the FBI were supposed to follow. ‘Woods’ Procedures govern the process, for anyone who’s interested.
SteveF – “The tradegedy here is that Felonia von Pantsuit skated”
We know who you have been reading.
mark Bofill said “Take Rosenstein trying to prevent names from being released in the memo.”
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Rosenstein wanted to remove his name from the memo.
SteveF said “You should not confuse the DNC emails (which were hacked via a simple password phishing ploy)”
.
Actually two different things here:
.
Podesta’s gmail account was hacked by the simple password phishing ploy and released by Wikileaks. Attributed to the Russians, but has not been proven.
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The DNC network was comprised in some manner and had email files down downloaded from it (also released by Wikileaks). I am not sure if any stand alone file were downloaded. This is attributed to the Russians using installed software, but has not been proven.
Here’s another excellent Andrew McCarthy summary, highlighting that Steele is not the source of the dossier.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456093/jerrold-nadler-memo-rebuttal-weak-unpersuasive
MikeM, I think Lucia uses ‘primary’ to mean first reason. Note the memo lists the dossier as ‘essential’ to getting the warrant.
SteveF – “AFAIK, nobody has published Hillary’s emails.”
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Yes – all of the emails (30,000 +) which Hillary turned over to the State Department have been released via Judicial Watch FOIA. .
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There are 22 SAP emails that were acknowledged to exist but were not released. These 22 emails are thought to be the ones directly between Hillary on her Clinton.com account to Obama on a pseudonymous .gov account.
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We know about this presidential pseudonymous account via released FBI transcripts of the Huma Abedin interview by Strzok.
The biggest disappointment in all this is that FBI director Wray is still supporting the cover up of FBI corruption that occurred during the tenure of Meuller and Comey.
Wray needs to clean house by stopping the obstruction of congressional oversight so that corrupt FBI officials can face “Grand Juries” rather than being demoted or allowed to retire with full pensions. The nation needs to see crooked FBI officials prosecuted and the “Dead Wood” retired.
The fish rots from the head so don’t try to tell me that Meuller and Comey are not dirty cops.
Lucia said – “So it doesn’t mean it was the “primary†basis. Only that whatever was “primary†they felt probably wasn’t enough. It could have been the proverbial thousandth straw.”.
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Byron York of the Washington Examiner reported that multiple sources said there were 5 categories of information used in the Carter Page FISA application on Oct 21, 2016.
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1) The Steele Dossier,
2) The Yahoo news in Sept 2016 based on the Steele Dossier,
3) The Papadopoulos report from the Aussies,
4) Page’s history,
5) a general survey of Russian bad deeds.
.
The FBI did not interview Papadopoulos until Jan 2017, so this element cannot be very big at all.
.
The Carter Page history is interesting, and in fact has Carter Page acting as an FBI informant in the 2013 probe. However, given that McCabe said that the FISA warrant would “not have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information” (paraphrased statement is argued by Democrats) one can conclude that the history of Page was insufficient on it’s own and had been for several years.
.
What is troubling is that the new information on Carter Page reported in the Steele Dossier (meeting in Moscow with individuals) was not verified by the FBI in any manner other than what was already publicly known, i.e. Carter Page gave a speech in Moscow when Steele said he was there. This lack of verification, beyond that Page gave a speech in Moscow at the time Steele reported, was confirmed by McCabe in Congressional testimony.
.
That leaves us with the “general survey of Russian bad deeds.” Well this could be anything but does not seem to help in getting Carter Page targeted as a foreign spy, as this general survey could have been used at any time prior to the Steele Dossier coming to the attention of the FBI “around July 4th 2016” [Glen Simpson HPSCI testimony].
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Assuming these anonymous statements are close to the truth of the 5 categories, that would put the Steele dossier (repeated in 1 and 2) as the being the majority of the FBI/DoJ case.
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I tend to believe this is true, because the HPSCI report would not hold up to scrutiny if the other application information had any great value.
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We may learn of it, but I am not counting on it.
Page’s history is that they opened an investigation, and used him as an informant. So the fact that he worked for America against Russia is now evidence that Page is working for Russia against America.
Sharyl Atkinsson describes how the FBI is supposed to verify everything they present to FISA.
http://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/372233-nunes-memo-raises-question-did-fbi-violate-woods-procedures
Kan,
I meant the many thousands of emails that were bleach-bit scrubbed from Hillary’s private server…. all those about wedding plans and the like, ya know. More likely they are about pay for play donations to the Clinton foundation, arranging pricey speaking engagements for Bill, setting up a Canadian arm of the Clinton foundation to avoid US disclosure of dubious contributions, and use of the foundation as a political slush fund.
MikeN,
The only thing the FBI verified in this case was the Russia is a country and Carter Page visited that country. What they knew for certain was that they didn’t want Trump elected.
Kan,
Yeah. FBI / DOJ top guys try to cover for each other and cover their own butts, apparently that’s perfectly fine. Trump tells Comey ‘I hope you can let this go’ with respect to one of his guys, uh-oh, Trump has committed a crime in doing so.
.
It boggles the mind when you step back and look at it.
MikeN (Comment #166886): “I think Lucia uses ‘primary’ to mean first reason. Note the memo lists the dossier as ‘essential’ to getting the warrant.”
Yes, the memo does not say that the dossier was not the primary basis for the warrant. But as Kan (Comment #166889) and I (Comment #166877) explained, it appears that the dossier was in fact the primary basis for the warrant. The rest of the “evidence” was just window dressing.
The silence is deafening as to whether the facts in the memo are incorrect. There are almost no denials coming from anyone here.
.
The NYT FBI agent story is such a partisan hack piece very representative of what that rag puts out nowadays. So let’s see, the FBI is going to enter into two very political investigations on both candidates up for a Presidential election and he is all butt hurt that there is criticism. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out Agent SnowFlake. The NYT specializes in putting out solely anecdotal puff pieces where the facts are not in their favor or when they want to misrepresent an issue. Very tiring.
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Somebody needs to answer the simple question “Why was the provenance of these documents not disclosed and who made that decision?” The rest is noise.
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For partisans it is in their favor to make this entire investigation look like a bunch of raging TDS keystone cops willing to do anything to take Trump down. This certainly helps their cause, as do the boneheaded FBI texts. The malfeasance will not overcome strong evidence of wrongdoing, but it will overcome weak evidence. The smoking gun better be on fire.
SteveF – “many thousands of emails that were bleach-bit scrubbed”
A very good point. I had not remembered that possibility. My thinking focused on the DNC emails being known to have been hacked, but had not been released yet.
The National Review article makes a good point.
“Here’s the problem: Steele is not the source of the information. For purposes of the warrant application, he is the purveyor of information from other sources. The actual sources of the information are Steele’s informants — anonymous Russians providing accounts based on hearsay three- and four-times removed from people said to have observed the events alleged.”
Another memo is made public.
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Graham and Grassley suggest that Steele was being fed info from one of Clinton’s people. Talk about circularity!
story in the Washington Examiner, redacted memo is in there too, but here’s a direct link.
The National Review article is excellent. McCarthy demolishes Nadler’s rebuttal of the memo. As Tom points out, the key is that the credibility of Steele is irrelevant to the warrant; what matters is the credibility of his sources. We can be quite sure that the FBI did nothing to verify those, since they were anonymous sources passed on to Steele via anonymous intermediaries.
Since the link is some distance above, here it is again: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456093/jerrold-nadler-memo-rebuttal-weak-unpersuasive
Tom Scharf,
Yes Steele is so far removed from actual information that he would not be a credible source even without his declared desire to keep Trump from being elected.
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I think in the end we will find out that the ‘intelligence community’ was trying multiple approaches to discredit Trump and debilitated his presidency after he won. The former Obama officials with real power as agency heads (CIA, FBI, DOJ, NSA) are the people who ought to be held to account.
Here’s an article that I found on Yahoo News that shows just how far the FBI is out of touch with reality:
https://lawfareblog.com/i-hope-instance-fake-news-fbi-messages-show-bureaus-real-reaction-trump-firing-james-comey
James Comey was a dead man walking as far as being the FBI director no matter who was elected President. I doubt that HRC would have forgiven the last minute email intervention if she had managed to win. Comey wasn’t responsible for the original whitewash. He was operating under orders from higher up so that wouldn’t have counted in his favor.
Mark Bofill,
I suspect Mr Steele will make a point of not visiting the USA in the future. I do wonder if he would be covered under extradition agreements between the UK and the States.
>only thing the FBI verified in this case was the Russia is a country and Carter Page visited
I disagree. The FBI did not have just the dossier. They interviewed Steele, so they would have the name of his sources. Note that initially, one of his sources was someone who knew a Russian ethnic close to Trump who told Steele’s source about Trump’s “conspiracy”, but later Steele’s source is a Russian ethnic close to Trump, presumably the same guy as before. So FBI would have had the name of a source directly linked to Trump.
They presumably verified that the other people Page met with were in Moscow. Similarly with Michael Cohen in Prague, though the dossier is sketchy about who he met with. They should have verified that Michael Cohen did not go to Prague, and realized that a different Cohen with the same birthday visited Prague. Looks like Steele was supplied this info by Sidney Blumenthal whose fits the redacted portion for friend of Hillary, and got it thru a State Department source that looked up travel info for Michael Cohen and got the wrong guy.
Special Agent Campbell lands at CNN after his resignation of conscience.
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Heh.
MikeN (Comment #166905): “The FBI did not have just the dossier. They interviewed Steele, so they would have the name of his sources.”
It is not at all clear the FBI had the names of the sources since Steele got the info from contacts who got it from sources who, at least in some cases, were not actual witnesses to the information.
Even if the FBI had names for the sources, so what? They would have had to confirm the info, at least if they were doing their job.
There is no evidence that the FBI confirmed anything of significance in the Steele dossier.
MikeM, I suspect one of your 13k special agents was tasked with confirming Michael Cohen’s trip to Prague, and travel for any associated Russians to Prague, and came back with no he didn’t, but they went forward with the dossier.
This Mar 27 MSNBC interview answer by Dr. Evelyn Farkas Deputy Asst Dir. DoD now has more meaning given the current knowledge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gapRNpEjXUo
MikeN: “MikeM, I suspect one of your 13k special agents …”
I give you my solemn word that MikeM is not a sockpuppet for James Comey. 🙂
Falcon Heavy scheduled for launch tomorrow at 1:30 pm tomorrow. This is significant because it is the largest rocket since the Saturn V (you know, the one they launched 50 years ago!) and because it is a pretty risky launch with a good chance of spectacular failure.
http://www.spacex.com/webcast
Tom,
The payload includes an old Tesla belonging to Musk.
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Oh yeah. Mike M’s good. I know this guy Shearer who knows some Russians who say he’s clean; HRC put me in touch.
Stock market drop is being called a correction. I think it is because of the possibility of NAFTA falling apart. Trudeau has apparently read The Art of the Deal, and is threatening to pull Canada out. Problem is Canada’s being in NAFTA is the vehicle for other trading partners to bypass US tariffs, and exiting makes the other trading partners less interested.
Tom Scharf (Comment #166911): “Falcon Heavy … is the largest rocket since the Saturn V (you know, the one they launched 50 years ago!)”
Actually, the space shuttle was larger in terms of takeoff weight, thrust, and payload to orbit (if you include the orbiter as part of the payload).
That said, a successful Falcon Heavy launch will be impressive. An unsuccessful one is potentially even more impressive.
Something strange about the Grassley memo. It doesn’t just say that Steele got some info from Blumenthal, it says that Steele’s memo said, “received this report from …”
The quote is in the original. Nowhere else does Steele name sources. Also, there is no room for a company report on Oct 19, as 134-136 are taken from Oct 18-Oct 20.
Never mind. Atlantic is reporting that this new memo is the Shearer dossier, with a note by Steele. I think it is in the original too. There is a redacted page that if zoomed can possibly be reconstructed.
Mike M,
Yes, I guess the orbiter was a bit of dead weight that wasn’t being counted, ha ha. SpaceX is going to try to land all 3 of the boosters after launch. You would never catch NASA launching a sports car into space, privatizing space has its curious advantages. I was getting some vibes that NASA is getting a bit green eyed about SpaceX. I never seriously thought the first flag planted on Mars might actually be corporate.
Looks like Trump’s lawyers are worried his tendency to “exaggerate” would not serve him well in an interview with Mueller. The chances of him not lying by the FBI standard of “creating the crime during the interview” is approx. zero in my view.
Tom Scharf (Comment #166919): “Looks like Trump’s lawyers are worried his tendency to “exaggerate†would not serve him well in an interview with Mueller. The chances of him not lying by the FBI standard of “creating the crime during the interview†is approx. zero in my view.”
Like most people, Tom completely underestimates Trump. Trump is fully in control what he says. He only sounds out of control because he plays by completely different rules than a conventional politician.
“Looks like Trump’s lawyers …” In other words, anonymous sources, eagerly seized on by the press. When will people stop believing such rubbish?
SpaceX: What an effing spectacle that was.
Simultaneous landings of the two side boosters right back at the launch pad. Gratuitous shots of “Starman” riding in his Tesla in orbit. Live video from the pieces, no more of those lame animations.
NYT: “Whether the damage remains limited to markets or spills over into the general economy remains to be seen, but we could well be on the verge of another global financial crisis.”
“It is also difficult to excuse the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress for providing us with an unfunded tax cut at precisely the wrong time in the economic cycle.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/opinion/market-collapse-blame-game.html
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Vox: “Is this decline a direct reaction to Trump’s tax cuts? In a word, yes. This is a predictable outcome of giving large deficit-financed tax cuts when the economy is already operating at essentially full speed.” (Hmmmm…well I guess you could have predicted it before it happened then? Strange how pundit economic models only seem to work in hind cast).
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Snicker. Shameless. Ignore success for an entire year but blame a two day blip immediately on Trump and Republicans. I don’t think “expert” credibility could get much lower, but they sure are trying.
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I just love the term “unfunded tax cut”, I had no idea the government was generating the wealth. I fully support taxing the government even more to pay for this tax cut.
We’re still up 6K points from where we were before the election. Shrug.
A tax cut isn’t a tax cut, it’s a tax expenditure. All your money belongs to the government, they just let you keep some. Remember, “You didn’t build that.”
>we could well be on the verge of another global financial crisis.
If you accept that the Great Depression was because of Smoot Hawley tariffs, and the stock market crash was because of a break in the logjam, then this is a reasonable statement.
I think the general consensus was that Trump’s NAFTA renegotiations and threats of trade war are not going anywhere. Canada entered TPP in late January and Trudeau was encouraging of NAFTA at Davos. Last Wednesday, Trudeau says he doesn’t think Trump will pull out of NAFTA, but that Canada has contingencies if he does. Then on Friday, Trudeau made statements about walking away from NAFTA, that Canada will not accept any old deal. There was an immediate reaction to this in the stock market.
All January, Jim said the rise was ridiculous was going to blow off. Then it blew off.
Mind you: Neither he nor I are seasoned predictors.
I’m a bit more impressed when people publicly state their predictions prior to the event happening, ha ha. There was a general consensus the market was flying a bit too high, irrational exuberance and all. I think people are kind of relieved that it finally happened.
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I’ll accept predictions from anyone who saw the 2008 meltdown coming which in hindsight seems rather obvious. That list has about 10 people on it. Being an economic pundit requires no previous track record, and a bad track record doesn’t seem to matter either. My guess is the next major meltdown will be related to a debt crisis and people no longer seeing the US as a safe haven. Perhaps more than a decade from now. Since I didn’t predict anything in 2008 you can safely disregard anything I say.
Tom,
Of course you should be more impressed if someone reveals predictions before they happen. Also, if they frequently predict things publicly and have a proven successful record.
Jim didn’t predict when the market downturn would be– but he thought there just had to be a correction at some point. We don’t play “predict and move around” so no, we didn’t do anything based on the idea that the market was a bit overheated. He just kept marveling at the spectacular growth in January. So, he isn’t worried it went down.
OTOH: perhaps next month we’ll discover we should have been worried. 🙂
There was a drop of over 1000 points in Aug 2015. Some big names were suggesting the market would never recover back then. Jim Kramer advised anyone investing on margin to sell it all.
Those text messages are making the FBI look bad. It’s the gift that keeps on giving for the right.
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“potus (Obama) wants to know everything we’re doing.” Calling Virginians who voted against then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s wife for a state Senate seat “ignorant hillbillys.” The FBI knew about Clinton emails on Weiner’s laptop a month before Comey made the announcement.
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I doubt Fox is going out of their way for context, but this just looks bad.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/02/07/more-texts-between-strzok-and-page-uncovered-lead-to-more-questions.html
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Amusingly the NYT’s take on the same texts are: “FBI Texts Reveal Admiring View of Then-Director James Comey”.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/02/07/us/politics/ap-us-trump-russia-probe-fbi.html
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The FBI in general may not be any more partisan than other agencies, but these people obviously were. It seems everyone who lives near DC automatically turns into a fire breathing dragon by some air-borne plague. If Mueller had kept these people on the team his investigation would be over, good move on his part. The damage is still being done.
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There is no real reason the FBI needs to be in DC, among other agencies. Realistically it would be a good thing to move some of these agencies to the rest of America. It’s not 1850 where people ride horses to work. They would be less expensive to operate as well. DC has a very high cost of living.
Tom Scharf
I’m sure they aren’t. But the advantage of having press on opposite sides of the political spectrum is *other* agencies can, if they wish, dig for and present context.
In this case, it happens that when the Dem congress-critters or Dem leaning beaurocrats provide *more* context to other agencies, then additional redacted memos come out giving *even more* context.
So for example: after Nunes memo we learned “context” that FBI said *something* about Steele memo being connected to an identified US citizen and being politically motivated. We now know that was *precisely* the level of specificity. That is: no mention that it was connected and funded by the Clinton campaign and so on.
Right now, the problem for the FBI and the DEM side so far is that they haven’t manage to only leak or communicate that a tiny controlled snippet of info of their choosing. After the tiny controlled snippet comes out, more comes out.
In contrast, at least for now, it looks like the GOP side would, if they could, provide *more* info and are happy to make it available when the FBI/DEM side responds with their snippet. So we see FBI/DEM side howl that any information release will somehow destroy our natinoal security. Info is released– it’s obvious that info is ZERO danger to national security. The FBI/DEM side has different people flailing in different ways. Someone provides “context” — which then puts GOP side to release more stuff. (After all, if the “context” DEM/FBI side decided to release includes more info on what FBI had in FISA request, that undermines the claim that clarifying the context is a threat to national security. So more info– which the GOP side was probably eager to give out in the first place– has been coming out.)
It *may* be that if we knew “everything” there would be something to support the FISA request. But if so, the FBI and DEMS are going to have to reveal A LOT. They don’t wanna.
It’s a bit hard to believe these images are real.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS79Pk4naEk
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Who launches a car into space? How did this get past the committee? It’s a good thing this car is electric, those fossil fuel engines wouldn’t work up there. They missed their Mars trajectory and will now be heading near the asteroid belt. Here is the history of Mars exploration, maybe they will put the Tesla on it:
http://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/images/charts-diagrams/2017/20170424_mars-exploration-family-portrait-v08.jpg
The success of Fox News is arguably due to the increasingly leftward drift and group think of the mainstream media. We now see the rise of Breitbart and company for the same reason. They are filling a cultural void in the market. When the media fails to reflect the values and cover the issues readers care about, somebody else will. This is a good thing as it puts pressure on the main players to keep their worst tendencies in check, although not always. CNN/WP/NYT pretty much cover things identically today. Their newsrooms are culturally self selecting. They can’t dictate morals though, and the more they shriek about the impure thinking of people like their readers, the more Breitbart wins. US journalism now looks much closer to UK tabloid journalism.
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It’s not an evil liberal plot. The media reflects the blue state / blue city locations they are based in, and the upper middle class liberal arts graduate mentality. The economic devastation of small town journalism over the past decade has made it worse.
From the NYT op-ed linked yesterday by Tom Scharf, “The market collapse blame game”: “It was not simply that nothing was done to stop global stock valuations from reaching levels seen only three times in the past hundred years…”
Wow…I’m gathering that Mr. Lachman believes that governments should regulate stock prices, globally. One of his listed credentials is former deputy director in the IMF’s policy development and review department. I wonder if this view of pan-governmental economic interventionism is widely held at the IMF.
I never knew someone was supposed to “do something” to prevent stock valuations from rising!
Apparently, it is necessary that the stock market never experiences corrections after large rises. I didn’t know that. But someone who classifies a 5-10% pullback as a “collapse” does. And, well, he’s an expert, so…
After reading the Black Swan I have become convinced the small stuff in the economy is somewhat predictable, but the meaningful (negative) changes are Black Swans more often than not. Whether it is 9/11, irrationally and aggressively loaning people money who can’t be expected to pay it back, wars, etc.
Speaking of not paying back loans, I saw in the WSJ or somewhere that government backed student loans are about to become a net cost for the government. Yet another of Obama’s time bombs.
Vox: Is 100% renewable energy realistic? Here’s what we know.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/4/7/15159034/100-renewable-energy-studies
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Summary: The models say no, so ignore them and wish for magic. I find the discussion on the flaws of energy models to be one that never gets applied to climate models (“Pretending we can predict the far future is silly”, ha ha). At least the discussion on how cost increases dramatically as variable carbon free energy is increased is somewhat honest.
Obama wants to know everything we are doing.
Comey announced the investigation was over in July. This text was early Sept. What were they doing?
New e-mails with Weiner laptop didn’t happen until late Sept, announced by Comey in late Oct.
What was there for Obama to keep tabs on?
MikeN,
“What was there for Obama to keep tabs on?”
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Serious question, rhetorical question, or are you joking?
Maybe it was for unremarkable, non-nefarious reasons. It’s not unreasonable (in my view) to speculate that a President [might] want to know what’s going on so he can control / affect the media spin, for example.
shrug
Or because it might affect public support statements, ‘distancing’, endorsements, so on.
SteveF, perhaps I should ask the same of you.
The investigation was over, Comey had told Congress that the FBI had completed its investigation. Why did Obama think otherwise?
Or maybe, MikeN, the reference to Obama’s interest was with regard to the Russian investigation.
CNN “debunks” speculation about “Obama’s interest” by quoting anonymous sources that were familiar with Strzok’s thinking. I guess that clears it up, ha ha.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/07/media/right-wing-media-fbi-text-message-clinton-investigation/index.html
The hysterical reaction to Trump wants a military parade is over the top as usual. Trump wants to honor the military, how could he do such a thing? I very much doubt we can outdo the Norks, they have that goose stepping spectacle down.
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Of course the critics still support the military, of course, of course. Kneeling during the National Anthem isn’t dishonoring the flag. Endlessly highlighting a few bad cop shootings isn’t dishonoring police. Calling people who merely voted for Trump a white supremacist isn’t racist. It’s amazing, the power of words.
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“Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton University, said some Americans are criticizing Trump’s proposed parade not because they don’t support the military, but because, in contrast to other countries, the U.S. has always wanted to “imagine ourselves celebrating values that go beyond the military.â€
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He’s a professor so it is obviously true because the people at Princeton know what America is thinking. I wonder what he would think about a parade honoring academia? What a horrible idea. I have always imagined myself celebrating values that go beyond academia, but it’s not because I don’t support academia.
I thought the idea of a march of veterans, including as far back as they are still alive, and maybe without uniforms – citizen soldiers – and without the machinery was an attractive one.
If that was done I would go — to watch and be respectful.
MikeN,
Mr Obama is a life-long ‘progressive’ politician, and appears quite dedicated to making sure the USA becomes more like Sweden. He was therefore obviously interested in Hillary winning the election over Trump. He didn’t need any more motivation than that to be very interested in the FBI’s “investigations” of Hillary’s email scandals and of Trump and his campaign.
I like the tanks and missiles and planes and so forth. Air shows are very popular and it’s not because of the pilots. B-2 flyovers are the greatest thing ever. I saw one at an air show and it flew about 50 feet high. Very, very impressive. A proper argument can be made that it is a waste of money and most people can’t actually go see it, and there is a nagging feeling the US probably wouldn’t be very good at it anyway. I could live with a more human-centric version but I do love the toys and I can’t deny it. We have the best military in the world, we pay a gazillion dollars for it, and it’s not unseemly to let them show their stuff. Now let me get back to my Call of Duty game.
From an article entitled “How nuclear weapons research revealed new climate threats”: “Climate models are often derided as unreliable approximations of the Earth’s complex systems, particularly among climate change deniers. But thanks to advances in computational power, the inclusion of more Earth components, and other technical strides, these simulations are becoming incredibly powerful. They can predict with growing certainty how global warming is already altering the planet, and how it’s likely to in the future.”
Apparently powerful = reliable. You learn something new every day.
Of the course, the paper doesn’t claim that. Even the press release only says “The study does not attribute the 2012-2016 drought to Arctic sea ice loss. However, the simulations indicate that the sea-ice driven precipitation changes resemble the global rainfall patterns observed during that drought, leaving the possibility that Arctic sea-ice loss could have played a role in the recent drought.”
I like the flyovers because they are the machine equivalent of acrobatics. It’s fun to watch in the same way gynmastics, diving and dancing are fun to watch.
Tanks rolling slowly down the streets? Displays of missles? Even guys marching? ….. Not so much fun to watch.
That said: I find things like the Rose Bowl Parade and the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade super boring too. But other people like them. So I guess closing the streets for those is no worse than closing them for marathons and other things I find inconvenient and not fun to watch. (Mind you, marathons close streets for even longer than parades.)
The only parades I like are fairly short and include mostly grade schools and high school kids getting a chance to show off. (Of course you get other things in there too.)
mark bofill (Comment #166944): “Maybe it was for unremarkable, non-nefarious reasons.”
I see no innocent reasons for a president to keep tabs on an ongoing FBI investigation, other than a general “Are you investigating this?”.
Mike M.,
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Innocence or guilt in high profile cases can have political implications. Politicians worry about politics. I don’t see the issue.
Not to mention that the FBI is ultimately answerable to the President, and in that sense the President is responsible and maybe even accountable for the FBI.
Not to say I think President Obama was above dirty deeds, merely that there need be no hypothetical dirty deed to explain his interest here, in my view.
mark bofill (Comment #166956): “Innocence or guilt in high profile cases can have political implications. Politicians worry about politics. I don’t see the issue.”
If the FBI were investigating you or me, they would not keep us posted on the progress of the investigation. We probably could not even expect an answer to the question “Am I under investigation?”
Politicians, including the president and his friends, should be entitled to no special consideration. Certainly the press and the Democrats are unanimous in making that claim about the current president. If Obama was demanding details about an ongoing investigation, that was highly improper. Maybe worse than improper.
Mike M.,
Okay, but even if it shouldn’t in principle give the President special consideration, as a practical matter I think it does. Given this reality, it seems plausible to me that President Obama might have wanted to keep tabs on what was going on in the HRC email investigation for political reasons. While we can argue about whether or not he should be entitled to do this, perhaps we can agree that there is nothing criminal about him doing this. That there is nothing criminal about the President keeping tabs on what his FBI are up to so he can play politics more effectively is the point I’m arguing.
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Also – not that this mattes with respect to the point under discussion, but as an aside I think the President really is a special case for the FBI, because he can fire them. Ultimately the President isn’t subject to the FBI the same way you or I are; he’s subject to Congress. But it’s neither here nor there for our purposes I think.
Mike M,
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I guess my view is colored by the theory I cling to that the FBI isn’t a separate branch of government. They’re under the President’s authority. I know these days people seem to want to make them their own thing, but I don’t think they are or should be.
Oh, I didn’t respond to this part so:
Certainly, but in my view this means nothing except that the press and the Democrats behave exactly the way one would expect unprincipled partisans to behave. It doesn’t make their view correct. As far as I am concerned, much of the press and some liberals demonstrate little [else] except unreasoning tribal loyalty. In fairness, of course plenty of conservatives do the same thing. But. Whatever. 🙂
mark bofill (Comment #166958): “… it seems plausible to me that President Obama might have wanted to keep tabs on what was going on in the HRC email investigation for political reasons. While we can argue about whether or not he should be entitled to do this, perhaps we can agree that there is nothing criminal about him doing this”.
I don’t see anything criminal in keeping tabs, for the reasons you give. If he was passing info on to subjects of the investigation, that might be a different story. Perhaps one of our legal eagles can clarify.
Mike,
Heh, why would he need to? It sounds like the FBI was already using kid gloves to handle HRC in the first place. No recording of interviews, not putting her under oath, drafting the exoneration before finishing interviewing key witnesses, softening the language of the findings…
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Pretty darling of them. Doesn’t sound like HRC would have much needed the President’s help.
M Bofill: “I guess my view is colored by the theory I cling to that the FBI isn’t a separate branch of government. They’re under the President’s authority.”
Exactly right.
See this commentary from 2016 by a former law clerk to the liberal Justice Blackmun.
…..
” The power to prosecute or not does not rest with the FBI, or the “career prosecutors†in the DOJ Mr. Miller mentions and Mr. Akerman adverts to, or even the attorney general of the United States. It rests with the president and the president only. He is the one in whom Article II of the Constitution vests “the executive authority†(of which criminal prosecution is a key component). He is the one the Constitution charges to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.†He is the one who can render moot any pending or future federal prosecutions (even prior to indictment—more on that later) by pardoning individuals. And he is also the one who can declassify documents (in a world of overclassification that tends to sweep in things already in the public domain), essentially rendering innocent conduct that may before have been criminal. He controls both classification and criminal prosecution, the two powers central to the Clinton email incident.
Over the past few weeks, it would have been easy to lose sight of these constitutional facts, given how people in the media, some members of Congress and others talked about how Comey, the FBI, other people in DOJ, and the attorney general were going to proceed. These folks had decisions to make, to be sure, but those decisions ultimately were decisions about what SUGGESTIONS to make within the executive branch, whose ultimate arbiter is the president himself.” https://verdict.justia.com/2016/07/15/three-important-constitutional-lessons-take-fbi-director-comeys-statements-hillary-clintons-email-management
…..
In my view, Trump has the absolute legal right to fire Mueller. If anyone objects, the remedy is impeachment. Since Trump is in reality the chief prosecutor he cannot obstruct his own investigation by ending it.
JD
Thanks JD.
[Edit: Wow. I didn’t realize people could be impeached after leaving office. Thanks again!]
Re: Divergence of Tree Ring Proxies beginning around 1960s from actual temperatures.
The big kerfuffle over Mann’s 98 and 99 papers and other advice to policymakers (Such as WMO 1999) [could have the exact papers wrong, but the gist of my question is the same] was that when the tree rings started getting smaller even though temperatures were rising, there was clearly an issue with the tree rings. Up at least through 2010, there was no answer why (allegedly) tree rings could be used as a proxy for temperatures up to about 1960, but that they didn’t work after that.
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So my simple question now is: Is there any recent science that convincingly explains why tree rings showed a decline in temperature (using growth and density as proxies) after 1960 while in the centuries before growth and increased density tended to show increases in temperature.
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Also, the obvious question is that if the tree rings aren’t valid now, how do we know they were valid 1,000 years ago?
JD
M Bofill: “I didn’t realize people could be impeached after leaving office. Thanks again!”
Haven’t looked closely, but I think all that means is that you can’t hold office again. Don’t believe it is like a criminal prosecution.
JD
JD,
Ah. Well, Hillary is unlikely to ever hold office again anyway, so..
M Bofill: “Well, Hillary is unlikely to ever hold office again anyway, so..”
….
In all seriousness, if Trump or the AG decides to prosecute her, she is subject to criminal prosecution unless the statute of limitations has run. Nothing that happened under Obama immunizes her from prosecution. I expect that, so far, the decision not to prosecute her is a political one; not one that is mandated any legal roadblock. (other than potentially the statute of limitations, again)
JD
JFerguson, it makes more sense that he was asking about the Russia investigation, which was not a criminal investigation but a counterintelligence investigation.
All the people saying Obama would get involved in Hillary’s e-mail investigation, I repeat that the investigation was declared “complete” by Comey two months earlier. If this text is about the Hillary e-mail investigation, then there is a major story that has not been covered. What was happening in the Clinton e-mail investigation in late August/early September?
JD, I think Mann’s proxies exhibit the divergence later than 1960. Briffa’s graph was the one that was cut from 1960 on.
Briffa makes an assumption that the divergence is caused by recent anthropogenic factors to allow him to ignore the possibility that the trees were not working with higher temperature in the past. Global warming caused the divergence.
Note also, that in some instances, the divergence operates in the other direction. Mann’s hockey stick is caused by trees that grew more with higher levels of CO2. One version of Yamal/Polar Urals has the same effect, but Yamal does not appear in Mann’s 98 paper.
You should try asking Rob Wilson for detail on divergence. He sent me some papers awhile back.
MikeN: “You should try asking Rob Wilson for detail on divergence. He sent me some papers awhile back.”
Thanks. I am just looking for a broad explanation. In 2010, everyone agreed that the divergence had not been explained. Has that changed in any substantial way? I am trying to get out a blog post dealing with part of Court of Appeals opinion in Steyn v. Mann, and I don’t need to go into a lot of detail. I just want to make sure that I am basically correct, that as of now, there is no scientifically hard explanation for the divergence — much the same as the situation in 2010.
JD
Steve McIntyre makes the case that this text was about Hillary. The details of her FBI interview were released to the public around then.
https://twitter.com/ClimateAudit/status/961676653393924097
It’s my cynical opinion that nobody knows why because they were worried what they might find. If they truly investigated it then they might have to write a report that tree rings aren’t reliable. Funding for that study probably wasn’t readily available, or they did investigate it and decided to not to publish anything. I know McIntyre made a point of showing how one could get updated tree ring data in the field in a matter of a day or two.
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If you want to really be cynical about reconstructions follow the Gergis farce over at Climate Audit. That is a world class example of knowing the result before data processing was done and doing whatever is necessary to make it fit.
1. Gergis publishes hockey stick result.
2. CA finds math error, no hockey stick. Retracted.
Quite a public dilemma Gergis made for himself, one could call it the perfect test case for climate science reconstruction integrity.
Choice 1: Publish the study with the valid math as originally shown that gets an unfortunate result.
Choice 2: Spend two years finding some “new and improved” math that will generate a HS.
Guess what happened. Mann was involved so no guessing is required.
https://climateaudit.org/2012/10/30/karoly-and-gergis-vs-journal-of-climate/
DNI Clapper was getting briefed on the Hillary e-mail investigation in Sept 2015.
Mike M,
“Maybe worse than improper.”
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The President is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. He/she is most certainly not subject to investigation by people in the Justice Department who work for him/her. The constitution provides for cases wher the president behaves unlawfully: impeachment. The entire idea of a “special prosecutor” trying to investigate a president is baldly and clearly unconstitutional. If the president has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, then the constitution provides the appropriate process. Mueller’s ‘investigation’ is completely unconstitutional.
What if Peter Strzok was reassigned not because of bias, but a separate issue where he was found to have leaked material regarding Apple’s IPhone security?
The entire idea of a “special prosecutor†trying to investigate a president is baldly and clearly unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court found otherwise in Morrison v. Olson (that was evaluating the now-expired Ethics in Government Act, which allowed for special prosecutors, and placed some limits on the President’s ability to fire them). The main opinion’s by Justice Rehnquist…there’s a long dissent by Justice Scalia that agrees with you. I won’t say it’s an easy read but it’s got some interesting history.
MikeN.
Impossible! He would have disappeared and nobody would have ever found his body…
:p
See Also: http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-02-02
Joseph W.
A lot of people think that Scalia’s dissent in Morrison was correct, and there is a chance that Morrison would be overruled today. Linda Greenhouse wrote a very ironic (in today’s world) column about special counsels around 18 months ago saying how brilliant Scalia was. She ended the column saying Scalia’s analysis was “airtight.” See https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/opinion/the-president-the-prosecutor-and-the-wheel-of-fortune.html?_r=0
Thanks! Though I see it was 7-1 with Scalia dissenting alone, and Kennedy not taking part.
I found it interesting to read because I had casually supposed (quite incorrectly) that special prosecutors were justified as a delegation of Congress’ own power to investigate (which has continued uninterrupted since ratification). But that didn’t get a mention in the opinion.
I note that one reason the Court upheld the process is that Congress did not expand its own role beyond impeachment, and did not completely eliminate the President’s ability to fire the prosecutor for good cause (earlier statutes, where the President needed consent of the Senate to fire Executive officials, had been overturned).
btw,
Haven’t looked closely, but I think all that means is that you can’t hold office again. Don’t believe it is like a criminal prosecution.
I haven’t checked either, but I’ve read there were two reasons that Jefferson Davis wasn’t prosecuted for treason. One was that the process was taking too long in violation of his speedy trial rights. The other was that the Fourteenth Amendment, which deprived him of the ability to hold office again, had already “punished” him, so that a trial would amount to double punishment.
(Of course, since he wasn’t prosecuted, that proposition was not tested in court…but I still found it fascinating. I suspect the politics of reconciliation also played a role.)
The independent counsel statute to which Scalia objected has been repealed. It is not relevant to Mueller. Mueller answers to Rosenstein, and Scalia if he ever chooses to unrecuse, and ultimately Trump.
Trump should just insist in an interview that per Justice Department regulations and federal law, the President will only take questions regarding subjects that are in Mueller’s purview as announced by Rosenstein.
MikeN,
Scalia may find it impossible to unrecuse at this point, never having recused himself in connection with this investigation.
There is at least one other reason he cannot unrecuse, but perhaps it’s less legalistic.
Joseph W. ” The other was that the Fourteenth Amendment, which deprived him of the ability to hold office again, had already “punished†him, so that a trial would amount to double punishment.”
…..
This is one issue I remember distinctly from my long ago law school days. I was in an ethics class, and the issue was raised as to whether it was unfair to punish an attorney twice for the same violation. (Attorney goes to jail for theft. Also, loses his license.) The rule explained by the law professor was that the double punishment was valid. (The more precise term where purely criminal matters are being raised is whether a defendant has been subjected to “double jeopardy.”)
Luckily, I don’t practice in the criminal law area, but it appears to me the law of double/jeopardy/punishment has been narrowed compared to what it was after the Civil War.
JD
Sessions.
j ferguson
Scalia resurrecting from the dead and reclaiming his seat would raise interesting legal issues related to lifetime appointments.
especially difficult to reclaim a seat in which someone else is sitting.
Joseph W,
Scalia was right and Rehnquist wrong. By the odd logic of Rehnquist, Congress could set up an independent “congressional executive branch” that supercedes the President and so renders him powerless. That ruling was just another in the long line foolish SC decisions motivated by political expediency instead of the plain words of the Constitution.
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Fortunately, that foolish law has expired, and so the problem remains: if Mueller is not accountable to the executive, then who is he accountable to? The answer is “nobody”. Like I said before: plainly unconstitutional. I suspect the Supreme Court would today agree.
J Ferguson,
“especially difficult to reclaim a seat in which someone else is sitting”
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In academia I think it is called emeritus status😉
j ferguson,
Yes. So one of legal question might be do they have to increase the number of seats to 10? Another: does “for life” expire the first time you die? Or only when you die permanently?
Oh. The legal questions one must ponder!
There’s possession too. Shouldn’t leave that out of the equation. Who or what is actually occupying Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s body right now?
From the link, Linda Greenhouse Sep 2016: “So Bill Clinton appears well on his way back to the White House (albeit in a different capacity)”
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Ha ha…
That opinion on prosecuting the president won’t be showing up again in the NYT’s for quite a while now I estimate. I give her credit for not writing the exact opposite column a few months later.
There is a perfectly good and uncontroversial process for removing a President, it’s called an election. It’s worked for a very long time.
Marc: “Possessed” that’s really good. thanks.
I am getting a kick out of all the complaining that Rand Paul “shut down the government” by having the temerity to insist that the Senate follow its own rules. So far as I can tell, the “shutdown” lasted from midnight to about 3:00 a.m.
Sorry John. 🙂 I’ll try to step up the quality a little.
I don’t get how a Supreme Court Justice like O’Connor can resign from the Court, and then continue to hear cases on lower courts.
For that matter, the practice of resigning effective when a replacement is approved by the Senate, should probably be outlawed. It is more efficient, but the Constitution says the President fills vacancies, and there is no vacancy if you are continuing to practice.
NYT: American Spies Gave $100,000 to Russian Who Wanted to Sell Material on Trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/us/politics/us-cyberweapons-russia-trump.html
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1. I want my money back
2. I want these people FIRED
Tom Scharf,
Heh, when you need dirt on a political opponent, what’s $100K? The best part was that the deal was actually for $1 million, the $100K was just the first installment, after which their Russian source disappeared. Should those responsible for this all be in jail? Sure. But they will skate. The best we can hope is that at some point there will be a housecleaning of all the upper managers at the FBI and DOJ. More likely only the very worst few will suffer any consequences, while the rest continue to operate outside the law.
JD, not all trees used in proxies showed divergence. Also it should be noted that tree proxies used for temperature reconstructions included tree ring densities and not all proxy divergences started in the same time period. In addition divergence is not limited to tree proxies. If one (like me) were to think of temperature proxies as giving rather random results that due to persistence can show rather lengthy series ending trends both upward and downward in direction, the divergence problem is to be expected. That someone can select proxies after the fact that show modern warming is also no surprise given the random nature of these persistent trends.
Given also that most scientists constructing temperature reconstructions do not have a problem with selecting proxies after the fact – and not by using carefully selected and physically reasonable criteria before the fact and then using all the selected proxies – it is rather easy to see why little effort would be made to explain divergence. A proxy with divergence can be simply (and incorrectly) thrown out.
The real question then is how these divergent proxies were ever considered and became part of a controversy. It may have been that those proxies fit an earlier period of instrumental data and then lost it latter and were kept in the mix since when a spaghetti graph or a graph with averaged data is used the divergence with a single or a low percentage of proxies would not be evident. (In my analysis of most climate science data the first effort I make is to look a single pieces of data and determine what those reveal.)
Anyway what I see generally with criticisms of climate science papers and particularly those dealing with temperature reconstructions is that a number of them get bogged down in the details and lose track of the more basic problems – which in the case of temperature reconstructions is, and I repeat, not having an a prior criteria for selecting proxies or at the very least using a sophisticated cross validation method with in-sample data and then making every effort to test it against out-of-sample data.
>do not have a problem with selecting proxies after the fact – and not by using carefully selected and physically reasonable criteria before the fact
No one else seems to have a problem with it, but it bothers me that they run the temperature against seasonal or monthly temperature series, then pick the one with the best correlation and declare that this is what the proxy represents. Even five day periods get used.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #167000): “If one (like me) were to think of temperature proxies as giving rather random results that due to persistence can show rather lengthy series ending trends both upward and downward in direction … The real question then is how these divergent proxies were ever considered and became part of a controversy.”
Most physical scientists are very familiar with random, uncorrelated noise. We are much less familiar with autocorrelated noise, such as from a random walk (AR1) process. The familiar sort of noise will not produce a significant chance correlation between two time series. So, if you take a temperature time series and a tree ring time series, run a correlation, and get a highly significant result you might conclude that the result is meaningful. But it is quite possibly just chance, due to autocorrelated noise in each series. Then the idea gets established and deviations get explained away since people “know” what the result should be. Eventually, the system should self correct; that seems to be happening with tree rings. But the correction is slow since people are unwilling to abandon what they “know”; all the more so if they have built their careers upon it.
MikeN, this is a problem that I am not sure is well understood by those doing temperature reconstructions and even those criticizing their work. The problem is one of a high frequency correlation not necessarily translating into a low frequency one. A proxy could generally respond on a monthly or annual basis to temperature changes up and down, but since the longer term correlation depends on those changes being proportional to temperature changes and by nearly the same amounts over very long periods of time, a proxy that passes the higher frequency correlation test (after the fact and thus incorrectly) for selection for a temperature reconstruction could have a very different trend (low frequency correlation) than the trend of the instrumental record. This situation can be shown to readily exist by doing simulations. An example of this would be the situation whereby a large volcanic eruption in past times can be “seen” in a proxy series but the blip is not proportional to the expected change in temperature. It also might be the cause for the existence of a divergent proxy getting included in a temperature reconstruction. In the end there are two problems that can preclude proxy selection after the fact that would appear to counter one another. On the one hand it is the low frequency trends of a proxy response that are critical to a temperature reconstruction and on the other it is the trends which can show spurious relationships between temperature and response.
I would be more convinced that those doing temperature reconstructions were serious about the truth of the matter if they were diligently working on finding physically based criteria for a prior selection of proxies. It would be a lot of hard work and perhaps without the attention that a hockey stick can generate and even with the possibility that negative results would have to be published. I would think that the most promising places to look for valid temperature proxies are those that are more directly based on well known chemical and physical phenomenon like oxygen isotopic fractionation – which at least for large temperature fluctuations expected from glacial-interglacial periods seemed to give reasonable results.
Finally, I find in my experiences that it is physical scientists that are often the ones who do not understand the differing statistics that are required for situations where an outcome of a result cannot be conveniently repeated with a test. They do not understand or sufficiently appreciate the difference between in-sample testing and out-of-sample testing. I think this stems from most hard sciences having ready access to out-of-sample testing.
It’s not like they have much choice. There is only valid localized temperature data for a tiny period relatively. Doing it almost purely through correlation is suspect of course and iterating algorithms based on wished for results have corrupted the process. A straight out correlation search would also pick up negative correlations. Wonder how many times that turns up. It always bothers me only one magic algorithm result is typically shown. Showing the results from multiple algorithms would increase confidence. You could run a zillion algorithms on a correlation between height and NBA careers and they would almost all show the same result.
KF (and Mike M & MikeN) “what I see generally with criticisms of climate science papers and particularly those dealing with temperature reconstructions is that a number of them get bogged down in the details and lose track of the more basic problems – which in the case of temperature reconstructions is, and I repeat, not having an a prior criteria for selecting proxies”
….
Thanks very much to all of you for your responses.
……
To me a much bigger issue is whether the tree rings have any significant functional use at all other than possibly showing gross variations and changes, for, let us say, 1000 years ago. It seems to me that people are hung up on minor differences in temperatures as recorded in the last 175 years and are missing the elephant in the room. The divergences show that the tree rings are not, in any sense, fine-tuned measures of temperature. If that is the case, then all of the proclamations about, for instance, 2017 [or another recent year], being the warmest year in 1000 years are complete garbage and easily refuted: to me in a very basic sense, we don’t know what the temperatures were 1,000 years ago, and it is absurd to say that 2017 was the warmest (or third warmest — whatever) in history.
…..
Whenever various studies/press releases come out saying that a recent year is very warm compared to 1,000 years ago, the simple, basic response should be that we don’t know the temperatures from 1,000 years ago because the estimates for 1,000 years ago are based on proxies which are not fine-tuned, accurate measures of temperature. (I realize that there are other proxies for temperature, such as ice cores, but I believe the tree proxies form a very substantial basis for what, I would call, the rough guesses for temperatures that existed 1,000 years ago. My educated guess is that the other proxies are also not fine-tuned.) If we don’t know past temperatures, we surely don’t know whether today’s temperatures are higher than those of 1,000 years ago. These comparisons are crude basic guesses concerning what was occurring 1000 years ago and comparing it to what is occurring now.
JD
JD: “It seems to me that people are hung up on minor differences in temperatures as recorded in the last 175 years and are missing the elephant in the room. The divergences show that the tree rings are not, in any sense, fine-tuned measures of temperature.”
I think that is absolutely right. Tree rings are obviously a measure of favorable growing conditions. But temperature is only one part of that. I seem to recall that is known and accepted among tree ring researchers. That is, tree rings only provide temperature information when the limiting factor for growth is the length of the growing season. I have the impression that is used to “explain” disagreements between data sets.
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JD: “Whenever various studies/press releases come out saying that a recent year is very warm compared to 1,000 years ago, the simple, basic response should be that we don’t know the temperatures from 1,000 years ago because the estimates for 1,000 years ago are based on proxies which are not fine-tuned, accurate measures of temperature”.
You are absolutely correct. But there is another, more fundamental problem. Even if the tree rings were a specific measure of temperature, they are not sufficiently accurate to say that the Medieval Warm Period was cooler than the present. The most that can really be said is that it was somewhat more likely than not to have been cooler.
Mike M: “Even if the tree rings were a specific measure of temperature, they are not sufficiently accurate to say that the Medieval Warm Period was cooler than the present. The most that can really be said is that it was somewhat more likely than not to have been cooler.”
I would rephrase you last sentence to say that the most that can be done is to make a crude guess that that it was cooler 1,000 years ago. In today’s world, we can test hypothesises, and we don’t understand proxies that well. Our understanding of what proxies say for conditions 1,000 years ago is much worse.
JD
There is also the problem of local land based variations in temperature trends and even large ones over lengthy periods of time. As I recall the instrumental record for the US shows a slight cooling trend over the past 100 years for south eastern US and some large trends in northern regions of the US. It would take a large number of land based temperature proxies to average out these differences. That become a larger problem when one were required to hunt for locations with so-called temperature limiting conditions – like at high elevations.
JD, I think you might appreciate that if these facts, observations , theories and conjectures that we have discussed here were presented to a judge and on the other side he had scientists working in the field of temperature reconstructions who claimed that it is valid to select proxies for a temperature reconstruction that fit the recent instrumental records and throw out those that do not it would take a very statistically savy judge to go against the experts. He would have to explain it in his judgment. The reconstructionists would also be savy enough to say they use prior selection criteria like temperature limiting locations and summer growth only and only certain species of trees and the judge might well except that “expert” evidence without asking for hard evidence in published papers – or even if papers were presented as evidence he would have to be able to understand and find the flaws and unstated uncertainities in these papers.
KF: “JD, I think you might appreciate that if these facts, observations , theories and conjectures that we have discussed here were presented to a judge… it would take a very statistically savy judge to go against the experts.”
My point is that you don’t even need to go to statistics. (And, speaking as a lawyer trying to convince a judge, you don’t WANT to go to the statistics; it only gives the other side the chance to obfuscate and create straw-persons)
The underlying data for the statistics is not worthwhile. If the judge understands that the underlying data is not reliable for the purpose used, he will stop right there and not even bother with the statistics. Debating the statistics is very useful in the scientific community, but before a court, or for public policy purposes, it hardly matters. Delving into the statistics only confuses the Court and public opinion into believing that the underlying data is sound and should mostly be reserved for highly technical discussions among scientists.
…..
It is sort of like getting into a debate as to whether someone jumped off of a 300 foot cliff or a 350 foot cliff to commit suicide. Either would cause the death. In this instance, the data are unreliable, so there is nothing to compare the instrumental temperatures to from 1,000 years ago. (In determining whether today’s temperatures are warmer than those of 1,000 years ago.)
JD
On Trump blocking the release of the Dem response memo story here:
Poor form.
I don’t believe the FBI anymore when they say names need to be redacted for security reasons; they said that about the Nunes memo and that was clearly not so.
It looks like Trump is trying to suppress the response. Maybe he is. Maybe it’s a good response. Wish I could read it.
mark bofill (Comment #167011): “It looks like Trump is trying to suppress the response. Maybe he is.”
No, he is not blocking it; he sent it back for editing. I am getting cynical enough to suspect that the Democrats deliberately included classified stuff so as to make it look like Trump is suppressing the response. I’d believe that, if I thought they were smart enough.
Could be.
I’m aware that I’m biased in Trump’s favor. I deliberately try to entertain the possibility that my bias misleads me [and therefore] put forward possibilities like that. Trump might be trying to suppress the response. It’s not impossible, regardless of the fact that I’d prefer that it not be the case.
shrug.
JD Ohio (#167010): “straw-persons”
😀
We like to say “strawpeople”. Or at least Trudeau would.
Mark Bofill,
I want not to praise the FBI, but to bury it. The good that organizations do is often forgotten, while the evil they do is long remembered. So be it with the FBI: they have sold their souls in the hope that a corrupt, dishonest, and evil candidate would be elected president… their hopes were misplaced. Now they suffer the consequences of poor judgement, dishonesty, malfeasance, and hubris.
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I can find no sympathy in my heart for this sorry lot. Prison time seems not nearly severe enough a consequece for willful undermining of the rule of law. The loss of their jobs seems even less adequate a punishment. Sadly, most of the evil doers will suffer no consequence at all. There is little justice to be found in any of this, but we might hope the body politic will learn from this sorry episode, and eliminate a large portion of the permanent bureaucracy.
Sounds like you have it fairly straight JD. The whole enterprise relies on the assumption that a tree, judged sensitive to temperature over a relatively short time period, remained just as sensitive hundreds to thousands of years ago. A change in temperature would affect its sensitivity to temperature, together with its surrounding environment. The decline is just some evidence their underlying assumptions are nonsense.
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Then you have the obvious data manipulation issue that choosing time series displaying certain characteristics, biases the reconstruction to emphasize those characteristics ie produce hockey sticks. “Noise” that has been screened out of the modern part of the reconstruction would act to reduce any signal in the earlier part.
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Additionally, tree ring measurements can be coverted to points of a degree of temperature change? Ridiculous.
JD Ohio (Comment #167010)
Good luck with that approach JD. The issue at hand is a statistical one. It is probably why such issues should not go before a court of law. I suspect that the judge would be swayed by expert opinion and those experts if coming from the climate science community would be overwhelmingly wrong about the statistics or sufficiently ambivalent about it to convince the judge that they are correct.
Maybe we should have a mock trial here.
Craig Loehle has written some stuff on divergence. One was about how the response is quadratic to temperature, at high temperatures you get less ring growth.
Briffa’s response to divergence was to assume it was a modern effect, and was pretty open about it.
Defense I’ve seen is about comparing different proxies, but I thought they were making it up.
MikeN,
The more I read about tree ring proxies, the less credible the field becomes. As Kenneth correctly points out, the complete lack of a priori selection criteria means the entire field lies somewhere between dubious and garbage… and leaning strongly toward the later.
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The good news is that the field seems to have (correctly) become of very little consequence since AR3.
KF: “Good luck with that approach JD. The issue at hand is a statistical one.”
If we don’t know whether, using a gross oversimplification, the global average temperature in the 10th century was , pulling out some numbers for illustrative purposes, 54 or 57 degrees Centigrade, then how would we know, even assuming the statistics were very well done and not subject to serious dispute, whether the current temperatures are significantly higher or lower than those in the 10th century. In computer terminology — garbage in, garbage out.
With respect to the statistics that are typically disputed here or at Steve Mc’s, you might as well be writing in Chinese to a typical court; most courts have virtually no understanding of statistics, and if you get to moderate level statistics, you might as well be speaking a foreign language. A classic example of that is the Mann appellate court that said that Mann had been exonerated by “investigations” (Muir Russell and Oxburgh) that didn’t even focus on his work.
JD
DaveJR: “Additionally, tree ring measurements can be converted to points of a degree of temperature change? Ridiculous.”
I agree very much with your statement. That is also where I am coming from.
JD
JD Ohio,
” 56 or 57 degrees Centigrade”
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I do hope you mean Fahrenheit. 56 C is about 132 F.
Steve F:”I do hope you mean Fahrenheit. 56 C is about 132 F.”
Thanks. I was just throwing out numbers. Silly error occasioned by making a very simple point on my end. I was thinking of roughly a 1.5 degree Centigrade rise in temperature in the past 175 years and didn’t bother to calculate what the actual Centigrade temps would be.
JD
JD Ohio,
The best estimate rise since the mid 19th century is about 1C. The current rate is about 0.15C per decade… or about 1.2 C between now and 2100 if current trends continue. Most warming will be at high northern latitudes, at night, and in winter. That rate will likely drop a bit as the age of carbon draws to a close. The rate of warming will definitely fall if humanity determines geoengineering is needed to control temperatures, although I doubt it will. We (you and me) won’t be around to verify any of that, but the world won’t end, no matter what.
SteveF: ” (you and me) won’t be around to verify any of that, but the world won’t end, no matter what.”
I always hold out hope that with our increasing knowledge of DNA, I may live a lot longer than expected. We hold the keys to the kingdom. Keep myself in good shape. I think there is a 50/50 chance my teenage children may live indefinitely. As knowledge increases exponentially, I see no reason why DNA can’t be manipulated in a way that will greatly extend people’s lives.
JD
Re: Statistics and Divergence:
Craig Loehle seems to support my viewpoint. He states:
“My disagreements with the use of tree rings (by anyone, not just Mann) have nothing to do with a conspiracy, are not organized or directed by anyone, and are not personal. I just think tree rings (especially strip bark) are not valid more than about 100 years back in time no matter how fancy the statistics used.” https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/17/scientists-rebuttal-of-michael-manns-denierand-other-unsavory-labels-in-his-book/
JD
Jim Bouldin was one of the original contributors to RealClimate. A few years ago he was taken off their list. It appears he is not as favorable towards use of tree rings as he was before.
JD Ohio,
I once believed there would be rapid progress against the debilitating effects of aging, but it now seems clear that progress has been non-existent so far. Treatments for specific ailments have increased average life span in developed countries, but not increased maximum lifespan. The greatest gains in average life span have come from the basics associated with increasing wealth:vaccinations against fatal diseases, clean water, screens on windows, more and better food. Medical science has not moved the needle on maximum lifespan. It is sobering to remember that nearly every person who passes 100 years suffers from substantial mental decline. Until that changes, there seems little reason to hope for increased lifespan.
SteveF,
I’m with you on human lifespan. There is no evidence that any human has lived past 120. I get a newsletter from someone who thinks that’s going to change soon, but he seems very gullible to me. One of the things he talks about is work on mice. Mouse lifespans can be increased significantly by calorie restriction or some drugs. But humans are not mice. IMO, there may be some hope in extending healthy lifespan and preventing senile dementia, but I’m not expecting it any time soon.
A friend of mine is reading a book on sleep. Apparently a lot of good things happen when we sleep and almost everybody really needs eight hours of good sleep per night. Maybe that’s Trump’s problem. He brags that he only needs five hours of sleep a night.
DeWitt,
“Maybe that’s Trump’s problem.”
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Trump would tweet fewer really foolish things if he were sleeping more hours…. but only because one doesn’t tweet while sleeping. He needs to recognize that the first thing which pops into his head may not be a prudent thing to tweet, though I suspect he never will. His tweets damage his public support, needlessly offend many, and make implementing substantive policies more difficult than necessary.
I believe caloric restriction works the same in humans (and is in fact a very well conserved mechanism between species), it’s just that humans love their calories far too much to voluntarily restrict them.
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Essentially, it triggers survival mechanisms within cells to make them more resilient, particularly with regard to maintaining mitochondrial health and efficient disposal. An increase in cell resilience and survival act to increase overall organism resilience ie live longer.
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A similar effect can be caused by depriving the heart of blood for short periods of time. This triggers the survival mechanisms which can dramatically reduce damage to cardiomyocytes during much longer periods without blood flow.
DaveJR,
It’s really complicated, and it seems not at all clear that CR increases average human lifespan:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4115619/
SteveF/DaveJR,
A long time ago, I ran across an article a newspaper I was reading at breakfast that discussed people who were “into” calorie restriction with the goal of living a long time. The writer talked to the calorie restricting person and their family. I thought the whole issue was sort of amusing.
The calorie restrictor (husband/father) in the family was eating practically nothing. Evidently his dream was to be around for his great and great-great grand kids. Whoo hooo!
Meanwhile, the wife and kids reported that after he began severe calorie restricting, he was so horribly grumpy and hard to get along with that they exhiled him to his one set of rooms in the basement. They also reported he had become pretty much of the proverbial 98 lb weakling, so many tasks a normal guy could do easily were pretty much picked up by others in the family.
In this household, the man of the family was asking the wife and kids to open jars!!
Jim and I both laughed at this nothing that since the guy’s kid’s don’t even want to be around him, it’s likely he won’t have much of a relationship with his grand-kids much less his great-grandkids and so on. If so, he might be alive when his great-grandkids were around. But he wasn’t really going to be “around” for them in any real sense.
The other thing to consider is whether he will actually be self-reliant at 120 or whatever age he hopes to survive too. Even if he’s not in an Alzheimer’s unit, it’s likely he may weaken to the point of needing help with things like general house keeping, making beds, cooking foods. I doubt 90 year old children (if they survive that long too) are going to consider taking care of him much of a “gift”. The 60 year old grand children probably won’t either. So it seems to me that if the goal is to be “around” for your progeny, one needs to seriously consider whether you presence is likely to be a gift or a burden.
On the more scientific question of whether or not calorie restriction will actually work, it’s worth noting that one huge difference between lab rats and people is that lab rats in experiments are living in cages. Whether they live a long time or a short time, they are being fed, their cages are being cleaned, they are probably not being exposed to whatever diseases rats might die from and so on. The also don’t do things like drive cars and so get into car accidents and so on.
In contrast, people generally need to more or less figure out how to get food, clean their houses and want to live life in a way where they do encounter other people– and so other pathogens. As one ages it’s quite likely your immune system weakens, and so it’s not unlikely that some of these other factors will cut short ones’ life.
My bet is our only hope for viable life extension lies in the realm of DNA tweaks, surgical tweaks and engineered devices. Calorie restriction alone probably won’t do the trick.
Re: Aging
Most of the people responding here are assuming traditional anti-aging programs/therapies. I am guessing that there is a good chance that people will be able to create new organs and, even further out, transfer consciousness to whatever machine/process follows computers.
…..
For instance: “Researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Ohio State’s College of Engineering have developed a new technology, Tissue Nanotransfection (TNT), that can generate any cell type of interest for treatment within the patient’s own body. This technology may be used to repair injured tissue or restore function of aging tissue, including organs, blood vessels and nerve cells….
With this technology, we can convert skin cells into elements of any organ with just one touch. This process only takes less than a second and is non-invasive, and then you’re off. The chip does not stay with you, and the reprogramming of the cell starts. Our technology keeps the cells in the body under immune surveillance, so immune suppression is not necessary,” See https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170807120530.htm
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This is only the beginning and is quite revolutionary. It looks like we are fairly close to being able to recreate organs using DNA. If not, that will surely come within 20 to 40 years.
…..
I view the process of science as one that leads to the exponential increase of knowledge. (Easily, 10% per year] If you add that to what we already know, it is a virtual certainty that incredible advances in human health will occur in the not too distant future. As an example of the power of exponential increases, if you start out doubling a penny and do so for 30 days, you will have over $5,000,000. See http://www.savingtoinvest.com/power-of-compounding-1-million-now-or/
JD
JD Ohio,
That’s interesting. If that becomes viable, then I would see that as potentially life extending.
Things like calorie restricting: it probably can make some difference but not in a breakthrough way.
Lucia: “That’s interesting. If that becomes viable, then I would see that as potentially life extending.”
…..
The researchers said they had a 98% success rate. However, what convinced me was when a lead researcher was interviewed, he said they didn’t expect the process to work so easily, but it did.
JD
JD, your statement is exactly to my point.
Perhaps a brave and expert statistician could make the point of the basic flaw in the approach to nearly all the temperature reconstructions published to date and convince a judge (probably never a jury – unless Bull were involved). There are other approaches that have some statistical credibility like very rigorous cross validation of in-sample data. The optimum statistical test is comparing in-sample data with sufficient out-of-sample data and there appears little effort in the temperature reconstruction community in doing this. You here excuses like it is too difficult and expensive to do on an extended basis. It appears to me that the community does not really want to know or perhaps do not sufficiently understand the statistics to see the importance of such testing.
By the way, Jim Bouldin’s falling out with some in the reconstruction and climate science communities had to do with his pointing out the unreliability of the adjustment being made to tree rings to account for tree aging affects. Because of that falling out he appeared to become a friend of some of those in critiques camp. The last time I had a discussion with Jim Bouldin on selecting proxies for temperature reconstructions he vehemently disagreed with my approach of an a prior selection and said that after the fact selection is the only way.
Interesting that those working in this field make every effort to subscribe divergence effects as having an anthropogenic cause of recent origin and that those attempts can be readily seen as a way to save the credibility of the historical reconstruction data. Not often noted or mentioned but in a Mann reconstruction he and the authors actually truncated some more recent tree ring data that gave extremely high recent temperatures and attributed that upward divergence as due to CO2 fertilization.
I would agree that once valid statistical methods were used to establish a relationship between proxy response and instrumental temperatures there remains the problem of providing assurances and evidence that that relationship will hold going back centuries in time. That task would require rigorously (and not the typical hand wave) showing that a many of the same and different validated proxy kinds gave similar results going back in time.
Kenneth thanks for the detail. I don’t remember him participating in the Yamal discussion, where tree aging effects were important. Steve McIntyre was going back and forth with a random commenter(who maybe was Gavin) and I remember jumping in that he was doing the tree aging all wrong. Looking at it now, I’m not even sure my criticism was valid.
Jim was very defensive of Mann 08 at Amac’s site. I pointed out that some of the details he was stating as fact were not, having to do with the number of proxies passing correlation at a certain level.
>Trump would tweet fewer really foolish things if
I think people mock him for saying foolish things while he is thinking through what he wants to say. His tweets on Korea look very deliberate. Right now he is praising South Korea, demeaning North as a s——- without saying it.
Sometimes getting attacked for his tweets is his plan.
It is not normal, but it may not be foolish.
Harold W,
I think that would be “straw-kind”.
lucia (Comment #167033)
Even if that guy does not live a long time it will surely seem a long time and especially for his family.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #167041): “Even if that guy does not live a long time it will surely seem a long time and especially for his family.”
Reminds me of the guy in Catch 22 who always tried to be as bored as possible. That way he would seem to be living longer.
MikeN (Comment #167039): “Sometimes getting attacked for his tweets is his plan.
It is not normal, but it may not be foolish.”
I think that is correct. Trump’s tweets are deliberate and purposeful. The vast majority accomplish what he wants them to. A small fraction do blow up in his face since, unlike a normal politician, he is willing to take risks.
Well, now we know why the UK’s transition from fossil fuels to renewables isn’t proceeding at a rapid pace. Previously, I thought that it had something to do with the facts that renewables are more expensive (requiring subsidies), and as their proportion grows, create issues due to intermittency. But now I know that it’s due to an insufficiency of women in the industry.
“The energy sector is lagging sorely behind other industries in terms of diversity, meanwhile sustainable [green] businesses are very balanced. So the idea that lack of diversity is contributing to the issue of transition to renewables is very plausible.â€
HaroldW,
You need to brush up on your intersectionality.
Ahhhhh…it warms my libertarian leaning heart to see someone whose evil thoughts must be banned at the top of the Amazon Best Seller list.
Jordan Peterson – 12 Rules for Life
https://www.amazon.com/charts/2018-02-04/mostsold/nonfiction/
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Some of you may not know, but how the NYT creates it’s best seller list is a highly guarded secret, ostensibly so it can’t be hacked. When I learned this I started disregarding it. Somehow the #1 best selling and #2 most read non-fiction book at Amazon is nowhere to be seen on any NYT best seller list. Allegedly they use a selected low number of local bookshops, “right thinking” ones I imagine. I can imagine Peterson’s book not being a hot commodity in NYC. Update: Someone asked the NYT’s why – “Per the Bestsellers team, we do not include books published in Canada only”. A bit of a confusing answer from those nationalist hateful xenophobic bigots, ha ha.
https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2018/02/09/jordan-petersons-book-is-a-bestseller-except-where-it-matters-most.html
Tom,
The NYT has a system. The choice may or may not be influenced by politics.
The thing is: whether or not it’s “prestigeous”, the book is selling.
I worked in a bookstore when I was in high school. The NYT list mattered because it influenced our display.
My guess is nowadays more people just look at the Amazon rank.
HaroldW, I hope you read this little note that came with that Guardian link. I would think that that article required much hard work to produce and put it into the Guardian’s ever so objective perspective. I feel like a thief even reading from your link. I can only image the guilt you must feel.
You would think that those people who read a lot of books would not be persuaded in the books they read by what is on a best seller list and particularly by a single best seller list like that of the NYT’s. I do have acquaintances who I considered very nice people who read and quote the NYT as those who proselytize might quote the Bible. There are probably those who do the same with Fox News – I just do not know any at the present time.
Kenneth,
Lots of people want to be able to engage other readers on topic the other readers are thinking about. Reading “best sellers” facilitates this. Also, on average, “best sellers” generally are more interesting than books that bombed and failed to sell. So these lists do motivate people to read a book. Book stores tended to stock these book and highlight them.
Lots and lots and lots of books are published every year. Most people use some metric to pick which ones to read so book reviews, best seller lists and so on are all useful information.
There are so many books out there, you need to filter them somehow, and bestseller lists are one good way. Most of the stuff that gets high on bestseller lists is typically decent, but only if the subject matter is interesting to you. Amazon reviews are better than the NYT’s list IMO. The NYT not being transparent at all, but also the most prestigious, could lead a partisan to use that power in ways their readers would object to. Is it happening? I don’t know, but their lists are chock full of “socially important” books.
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I think most people interpret best seller as in “most sold” and even the NYT list will more or less line up here, mostly. People will certainly accuse the NYT of partisanship as knee jerk reaction, as I do. Here is the NYT’s explanation for not putting Ted Cruz’s book on their list in 2015:
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“We have uniform standards that we apply to our best seller list, which includes an analysis of book sales that goes beyond simply the number of books sold,” Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy explained when asked about the omission. “This book didn’t meet that standard this week.” Asked to specify those standards, Murphy replied: “Our goal is that the list reflect authentic best sellers, so we look at and analyze not just numbers, but patterns of sales for every book.”
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This book did show up about a month later. NYT: “Our approach serves Times readers by authenticating broadly popular books through the confidential reporting of a wide range of retailers. In order to avoid compromising that process, we do not disclose who reports sales to us,”
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They do fight against publishers reporting “book sales” to distributors that may or may not end up being sales to customers. A publisher can front load all their sales to make it look like it’s very popular. And being on the list increases sales dramatically. It’s an arms race, but I do note a bit of a moving target of explanations from the NYT.
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Summary: Look at more than one list.
Kenneth Fritsch (#167048) —
Like Ms. F-R., I too appreciate there not being a paywall. If a paywall were in place, I would never read the Gruaniad. [What, never? Well, hardly ever.]
I am fine with them soliciting donations, and also fine with my not supporting them. Also, last I knew its owner, Scott Trust Ltd., had assets of about £1000 million and was turning a profit, so I don’t think they’re in any great danger of going under.
Lucia,
“The choice may or may not be influenced by politics.”
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I’d place 10:1 odds it is so influenced…. just like everything else at that lefty rag.
Kenneth,
” I do have acquaintances who I considered very nice people who read and quote the NYT as those who proselytize might quote the Bible.”
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A lot of truth there. People who treat the NYT as if it was a flawless source of knowledge may be very well intended, but they just don’t think much about the often horrible (unintended) consequences of the policy tripe pushed by the NYT.
lucia (Comment #167050)
Motivation for me would be some book reviews: yes; best seller lists: no. Although depending on the crowd one might hang with, reading the same books (i.e. most likely best sellers) might help the conversations along.
There are also specialized books where groups gather to discuss them. When I was young I remember attending seminars where before and at the breaks there would be groups of people discussing Ayn Rand’s books and talking about how a character in the book would react to certain current situations – almost to the point of proselytizing and a major turn off for me.
The more I am acquainted with an author the more likely I am to read their books. I read all my brother’s and sister’s and daughter-in-laws father’s books. It is interesting how a fiction book by someone you know very well gives you additional insights into those persons thinking and philosophies.
HaroldW (Comment #167052)
From an anology of the Guardian soliciting (beggoring??) funds I suppose when you see a homeless person on the street you can refuse them by inference that they are actually not that bad off. Some people are just heartless. At least we should be good liberals about these matters and feel guilty about the situation and better still get someone else to make the contribution.
I recall reading, as a child, the story of a Scotsman who lived to be 110. Due to severe food allergies, he could tolerate only three foods, all white!: potatoes, oatmeal and goat’s milk. A diet that boring, I speculate, could result involuntary calorie restriction.
The benefit to caloric restriction is that it can limit over production of insulin, especially if the foods are low glycemic and consumed in moderation. However starving is bad as it increases corticosteroids, among other reasons. If one has terminal cancer, malnutrition can extend life, however, the diet will eventually be fatal.
blueice2hotsea,
” If one has terminal cancer, malnutrition can extend life, however, the diet will eventually be fatal.”
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Even if one does not have terminal cancer all diets are eventually fatal. Caloric restriction clearly extends life in mice. The data are less clear for non-human primates. For people, the data on calorie restriction are confused at best.
SteveF
Yes, yes, yes and yes. However, I suspect that if we were to dig deeper, we will disagree. On what I am not sure.
Kenneth,
You’re right. I think the UK government should give to the Guardian. There, no more guilt.
A website hacked their way to the NYT bestseller list.
http://lithub.com/8-notable-attempts-to-hack-the-new-york-times-bestseller-list/
blueice2hotsea,
I suspect we would disagree about many things, but in this specific case, most likely we would disagree that calorie restriction regimes will have much impact on human lifespan. I have looked at the data, and I am not convinced. If human lifespan is to be significantly increased, and that increase is to be more than some additional unconscious months in diapers in a nursing home, then that will require a real increment in understanding of how age leads to general sesinence, and more specifically, to how age leads to mental decline. So far, I have seen zero evidence of progress on either of these key issues.
The depressing reality of aging is here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4748967/
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There are a dozen similar papers available if you need more convincing.
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The links between aging, loss of cellular (and organism) function, and ever rising incidence of cancer with age seem pretty well defined. The loss of DNA telomere length with each cell division appears a programmed “clock” on natural lifespan, and one that is a biological trade-off between longevity and developing cancer. Increasing basic lifespan appears impossible unless you can figure out how to maintain DNA telomere length during cell division…. but then cancer seems ever more likely due to continuously accumulating DNA damage over time. It is a classic conundrum, with no simple solution.
blueice2hotsea
“a Scotsman who lived to be 110. Due to severe food allergies, he could tolerate only three foods”
The oldest woman in the world smoke cigarettes most of her 121 years.
Facts are funny things.
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” If one has terminal cancer, malnutrition can extend life”
Many more people with terminal cancer die of malnutrition, the cancer robs their normal cells of nutrition and outpaces and outgrows the normal cells .
Hence starving the person just slows the cancer growth that is killing them, hardly worth describing as extending life, more extending misery and pain.
There are studies that apparently show that partial starvation in animals can extend life span.
It reminds me of the joke about exercise.
The time you spend per week exercising is the same amount of time as you extend your life by, except that you have had to spend it in the gym and your quality of life is wrecked by being tired and exercising more.
Lifespan as Steve F said is genetics and luck. Extended life span is not always a blessing but may be a possibility in the future.
Seems like our DNA is smart enough to discard their tired old containers on a regular basis. They even programmed in a fun and exciting way to make that more likely to happen.
Of course people want their consciousness transferred, and DNA doesn’t care. If you beamed yourself somewhere else, would your consciousness go with it? If you think so, then imagine that beaming is just a destroy and rebuild process. Suppose you didn’t destroy and instead copied. You wouldn’t have two simultaneous you’s. If they found a way to copy your consciousness and upload it to the cloud, then that probably won’t be you, it would be your identical twin. Other people may not be able to tell the difference, but “you” are probably gone.
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You are going to die, deal with it.
HaroldW (Comment #167060)
Harold, I have read of people seriously rationalizing government subsidies to keep newspapers going by way of the mantra that democracies need newspapers – I suppose to keep voters informed with a given paper’s “perspective”.
Not to worry, Tom, we all will – sooner or later.
If we look at how we have addressed issues that affected longevity in the past we see a clear trend in the timing of our efforts. (For an ‘x-factor’ I recommend Kevin Drum’s writings on the effects of lead. I don’t know where to stick that in in this list…)
Childbirth issues–neonatal and maternal mortality, mostly through hygiene and improved nutrition
Childhood issues–immunization, child labor, urbanization, mandatory education
Early adulthood–or safety regulations, decrease in wars/civil conflicts, dramatic decrease in homicides (See Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature)
(Late) Middle age–successful treatments for COPD-related illnesses
(Early) Old age–reductions in poverty and improvements in social care mechanisms (What was done haphazardly at the ‘village’ level has actually improved dramatically at a national level)
Side point first: Yay, Liberals for working hard to effect these changes! (Okay, that’s snark…)
Pointing out the obvious: The famous argument about population increase is ‘We haven’t started breeding like rabbits. We’ve stopped dying like flies.’ The second half of that statement is pertinent here. We have been energetically addressing the high payoff causes of premature mortality. As our efforts have been increasingly successful, we are now freeing up resources to address the idea of extending the natural lifespan of humans.
It’s a worthy endeavor. It will also follow a pattern and timeline of other ambitious technology-driven initiatives. Plotting the future of longevity gains will produce a trend line very different from that of previous gains. It will look more like initiatives to change fuel portfolios from coal to oil, or a Manhattan Project or a trip to the moon. Or attempts to address climate change…
Lots to learn from.
Tom Scharf,
The subject of whether a transporter copy was truly the original was actually raised in a couple of episodes of Star Trek:TNG. There’s also a new series on Netflix, Altered Carbon, where consciousness transfer and cloning is a fact of life. In that series, individuals are implanted early in life with a device called a cortical stack, based on alien technology, which maintains a copy. The copy can also be backed up remotely. This leads to the potential for something like immortality provided you’re wealthy enough.
As far as we’re concerned, consciousness transfer is science fiction. We don’t really know what consciousness is, much less how to record and transfer it.
Tom,
That’s a fun thought experiment I’ve never satisfied myself one way or the other about. The other side of it goes like this: Say by whatever process X I can replace each of the neurons in your body and brain over time with an synthetic replacement that behaves in all respects identical to the original except that it does not die. Is it still ‘you’ at the end of the process? I’d think at least one’s consciousness, memories, and perception of identity would be continuous over the process.
Variation of the old idea – replace each plank in a boat, at what point is it in fact a new boat.
DeWitt,
Yes. This said, I think we can have some reasonable confidence that it’s got a lot to do with the functioning of our brains and nervous systems. I’m a mechanistic type who thinks our consciousness is really nothing more than the functioning of the relevant parts. But I could be wrong.
This is all thought experiment stuff of course. I’m pretty sure it’s nowhere near feasible in a realistic scenario.
So yup. I’m at peace with the fact that I will indeed die.
SteveF
All diets, as you put it, are fatal. I agree that this realization can be depressing to some. No need to convince me of that. Slow death is grievous for the dying and for the living (my father-in-law passed 10 days ago). I agree that aptosis and senescence is real. But all that seems trivially true.
“I suspect we would disagree … that calorie restriction regimes will have much impact on human lifespan.”
Depending upon interpretation and definitions, that statement could be either trivially false or possibly true. Worse it entirely misses the most concerning issue here, quality of life. I really don’t know what it is that you have telepathically determined I am supposed to disagree with.
angech
I have known a number of woman who have taken up smoking because it suppresses appetite. Clearly, in the case of the 121 yr-old female life-long smoker, caloric restriction raises its ugly head! My simple claim here is ONLY that her case was a poor choice if you wished to rebut the usefulness of life-long caloric restriction.
The usefulness of caloric restriction to avoid decades long, progressively dehibilitating disease is not settled. However, it is certainly true in the U of WI rhesus monkey study. In humans, it is merely implied: Google “insulin resistance” and “memory loss”, cardiomyopathy, cancer, etc.
blueice2hotsea,
“Depending upon interpretation and definitions, that statement could be either trivially false or possibly true.”
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Well you can easily clear that up: do you think calorie restriction regimes will have much influence on human lifespan?
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WRT quality of life: that is obviously the most important issue… more years of “life”, while suffering terrible pain or in diapers in a near vegetative state, are not worth pursuing.
SteveF,
I agree with you with respect to quality of life. I would not want my life “extended” if the extension time was time with Alzheimers, in pain or in a vegetative state.
Lucia, you’re forgetting Jame Caan’s line about his friend who was vegetabalized in Rollerball: “Hell, even a plant turns towards the sun. Leave him on.”
But I guess I agree with you.
Bob has his head saved, in the future he is transferred to a computer and gets launched into space. It deals with cloning (using a 3D printer of course), enhancing one-self and so forth, and it’s pretty funny. It tries to be harder science fiction than most, a bit of hand waving here and there. This is a great book with a terrible title:
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1)
https://www.amazon.com/Are-Legion-Bob-Bobiverse-Book-ebook/dp/B01LWAESYQ
I don’t think I ever watched Rollerball.
There s difference between thinking we should snuff people who have lost sentience and thinking that we should strive to extend life if it means living that way.
SteveF
“…do you think calorie restriction regimes will have much influence on human lifespan?”
In the short term, no. In the long term, it’s inevitable.
“…more years of “lifeâ€, while suffering terrible pain or in diapers in a near vegetative state, are not worth pursuing.”
I respect that opinion, provided you are talking about your life and not for example, my father-in-law’s life.
blueice2hotsea,
Why is it inevitable? I really doubt many people are going to restrict food intake by 30% or more over 40 years. Heck, it is not even clear that CR will work in humans to extend life.
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Your father in law? Where did that come from?
blueice2hotsea,
BTW, it was your supportive comments about C. Johnson’s physical theories (years ago at jeff id’s blog) that made me say we would disagree about many things.
blueicetohotsea,
How is calorie restriction influencing human lifespan in the long term inevitable? Real question.
mark bofill (Comment #167075)
“Variation of the old idea – replace each plank in a boat, at what point is it in fact a new boat.”
Funny thought that that is what has already happened to us many times. We shed our skins and our stomach linings and those cells we retain certainly renew their walls and do not retain much of the original cell lining molecules over time.
We do set down memories, “an algorithm for Mark” which like the pattern in Amber slowly changes over time so the current Mark or angech is certainly not the 16 year olds we once were.
And therein lies the rub with immortality.
Whether here or in heaven do we wish to be 16 or 567 with Alzheimers, wrinkles and no teeth or movement.
Furthermore would we wish all else to be intransigent, wives, friends etc. What difference would immortality make to our morals ethics and desires?
Give me calorie restriction or give me death, now there is another hard choice.
Angech,
🙂
No indeed. Oh, I don’t much care about wrinkles, and I’m hoping dentures aren’t *too* horrific when the time comes. I’m not suffering loss of my faculties (such as they are) if I can see that one coming upon me, I’ll end my own life first while I still have the capability to manage it.
I can’t begin to answer. Good question though.
Thanks Angech.
Very long life spans helps solve one the major problems of space travel. You can either figure out how to go really, really, fast where a speck of dust at relativistic speeds may destroy your ship, or you can live a long time, or do multiple generations. Better bring a few books and bag of Lego’s with you for entertainment though, and a lot of toilet paper. The standard bearer is hibernation, it’s unclear how realistic that is.
You kind of hit a conundrum during a fatal decline with cancer, at some point you go crazy due to improper nutrition and your ability to decide on self termination becomes unreliable. Best to discuss this with someone who is trusted, as making them live with the decision either way is a bit unfair. Letting people live is as hard as not letting them live at some point. I guess my advice would be to treat me like I was the family dog.
I’m happy to see that the judiciary in NY and SF have come to their senses and declared that it is illegal for illegal immigration to be illegal, and the declared law of the land is an executive order from the prior administration that is inviolable. Or something like that. I can’t think of very many cases where judicial activism ended up being helpful. Twisting yourself into a judicial logic pretzel to serve a partisan agenda isn’t a victory, it is friction to public policy.
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https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/13/585597527/second-federal-court-blocks-trump-from-rescinding-daca
“As NPR’s Joel Rose reports, “Garaufis said the administration can rescind DACA. But the judge said the reasoning behind its decision was flawed. The Justice Department argues that DACA was an illegal overreach by the Obama White House, and was likely to be overturned in court.”
Garaufis, however, said the government was “erroneous” in its conclusion that DACA was unconstitutional and that it violated the Administrative Procedures and Immigration and Nationality acts. He said President Trump’s termination of DACA was “arbitrary and capricious.”
Tom Scharf,
The problems with Federal judges are two-fold:
1) They serve for life (short of being convicted for a felony and impeached).
2) They suffer absolutely no consequence for unconstitutional, politically motivated rulings.
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I am not sure how to fix this, but some negative personal consequence (formal censure, suspension, limitations on the types of cases they can hear, etc) following rulings that block action by one of the other branches, and which ultimately are overturned, would seem a possible starting point. 99% of federal lawsuits would not even be involved; it is only the blatantly political cases that are the problem.
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Of course, the Constitution provides for a Supreme Court and such lower courts as Congress decides… Congress can at any time decide to reduce the number of lower Federal Courts to a very small number, leaving most adjudication at the state level.
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I predict the Supreme Court with take the appeals of the DACA rulings immediately, and overturn the lower courts, along a strict party line vote. IMO, the Courts have become nothing more than an extension of political disagreements, which is unfortunate for the country.
SteveF,
I’m betting 8-1 or 9-0, not 5-4. I think the whole Court is getting tired of Federal judges deciding cases on emotion, not law. Obama’s original DACA executive order was the definition of arbitrary and capricious, not that that should matter in any way.
Except the Justice Dept is deliberately slowwalking the appeals so they can keep DACA running.
A bad idea…it gives trial judges an incentive to rule in favor of whatever the other branches want to do (to avoid these consequences), and eliminates judicial independence. In the alternative it gives appellate judges an incentive to affirm bad rulings by the trial judges, in order to protect them from the consequences of reversal.
This whole thread is about what looks like a serious case of Executive overreaching–they don’t need extra power to intimidate the courts.
“The standard of good behavior for the continuance in office of the judicial magistracy, is certainly one of the most valuable of the modern improvements in the practice of government. In a monarchy it is an excellent barrier to the despotism of the prince; in a republic it is a no less excellent barrier to the encroachments and oppressions of the representative body.” –Federalist #78
The Constitution also leaves Congress free to limit the jurisdiction of federal courts, including the Supreme Court. (“In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”)
As I learned a while ago, the entire history of our republic is replete with “court-curbing plans”, mostly based on this power to restrict jurisdiction. Interestingly, no matter which party was in power or what they were angry about, these plans never went anywhere. (Unless you count Roosevelt’s court-packing plan, which was a different sort of animal.)
Joseph w,
“A bad idea…..”
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Really? So any one of 600+ Federal district judges, many little more than dedicated political hacks, should at any time, for any reason, be allowed to block any and all executive actions and any and all Congressional actions? I do hope you don’t think this is a good thing. But that is sadly exactly where we are today. You are absolutely correct that Congress can (and I think should) limit the range of judicial review. They won’t. Because it is all politics.
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The Federal judiciary has, during my lifetime, become hopelessly corrupted by politics. Every ‘historical’ ruling of the last 50 years by the SC has been politically motivated. For the good of the country, this needs to change. The Federal Courts are not a super-legislature, and were never intended to be one.
That isn’t how it works – there has to be a “case or controversy,” and a great many executive/legislative actions don’t count. (For example, back during Vietnam, various efforts to “stop the war with a court order” went nowhere.) The case has to be brought by someone who’s being hurt by the decision, and until it’s brought the courts can’t move.
When a district judge does make a poor move in a real case, the proper solution lies in the appellate courts–that’s exactly how the Trump administration handled it with the judges who put injunctions on his immigration orders. If you give the executive a tool to intimidate the judges…no matter how angry you might be at the judges right now, you will end up regretting it. Just imagine your least favorite President with such a power. Or, as I like to say, “Even if you want to go there, you don’t want to go there.”
Try United States v. Lopez (1995) — not as “historic” or far-reaching as I wish it would be — or District of Columbia v. Heller or Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Those, I think, will all count as “historic,” they certainly made national headlines and generated lots of commentary at the time, and they look principled to me.
I doubt most people would consider Bush v. Gore as anything but political–however, as we discussed in this thread, it cuts strongly against any efforts by Congress to overturn a Presidential election by letting any state re-pick its electors (though I think Article II by itself is pretty strong against that). It may not have made headlines, but I like the way Blonder-Tongue Laboratories v. University of Illinois Foundation established that factual findings in a civil case don’t bind people in later cases–as a matter of due process. (Or maybe I just like saying “Blonder-Tongue.” My tongue’s blonder than your tongue..)
Some of the free speech case law we discussed in the “Marathon Mann” threads is less than 50 years old…New York Times v. Sullivan is just outside the window (1964), but Harte-Hanks v. Connaughton is from 1989, and St. Amant v. Thompson just barely makes it in as a 1968 case. Very important for some of the liberties we discuss around here.
Since this thread is about search warrants you might want to try Riley v. California, confirming that if the Government arrests you and seizes your cell phone, they still need a warrant to search the cell phone itself, 8-0 with a partial concurrence by Alito. That counts as a biggie in some circles since it’s applying ancient principles to new technology, an area where judges might be tempted to let the Government loose.
DeWitt,
“I think the whole Court is getting tired of Federal judges deciding cases on emotion, not law.”
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I wish it were so, but I doubt it. More to the point, the SC is powerless to do anything except reverse crazy lower court rulings. Since there are 600+ lower court judges, plus many appellate judges, many of them highly political, the reality is that the SC is not in any position to overturn every bad ruling of lower courts… even if they were so inclined. If you have even a small fraction of lower court judges willing to issue politically motivated stays and orders which are utterly contrary to the Constitution, the Supreme Court is helpless to stop it. Only Congress can stop it.
Joseph W,
“That isn’t how it works – there has to be a “case or controversy,†and a great many executive/legislative actions don’t count.”
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I must disagree. .. That is exactly how it works.
Trump orders a temporary suspension of immigration from certain countries, clearly within his legal and constitutional authority, and multiple district judges instantly block his actions, no matter how minimal the standing of those who bring the case. Yes, the SC court ultimately ruled in Trump’s favor, but only after great delay, and there is no reason to think those judges would not do exactly the same thing again. Federal courts were never envisioned by the Constitution to take such action. IMHO, the Federal Courts are politically out of control and need to be strictly limited in the range of cases they can hear. Barring that, they should be mostly eliminated. The one thing the Courts should always do (protect the Constitution from arbitrary “interpretation” with what can most generously be described as Orwellian logic) is the single thing they seem unable to do consistently. The Federal Courts are failing, and need major reform.
Joseph W,
I don’t think judges should be intimidated by the executive over politically motivated rulings, I think they should not be making such rulings at all; it should be outside their review. Judging a civil case between Joe Jones and Joan Smith, or a criminal case against a murderous drug dealer is not the same as blocking the President or Congress from exercising their constitutionally provided authority. Should a Federal court attempt to block Congress from exercising their oversight authority? I don’t think so.
.
If the courts persist in this, it will do them long term harm…. as it should.
SteveF,
I agree with Joseph W. Federal courts hear hundreds of thousands of cases per year. It would not be wise to fixate on a few egregious decisions, no matter how annoying they are. Exerting political control over such cases would likely make the courts more political, not less. Much better to appoint as many good judges as possible and let the appeals process sort out the nonsense.
There is an alternate solution in certain cases. Trump could ignore a court ruling.
For example, anyone who applies for DACA, they could just not take the application, and not issue work permits.
Lucia , can I throw this comment in here for Mosher?
If not please delete.
For some reason some comments go missing at some places.
–
Commenting at ATTP on an update of John Cook’s best,
Steven Mosher said February 14, 2018 at 6:31 pm “angech.
surely you can look at the list and pick what in your opinion is the strongest and weakest. they can all be equally certain.
if you dont believe in agw then pick the weakest argument and demolish it. if you believe in agw pick the strongest skeptical argument and make it more convincing.
but first angech. answer the simple question.
im deeply interested in your answer.”
I put up the answer, Mosher but ?? its not there.
angech,
SteveMOsher is always at twitter. You could also address him there.
He’s @stevenmosher
As Popehat says about the court system, “The wheels grind slowly, but they grind”.
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For the most part the partisan judges are usually just finding ways to delay things, and ultimately crazy ones fail almost always. I have an issue with a single judge making a decision to halt a national program. Stop the entire program isn’t the only solution available to a judge, and when he explicitly says Trump has the right to end DACA and does so anyway it smells like bias. Jurisdiction shopping is blatant. Perhaps for consequential national programs the jurisdiction should be a lottery somehow.
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I think one can expect a bunch of lawyers creating as much chaos as possible for any culture war issue. Obamacare, EPA war on coal, etc. It’s the process. It can be improved, but realistically it hasn’t distorted end results very much in the long term. Ultimately if pro-immigration people want lasting change, it goes through congress. Trench warfare in the court system is just noise.
The latest Frontline documentary covers immigration issues. It’s pretty decent as there is a concerted effort to tell both sides of the story without obvious bias. MS-13 gangs infiltrating Long Island through illegal immigration, multiple teens brutally killed (with the MS-13 signature machete), a heavy handed roundup occurs allegedly detaining some innocent people. Teens detained for months without any due process.
.
The Gang Crackdown
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/the-gang-crackdown/
Tom Scharf,
According to a paper based on public opinion surveys (prepared by the AEI), in the 1940’s, about 45% of people thought the Supreme Court justices decide important cases at least in part based on their politics and personal opinions rather than legal analysis. That increased to ~70% in recent years. The public perception is, IMO, absolutely correct.
.
Many judges are extremely political, and Presidents have become motivated to select extremely political judges exactly because Federal court judges, backed by the SC, of course, have taken to “interpreting” the Constitution in ways that are in obvious disagreement with the plain words of the document, when what is really called for in most every case is amendment of the Constitution. With new Constitutional rights regularly discovered by Federal judges (I would prefer “sensed” or “imagined” over “discovered”, because the words in the document don’t ever describe those rights), the courts have become just another political branch, albeit one where members are never elected and serve for life… sort of like the British Royal Family, but with real political power that is destructive of the social fabric.
The Supreme Court doesn’t get the easy cases, they typically only get the hard ones where there are legitimate controversies and it’s a close call. Cake baker vs gay rights for example. When things aren’t obvious I think most people side with their own prejudices. Of the 3 branches I would say the judicial is the least f***ed up, but that is a low bar at the moment, ha ha.
I’m very glad to hear it. But “court-curbing” plans…including FDR’s proposal to pack the court…invariably have that effect. FDR’s plan (apparently) worked because the judges started ruling his way in order to prevent it being enacted; that’s intimidation plain and simple. I haven’t heard that any of the others ever got results, possibly because they never got so close to being law.
(The history of such plans is interesting…Professor Ross, one of whose articles I linked you to, is something of a specialist in their history.)
Your proposal….to punish judges if they rule against the political branches, and are reversed…is custom-made to intimidate them, in favor of whichever party is in power. That’s why I’m against it.
According to this, the story that Andrew Jackson did so is apocryphal (and this suggests that the story that Lincoln did so is the same…in both cases, so say the articles, the Supreme Court didn’t actually order the Executive to do anything, so there was nothing for the Executive to do). So I don’t know of anyone who’s done it.
That would be very problematic for the simple reason that the President can’t act alone, and can’t very well enforce his orders if those orders are to violate court orders or other law. Especially now, since new administrations are no longer able to fire the existing Executive Branch from top to bottom, and replace them all with people who’ll do what they’re told.
(Even servicemembers are taught to disobey orders if those orders patently violate the Law of War or other law…though it had better be pretty dang patent, per this.)
The court is ordering the executive branch. Orders to process visas for entry to the country. Order to issue EAD cards to DACA applicants. The latter has no law passed by Congress to authorize it.
I should’ve been clearer – I meant I don’t know a clear case of any President outright disobeying a court order. (I’d always thought Jackson and Lincoln were the two examples but those articles suggested that those court opinions did not include orders.)
Joseph W,
If the Constitution clearly empowers Congress to curb the range of subjects Federal courts can review, and even eliminate all Federal Courts except the Supreme Court, then why do you object to curbing the power of Federal judges? Real question, not rhetorical.
.
I can’t imagine those Congressional powers would have been explicitly included unless the framers considered those powers appropriate and needed. I note that the most of the Constitution focuses on things the Congress is prohibited from doing, not what it is allowed to do. When something is explicitly allowed, the framers obviously believed it important. Dictates from Federal judges based on purely political grounds (“Trumps campaign sp
If the Constitution clearly empowers Congress to curb the range of subjects Federal courts can review, and even eliminate all Federal Courts except the Supreme Court, then why do you object to curbing the power of Federal judges? Real question, not rhetorical.
And it’s a good question, too. My problem with court-curbing schemes…at least the actual ones I have heard about…is not that they are unconstitutional. All of them require either a Constitutional amendment or the exercise of Congress’ power to limit jurisdiction, and both of these things are perfectly permissible, just as you say.
My concern is that these schemes permit the other branches to intimidate the judiciary….and that is one of those weapons that you sharpen today, to be stabbed with it tomorrow. Judicial independence is as important as Hamilton said it was…though it is frustrating as hell when the judges go off the rails.
Sorry, that should have ended:
“Trumps campaign rhetoric prohibits him from exercising his legal and constitutional authority … because I say so.”
.
Federal judges are out of control. We need a way to stop the politics in the Federal courts.
(A response of mine just disappeared, so if this is a double post, please delete one.)
It’s a very good question, too. My answer is that such schemes are not unconstitutional — at least not the ones I have seen. They all rely on either Constitutional amendments or legislative restrictions on jurisdiction, which as you say are perfectly lawful.
But I believe they are bad policy, because the ones I have seen always look like ways to intimidate the judiciary–“Rule with the party in power, or else lose your powers.” And that’s the kind of weapon that you sharpen today, to be cut with it tomorrow.
Judicial independence is very important — I think Hamilton was 100% right on this — even though it is frustrating as hell when the judges go off the rails.
Joseph W,
BTW, this made me smile a little:
“Your proposal….to punish judges if they rule against the political branches…”, because I find it quaint to consider Federal judges not part of a political branch. Every one was selected to advance the political goals of the President who selected them. They are extremely political.
Joseph,
I understand the risk of curbing the range of subjects the Federal courts can review. The only way I see forward is to put clear limits on things like which Federal Court has the authority to enjoin the executive or the legislature…. ideally only the SC should have that authority. The SC should understand that it is ultimately and completely controlled by Congress; exactly as the Constitution specifies.
(Some proposed legislation actually limiting what cases they can hear would help ocus minds.)
lucia-
“How is calorie restriction influencing human lifespan in the long term inevitable?”
Inevitable is a strong claim. However, ‘long term’ is open ended and and there are numerous non-zero, even high probability scenarios.
Two somewhat uninteresting examples: 1) natural disasters causing widespread starvation; 2) eradication of global obesity through tyrannical decree.
A more interesting lower probability case might be a future fad where people delay apoptosis by slowing the rate of cell division. Cells divide when they reach a certain mass, so calorie restriction could be a part of the strategy.
I am busy, so here is my drive by analysis of the federal judiciary problem. I think the judiciary plays way too much of a role in shaping law (the legislature should be supreme here) and politics and that it is impossible to curtail this in the current system. There really is no objective law in the sense that there are, for example, objective principles applicable to chemistry. That being the case (and adding to that the moral self-righteousness of the Left), there is no principled way to limit the practical law-making powers of the federal courts as they are structured now.
….
For instance, the Supreme Court knows no more about the morality of abortion that any Tom, Dick or Nancy. Yet it purports to make legal decisions on abortion under the guise of objective law, when there isn’t any. This is a hugely moral issue that should be decided in the voting booth. (My practical view is that I would support legislation making abortion legal, because next to murder, one of the worst crimes is having a baby and not taking care of that person. On the other hand, judges under the guise of a right to privacy, have no more competence on this issue than do legislators or voters.)
….
To give an example of what I would consider serious dysfunction on the Supreme Court. Ruth Ginsburg has exhibited an extreme bias against Trump. Under many decisions, her ruling on his administration’s cases would be a violation of due process. However, almost certainly she won’t recuse herself from Trump cases, because, in my mind, she is so devoted to her policy agenda that she places her policy goals above the requirement that judges be fair and impartial. (Would add that if 1000 people were to demonstrate each day in front of the Supreme Court and keep this issue in the public eye, there is a substantial chance that she would have to recuse herself. Under past decisions, even the appearance of impropriety, can be grounds for recusal/removal. If this issue was steadily and consistently raised and in the public eye, she would have no real defense that would permit her to sit on Trump administration cases. If the question were to be asked again and again; she wouldn’t have an answer)
….
My partial solution to the problem of a politicized judiciary is to do away with lifetime appointments and require the reappointment of all federal judges maybe every 10 or 15 years. This is not a perfect solution, but in my view what needs to be done is to knock down the prestige of the federal judiciary so that it doesn’t so easily issue blatantly policy-based decisions.
JD
JD Ohio,
I think limiting the appointment of all Federal judges to 10 or 15 years would be very good for behavior of judges, but alas, would appear to require a Constitutional amendment… not going to happen any time soon.
.
Prohibiting any lower court (not the SC) from issuing orders against the executive or legislature can be done by simple statute, and would eliminate all the crazy crap the Federal Courts have become involved with. If there were a case important enough for the SC to hear, then they could choose to hear it. The secondary benefit would be that SC justices would finally understand legislating from the bench could provoke very bad consequences for the SC itself, and be a lot more circumspect about constantly finding new “rights” and new “meanings” unrelated to the plain meaning of the words in the Constitution.
SteveF
I have stated that CJ’s controversial stuff is “weak tea” and also enjoyable to me. If I got caught up and made teasing comments, I apologize.
CJ the mathematician has roughly 11,000 cites. What I guess is happening is a dogmatic logician is openly contemptuous of dogmatic pragmatists; it’s a collision of worldviews. IMO, in between CJ and SMosher for example, would be Feynman, a negative pragmatist. I appreciate all three even though yes, it’s basically incompatible and incoherent.
blueice2hotsea,
No. That’s not what’s happening with CJ.
What’s happening?
blueice2hotsea #167125,
“….incoherent.”
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I think that fairly well summarizes your comment. I have no clue what that comment is supposed to convey.
Michael Flynn’s judge recused after a week, perhaps because he approved a FISA warrant.
The new judge Emmet Sullivan was the judge for the Ted Stevens case that had a conviction, he lost his election, and eventually the case was dropped after it was revealed the prosecution withheld evidence. Emmet was not happy. Now he ordered Mueller to hand over all evidence, even though Flynn’s deal waived his right to such evidence. He also ordered Mueller to hand over to Sullivan any evidence that Mueller doesn’t think are relevant for Flynn to see. Mueller has since called for a delay in sentencing and now filed another order asking any evidence handed over to be sealed and not used in other cases. Andrew Weissman on Mueller’s team has been found to withhold evidence in the past.
blueice2hotsea,
I don’t need to know precisely what is happening to know that what you describe is not what is happening. CJ is just confused and wrong on this topic. His confusing has nothing to do with logic or pragmatism.
FWIW: I also don’t see Feynman as somehow “between” CJ and SMosher!
Of course you can “appreciate” anything you like. You are free to appreciate the deluded, confused, mistaken and so on. No skin off my nose.
lucia
“CJ is just confused and wrong on this topic.”
Yes or maybe CJ is mostly a deliberate provocateur. In either case I am not his apologist.
“FWIW: I also don’t see Feynman as somehow “between†CJ and SMosher! ”
I am very interested in your opinion of their respective philosophical approaches to science. Real question.
“You are free to appreciate the deluded, confused, mistaken and so on”
Whoa!! Timeout, please.
I had a renewed interest in calorie restriction and health due to a recent death in my family. But it is enormously painful to discuss it now. Maybe some other time.
I have no opinion on their “philosophical approaches to science” (whatever that might even mean). I am only interested in forming an opinion on the points and claims they make and the arguments they advance in favor of those point. Feynman is not “between” CJ and Mosher in this regard.
The motive of your interest, doesn’t really affect the strength of evidence for whether calorie restriction has any practical importance in advancing human lifespan. I think it’s pretty clear that calorie restriction will have at best a teensie-beensie impact on life extension.
MikeN,
Judge Sullivan is Muller’s worst nightmare. Count on him to refuse the new request from DOJ to hide evidence. “Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice…..?” Nope.
.
He really doesn’t like the way DOJ handles cases, flouts norms of behavior, and withholds evidence in violation of clear rules. This case is 20 times higher profile than the Stevens case, and DOJ has 20 times the motivation act unscrupulously as it did with Stevens. If I were in the Muller posse of leftist prosecutors, I would be very careful. Sullivan is unlikely to pass a second time on immediate contempt citations and incarceration for the miscreants at DOJ.
lucia (Comment #167106)
Thanks. Old and slow and definitely not on twitter or facebook. Me that is.
I was having an attack of the gripes due to the seeming promise of a discussion, even under house rules, pulled from under my feet like a Charlie Brown football.
Now while used to the moderation, been there dozens of times, the issue was that no mention of the fact that the rug had been pulled was made leaving Mosher and others in the dark and thinking that I had stopped commentating.
Appreciate your leaving the message in. It should slowly percolate through the system.
–
Apropos Trump, I though he would only be allowed to go 3 months. This is truly amazing and as good as a Chtulu return.
Funny to be living in instead of merely watching a good soap opera.
Perhaps you could put up a post for skeptics to debate Steven’s demand on “A challenge for my readers”
February 14, 2018 at 6:31 pm
surely you can look at the list and pick what in your opinion is the strongest and weakest. they can’t all be equally certain.
gosh if i were teaching rhetoric/composition i would have my freshman do this.
if you dont believe in agw then pick the weakest argument and demolish it. if you believe in agw pick the strongest skeptical argument and make it more convincing.
The point I am trying to make is that skeptics cannot identify which argument they think is the strongest
But lets make it easier.
Which one do they think is weakest?
another way of seeing if there is any argument, however weak, that they will reject.
As a AGW type it’s easy for me to identify the kind of arguments I find weakest.because we kinda put confidence intervals on things.
That is the weird thing that goes un noticed ( perhaps) about skeptical challenges. They never assign confidence to their own arguments.
Read through the list of skeptical arguments. Pick the one that YOU THINK is the Best.
1. Articulatethat argument as best you can.
2. Stand and defend
In short you want a debate? Cool, down for it. Simple cage match rulz. We stick to the one argument you find most compelling. No side tracks, no but moderation, no ad homs, One argument.
the one you find most compelling
Re state it in terms you choose.Then stand and defend.
That would be honest engagement [*Heh,Heh, Heh]
If you can’t do that, then I suppose I could play better skeptic than the lot of you combined, with half my brain held by the moderator in escrow..
Not much of a challenge but a lot of fun.
The two deleted comments were in regard to the hot spot and previously to the CO2 being colorless and odorless being exceptionally weak AGW arguments
I see in today’s paper that our supposedly uber-competent FBI was warned about the Parkland shooter and failed to take any action. I guess they’re too busy trying to take down Trump. /sarc
DeWitt,
Ya, well. They received at least two warnings from private citizens (and it sounds like maybe others will be revealed). At least one of these was in January of this year, with an explicit identification of the shooter and claims he was unstable and potentially dangerous. Apparently the warning was never passed from Washington to the FBI field office in Miami, nor any local police/sheriff to follow up on.
.
It sounds a little like the case of the Boston Marathon bomber brothers, who were identified as potential terrorists and interviewed, but then the inquiry was dropped.
.
Your sarcasm aside, the FBI probably has been too preoccupied over the past year with other more important activities…. like how to hide their political interference in the 2016 election (both making sure Hillary was not indited and spying on Trump)… to worry over small matters like warnings of an unstable and potentially violent person.
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Whoever dropped the ball on this (failing to pass the warning to the Miami FBI office) should be out of a job, along with at least their immediate supervisor and maybe one or two levels up the chain of command. This is grotesque and unforgivable incompetence. But since the FBI seems more worried about protecting incompetent agents than anything else, there may be no consequences at all. The FBI will try to go into full-turtle mode, and refuse to divulge the names of those involved, much less fire their sorry a$$es.
.
There are lessons here:
.
1) Contact the local police or sheriff, not the FBI, if you think someone is unstable and potentially dangerous.
2) Fish rot from the head down. The structure of the FBI and the people who lead it both need major changes. Jeff Sessions should do this immediately or resign.
Angech, maybe arguments aren’t assessed for strength because none of them really have any. The usual tactic is to bombard with numerous weak arguments and when any is demolished skip to the others. Rinse/repeat.
The FBI failing to act on warnings is nothing new. Two months before 9/11, the Phoenix field office reported suspicious behavior by people taking flight lessons and expressed concern that they were part of an organized Al Qaida plot. FBI headquarters did nothing. A month later, one of the would-be hijackers was arrested in Minnesota as a result of a tip from a flight instructor. The agents tried to get permission from headquarters to search his rooms and his laptop; that permission was repeatedly denied. All this in spite of the fact that the FBI apparently knew that Al Qaida was planning some sort of a strike in the U.S.
We have to consider that the FBI gets lots of false warnings. Perhaps people with a grudge. It may be the number is so high they have trouble checking all of them.
“The hijackers also left no paper trail. In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper – either here in the U.S. or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere – that mentioned any aspect of the September 11th plot. The hijackers had no computers, no laptops, no storage media of any kind. They used hundreds of different pay phones and cell phones, often with prepaid calling cards that are extremely difficult to trace. And they made sure that all the money sent to them to fund their attacks was wired in small amounts to avoid detection.”
Robert Mueller
There was a wall of separation between the criminal investigations of the FBI and the intelligence apparatus. This memo was written by Jamie Gorelick who later served on 9/11 Commission to cover for herself and the Clintons. Sandy Berger’s stealing documents from National Archives was part of this.
It is not clear if this wall prevented the search of the laptop which Mueller is essentially lying about here. FISA regulations were invoked as a reason, and the main reason for the memo was to make sure FISA was not abused to get around warrant rules.
This is where the FBI’s lack of trust starts to really hurt. When it goes from accusations of partisan bias to direct proof of institutional incompetence it hurts their image. CNN made a big deal of an ex-FBI agent crying on air about the school shooting, making sure and emphasizing “ex-FBI agent” in a transparent attempt to create sympathy for team CNN’s agenda only to have to report the next day the not-ex-FBI having dropped the ball big time.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/14/us/cnn-phil-mudd-breaks-down-mass-shooting-florida-high-school-cnntv/index.html
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There are lots of crazy people out there and the FBI can’t be rounding up every crazy critter espousing thought crimes on social media, but it is well within the realms of reasonable expectation that they should have followed up here. I can live with there isn’t enough evidence to do anything, but “we didn’t even bother to look” is another thing. Broward county Sheriff’s office had also been contacted 20 different times about this guy apparently.
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“Too busy trying to take Trump down instead of doing their job” is an accusation they set themselves up for. It may not be true, but they need to defend themselves here. They look to be handling it transparently so far, I’m sure the urge to bury that phone tip was might tempting.
This is Comey’s buddy who was hired by CNN to defend the FBI. He wrote an op-ed claiming that he is resigning from the FBI because of Trump, not mentioning he had another gig lined up.
Tom Scharf,
“Too busy trying to take Trump down instead of doing their job.”
.
As I noted above, fish rot from the head down. The FBI clearly did purposely act to influence the election, in multiple ways. Many managers in a very badly run organization need to go to start to fix things. Many, many heads at the FBI need to roll.
Angech __ Mosher Challenge (Here is my answer, currently under moderation at ATTP — No insinuation by me as of now of improper moderation. I might not ever have commented there)
******
Mosher: “Read through the list of skeptical arguments. Pick the one that YOU THINK is the Best.
1. Articulatethat argument as best you can.
2. Stand and defend
In short you want a debate? â€
********
JD
Very easy. Will do my own list.
1. Climate change as articulated by “mainstream†scientists will take 80 or 100 years to become a problem. The world changes so fast, particularly now with scientific knowledge increasing exponentially, there is no way to predict the future over that time frame. So, substantially decreasing CO2 at the present time is fruitless because humankind’s ability to predict what problems will be in 80 years and what the proper solutions are is extremely limited. (Think to predictions in late 19th century that New York City’s ability to grow was limited by horse manure)
1.a Even if CO2 could accurately be predicted to cause substantial problems 80 years from now, new technologies will develop to make dealing with CO2 a trivial problem. (Think simply adding nano engineered dust in the air, and generally Julian Simon)
2. The proxy paleo divergence problem. Since tree rings don’t work now, how do we know that they worked 1,000 years ago.
3. The modelling skill problem. See Freeman Dyson and his criticism of climate models. (Will admit upfront, I am not qualified to argue further on this. However, I think his skills and qualifications are much higher than the “mainstream†modellers.)
JD
I thought this was interesting and disturbing.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/02/mueller_worked_with_lerner_to_target_tea_party.html
Good lord.
I doubt that got as high up as Mueller.
mark bofill,
.
Before the IRS started targeting conservative 501C(4) applications, conservative 501C(4) organizations were outspending their liberal counterparts on elections by ~4:1. That is what got the Obama administration after them.
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It was all started by two Supreme Court rulings against the Federal Elections Commission (FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc, and Citizens United v. FEC). These rulings allowed 501C(4) organizations to spend on support of candidates and to broadcast advertising for or against a candidate (by name) any time up to an election. Previously, there had been strict limitations on corporate political support, and no broadcast advertising within 30 days of the general election and within 60 days of a primary.
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Political Action Committes (PACs) could bundle donations and spend them on behalf of candidates, but PACs had to disclose the names of all donors. 501C(4)’s are not required to disclose the names of donors, and most donors do not want their names disclosed… perhaps they fear an IRS audit, where the process is often the punishment.
I’m surprised no group has challenged the rule that candidate ads must say “I’m X and I support this message.”
The express intent of the law was to reduce negative ads.
I can see how having your name known as a contributor to a particular candidate could be problematic if it could lead to a loss of business from the half of the country which disagrees with you. But individuals without business exposure?
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or is the concern more about business contributions?
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I don’t get it.
j ferguson,
In addition to potential loss of business, I suspect it is a combination of things: fear of being targeted by the IRS, and/or EPA, OSHA, etc if you own a business, fear of intimidation by opposition activist, not wanting your friends/neighbors/family upset with you, etc. Many of the same reasons voting is private.
Interesting that the partisan defending of federal government law and order agencies such as the FBI often in the past has come from the Republicans and now appears to have shifted to the Democrats – or at least for some of the recent instances. It is good to see these agencies take some heat just like the Lois Lerner IRS did and in doing so pointing to these agencies tendencies to hide behind the secrecies that are supposedly required for their missions. The recent testimony before congress by FBI director Christopher Wray where he once again used superlatives in describing the FBI workers’ diligence and hard work in an obvious attempt to deflect criticism from the institution itself was rather a sad commentary and made worse by the lack of hard questioning by members of congress.
The FBI and any local law enforcement agencies and even school officials that failed to respond to red flags in the most recent mass killings will very probably once again go unpunished or even criticized very much and probably by way of lumping all these agencies and responsible people under the category of first responders and the blanket praise that they receive after every mass killing. This praise, while appropriate in some cases, when made so general and so effusive takes away from the genuine heroes and from the discussion that could better be directed at what it takes to avoid these killings.
If nothing else these examples should make the public more aware of the institutional failures of government (and not necessarily the government workers since they cannot be responsible for the institution and the institutional lack of accountability) and where not to look for relief from some of these pressing problems. In some ways partisanship is good at pointing to problems of government but the inconsistencies of doing it leads to a credibility problem
DaveJR (Comment #167139)
“maybe arguments aren’t assessed for strength because none of them really have any. The usual tactic is to bombard with numerous weak arguments and when any is demolished skip to the others. ”
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It is funny that sensible people have to put up a 100 or so arguments to try to shoot down a concept.
They should be putting up one argument to prove it.
E.g. here is a rate of CO2 rise, Here is a proven dangerous level of global warming [0.3C per decade per relevant amount of CO2 increase] over this entire period.
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One of the more interesting contortions they do is to blame natural variation for every episode where the warming does not materialize as expected, then claim that it is not important.
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recent example Nerem om SLR and the old chestnut of global warming would be 110% of the actual warming without natural variability.
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JD Ohio (Comment #167147)
Angech __ Mosher Challenge (Here is my answer, currently under moderation at ATTP — No insinuation by me as of now of improper moderation. I might not ever have commented there).
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Look, lots of 100 answers obviously have some scientific validity, it is not as if they were put up as a parody by a cartoonist. It is just that the application of the science to the answers seems very stretched logically.
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Perhaps a list of the 10 best/10 worst with reasons, Lucia.
JD well your up there which is good.
Have to wonder why my post was removed.
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“No way to predict the future over that time frame, and then predict that progress will be sufficient to deal with the problems that will arise due to fossil fuel use, in fact to make them trivial.”
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This sort of logic at the site makes one laugh and cry.
First saying we cannot predict the future over the time frame but then saying we can predict future problems over that time frame.
The burden of proof is squarely on those who think the sky is falling. I’ve examined the evidence for several of the alleged “catastrophes” to come, sea level rise, extreme weather, food shortages, etc. and found the observations are not in line with the claims. Only one side of this argument is policed by team science, and the propaganda has gotten rather stale and boring. The epitome of confirmation bias occurred this year when all the various very serious people decided two single hurricanes proved global warming was making these events worse, thus ignoring a record 11 years without such events.
I wonder if someone here can enlighten me as to how the Russian “interference” in the election was illegal. I know there are laws that prohibit foreign contributions to U.S. campaigns, but I would think that such laws apply to the campaign organization, not people in other countries. There might be laws saying that foreigners can not place political ads on the internet, but I have a hard time seeing how such laws can be constitutional. So what laws did the interference actually break?
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I realize that the Russians are accused of other illegal acts, such as bank fraud and identity theft. But those are not, in themselves election interference.
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Addition: After posting the above, I promptly found the following.
https://lawandcrime.com/opinion/does-mueller-indictment-mean-clinton-campaign-can-be-indicted-for-chris-steele/
“Mueller’s unprecedented prosecution raises three novel arguments: first, that speaking out about American politics requires a foreign citizen to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act; second, that speaking out about American politics requires a foreign citizen list their source and expenditure of funding to the Federal Election Commission; and third, that mistakes on visa applications constitute “fraud†on the State Department.”
The article argues that if the Russians can be indicted, then so can Steele, FusionGPS, and possibly both the DNC and the Clinton campaign.
JD Ohio (Comment #167147)
February 17th, 2018 at 9:17 pm
JD, Mosher has been on mission for some time now to show that many of the skeptics, and evidently at all degrees of skepticism, of the consensus stand on AGW are making weak or invalid arguments. He seems to glom onto those skeptics who obviously overstate the case against the consensus or make invalid arguments and those who deny the basic physics of global warming altogether. He then makes his cryptic quips about the skeptic case in general and, without distinction between the cranks and those who are making serious arguments. The showing of weak and invalid arguments on all sides of the AGW debate is like shooting fish in a barrel and, in my view, is a major waste of time in sorting down to the strongest arguments on all sides of the AGW discussion.
If you make reasoned arguments for the non consensus side of the AGW debate you will not hear much from Mosher other than perhaps some vague and obtuse reference that you need to read and learn more. If you were a fish in that barrel you should expect to be shot at. I have had one constructive discussion with Mosher in recent years and that was about the methods used by Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST).
Kenneth,
People who deny basic physics exist. Some people who exaggerate the strength of evidence on alarm side also exist. So yeah, one can find bad arguments of all sorts.
I think *some* of the people Mosher is currently engaging approach him first– on Twitter. He answers. Mosher also does criticize people who exaggerate the alarm — I follow him on twitter. But right now, there are a few skeptics who really, really, really want to debate him on Twitter, so there is more of that going on.
lucia (Comment #167160)
I have a very selfish approach to these blogs and that is to learn from exchanges about AGW and to attempt to engage with reasoned political arguments. Mosher’s approach in my opinion is pretty much a waste of time. That is just my opinion and obviously I can simply ignore what he posts or what his antagonizers post.
Kenneth,
His fly-by posts often create more confusion than clarity.
Kenneth,
I think Steve Mosher (unfortunately) does combine all skeptical arguments when he makes sweeping statements about skeptics. There is a big difference between people who say climate sensitivity to GHG forcing most likely is near the low end of the AR5 ‘likely range’ (Nic Lewis and many others.. including me!) and people who suggest zero or very low sensitivity to GHG forcing, which is completely contrary to the empirical data. I think Mosher would be well served to draw that distinction, but he seems unwilling to. I’m not sure why. His request for strongest and weakest arguments is fine, but the forum where he made that request (Ken Rice’s echo chamber for wild eyed greens) is not the forum where most people who could make those arguments would ever want to comment. Any support for other than the conventional CAGW memes instantly provokes personal insults and accusations of dishonesty from the local denizens.
Lucia,
I agree, the fly-by comments are the worst. Reminds me a little of the old joke about sea-gull style management (Fly in, make a lot of noise, crap everywhere, then fly off.) It almost seems like Mosher is having a long conversation with himself, then writes down a sentence or two from that long conversation, completely out of context. I usually have no clue what he is trying to say.
MikeM, that lawyer is wrong on one key detail. Mueller never charged the Russians with those specific violations. He described it as a crime, but in the counts those details are missing. Instead there is a general conspiracy to defraud the US. The crimes in the conspiracy appear to be the same nonreporting and contributions that didn’t get charged specifically. I wonder if this would hold up in court if Mueller had indicted people that would actually show up for trial.
Perhaps he avoided charging those crimes to avoid comparison to Steele.
It is illegal for a foreign citizen to contribute to a campaign, or to spend money in a campaign that either calls for electing a candidate or mentions the candidate’s name.
Many of the Russian ads do not meet this criteria, and are not illegal. It would also be illegal for Americans to do this without reporting the donations and expenditure.
Posting on Facebook and other internet sites is exempt from FEC regulation as long as there is no money involved.
It is legal for foreigners to volunteer for a campaign. However, these Russians were paid and so was Steele. Letting foreigners volunteer destroys the argument that Trump had broken the law by accepting something ‘of value’ at the Trump Tower meeting with Russians. Hillary had a whole group of Brits volunteering in swing states for her. That was ‘something of value’.
The FARA violations look like a bigger stretch, especially if they are not working on behalf of the Russian government. I think Manafort can dodge the money laundering charge if he fights a constitutional case. Money has to come from a crime to be money laundering. Lobbying on behalf of Ukraine is not a crime. FARA says it is a crime to lobby without registering. I think this can’t work on constitutional grounds to say lobbying is a crime instead of the act of not registering. If not registering is the crime instead of the lobbying, which might be the proper reading of the law, then Manafort has not made any money from a crime to be laundered.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #167159) JD Ohio (Comment #167147)
Mosher has been on mission for some time now to show that many of the skeptics, and evidently at all degrees of skepticism, of the consensus stand on AGW are making weak or invalid arguments.
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To be fair it is really skeptical science that has been on a kick the skeptic argument for the last 10 years.
They have the big list up with the recent rewrite by John Cook.
Steven believes CO2 doubling will give a dangerous ECS of between 2.0 to 3.0 C.
And that something needs to be done about it now.
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He is a smart cookie with the maths and his figures must compute with the figures that he chooses to put in. Hence there is no leeway to consider skeptic arguments because they cannot be real.
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The problem is that he is suffering from a double bias. He works and socializes with people who also believe wholeheartedly in the CAGW narrative so has little wriggle room in discussions to exercise the skepticism that he naturally has. Arguments to people outside the bubble that make sense are just not capable of being perceived.
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There are a whole number of valid grounds to question the occurrence, extent and severity of the warming that should logically follow a CO2 doubling. Fortunately nature , if not the scientists, is following a different script. This has to play out in time scales of 100-200 years to become obvious and has numerous areas where the equation breaks down. JD points out the advances being made by science and the fact that if warming becomes dangerous we could well evolve quickly ways of dealing with it.
That is if the human population can keep growing, if we can continue to find and maintain our fossil fuel dependence, if we do not kill ourselves off or sensibly restrict our populations anyway.
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The error, in plain sight, is theconsensus not of numbers of scientists but the consensus to prove every little bit of CAGW is real and believable.
To this end temperatures must and are being altered to always prove an upgoing trend.
We cannot have a 1940,s drop in SST. We cannot use natural recorded temperatures. We cannot have a puase or a little ice age.
Every last detail has to be Mary Poppins perfect.
Hence Cowtan and Way with their algorithms that no matter where they are applied to, or what time period, will always show a warming earth.
The essence of true science and data is that observations sometimes [usually 50%] go the opposite way for a day month decade or century.
If these are airbrushed out all the time to give the perfect warming world, every set of observations you have a giant flashing red light.
Phew.
I saw this last week. They are playing the same games with post-hoc adjustments now to sea level.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/yes-sea-level-rise-really-is-accelerating/
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Note the framing, it isn’t that the adjustments shows that satellite sea level measurements shows sea levels were rising slower than reported, the framing is that it proves that the levels are now accelerating.
MikeN (Comment #167165): “that lawyer is wrong on one key detail. Mueller never charged the Russians with those specific violations. He described it as a crime, but in the counts those details are missing … I wonder if this would hold up in court if Mueller had indicted people that would actually show up for trial.”
I think that is right. Which brings this back to the original part of my Comment #167158 and what I think the article I linked to was saying: Ultimately, the charges against the Russians are empty.
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It is illegal for a foreign citizen to contribute to a campaign, or to spend money in a campaign that either calls for electing a candidate or mentions the candidate’s name.”
Technically, that applies to “foreign nationals”. It does not apply to U.S. citizens and permanent residents who are citizens of another country. Frankly, I have a hard time believing that the “mentions a candidate’s name” part would survive a legal challenge.
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So let’s see where Mueller stands. The charges against the Russians are a dead end, since they will never stand trial or even be interviewed by Mueller. The charges against Manafort have a good chance the being thrown out of court. The plea bargain with Flynn may not survive. It looks like the only result of the entire charade might be the charge of lying to the FBI made against the nobody with the Greek name.
Another item today: Student loan debt now exceeds credit card and auto loan debt as a fraction of total consumer debt and is second only to mortgage debt. Thanks to Obama, taxpayers are probably on the hook for most of it.
Tom Scharf,
“..the framing is that it proves that the levels are now accelerating.”
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No surprise there. The only way the public will accept costly “mitigation schemes” is if the consequences of not mitigating are portrayed as very damaging and costly. That is why “find sea level acceleration at all costs” has been the focus of the green rabble for a while. The truly unhinged (like James Hansen) make projections based on the bizarre claim that the rate of ice melt will double each 10 years…. and suggest a total rise by 2100 of >3 meters… and average rate of rise of 3.7 cm per year from now on. The heck with the IPCC and AR5’s worst case (RCP 8.5, itself highly dubious) projection of 20 to 38 inches by 2100, because that is not scary enough. So the truly unhinged now claim many major coastal cities (including Miami) will be “lost” under 3+ meters of water by 2100 unless we mitigate NOW. The claims of doom are obvious garbage.
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The green rabble can’t seem to get past the suggestions of the late Stephen Schneider to exaggerate and frighten voters with scare stories. But they seem to miss the key point: obviously bogus scare stories only inhibit a serious conversation about costs and benefits. Perhaps that has always been their objective.
DeWitt,
“Thanks to Obama, taxpayers are probably on the hook for most of it.”
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Probably true, unless there is a rapid increase in inflation which reduces the real value of the loans. In which case, the lenders are on the hook for most of it. Like always, bad investments lead to losses.
I think the key for Mueller and his posse is to keep the investigation going (under wraps, of course) until after the mid-term elections, with the secondary goal of provoking Trump into a rage and doing stupid things. It is 99% politics, and 1% law enforcement.
I don’t know what will happen with Manafort, but in any case, the charges against him are unrelated to the campaign or to the Trump administration. Popadopolous (sp?) is a classic case of not knowing that you should never talk to the FBI. It’s another Martha Stewart “investigative process crime”, one which only exists because the FBI was investigating a non-crime. I do hope Trump has the good sense to resists the temptation to talk to Mueller and his hacks. Remember the Fifth Amendment, and NEVER talk to the FBI.
angech (Comment #167166)
Angech, I have no problems with those who attempt to improve the instrumental temperature records – like Cowtan and Way and BEST- and those who point to the need to compare apples to oranges when comparing modeled GMST to the observed whereby we need to use the modeled SST and not SAT in the comparisons. Even the Karl paper using different data for SST/SAT can be of some value in methods validations even if one does not agree with the final results and manipulations. Karl did include the uncertainties of measurement and sampling errors.
I have recently been looking at the Empirical Ensemble Mode Decomposition (EEMD) of the observed and modeled GMST series and found evidence for a reoccurring cyclical component in these series. The CMIP5 models and observed series do not necessarily have the same frequencies of cycles but there are cycles in both the observed and modeled series as extracted by the EEMD method. There have been papers published pointing out these developments and without much reaction from the climate science community. It would change dramatically how we look at the trends (the trends would be reduced) in the recent warming period and what could be attributed to GHGs and to natural sources. What bothers me about the authors of these papers on observed temperatures is not what they have published but rather that they have ignored my emails on the subject of EEMD results. I seldom if ever have had any author ignore my emails on other climate science topics.
Mosher, I think, gets upset with how some skeptics have (over)reacted to the authors of these papers that are giving evidence for different recent warming trends. He has directly worked with some of these authors and probably knows them personally. I would agree with him that some of the criticisms have been too personal and too often missed the point. It has been my experience in analyzing these works that it is seldom what has been included in them that I disagree but rather what has not been included and/or sensitivity tests that have not been run.
Anyway after giving Mosher my druthers here in this case, I still think his general approach is a waste of time.
Federally backed student loans are basically academia welfare, they are a stealth tax that gets funneled to the public sector. There is no incentive for academia to control costs under this setup, and unsurprisingly they haven’t. Additionally they control the career gate-keeping function with professional degrees.
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The average debt load was $27K in 2015. This is still a very good investment for some degrees, especially STEM. Students pay the same rate for online classes as regular classes. Enormous amounts of money can be saved with online classes / standardized classes. It’s unclear why someone who is smart and can learn on their own should have to pay anything at all if they demonstrate degree competence using online classes. The education system has very serious legacy issues and refuses to embrace technology.
TS “Federally backed student loans are basically academia welfare, they are a stealth tax that gets funneled to the public sector. There is no incentive for academia to control costs under this setup, and unsurprisingly they haven’t.”
My solution to this is to make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy, with reasonable restrictions. If academia knew it would take the losses for those students who do not do well by college, there would be lot less loans and a lot less money going to the colleges.
JD
JD,
It won’t be academia that takes the loss. It will be the Federal Government. That’s the meaning of Federally backed. In the past there was net profit on loans from interest payments. That is projected to soon turn to a loss.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Federal-Student-Loan-Program/242426
DP: “It won’t be academia that takes the loss. It will be the Federal Government.”
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Part of what I meant to say was to take the Federal government out of the loan guarantee business.
JD
JD/DeWitt,
The solution has to either:
1) Limit student loans to schools whose students repay at some reasonable rate. If the graduates (or dropouts) don’t make sufficient income to repay at a reasonable rate, then that school is not one the taxpayers should be subsidizing.
2) Require schools to make up the difference between a reasonable repayment rate for the student and the amount the student is currently deferred. So for example: if a 15 year repayment plan requires them to pay $600, but income based, they are only paying $400, have the school make up the $200 or some fraction. (So, possibly $100.)
Some accounting might be made for students who continue to graduate school, and some allocation for how much debt at each institution. But, basically, the purpose of the loan program is to help people put themselves in a position of later earning a better living. As much as some people like the idea of education as just making a person a fuller, better more wonderful in all ways being, that should not be the purpose of a loan program. Loans are an economic thing and should be seen that way. (Otherwise, you can get a loan for a 2 year world tour to expand your views and so on from a bank!)
Either situation would make schools seriously rethink programs whose graduates can’t get jobs.
Lucia: ” (Otherwise, you can get a loan for a 2 year world tour to expand your views and so on from a bank!)”
That is what home equity loans are for. 🙂 Seriously, I have heard banks selling them as a way for people to take vacations.
JD
Lucia: “1) Limit student loans to schools whose students repay at some reasonable rate. If the graduates (or dropouts) don’t make sufficient income to repay at a reasonable rate, then that school is not one the taxpayers should be subsidizing.”
Very good, creative idea.
Mueller reeled in another for lying to the FBI, failure to disclose something the FBI apparently already had. Talking to the FBI isn’t wise.
In other news, latest polling has tax cuts proving popular. 37% in December, 51% now. I wouldn’t suggest running against this bill in November.
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Only 1 in 3 still thinks they will receive a tax cut, 80% will. I think it used to be 15%. Amazingly the increase in support is about the same number of people who now realize they will get a tax cut. I’m guessing the bill will be even more popular once the rest of the people find out the reality, not that the media is going to go out of their way to point that out. The NYT did mention this disparity with their results.
Tom,
On tax cuts: of course. The tax cuts were “unpopular” when people believed those who told them their taxes are going up. That reverse when people saw the size of the after tax takehome pay rise.
>not that the media is going to go out of their way to point that out.
Even fairly innumerate people can see: “Last month I got $1000, this month it’s $1050.” Or whatever the difference is.
The economy doing well also helps. Stories of raises, bonuses and so on helps.
Certainly some people still don’t like Trump.
But bigger pay checks, having a job and so on are going to make it hard for people to vote for a candidate who seems to be against letting your pay check be larger, or the economy chugging along well.
Still…. we’ll see.
>people believed those who told them their taxes are going up.
And will it make them less likely to believe those in the future?
> The charges against Manafort have a good chance the being thrown out of court.
I doubt whether they would fight on constitutional grounds, when there are so many other charges Mueller will bring. Bank fraud and tax evasion haven’t been charged. Even if he beats money laundering without a constitutional challenge, there was more in that indictment.
It’s been reported that Manafort’s partner Gates will plead guilty.
Mueller single handily reverses DoJ precedent with an indictment for failing to deliver emails under subpoena.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #167173)
“Angech, I have no problems with those who attempt to improve the instrumental temperature records – like Cowtan and Way and BEST”
Neither do I.
I do have a problem with people in a club [Skeptical Science] with a preconceived notion of what the instrumental temperature record should look like having carte blanch to set the parameters of the records.
These guys are good enough and have access to the data through their jobs to set up a kriging model.
The problem is a bit like a stock market predictor model or a horse racing model.
It has all the past results in it. It is calibrated to them. If you wish to do a run on what it would predict in the past your horses will always place and your stocks will always go up.
Try it in real life and thanks to the influence of money the performances do not work.
After all if it worked why in the heck would you sell it rather than simply use it yourself.
Cowtan and Way have run past assemblies and the match the past very well every run they do.
That is not a model doing predictions, one in a hundred must show a cooling trend somewhere. It is the lack of negativity that damns their efforts as not being science but a kangaroo court.
Mosher knows that, intrinsically but refuses to see it.
Same for a lot of the BEST data reconstructions.
I think your work on the cycles, like Judith and many of the scientists you have approached is out of my range and more in Lucia and De Witt’s sphere. You may find that some of the people you are talking too are not as knowledgeable as they should be.
Kudos to Mosher for asking questions at ATTP and thanks to JD for having a go and Lucia for letting my comment through.
I have been allowed to put several previously moderated comments up and am much happier.
On the lighter side of emojis:
https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/the-new-lobster-and-dna-emojis-are-finally-correct.html
SSC: Technological unemployment, much more than you wanted to know
http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/19/technological-unemployment-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
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Summary, everyone is confused. Middle class jobs are disappearing and being pushed to both lower and higher paying jobs. Nothing alarming happening in the past few decades that wasn’t already happening for 100 years. Disability has increased. Normal economic forces may solve the problem as they have for centuries, or maybe not. This contains surveys of economists so it should be rock solid, ha ha.
angech (Comment #167187)
Angech, I think what you are saying about those who are providing new adjustments or methods to the instrumental temperature record and using historical data is analogous to stock picking based on historical (in-sample data). While that analogy would apply to those doing temperature reconstructions using proxies selected after the fact, I do not see how it applies to adjustments to the historical instrumental record. I may well be missing something in a discussion you are having at another blog where perhaps posters are making predictions of future temperatures based on the instrumental record and/or a combination of the observed and modeled temperatures.
I am also confused about your citing cooling trends in the past. All the observed temperature data sets, no matter how adjusted, show cooling trends in the past. When I look at these data sets with EEMD, all the series show multi decadal cyclical variations. I would strongly object to using simplistic linear trends when analyzing GMST temperature series.
HaroldW (Comment #167188)
February 21st, 2018 at 8:23 am
So, Harold would I be within the emoji user protocol to go ahead and use the lobster and DNA emojis or is there another step in the approval process? Heaven forbid that emojis were not anatomically correct.
Kenneth –
Lobsterkind requires accuracy in these things.
And I fear that you are not treating the DNA error with the gravitas which it requires. Flanders & Swann’s song “Misalliance” demonstrates the importance of chirality.
That sounds like a cleaned-up version of “Here lie the bones of Screwy Dick…”
HaroldW, that was a clever little ditty but the bindweeds I know would never commit suicide. It takes boiling water and Roundup. And I say let companion vines, be they right handed or left handed or ambidextrous, be damned to the same fate.
HaroldW,
Said to say this midwestern-raised boy had never heard of Flanders and Swann.
So I took a look and found this.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VnbiVw_1FNs
Quite appropriate for the usual subject of this site.
Thanks for the education!
Kenneth Fritsch –
I defer to your greater knowledge of weeds. I’m far too lazy to extirpate mine.
But then the song wasn’t really about horticulture…
John M –
Glad to oblige. I’m happy to use most anything as a pretext to link to my favorite Flanders & Swann songs. And I had forgotten about the thermodynamics song!
Looks like Google is sending a message:
Ex-Google engineer: I was fired for being too liberal
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/ex-google-engineer-i-was-fired-for-being-too-liberal/
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It seems labeling oneself a “diversity advocate” is not license to say anything you like. Google is telling people to STOP IT. Hard to believe diversity activism results in a poisonous work environment. Hopefully we are returning to the sane world of no politics at work.
Tom Scharf –
Gizmodo has a longer article about diversity and politics at Google.
HaroldW,
Maybe Google wants their employees to go write code instead. The shiny new toy image of Google is wearing thin as they encounter the exact same problems every other company has and there isn’t any magical Google fairy dust, although immense profits may count as some.
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I like the framing, one side is speaking out about diversity and the other side are bigots and white supremacists. The vileness reminds me of the abortion debate and why nobody ever, ever, debates this. Perhaps this is just a controversial topic that has valid positions on both sides, as almost every controversial topic does. I grow weary of “lets label the other side for the win”.
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Ultimately someone is going to have the bright idea to do a large study of how effective diversity training is, I’m guessing results will be disappointing because the vast majority of people already respect others based upon their character and being an a-hole is an equal opportunity character trait.
For the record, American women rule, especially over Canadian women.
Some number of employees decided to make the Left live by their own rules at Google.
Perhaps the Canadians have as big a phony for a national government leader as we in the US do.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5421779/Justin-Trudeau-ridiculed-Indians-fake-outfits.html#ixzz57rlDtRpZ
..in hockey.
…and in an even bigger upset, the US men have defeated the Canadians to advance to the curling gold medal match! If I ever figure out what the rules of curling are it will be much more exciting. It should be illegal to use those scrubbing brushes because it looks so ridiculous.
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We are at a pretty low point if beating the Canadians make you feel good, but in the age of Trump you take what you can get. I’m sure most Canadians are perfectly fine people, except at hockey and curling.
“Justin Trudeau has been ridiculed on social media by Indians for his ‘tacky’ and over the top outfit choices while on his first visit to their nation as Prime Minister.”
The line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation is not only thin, it is in constant motion. This was not the first time Trudeau crossed that line with respect to Indians (albeit, a different sort of Indian).
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/skin-deep-the-awkwardness-of-justin-trudeaus-haida-tattoo/
Do you guys think there is anything incongruous about claiming that 18 year olds shouldn’t be able to buy guns yet 18 year olds can serve in the military?
This is not a rhetorical question – I mean it. I think it is incongruous and strange to make both claims at once. If 18 years olds shouldn’t have guns because they aren’t mature or developed enough intellectually or emotionally or maturity-wise or whatever, I think it’s unwise to have them serve as troops in combat situations.
But often I am categorically wrong, and maybe I am wrong again, which changes the question from rhetorical to heartfelt and sincere. Feel invited to explain to me why I am wrong, if you think I am and care to give it a go.
Thanks.
I think it makes no sense to have a drinking age of 21.
Trudeau was snubbed upon landing, given his connections to people not favored in India but liked by Sikhs in Canada. It’s been reported that he even took with him on the trip a person who assassinated an Indian politician in Canada.
mark bofill (Comment #167206): “Do you guys think there is anything incongruous about claiming that 18 year olds shouldn’t be able to buy guns yet 18 year olds can serve in the military?”
I agree that is incongruous. People use the drinking age of 21 as a reason for not allowing younger people to buy guns. But it the drinking age that is the anomaly. Is there anything else that is legally prohibited between 18 and 21? Real question. Off hand, I can’t name anything.
Most mass shooters have been older than 21. The ones who weren’t often used guns belonging to family members. It is another example of the politician’s fallacy: We must do something, this is something, so we must do this.
Thanks Mike M.
MikeM, I think you can’t get a rental car until age 25.
MikeN,
You can rent a car if you’re younger than 25 (as young as 18 in some states), but there is typically an added fee involved. For example, see https://www.enterprise.com/en/help/faqs/car-rental-under-25.html or https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/misc/index.jsp?targetPage=Hertz_Renting_to_Drivers_Under_25.jsp
My guess is the theory would be that the military trains 18 years old much better than what is required to buy a gun, they also can choose who gets to carry guns and who doesn’t, and people in the military don’t typically carry their guns around, not sure if they have 24/7 access to them either. I’m not defending this policy, only guessing.
An armed officer was at the school during the entire shooting episode, and did nothing. These are not glorious days for law enforcement. People freeze up under a crisis, but they are supposed to be trained to overcome this. School security is probably closer to mall security than patrol officers. I am both outraged that this guy did nothing and simultaneously have empathy that he will be replaying those 6 minutes in his head for the rest of his life over and over.
I would agree with MikeM’s comment here. Politicians and their counterparts in the MSM are very predictable and particularly with emotional issues like this one. Do not expect to see these issues argued with any amount of reason or logic. Just look at the CNN townhall effort.
Most of the discussions have ignored what went wrong with security (and how to fix it) at all levels in the most recent mass killings.
Tom Scharf (Comment #167216): “An armed officer was at the school during the entire shooting episode, and did nothing. … School security is probably closer to mall security than patrol officers”
The officer in question was a police officer with the sheriff’s department, not a security guard. He has resigned.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #167217): “Most of the discussions have ignored what went wrong with security (and how to fix it) at all levels in the most recent mass killings.”
True. Part of the reason it is ignored may be that it undermines the argument for gun control. An essential part of the logic of gun control is that people should not defend themselves, but should rely on the authorities for protection. So the multiple failures of the authorities in this case works against the narrative.
I have come to the conclusion that gun control is not about public safety. It is not even about guns so much as it is about control.
Let’s see if this rings a bell: I’m really really angry. You should be ashamed of how you think. You need to just shut up and listen to my righteous tirade. My level of anger proves I have the morally superior position which means it is the correct position so we must do it my way even if it won’t be effective. We must do it Now. Your input is not needed, nor will I view you any differently after you do it my way. Debate over. Celebration of big “victory” of culture smack down occurs in media. This time will be different. Nothing ends up happening. Repeat.
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As David Brooks recently said, respecting the opponent’s position is the pathway to change. The drug of asserting moral superiority is too enticing. A handgun ban is a very, very, high bar to say the least. You won’t get there, or even start on the path, by demonizing the other side.
Indeed!
Back in the day, pre the early 1960’s, Cruz might have been involuntarily committed to a mental health institution. Basically, that’s no longer an option since the deinstitutionalization movement succeeded. Or at least succeeded in releasing a lot of seriously ill people into the general population. Admittedly, state mental institutions were in dire need of reform, but the cure may have been at least as bad as or worse than the disease.
Btw, I seriously debated putting scare quotes around the word health in the first sentence. See, for example, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The book was published in 1962.
Mike M,
It is about public safety, but ignoring historical precedent:
Impossible to throw off a destructive government if the people have no guns. That was (and is) the whole point of the second amendment. People could try to change the second amendment, but that is not going to be approved by the states.
The same guard who didn’t go into the school had refused to answer questions for social services investigators.
Broward County Schools and police department had a policy of trying not to arrest students. The police department did not miss signs; they deliberately ignored them.
The 30 minute tape delay was not accidental. It was a means of implementing the policy.
“We’re not compromising school safety. We’re really saving the lives of kids,†said Michaelle Valbrun-Pope, executive director of Student Support Initiatives for Broward County Public Schools.
https://www.publicsource.org/these-districts-fought-the-school-to-prison-pipeline-can-pittsburgh-learn-their-lessons/
It is interesting it took a week for the news that the officer declined to engage the shooter to come out. They probably knew this in the first few hours. NYT 2 days ago:
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“Sheriff Scott Israel said that, to his knowledge, deputies followed protocol and did not wait for specialized teams to arrive before going into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. But he said that details over the office’s response remained unclear.”
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A bit too carefully worded IMO. Smells like an attempted cover-up. I’m not sure if the Sherrif’s office fessed up to this before the media reported it.
Mike M. (Comment #167219)
February 23rd, 2018 at 11:32 am
I have the view that what you say about gun control not being about safety but about control is correct and applicable to what I have been saying about government attempts for mitigation of AGW whereas I see those who would attempt to make a case for it consider that government should have these controls already. That is why the uncertainty of the need for mitigation and the proprosed solutions for mitigation actually working are not all that important to them.
SteveF,
To believe, as you apparently do, that the second amendment was intended among other things to enable armed insurrection in response to the actions of a tyranical government is to accept the notion that the guys who constructed both the constitution and the amendments contemplated that their words and the ideas which they conveyed in those words might not prevent the rise of such a government. I don’t buy this.
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The part I don’t buy is not that it couldn’t happen but that the framers doubted the effectiveness of their words and believed that a popular rebellion enabled by domestic armories could be effective against the government’s organized army.
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I suspect that most of these guys read Hume’s History of England published about that time. Hume goes into some detail on the folly of supposing an untrained militia could stand up to a well organized government military.
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Right to bear arms is intended to assure the folks on the frontier of their ability to defend themselvs agains the previous locals.
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I write this as a former Expert (Rifleman IIRC) 22 Rifle (in high school – nomenclature for this rating seems to have changed since then) and not too bad more recently with my brother’s Glock, M1911, and S&W’s.
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To repeat, armed insurrection is not intended to be enabled by the Constitution nor by the Amendments.
I should add to the above tirade that because something was in the Declaration of Independence doesn’t form the basis for its assumpton into the Constitution.
j ferguson,
We will have to agree to disagree. I think no military would like to face a population armed with 100 million firearms. And certainly not a population of their own countrymen. Where do most enlisted soldiers come from? Certainly not from those states opposed to the second amendment. It is not clear to me the US military could keep a lot of soldiers from going AWAL if they were ordered to shoot civilians.
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I do believe those writing the Constitution and early amendments had been through a revolution, and believed it could become needed again.
j ferguson (Comment #167234): “To believe, as you apparently do, that the second amendment was intended among other things to enable armed insurrection in response to the actions of a tyranical government is to accept the notion that the guys who constructed both the constitution and the amendments contemplated that their words and the ideas which they conveyed in those words might not prevent the rise of such a government.”
I think it is a historical fact that the framers contemplated the possibility that things might go wrong. They believed that a democracy was unstable and were not at all certain that a republic could be stable for long. They put a lot of effort into designing a system that could avoid the problems that destroyed previous democracies and republics. They surely were not so arrogant that they believed that they got it exactly right.
When the convention ended, Franklin was asked “what sort of government have we got” and replied “a republic, if you can keep it”.
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j ferguson: “Hume goes into some detail on the folly of supposing an untrained militia could stand up to a well organized government military.”
Seems to me that Hume had just been shown to be wrong. Twice.
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j ferguson: “Right to bear arms is intended to assure the folks on the frontier of their ability to defend themselvs agains the previous locals.”
But I don’t think it was just a matter of concern on the frontier.
I think that whether a rebellion against the government can succeed is irrelevant. The Second Amendment acknowledges the right of the people to overthrow their government. Repealing the Second Amendment would deny that right. It makes a big difference for the relation of the government to the people.
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j ferguson (Comment #167235): “I should add to the above tirade that because something was in the Declaration of Independence doesn’t form the basis for its assumpton into the Constitution.”
The Declaration is important as a statement of the political philosophy that guided the drafting of the Constitution. As such it is vital for understanding the Constitution.
People point to Heller as allowing handgun bans but OK with bans on assault weapons. That’s not what it said. It merely only covered handguns for the case at hand.
The previous case US v Miller seems to allow for any weapon that has a military purpose, despite their being a lawyer for only the government.
Jferguson, the founders didn’t contemplate a standing army to begin with.
Mike M:
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Mike, that seems to me an interpretation (maybe an assumption) of intent since it doesn’t actually say anything of the sort.
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Why didn’t they actually write what you suggest?
BTW, I have no problem with the second amendment.
J,
Read Federalist 46. Madison was discussing precisely this possibility. He estimates the force the Federal government could bring to bear against a State would be a fraction of the size of a State militia.
Federalist 46. Thanks Mark, Wow, was I misinformed. Sorry, SteveF and Mikes to have wasted your time with this.
Mark Bofill,
Thanks. It had been many years since I read Federalist 46. Madison plainly argues the citizens of the USA, unlike most every other country, have the right to bear arms, and because of this, could, if needed, resist a regular army. It is obvious both in the contemporary documents and the explicit inclusion of the second amendment right that the possibility of armed resistance against an unjust Federal government was contemplated by the framers of the constitution.
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I think what Madison did not foresee was the gigantic growth in the power of the Federal government through two 20th century developments: Federal income tax, via a legitimate amendment, and corruption of the commerce clause by the Supreme Court to allow Federal intrution into most every aspect of states rights and individual liberties which the Constitution was designed to protect. That corruption via the commerce clause remains relevant today… The main argument made by the Obama administration for the constitutionality of the coercion of the individual mandate was that it was allowed by the commerce clause. The chief justice knew that was a rubbish argument, but did not have the courage to simply declare Federal coercion of individual behavior unconstitutional, opting instead to allow the coercion as just a “tax”. A grotesque and cowardly ruling, IMO.
A good argument against my earlier and clearly misinformed view might have been that the amendment contemplates the right to bear arms being infringed. Who but a tyranical central government would infringe tjhis right and to what end but to be better able to impose a locally unpopular action?
Yeah it had been years for me too. I only remembered because my daughter has been studying our early days and arguing with me about them and I’ve had to refresh my memory in the past few weeks.
SteveF
That’s why during the Battle of Chicago the guys from the South Side armed themselves and helped the Transformers repel the Decepticons!
Ok… fiction. And most of the more dramatic scenes are the Transformer and Decepticons fighting. But armed Chicagoans were pitching in.
The idea of people arming themselves to invade invaders is something Americans think of as an American “thing”. It comes out regularly in sci-fi type movies. It happens at a smaller scale in westerns where locals are just repelling bands of bandits.
Admittedly, I think in a real invasion, Illinois in general and Chicago in particular would need help from people in Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana. We’d probably get it with Michigan leading the way.
My impression gun control advocates are going to find it very difficult to disarm Michiganders.
Lucia,
“My impression gun control advocates are going to find it very difficult to disarm Michiganders.”
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Or, Iowans, Cajuns, Alabamans, Floridians, or… well lots of states. Attempts to disarm the population would cause widespread civil revolt. Any suggestion this is a good idea is nuts.
Dunno. Seems to me it would be easier to strip Hawkeyes of their guns than Michiganders. I’m pretty sure the entire city of Madison WI would drop their guns in a heartbeat, but Green Bay, WI? Not so much.
Cajuns? I suspect getting actual Cajuns to give up their guns would be impossible. Alabama? Not happening.
Of course I am going on stereotypes. 😉
Lucia,
“Of course I am going on stereotypes.”.
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Sometimes stereotypes are informative. 😉
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I have had several different Cajuns, on several different occasions, tell me directly they would shoot anyone who came to take their guns.
Lucia,
By coincidence, I was in Wisconsin this week (30 miles west of Milwaukee), and over lunch discussed the recent school shooting with three locals. There was a range of opinion on what can be done to reduce the chance of similar shootings, but none of them suggested gun confiscation. And they all own guns. Those who suggest rescinding the second amendment is a practical approach are suffering delusions; it will not happen.
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But I was surprised that there was clear support for things like restricting arms purchases by people less than 21 years old, and better/more complete background checks.
SteveF,
That all sounds good, but probably still wouldn’t have done much for recent events. Much like alcohol, one can usually find someone with the proper credentials to buy a gun for you. It’s called straw purchase. There are laws against it, but they’re not enforced. Then there’s always theft. There was an opinion piece in the WSJ recently detailing all of this. The suggestion was to enforce the laws already on the books and make those convicted of stealing guns do serious hard time. That won’t happen either. Can you say ‘disparate impact’?
Connecticut passed an ‘assault weapons’ registration recently, and it’s clear most of the holders have not registered.
> did not have the courage to simply declare Federal coercion of individual behavior unconstitutional, opting instead to allow the coercion as just a “taxâ€.
This minority side(which Roberts abandoned) would not have declared this either. Their only objection was that the mandate was not labeled a tax. If it had been, they would have upheld it.
Mike N,
Did you ever read the Sebelius dissent (2012) by Scalia, Kennedy, Alito, and Thomas?
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Seems to me they objected exactly to the expansive reading of the Commerce Clause to include regulation of non-action as an absurd distortion of the Constitution. They further directly ask: if the commerce clause allows coersion for an economic non-activity, then what private activity is not subjected to direct control by the Federal Government under Constitution? The only reasonable answer is “none”…. all private activities are subject to Federal control.
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Save for Kelo v New London, this was IMO the worst ruling by the Court in the last 40 years. The States could (and most did) immediately prohibit the Constitutional abuse allowed by Kelo. But the states could not eliminate the Constitutional abuse (the individual mandate) of Sebelius. That ugly precedent stands as a permanent testiment to just how bad a justice John Roberts is.
SteveF, yes, there was a discussion of it here sometime last year.
My conclusion was the minority objected to the Commerce Clause justification for the mandate, but only voted to overturn because it was not clearly identified as a tax. Had it been clearly identified, they were OK with it.
Schiff memo is finally out. It confirms there were four different judges who approved FISA warrants as reported. They cite this to show how strong the application was. I think it shows they felt they needed to find a new judge each time, three times leaving DC to do it.
The Schiff memo is a little difficult to follow, in part because it is partially redacted, and in part because it jumps around quite a lot.
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The messages the Schiff memo sends are: 1) yes, the FBI and DOJ were investigating Trump, just as they should have, 2) none of the officials at the FBI showed any bias against Trump, nor bias in favor of Clinton, and 3) everything in the dossier may STILL in fact be accurate.
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Most of that is demonstrably wrong, of course.
Nothing in the dossier has been corroborated, except that Carter Page actually did travel to Russia. Nothing else. Andy McCabe didn’t resign for no reason…. he was blatantly biased, as I suspect the FBI Inspector General report will show… assuming the FBI does not hide the report. That he is gone is probably more important than that he won’t be prosecuted for likely perjury in his congressional testimony. Agent Strok (sp?) was not demoted to a closet for his superb handling of the Clinton and Trump investigations… he was demoted for being a political hack. Comey was fired for the same reason.
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I don’t doubt most managers at the FBI were absolutely horrified by Trump, nor do I doubt that they hoped and dreamed Trump was a Russian puppet they could quickly drive from office. I do doubt they were unbiased or had any reasonable cause to pursue those dreams via investigation. The FBI needs a complete reorganization, and Congress needs to oversee that reorganization…. or start defunding many of their activities.
SteveF,
There do seem (to me) to be at least a few conflicting points. I’m still adjusting my caffeine levels this morning and need to think it through after I’m all the way awake. But I seem to recall reading that high level DOJ or FBI officials reviewed Nunes memo and reported that it wasn’t wrong as far as it went, just that it contained material omissions.
Take verification of the dossier, for example. I’d have to go back and search, but my recollection right now is that multiple people reported that the dossier was largely unverified. Including Comey I think.
Dunno.
mark,
I’m pretty sure that strictly speaking Comey’s “salacious and unverified” comment applied only to the golden shower thing in the dossier. However, the dossier has been in FBI hands for a long time, so claiming that other things in the dossier still could be true is skating on thin ice and, if anything, reflects poorly on the FBI.
IMO, everything in the dossier, other than Carter Page’s trip, remains unverified by definition until there is verification. You don’t need a statement to that effect by Comey or anyone for that to be true. Which means that that the MSM’s crowing that Comey didn’t say the entire dossier was unverified is irrelevant.
I agree that never going back to a previous judge for FISA warrant extensions is a sign of weakness of the case, not strength.
Byron York’s analysis of the new memo:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-assessing-the-new-democratic-intel-memo/article/2649977?platform=hootsuite
He pretty much guts its. The new memo realy does not rebut anything in the Republican version.
Alright.
Let’s take CNN’s Five key areas where Nunes and Schiff disagree
1. How important was the Steele dossier? Nunes: formed an essential part. Sciff: narrow use of Steele.
A. Nunes memo claims ‘“Deputy Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information,†the memo claims, referring to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.’
B. Unnamed sources say this is 100% false, yet Sciff memo does not appear to address this claim.
C. McCabe did resign. Exactly why is not known with certainty.
My verdict: I’m going with Nunes on this one.
2. Did the Justice Department tell the FISA court about Steele’s political motivations? Nunes memo says does not name actors, or DNC. Schiff does not dispute this, but explains FISA warrant disclosed political motivations.
A. There is no factual disagreement here.
My verdict: Both are correct.
3. Why did the Justice Department reference a Yahoo! News article in the FISA application? Nunes claims article was used for collaboration. Schiff says that’s not at all what it was for, it was for demonstrating Page’s public denial of meetings.
My verdict: Don’t know. We are still left wondering what if anything collaborated Steele.
4. Bruce Ohr – basically Schiff disputes that Ohr had anything to do with the FISA application.
My verdict: So what. Doesn’t really dispute Ohr bias, only impact on FISA.
5. When did the FBI counterintelligence investigation begin? Agreed that it was July 2016. Claims in memos surrounding this do not actually appear to conflict.
My verdict: CNN was writing filler material here.
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Extras not in CNN from Schiff memo:
The defense of Strzok and Page smack of lawyerly B.S. The texts demonstate obvious bias. Whether or not Strzok and Page were affiants on the FISA application is irrelevant to the fact that the texts demonstrate obvious bias. Noting that the texts demontrate bias is not demonizing anybody. McCabe testified that he had no idea what insurance policy they were talking about is all very well and good. How then can the text references be explained. Finally, Strzok role in Clinton’s email affair is far from a demonstration of Strzok’s lack of bias. He softened the language of the findings; this demonstrates bias.
The dossier has lots of memos. It’s not clear if anything was verified that was not based on publicly known info at the time.
Nunes memo says McCabe testified without the Steele dossier, there would have been no FISA warrant. At the time Schiff and Staliwell said this was false, but this memo doesn’t counter that point. It looks like Carter Page was not the only application. Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen both fit the redacted portion.
Did JD’s post disappear?
I wrote an earlier comment that fell into the bit bucket about CNN’s 5 point comparison. Mostly it was uninspired so – no great loss. I would like to put this in though, from the bottom of the lost comment:
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The defense of Strzok and Page smack of lawyerly B.S to me. The texts demonstate obvious bias. Whether or not Strzok and Page were affiants on the FISA application is irrelevant to the fact that the texts demonstrate obvious bias. Noting that the texts demontrate bias is not demonizing anybody. McCabe testified that he had no idea what insurance policy they were talking about is all very well and good. Still, the text references to an insurance policy remain unexplained. Finally, Strzok role in Clinton’s email affair is far from a demonstration of Strzok’s lack of bias. He softened the language of the findings; this demonstrates bias.
This bit in Schiff’s memo is a steaming pile of fertilizer.
Thanks DeWitt. I think that’s correct.
Bias in investigators is not a problem. Reading the texts suggests they were not very supportive of Hillary, seeing her as too weak on foreign policy. Then Page was supporting Bernie. It’s whether they let that bias influence their actions. It has been reported that Strzok interviewed Michael Flynn and thought he did not lie.
Either way, it is doubtful that Strzok and Page were the cause, and instead were assigned to the case. Obama, Brennan, Yates, Rice, Comey, McCabe, Fortan, etc were team leaders.
Respectfully, I disagree with you on this point MikeN. I’ll spare us all an argument about the point and let it go at that.
You don’t want people who care a lot about politics investigating politics. Think of how many people you know that just could care less what is happening in DC every day and do their jobs quite professionally. Those are the types you want doing political investigations. However it is almost impossible to not care the further up in the hierarchy you are in a government organization. I know of exactly nobody that is arguing Strzok and Page should be reinstated in the investigation. Their bias was blatant and a black eye to the FBI. There are going to be plenty of others who are smarter and have stealth bias.
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Having bias and allowing bias to corrupt results are different things. To overcome this they need evidence. We shall see what the future holds. So far evidence is lacking.
US curling for the gold! Leaving five in the house with a tie game after an awesome double tap removal of opponent’s stones in the eighth end with the hammer was the key to the match. Yes, I watched the replay and picked up some lingo. See the winning shot here:
http://ftw.usatoday.com/2018/02/curling-winter-olympics-team-usa-john-shuster-doubled-score-watch-replay-highlights
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It was strangely fascinating how excited the crowd got.
Public sector unions, Supreme Court today:
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Justice Anthony Kennedy asked David Frederick, the attorney for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Illinois affiliate, whether a ruling against AFSCME would reduce its political influence.
Frederick agreed that it would.
“Isn’t that the end of this case?” Kennedy asked.
New lawsuit has been filed against ObamaCare. The tax law did not repeal the individual mandate but instead set the penalty at $0. It can no longer be argued that it is a tax. Also, both sides agreed that the entire law falls without the mandate. So the logic of the lawsuit is that ObamaCare must be thrown out as a result.
MikeN,
I’m not a lawyer, but I’m no sure that logic means ObamaCare must be “thrown out”. It seems to me it’s perfectly legal to just let it fail. Then the legislature can respond to its failure.
Tom Scharf,
I’m sure AFSCME didn’t like Justice Kennedy’s comment. But don’t count your chickens before they hatch. He’s only one vote.
lucia,
Roberts is almost certainly going to side with the liberal block, leaving earlier SC rulings in place. Once a fool, always a fool.
The previous ruling on essentially the same case was split 4-4 with Scalia’s seat vacant.
Roberts was willing to rule then against the liberal bloc.
Lucia, when ObamaCare was upheld, the minority said mandate was unconstitutional and it follows that the whole law must be thrown out. They were not willing to get rid of just the mandate and let the law fail. If Roberts was accepting the same reasoning, which is likely since he originally voted with them, then he would have to now rule the mandate is unconstitutional as a mandate, is not a tax, and throw out the law.
The logic looks sound, but I guess the result might be to throw out the individual mandate as a matter of law, then leave the rest to Congress.
Mike N,
“The previous ruling on essentially the same case was split 4-4 with Scalia’s seat vacant.”
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Yes, but you forget the venality of Roberts: when a ruling really matters for upholding constitutional principles, like striking the individual mandate in Obamacare, he always caves. I hope you are right, but I suspect strongly he will manage to cave again on this case when it most matters. His only compensation: loving approval of the progressive media hoard. He’s a terrible SC justice.
MikeN (Comment #167311): “If Roberts was accepting the same reasoning, which is likely since he originally voted with them, then he would have to now rule the mandate is unconstitutional as a mandate, is not a tax, and throw out the law.”
That makes no sense. You seem to be saying that since the law no longer contains an unconstitutional mandate, the law is now unconstitutional.
MikeN,
The issue was whether the government could levy a penalty. (That’s really the only thing that makes it a “mandate”.) They found the commerce clause doesn’t authorize a penalty, but the $$ someone had to fork over was a tax. And that’s allowed under the tax code.
A tax of zero would certainly still be allowed under the tax code. But a penalty of $0 is not a penalty. So it doesn’t need any constitutional basis. I just don’t see how zeroing out the fine– whether we call it a tax or a penalty– makes Obamacare unconstitutional.
If that suit doesn’t have some other argument, it seems like a waste of time to me.
MikeM, the unconstitutional mandate is still there. Because of Senate rules, they did not repeal the individual mandate. Then only reduced the level of penalty to $0.
MikeN (Comment #167318): “the unconstitutional mandate is still there. Because of Senate rules, they did not repeal the individual mandate. Then only reduced the level of penalty to $0.”
Lucia is right. If that is the basis of the suit, it will surely get thrown out. Perhaps one of our legal eagles will correct me, but I am pretty sure that you cannot sue if there is no harm done. A “mandate” with no penalty does no one any harm, so it can not be challenged in court.
Actually, a $0.00 penalty does harm, but it’s indirect. No penalty means even fewer young, healthy people will buy insurance. That will drive up premiums even faster. The Affordable part of the ACA came from the (questionable) assumption that the penalty would make everyone buy health insurance so the premiums would be reasonable on average.
DeWitt,
A person who has to pay more in premiums because others don’t subsidize it might advance the theory that zeroing out the penalty caused them “harm”. But I’m pretty sure it’s not the sort of “harm” courts generally recognize as an injury. They generally want harm to be direct and not something like “the government hasn’t arranged for my to be given a sufficient subsidy on the backs of other members of society”.
In any case, the person who thinks reinstating the penalty would allow them to pay less in insurance fees wouldn’t have standing to sue to make the ACA be thrown out. After all, if they think they are harmed by no penalty, throwing out the ACA would not provide a remedy.
They, or someone, might have standing to force the government to re-instate a penalty. But I suspect not. (Need lawyer to be more certain on this.)
lucia,
Yes. I thought about including a sentence stating that I wasn’t sure anyone would have standing to sue over the issue. But I didn’t because I thought stating that the harm was indirect would make the same point.
Regarding standing, the case is not brought by individuals hurt by the mandate but by 20 states. They do make the argument that higher premiums hurt them. The charge is that the ACA as a whole is damaging with its regulations, and the individual mandate is part of that. Also, one way to get out of the individual mandate is to sign up for Medicaid, so this harms the states where people who were eligible but didn’t sign up did so.
States also have standing if federal law preempts state regulation.
Page 16
https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/files/epress/Texas_Wisconsin_et_al_v._U.S._et_al_-_ACA_Complaint_(02-26-18).pdf
MikeN (Comment #167332): “They do make the argument that higher premiums hurt them.”
How?
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“The charge is that the ACA as a whole is damaging with its regulations, and the individual mandate is part of that.”
But you can’t sue just because you think the law damaging, and the individual mandate is gone.
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“Also, one way to get out of the individual mandate is to sign up for Medicaid”
That is nonsense. The mandate never applied to people eligible for Medicaid
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The link does not work.
MikeM: Re: Standing
There has to be some sort of identifiable harm for there to be standing. I haven’t looked at this closely, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were not numerous rules and regulations, separate from the mandate that cost the States money. With the mandate to pay gone, it is possible to legally argue that the remaining regulations are illogical, superfluous, or now with the change in the law, illegal.
JD
.pdf isn’t being included in the link. https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/files/epress/Texas_Wisconsin_et_al_v._U.S._et_al_-_ACA_Complaint_(02-26-18).pdf
>The mandate never applied to people eligible for Medicaid.
That’s the point. States were having eligible people who didn’t sign up, then signing up because of the mandate.
MikeM, the individual mandate is not gone. There is now a law that you must purchase health insurance. The minority ruled this was unconstitutional. Roberts said there was no such law, just a tax. This tax no longer exists, but the law does.
MikeN (Comment #167336): “States were having eligible people who didn’t sign up, then signing up because of the mandate.”
I can not imagine any reason why people would sign up for Medicaid because of the mandate.
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“the individual mandate is not gone. There is now a law that you must purchase health insurance.”
That is a distinction without a difference.
>I can not imagine any reason why people would sign up for Medicaid because of the mandate.
When they suffer tax penalty for not doing so, it makes sense. With just that they are breaking the law in not doing so, perhaps not.
>“the individual mandate is not gone. There is now a law that you must purchase health insurance.â€
>
>That is a distinction without a difference.
It was the key distinction in Roberts’s decision. Hence the new lawsuit.
Now anyone who does not purchase health insurance can be branded a criminal.
MikeN
Says who?
I’m pretty sure. The law already provided that not buying the insurance was not a crime. No one could be charged with a crime. Prison was not a penalty and so on.
There maybe some basis for some type of suit by someone. But I just don’t see how one based on the theory you seem to be describing makes any sense.
MikeN (Comment #167340): “When they suffer tax penalty for not doing so, it makes sense.”
There has never been a tax penalty for not signing up for Medicaid. And not getting insurance is not, and never has been, a crime.
MikeM, the tax penalty is from the individual mandate. If you sign up for Medicaid, you are exempt from the mandate, and thus avoid the tax penalty.
When we discussed ObamaCare before about the difference between a tax penalty and a tax credit, you said
“The other structure gives people in impression they have done something wrong
The requirement is still on the books, but there is no specific penalty specified now.
REQUIRED by federal law.
The law goes on to say there is a waiver from criminal penalties, but not that it is not a crime.
You cannot be charged, but it doesn’t take away the requirement, you are disobeying the law.
Lucia,
” The law already provided that not buying the insurance was not a crime. No one could be charged with a crime. Prison was not a penalty and so on.”
Yes, but once again, a distinction without a difference. It most certainly is a crime to not pay a Federal tax bill, and one for which you can be prosecuted. With the penalty zeroed out, there is no possibility of prosecution. That part of the law is now irrelevant; it wasn’t before. Unfortunately, the limitations on what insurance plans can be sold remain in place, and that continues to serve the original purpose of forcing a transfer of wealth from more healthy people to less healthy people, unless someone is willing to go without insurance at all. The scale of the wealth transfer is reduced, but not eliminated. The folly of Obamacare is that it is the least efficient means of wealth transfer I can imagine… it adds dramatically to total health care costs, when all that was really needed was to raise taxes enough to help people who could not afford basic health care. It remains nearly as crazy a plan as it was when enacted.
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MikeN,
“The law goes on to say there is a waiver from criminal penalties, but not that it is not a crime.
You cannot be charged, but it doesn’t take away the requirement, you are disobeying the law.”
This is a silly. Without enforcement, disobeying “the law” has zero consequence, and so it will be ignored, just as it should be. Make cocaine “illegal”, but zero out the penalties, or make distilling whisky unlawful, but set no penalty. Who would pay attention to these laws? Nobody. The role of government is not to stand on a soap box and scold voters… we leave that to priests, preachers, mullahs, and rabbis. Any insurance company that tries to sell an inexpensive insurance plan not allowed by Obamacare most certainly will be prosecuted.
SteveF
Yes. It is a crime to refuse to pay the taxes you own. But there is no independent crime.
With no penalty, the crime of not paying your taxes can’t have anything to do with Obamacare.
Evidently, some “non-qualifying” policies are now being permitted by idaho. See
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/idaho-tests-the-bounds-of-skirting-affordable-care-act-insurance-rules/2018/02/27/114157da-1266-11e8-9570-29c9830535e5_story.html?utm_term=.e2c8ba863148
We’ll see what happens with that.
Not by Idaho! So we’ll see what the Feds do.
MikeN (Comment #167344): “If you sign up for Medicaid, you are exempt from the mandate, and thus avoid the tax penalty.”
You simply don’t know what you are talking about. You can not sign up for Medicaid unless you are eligible for Medicaid. If you are eligible for Medicaid there is no penalty, whether you sign up or not. The mandate has no impact on people signing up for Medicaid. And nothing is changing for those people.
lucia: “Evidently, some “non-qualifying†policies are now being permitted by idaho.”
There are also short term plans available most places (see https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/health-insurance-alternatives/). Those are currently no more than 3 months and have limitations on renewal. The Trump administration is making the max term 12 months and, I think, lifting the limitations on renewal. They are a fair bit cheaper than Obamacare. I plan to look into them for 2019, especially if my Obamacare plan has another 20% rate increase.
MikeM
Yep. But I think Idaho and other places are going to relax limitations. They also aren’t offering things like maternity and other requirements and they are doing things like rejecting people with pre-existing conditions and making older people pay a larger increment compared to younger healthier people.
I found the Idaho link, but I had read an article in the Wall Street Journal this week, and basically some states are seeing what they can get away with given that the Federal Executive isn’t all that enthused with Obamacare.
MikeN,
https://www.healthcare.gov/fees/fee-for-not-being-covered/
There isn’t even a criminal penalty for not paying the fee. But the IRS will hold back from your future tax refunds (assuming you have any.) This is simply not viewed as a “crime” of any sort by the government. WRT to whether something is a “crime”: if the government doesn’t consider it a crime, it’s not. Or at least that’s the view the courts will take.
Your neighbor or someone who supports Obamacare might think it’s a crime.
But heck, some people think spraying your dandelions is a crime. Others think not spraying them is a crime. Both are using the word “crime” according to a non-legalistic meaning. Courts aren’t going to concern themselves with these sorts of “crimes”. They certainly won’t throwout Obamacare based on some argument that those who don’t buy are committing some sort of “crime” if the crime is not one under any legal definition of “crime”.
SteveF, ObamaCare specifies that there is no criminal penalty for not paying individual mandate on your taxes. The most the IRS can do is deduct from refund.
MikeM, eligibility for Medicaid does not exempt you from the individual mandate. Enrollment in Medicaid is considered minimum essential coverage. Yes not everyone can sign up, but not everyone who is eligible does sign up. Most of the ObamaCare health insurance coverage increase is from people signing up for Medicaid who were eligible before ObamaCare.
There is a low income exemption from the individual mandate, but that is not the same as Medicaid eligibility, which was expanded under ObamaCare.
If Congress passes a law that you are required to do something, then not doing it is a violation of the law. Even with no punishment, you are breaking the law.
I don’t know if there are any other examples on the books, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
SteveF is right that Congress shouldn’t be scolds, but that is what is happening here.
No punishment, under legal definitions, would mean no crime, so you are probably right the Supreme Court will not do anything, though they may formally excise individual mandate.
Volokh Conspiracy thinks the severability issue is key. Does not cover issue of crime with no punishment.
http://reason.com/volokh/2018/02/28/thoughts-on-the-new-constitutional-case
I read Ilya’s article and the suit. The plaintiffs don’t push the notion that those who don’t get insurance might be considered to have committed a “crime” either.
The injuries are all to the states having to run the programs.
It sounds like Ilya thinks the resolution might just be SCOTUS strikes the language that states people “shall” buy qualified insurance (if they fall in the particular group that must.) Then be done. But he thinks it might be useful for them to rule that if no $$ is raised then it can’t be a “tax” and so cannot be authorized under taxing authority.
That might be an important thing to have them rule — given how once some sort of authority to do something is “found”, Congress tends to use that authority for other things.
I think the Somin article cited by MikeN (Comment #167354) has it just about right. The lawsuit is pretty much pointless, unless it induces SCOTUS to establish a specific constitutional principle that “the federal government cannot use its tax power to impose mandates unless that mandate includes a monetary fine that raises some revenue for the government”. But SCOTUS generally rules no more broadly that it needs to, so I doubt they will do that.
The last portion serves no purpose. The real threat comes in using the tax power to coerce people to do things. Having a $0 fine does not achieve anything.
Lucia, you are right the brief does not address the crime issue. I took it to mean it is self evident. My point is, on what basis can the individual mandate be challenged if it is not a crime? They said it is within the tax power of Congress before. Now the justification is within the commerce clause, which Roberts has already rejected. Suppose only the mandate had passed and nothing else within ObamaCare, with no fine. Could it be challenged?
MikeN,
This is a suit. I’m not a lawyer. But I’m pretty sure that if a point is important to a case it needs to be stated directly, not omitted and assumed as “self evident”. In fact, my impression is that if a claim is not stated, and someone loses, they can’t bring that up later on. So it’s important to actually state things.
Is this rhetorical? Looks like it. But anyway, the plaintiffs didn’t say it was a crime. And if that is the claim why Obamacare should the found unconstitutional, it ought to be stated.
Google is being sued two more times, one for allowing a “Bro culture” to exist and another that YouTube explicitly stopped hiring white males and Asians. It is unbelievable that identity politics has turned into a toxic swamp of poison. I have a feeling Identity Law is going to explode in the next decade. Hooray for justice.
MikeN (Comment #167354)
March 1st, 2018 at 4:02 pm
The reasoning in this excerpt from Volokh would seem difficult for the Supreme Court to ignore in any ruling -but who knows.
At this point, I’m wondering on what basis can the individual mandate be challenged, if there is no penalty? If the states are claiming harm from the rest of the law, then they are not really challenging the mandate.
Suppose only the mandate had passed and nothing else, with no fine. Could it be challenged?
MikeN,
Obviously, a group of states is challenging it. We’ll see how this pans out. Maybe there will be more clarity in the argument at some future time.
That said:
A law you don’t like might very well be constitutional.
A law that is objectively bad might very well be constitutional.
So perhaps it is constitutional at this point. I don’t know.
Possibly. That would be like challenging the current mandate but saying you think it’s severeable from the rest of the ACA. Maybe the mandate is unconstitutional but severable. We’ll see.
Lucia, I am asking separate questions about standing vs constitutionality. It could be that the mandate is unconstitutional but no one has standing to challenge it as there is no penalty.
Ahh… I see.
The states are saying their damage pretty much comes from everything they have to do to offer qualifying policies. That might give standing.
In the previous comments, I think we were discussing individuals having standing– at least that’s what I thought we were discussing.
It really is the same thing as you point out. If individuals do not have standing on the mandate, then neither do the states, unless they can link it to the rest of the law. However, with no find their ability to do so is weak.
Just wanted to clarify that I meant ‘can a law be challenged?’
to mean ‘do you have standing?’, not ‘is it unconstitutional?’.
The issue of whether it’s a crime with no penalty I think is a key issue, but no brief discusses it.
Mike M,
“The lawsuit is pretty much pointless, unless it induces SCOTUS to establish a specific constitutional principle that “the federal government cannot use its tax power to impose mandates unless that mandate includes a monetary fine that raises some revenue for the government”.”
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Sort of like Marbury v. Madison I guess; a court decision that brings no writ of mandamus, but which serves to establish the Court’s authority to rule in the future. Roberts should simply have struck the damned individual mandate as unconstitutional in the first place, and saved everyone a lot of time and trouble.
lucia (Comment #167364): “The states are saying their damage pretty much comes from everything they have to do to offer qualifying policies.”
But the states are not offering policies. Those are offered by private insurance companies. I don’t think Obamacare imposes anything on the states.
MikeM,
Yeah. I didn’t write that well. Everything they are required to do under Obamacare. Even being forced to decide whether to expand medicaid, run exchanges etc. are time consuming and can require having people study costs and so on.
Off-topic (well, we’ve wandered from FISA/FBI anyway):
A subsidized energy efficiency improvement program did not produce an advantageous cost/benefit ratio, despite using a cost/benefit criterion for approval.
h/t Bjorn Lomborg
“…the upfront investment costs are about twice the realized energy savings. Further, the ex post estimated savings are roughly 30% of the model-projected savings.”
But we can leverage that (economic) inefficiency by pushing the program: “an aggressive encouragement intervention increased [program] participation from less than 1% in the control group to about 6% in the encouraged group.”
HaroldW,
The modeled energy savings for the program appear to be the biggest problem: the projected energy savings are wildly high… the model overstates actual reductions in energy use by a factor of 3.
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My experience is that after-construction modifications are much more expensive than improving efficiency from the start. Simple examples from Florida: Removing existing inefficient single pane windows and installing dual pane windows with low IR emission glass is multiple times the cost (and hassle!) of installing the better windows during construction; same thing for adequate wall insulation and high efficiency A/C units. The real problem is construction companies have zero motivation to push the more efficient alternatives, and the house buyer is usually not looking to add to construction costs (and mortgage payments), even if the long term payback is favorable. In most cases, the home buyer is not even fully aware of the higher efficiency options. Incentives in the construction market might increase the number of houses constructed with better energy efficiency.
Sometimes, the house may already have been maxxed out in terms of energy efficiency.
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In 1979, I designed two houses to be built in Boca Raton, FL. They were for a project my employer was doing as a first effort in the area from our base in Chicago.
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Boca Raton had an energy code which required a high level of insulation of the exterior envelope. To meet it, we were forced to furr in 6 inches from the exterior concrete block walls and fill this volume with urethane foam, lay 12 inches of insulation in the joists supporting the celings and double glaze the windows, even use insulated doors. The best part was I had to submit the calculations showing that we’d achieved whatever the standard was with our construction permit application.
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I couldn’t make the numbers work.
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Part of the problem was that Boca also had a mimimum window area requirement. Even with double glazing we were getting a lot of heat through the glass.
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I’ve been away from it too long, but I remember discovering that after you’d done a reasonable job the amount of improvement for a lot more insulation wasn’t that great. There’s probably an asymptotic curve somewhere which shows this.
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In any case, I couldn’t get to their number no matter what I tried –
close but no cigar. I called the building department to ask about their experience with submittals and was told that they were getting the calculations and projects then being built in Boca were conforming.
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I tried more sophisticated methods to do the calculations but just couldn’t get there. So i got the Boca Yellow Pages (remember them?) found and called a local architect. i introduced myself, apologized for working his side of the street, and asked about the calculation. He accepted my apology and told me something like anyone else who was stupid enough to try to do architecture in Florida deserved all the help he could get.
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As to the calculations, they had been the subject of a lot of discussion at the local AIA meetings. No-one could make them work.
They’d agreed on a way to fudge them such that the submittals of those who were in on it would all look the same and appear to meet the standard even though the resulting construciion wasn’t going to. He thought the City understood this but wasn’t sure.
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I submitted my fudged calculations, we got the permits and the houses were built.
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We started asking $175k for them. They sat and sat and sat, through three brokers. Finally someone told us they weren’t expensive enough. They needed to be $275k because this was what the Long Islanders who would buy them were getting for their houses up North. They would think there was something wrong with these houses if they didn’t cost about the same.
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We raised the prices to $275k, the first houses sold, and we were on our way to the completion of a 125 house build-out of the property with a profit around $150k in each one.
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I agree that this seems incredible, but it’s true.
J ferguson
Yep. Here’s what happens with pure conduction at a surface.
Suppose you lose Q with no insulation.
Then, you find a layer of insulation that reduces this to Q/2.
Then you add another similar layer — doubling the thickness–you reduce the lose to Q/4.
To reduce to Q/8, you need to ass *two more* layers.
This above is modified a little in real live because you have convection and radiation at the surfaces, but you can see each succeeding layer gets you less improvement. You need an infinite thickness of insulation gets you down to zero heat transfer through the wall.
The above actually understates the issue of assymptotic improvement because it only discusses conductive losses through a wall. You also have to heat (or cool) air you bring in and return to the house some way. Some air you bring in is waste– especially in old houses with leaky windows. That’s “infiltration”. But some is required to keep air quality livable inside a structure. So * no matter what* you need to heat (or cool) a certain amount of fresh air — which is often called infiltration (but might be separated into contributions from actual unintentional infiltration and air brought in intentionally in an engineered system.)
Obviously, at a certain point, adding insulation to reduce the conductive losses at windows is making a teensie beensie difference and it makes no sense if heating due to infiltration is much larger than your conductive losses. You need to work on infiltration.
Sad. But doesn’t surprise me.
Hi Lucia,
I should have been a little more clear. It was impossible to meet the standard.
‘
The on-site inspectors expected to see 6 inch furring full of insulation on the walls, 12 inches in the ceilong and double glazing. Triple glazing was available at the time but wasn’t worth the additonal cost. So these houses were pretty much state-of-the-art energy efficient for the time, just didn’t meet a truly nuts standard.
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In the early ’80s, I was involved with some office buildings not far from you, Highland on Route 5, which were subject to a maximum limit on fresh air makeup which was too low. If I remember, the problem expressed itself in a lot of condensation in the building because the air conditioners didn’t run enough to get rid of it. I think they were early examples of what came to be called sick buildings.
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It’s so nice to be retired and not have to deal with goofy building design regulations any longer.
HaroldW, I found interesting – on scanning – that article on energy that you linked, but have not had time to study it. I was most interested in the uncertainty the article points to in previous studies and particularly in the part about occupants that might use more energy with a more efficient energy use.
If you have studied that article or anyone else here who has I would be interested in your take on these issues.
Life is good sometimes. The NYT’s goes out of their way to create a fictional couple who will have to pay more taxes this year: Get to Know the New Tax Code While Filling Out This Year’s 1040.
How can this be? Didn’t the evil GOP promise tax cuts? This poor couple will be paying $3,896 more! With over 80% of people getting tax cuts it sure seems weird they chose this “random” fictional couple.
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Oops. Math error:
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Correction: March 2, 2018
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the probable effect of the new tax law on a hypothetical couple’s 2018 tax bill. The TurboTax “What-If Worksheet†that generated the projection for their 2018 taxes failed to indicate that the couple would probably be entitled to claim a sizable deduction for income earned from consulting. As a result of that deduction, the amount they would likely owe on taxes would decline by $43, not rise by $3,896.
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/23/business/how-to-fill-out-1040-form.html
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I also saw a while back polls about how many people “noticed” they were getting a tax break. Low numbers! Only 25%. Hilariously, and I mean that, buried in the article is: “Thirty-seven percent of employed voters say they have seen an uptick in their pay”. Turns out unemployed voters, who didn’t notice an uptick in their paycheck for some reason, were included in the poll.
Tom Scharf,
That is a funny story. The point of the article was to show how those evil Republicans had boosted taxes on a typical upper middle class family (in New York, of course). That the reporters are too dumb to even contrive such a family is indeed funny. The truth is that taxes will increase modestly for upper middle income and wealthy taxpayers in states with high income taxes, and everywhere for taxpayers who have very large mortgages.
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Even more humorous is that the Gray Lady will not even discuss that Republicans structured the tax bill to reduce (but not eliminate) the subsidy the rest of the country has been giving to taxpayers in states with high income taxes, like New York, Caleefornia, etc.
j ferguson (Comment #167375)
It must have been a few years since you roamed the Chicago area. That would be I-88 and Highland now.
What? Kenneth? It is no longer the single nickel?
http://joshblackman.com/blog/2018/03/07/understanding-texass-new-challenge-to-the-acas-individual-mandate-part-i/
Brings up the point I was making of how the mandate without a penalty is still having an effect on behavior.
Yep. You could be right!
Heck, my son who is a grocery store bagger, and knows absolutely nothing about politics came home one day and said – “My paycheck is larger than it should be.What changed?”
“The tax rates were reduced.”
“Ohhh. I like Trump as President.”
The Idaho health care plan was vetoed by HHS, because it violates ObamaCare.
Trump: “He (Cohn) may be a globalist,†Trump declared, “but I still like him.â€
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Language police news bulletin: Turns out “globalist” is now an anti-Semitic slur. Who would have known? TDS.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/trump-globalist-cohn/555269/
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So…what do we call people who prioritize global policy over national policy?
Old newspapers used to talk about the globalist Hank Greenberg.
But he could sure hit the ball a long way.
A moment of silence for Stephen Hawking.