It is believed that the introduction of large numbers of tiny ice crystals into the cloud layer sets off this domino effect of evaporation which creates the hole. The ice crystals can be formed by passing aircraft which often have a large reduction in pressure behind the wing- or propeller-tips. This cools the air very quickly, and can produce a ribbon of ice crystals trailing in the aircraft's wake. These ice crystals find themselves surrounded by droplets, grow quickly by the Bergeron process, causing the droplets to evaporate and creating a hole with brush-like streaks of ice crystals below it.
In a biography of the 41st president set to hit bookstores next week, George H.W. Bush heavily criticized former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as well as his son, George W. Bush, for giving them too much power.
Bush told his biographer, Jon Meacham, that Cheney had too much "hard-line" influence on George W. Bush, according to a copy reviewed by the New York Times.
"He had his own empire there and marched to his own drummer," Bush 41 said of Cheney. “It just showed me that you cannot do it that way. The president should not have that worry.”
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of addressing Stewart Brand’s “Long Now” seminar in San Francisco, talking about the various sorts of infrastructure on which civilization depends. Paved roads; public-health systems; the printing press; public schools; and these days the softer sorts of infrastructure that I’ve been writing about in venues ranging from China to the U.S. Capitol to the smaller-town and rural United States.
Part of this era’s big-civic-infrastructure: California High Speed Rail (map from UC Davis and ESRI)
One of the themes in the talk was the asymmetric bias in our public/civic consideration of big infrastructure projects. As I argued last year in the gala series of posts on California’s High-Speed Rail project, starting here, democratic societies are systematically prone to spend far too little on normal civic infrastructure. Bridges, canals, new schools, new parks — we repeatedly under-imagine their benefits in the long run, and over-emphasize their hassles and costs. Most of the big public efforts we now view as no-brainer steps to national greatness, from the Louisiana or Alaska purchases to the Golden Gate Bridge to the GI Bill, were controversial and seen as barely worth it in their time.
The strange converse, as argued in my Chickenhawk Nation piece early this year (and long before that in National Defense), is that the opposite bias applies to military purchases, infrastructure, and investment. The historical record shows strongly that we under-estimate their costs, complexities, and delays, and over-estimate how long they’ll last, how well they’ll work, and how much more they will keep us safe.
Why the difference? That’s a bigger question than I can deal with now. But that there is a difference is the theme of a note that’s come in from Mike McCoy, long an official with California’s Strategic Growth Council and UC Davis. He saw this very asymmetry in two big stories in the Los Angeles Times. It’s relevant to note that he has been a proponent of High-Speed Rail (HSR). Over to Mike McCoy:
There is this odd schizophrenia the LA Times has about public spending on essential infrastructure.
Here is the Timeson October 24th speculating and lamenting, from limited knowledge and information, about the possibility for cost overruns with High Speed Rail in the article "$68-billion California bullet train project likely to overshoot budget and deadline targets." It joins other laments in the Times about HSR on other dates. See the collection here.
But then on October 27th the paper celebrated Northrop Grumman’s $80 billion plus contract to build the next generation of Stealth Bomber near Palmdale praising it for its job generating public benefits. The article goes on practically to extol the virtue of cost overruns which seem inevitable on a plane announced at half the cost per unit as the last Stealth Bomber. The Times waives off the question of whether this investment is even needed.
Besides the obvious double standard regarding certainty in public expenditures there is the question of the highly differential economic benefits of the two projects. I only dabble in economics from the transportation perspective, but I think it is safe to say that HSR and Stealth are significantly different investments when it comes to economic impact.
The LAT story Mike McCoy is referring to.
HSR will benefit California in its construction phase. So will Stealth. HSR will create thousands of ongoing jobs in California. Stealth may create some ongoing jobs depending on deployment and basing of the finished product. HSR will create infrastructure that will have long term effects on economic productivity in California by providing significantly more accessibility to most major California destinations. Stealth will not have a continued general economic benefit specific to the residents of California. It is not a tool that adds value to normal economic productivity.
If previous transportation infrastructure investments are a gauge of future infrastructure investment longevity then HSR will be in use for many decades and even when obsolete will leave a right of way that can be reused. If previous B-2 military spending is a gauge then 25 years after the first flight of this new stealth we'll be reading these headlines again and the military industrial complex will be looking for another nominal $80 billion.
I am sure you see hundreds of contradictions a day in press treatment of current events but this one is particularly painful to those of us struggling to keep HSR alive.
Of course this is not just the LAT. (Which was our morning paper when I was a kid, and was my first “real” journalistic employer, and which I have always wished well.) What Mike McCoy identified was an unusually crisp example of a longer-term slant in our public thinking. The related point, of course, is that most people in California, and all politicians there, have an opinion, pro or (usually) con on High-Speed Rail. But maybe one in a thousand would have any view on a military project that will end up costing more money. Ah dysfunction, ah life.
The next issue of Jacobin, centering on development and the Global South will be out November 10. Just until its release, new subscriptions start at only $15.
In theory, writing an election take about demographic divides in candidate support is pretty straightforward:
Identify a demographic divide.
Provide a plausible theory for the demographic divide.
Because step one is usually pretty easy, most of the punditry action is at step two. But, as Amanda Marcotte’s take earlier this week shows, every so often, punditry is so bad that it doesn’t even manage to get step one right.
The dig clearly stung, as Bernie Sanders immediately went out on Sunday talk shows to deny Clinton’s insinuation that gender played a role in his remarks about “shouting” during the debate.
From the female-heavy crowds that turned out to support Clinton in Iowa, it seems the strategy is working. And not just on older women, either. Girls, from little kids to college aged women, were out in force for Hillary Clinton in Des Moines over the weekend. Moms with daughters, both little girls and teens, were a dominant force in the crowd. Glitter, unicorns, and Disney princess memorabilia was on full display at the Clinton rally. . . .
While both Clinton and Sanders had plenty of young people of all genders turning out, the young people of the Sanders crowd were just as male-dominated as the Clinton crowd was female-dominated. . . .
This contrast continued inside Hy-Vee Hall, where the dinner was held: More young men for Sanders and more young women for Clinton.
Putting aside the question of how much control eight-year-old girls have over what rally they attend, there is an obvious problem with this gender demography point. And that problem is that it’s not reflected in the polling cross-tabs. Although Marcotte insists that she “couldn’t find good polls on gender amongst supporters, much less age,” data for both are readily available on the Internet.
There simply isn’t a gender demographic divide. There is nothing here to theorize about. The take is dead at step one.
Interestingly, however, there is a very significant age divide:
Clinton wins among all groups, but it’s clear that Sanders support is coming from young people. If you wanted to write about demographic divides, it is age and race that matter in the Clinton/Sanders fight. Gender doesn’t even register.
Of course, my points here all assume that election takes are actually about the election. It’s clear in the case of pundits like Marcotte that “election analysis” is just a continuation of their normal personal political blogging. It is a new frame within which they hash out their same themes and grind their same axes, not a genuine effort to figure out what’s going on out there in the vast world of the Democratic electorate. It’s not just her who does this. I would say the majority of election punditry is like this, including on the Right.
This makes sense of course. People get very personally and emotionally committed to their candidates. That bias causes them to perceive the world in a very specific way. It also causes them to feel angered and betrayed by those who support someone else, especially people who they think should be supporting their candidate.
As understandable as this is, it’s also kind of a shame. This is because it actually would be very interesting to see people try to nail down the causes of the real (not imagined) demographic divides. I’d love to read a take that seriously tried to understand why Sanders is managing to pull down so much youth support or why Clinton is managing to attract so many black voters.
But as it stands, when these kinds of pieces get written, the authors aren’t actually trying to figure out what’s going on, but rather trying to make their own freestanding political points through an electoral hook.
must read if you are interested in libertarianism and free markets
The ideological framework undergirding capitalism is shifting. Since the 2008 financial collapse and the convulsions of the Great Recession, the free-market smart set has been working overtime to cope with increasing criticism of capitalism.
At publications like Reason and blogs like Bleeding Heart Libertarians, writers on the Right are embracing policies they might be more expected to denounce. Some are even responding by retrofitting seemingly anticapitalist analyses and designs to malfunctioning capitalist machinery in an attempt to work through capitalism’s growing legitimacy crisis.
So how do these attempts to shore up capitalism overlap with and differ from anticapitalist perspectives? Let’s begin with Milton Friedman’s heirs.
Bleeding Heart Libertarians
A Protestant Reformation of sorts has been taking place within right-libertarianism’s ranks, and the blog Bleeding Heart Libertarians (BHL) has functioned as its Wartburg Castle. The group was born in March 2011, mere months before the rise of Occupy, when a group of libertarians flocked online to defend their creed amid capitalist havoc.
The event represented a scaled-down, Internet Age version of 1938’s Colloque Walter Lippmann, when a similarly varied assemblage converged on Paris to make sense of classical liberalism’s post–Great Depression legacy.
While the site is small, it still publishes some of the most sophisticated free-market apologetics around, and its impact can be spotted at bigger right-wing publications. Self-styled “left market anarchists” like Roderick Long and Gary Chartier, both of whom operate in the socialist-inflected tradition of Benjamin Tucker and Thomas Hodgskin, are among its principal contributors.
But it is Matt Zwolinski, a political philosopher and cofounder of BHL, who has proven the most interested in reconciling libertarianism with social justice — and least averse to stepping on libertarian toes.
Take his case for why the Prime Directive of the libertarian right, the “Non-Aggression Principle” — “that aggression against the person or property of others is always wrong, where aggression is defined narrowly in terms of the use or threat of physical violence” — is unsustainable. According to Zwolinksi the dictum encourages its adherents to adopt a one-size-fits-all answer in policy debates — that their statist opponents are imposing their preferences at gunpoint — at the expense of a “close study of history, sociology, or empirical economics.”
Zwolinksi says this line of reasoning makes little sense, and his critique, while clearly an outlier among the free-enterprise intelligentsia, speaks to a growing willingness of libertarians to publicly rein in the excesses that have made their ideology such a hard sell.
BHL contributor and economist Mike Munger, meanwhile, has come out in favor of what he calls “Hayekian socialism,” which takes its name from political economist Friedrich Hayek. Munger reads Hayek — who despite his reputation as a libertarian was in many respects a chastened welfare statist — as favoring a universal basic income (UBI), public education, and universal health care.
Munger’s Hayekian socialist dream should not be confused with left ideas of socialism. His suggested UBI annual payment is only $12,000, and it is assumed to be a replacement to all “wasteful, scattershot programs with a cash payment.” He recommends vouchers and charter schools instead of “monopoly public education provision.” And his approach to health care rejects the public-provider model found in countries like Canada and England.
Moreover, it’s clear that many of these reforms are intended as a Trojan Horse — the dismantlement of the state is visible in the distance. As Jesse Myerson and others have argued, the Right’s embrace of the UBI is predicated on the eradication or dismissal of many programs (like guaranteed job programs) necessary to any genuinely egalitarian politics. And the insidious relationship between vouchers and charter schools on the one hand and austerity, privatization, and union-busting on the other is well-documented.
But Munger’s vision does deviate from the stereotypical trappings of the libertarian right, and it’s still been accepted in part or in full by numerous high-profile libertarians. Many of Munger’s BHL peers (like Zwolinski) are on board with a UBI, and voices at the Koch-funded magazine Reason have signed up. The idea has even been floated on Fox News. And while there is little love for single-payer health care at Reason or Fox, the former has partially defended Obamacare, contending that markets work most efficiently when all consumers are empowered enough to take part as market actors.
The emphasis on materially empowered consumers parallels philosopher Erik Angner’s insistence that resource redistribution is required to ensure every consumer can signal their local knowledge to the price system. If only a tiny elite is capable of availing itself of the medical marketplace, for instance, the information-gathering mechanisms and overarching quality of that marketplace will suffer.
This line of argument departs from standard Reaganite assumptions. As a standalone observation, it is consistent with the market socialism sociologist Johanna Bockman fleshes out in Markets in the Name of Socialism, in which neoliberalism is presented as a “parasitic growth on” otherwise collectivized and non-hierarchical notions of society that go hand-in-hand with competitive markets.
But whereas critics of capitalism like Bockman seize on this dynamic in order to pinpoint an Achilles heel of private ownership of the means of production, free-market enthusiasts studiously avoid its more radical implications. Corey Robin and Chris Bertram’s 2012 back-and-forth with BHL contributors over workplace democracy not only speaks to right-wing libertarianism’s general unwillingness to address the contradictions intrinsic to capitalism, but also the extreme power imbalances endemic in such a system.
Reason contributor and Austrian School economist Steven Horwitz has considered a Hayekian socialism even more in line with the thrust of Bockman’s study. This is remarkable given Reason’s status as America’s flagship libertarian publication — a kind of National Review without the endless bows to war, surveillance, and God. Red-baiting, though, is usually par for the course.
At the onset of the financial crisis of 2007, in a review of economist Theodore Burczak’s 2006 book Socialism after Hayek, Horwitz cottoned to Burczak’s market-socialist paradigm of worker-owned and managed businesses.
While stopping short of sanctioning state-led mandates, Horwitz concluded, “Labor-managed firms themselves are not antagonistic to the market economy,” and imagined a future where the boundaries between market and socialist approaches are challenged even further. (Of course, the state action Horwitz opposes is exactly what’s required for Burczak’s paradigm to stand any chance of facing off with global capital.)
Some of these positions, to be sure, are not new. Milton Friedman himself supported a meager UBI. But such relative heterodoxy is becoming more prominent as libertarian intellectuals are forced to defend the economic system they hold dear.
The Business Press
A related shift can be spotted at the C-suite capitalist’s favorite weekly, the Economist.
Since the Great Recession, the publication has traded its faith in otherworldly mathematical models for a more hardheaded empirical reckoning with market behavior, specifically as it relates to market failure in the finance sector.
They have acknowledged how excessive inequality negatively affects growth, and explained why careful redistributionist policies are in order. They even praised economist Anthony Atkinson’s 2014 book Inequality: What Can Be Done?, in which one of the world’s leading experts on the economics of income distribution pushes a social-democratic platform of progressive taxation, generous floor incomes, wage controls, guaranteed work programs, and other similar measures.
Earlier this year, the magazine also penned a positive reconsideration of the radical American economist Henry George, who demanded a high land value tax to confiscate the rentier class’s unearned income.
Actually-existing economic difficulties like asset bubbles, short-termist speculation or investment, and corporate stock buybacks appear to have warmed the Economist to a more interventionist state; at times they even seem to be harkening back to the periodical’s Keynesian stretch under the editorship of Geoffrey Crowther and his immediate successors.
Capitalist stalwarts like Fortune are now mourning the results of forty years of neoliberal social policy, Forbes continues to rail against austerity, and the Wall Street Journal has conceded that a $15 minimum wage for fast-food workers might make sense in the country’s most expensive cities.
The right-wing Heritage Foundation, in conjunction with the Wall Street Journal, reserves the top spots in its Index of Economic Freedom for Western European social democracies. This showcases the best-kept secret in the United States: the fact that the accomplishments of the fairest and freest nations in the world are due to the struggles of workers and the historic strength of left parties.
Just as capitalists and conservatives were once compelled to accept the terms of the Progressive or New Deal bargains, so too are they now forced to acknowledge the social and economic costs of neoliberal capitalism.
Paleoconservatives and Traditionalists
Then there is Pat Buchanan’s brainchild, The American Conservative. Founded in the early 2000s in “paleoconservative” opposition to President Bush’s war administration, the magazine’s cultural revanchism offers a rebuke to stereotypical right-wing economics (when it’s not indulging in racist or restorationist apologetics).
In a recent piece honoring the legacy of social theorist Christopher Lasch, Matthew Harwood explains how corporate capitalism has undermined conservative values like autonomy, community, and the work ethic. Modesty and a healthy respect for limits have been sacrificed at the altar of economic growth. Families and neighborhoods have been uprooted by the demands of the unregulated marketplace. Individuals have been forced to relinquish their independence to the cold imperatives of distant employers.
For Lasch and Harwood, the solution is returning to the “producerist” tradition of Thomas Paine and Henry George, a vista where all citizens are guaranteed property or capital they can manage and workplaces they can democratically own and control. As Harwood concludes, this forgotten ideology “reveals that too many libertarians and conventional conservatives are confused apologists for a system that produces everything they despise: authoritarianism, centralization, and widespread dependence.”
Venues like Front Porch Republic have taken up similar battle cries, and the influential Catholic conservative journal First Things has praised the economic critiques of Pope Francis and the agrarian writer Wendell Berry.
In these sections of the Right, defending capitalism as such was never really the point. Their loathing of communism always eclipsed their love for capitalism. Now, with the Soviet Union vanquished and capitalism baring its teeth, the traditionalists are comfortable taking their own idiosyncratic shots at free markets.
Crisis of Legitimacy
We shouldn’t mistake elite opinion-makers on the Right for the conservative or libertarian bases they purportedly represent — bases that still view even a middling UBI as tantamount to socialism.
But what’s clear is that a growing number of intellectuals on the Right are taking anticapitalist critiques more seriously and are dabbling in socialized measures — provided they can be contained within an individualized vernacular and capitalist framework.
These developments represent a potential opening in the fault lines of the present, just as they offer the Left more intellectual breathing room.
The proper response is to acknowledge and engage with these ideological shifts — and then expand upon them. This might mean honing in on admissions at Reason or the Economist regarding the necessity of redistribution or regulation in order to make the case for more ambitious reforms.
Even more importantly, the Left must emphasize how and why the Right’s admissions fall far short of the anticapitalist critique needed amid capital’s legitimacy crisis. In that sense, the task isn’t all that different from previous convulsions when society was propelled, by material circumstance, to either save capitalism or transcend it. On this go-around, we must insist on the latter.
Despite all our disagreements and polarization in this country, all seem to agree that the CNBC debate was a disaster. What's notable though is that no one seems to agree why it was so bad. Indeed, the key attacks and critiques are actually mutually contradictory. Lots of people, myself included, were surprised that most of the debate moderators, besides John Harwood, seemed so poorly prepared. Betsy Quick had Trump dead to rights on her Mark Zuckerberg question but was so poorly prepared that when Trump flatly denied her accurate claim she could only respond, "So where did I read this and come up with this ..." On top of that, CNBC gave a lot of time to pet network ranters like Santelli and Cramer. In other words, one critique was that the questions tended toward the obscure and they let the candidates off too easy. But Republicans are now in open revolt because of media bias.
While it's still open to interpretation which Republican presidential candidate won Wednesday night's primary debate, there was one very clear loser: CNBC, the network hosting the event.
RNC Chair Reince Priebus, who partnered with CNBC to put on this debate, is crapping on CNBC big time for putting on a terrible debate. I thought it was a terrible debate. But I was a little unclear why Priebus thought it was so terrible from a GOP perspective. That became a little more clear after I saw the breakdown of how much each candidate got to talk. Carly Fiorina, who is barely in the running, got more time than anyone else. Jeb Bush got the least by a significant margin - less than Rand Paul, Huckabee, Christie, people who aren't even really in the race. Priebus is clearly getting hell for that.
<p>Ben Carson isn't paying senior adviser Mike Murray a salary. But the Republican presidential contender is pouring millions into companies connected to Murray, one of the dozens of operatives benefiting from a surge in grass-roots donations to Carson.</p><p>Carson paid more than $1.3 million to TMA Direct, where Murray is CEO, and another $75,000 to Precision Data Management, where Murray is managing partner. Carson forked over more than $4 million for database services, web fundraising and postage to Ohio-based Eleventy Marketing, a company that lists TMA as a client. And Carson and Murray paid a July visit to an Akron-based telemarketing company whose call center raises money for Carson's campaign and a conservative political action committee that Murray runs.<br /><b> </b><br />The payments to Murray-linked companies are part of nearly $11 million in third-quarter spending by Carson for services that help him raise even more money. Carson, whose $20 million third-quarter haul made him the top Republican fundraiser, is spending 55 cents of every dollar he raises on payments to fundraising-related companies and consultants.<br /><b> </b><br />His campaign finance reports reveal a complicated money churn that relies heavily on telemarketing and direct mail pitches to mom-and-pop donors. But the reports reveal few details about companies making big bucks from the campaign or exactly what services they provide.</p><p>Carson's campaign did not respond to repeated requests for clarification, and Murray did not respond to calls or emails. </p> <br><p>Rival campaigns and campaign finance experts say Carson's infrastructure intentionally flouts transparency, making it nearly impossible to determine how he’s spending donor cash. Millions in payments to companies that compile and maintain donor lists make some question whether Carson's vendors aren't just spending big to win but also using his lucrative brand to build a longer-term conservative infrastructure. <b> </b><br /><b> </b><br /> “Ben Carson is building these guys a giant database company of Republican donors, and they're getting paid millions to do it,” said one Republican consultant who works on presidential campaigns.</p><p>The consultant, who requested anonymity, suggested that it’s increasingly common for fundraising-related companies to attach themselves to candidates like Carson who can help build massive small-donor lists for future campaigns.<b> </b><br /><b> </b><br /><b> </b>Much of Carson’s money went to obscure LLCs that appear to have been set up exclusively for the campaign. Carson’s spending reports also show payments totaling nearly $10,000 to his own Florida-based LLC, American Business Collaborative LLC, although the reports do not explain the purpose of the disbursements. Public records show that the LLC is managed by Carson and his wife, Candy. Both payments are described in the report as "contract labor-administrative services." A similar $10,000 payment in the spring was described as "advance operations consulting." </p><p>Carson also paid $25,000 in consulting and travel to a firm called Lead Strategies Group, LLC, which traces to Joel Garcia, a Nevada representative for Carson. Garcia directed questions about the LLC, established in June, to the campaign, which did not respond to questions. He shelled out tens of thousands of dollars to ambiguously named LLCs registered to the same Alabama address, and many of his consultants' LLCs trace to residences, which make it difficult to determine the nature of their businesses.</p><p>“When you’re not disclosing names, whether it’s intentional or not, you’re making it harder to find out who’s doing actual work for the campaign,” said Larry Noble, senior counsel at the Campaign Legal Center and former head of Americans for Campaign Reform. </p><br><p>Carson's October report includes thousands of dollars in payments to newly created firms like Innovative Alpha Management, LLC, established in June. That particular one was registered only to "United States Corporation Agents, Inc" and offered no insight into who was doing work for the campaign, or what the work involved.<br /><b> </b><br /> Carson employed similar hard-to-track companies early in his campaign, too. For example, in the spring he paid a company called "Fre-Gate LLC" for legal services. The company is registered to Nevada law firm Oshins & Associates. But Steve Oshins, a partner at the firm, said Fre-Gate belongs to his client, who doesn't provide legal services.<br /><b> </b><br />The extent of Carson's reliance on LLCs was evident in his October report: payroll was only $169,000 in the third quarter, but he spent at least $1 million on fees and expenses to limited liability corporations and firms linked to staffers. <br /><b> </b><br />He's hardly the first candidate to take this approach. Mitt Romney<a href="http://http:/www.propublica.org/special/a-tangled-web#payee=fc2b3358d8986a2197c8fa148e5f72e0" target="_blank"> paid</a> millions of dollars to a firm called American Rambler Productions, LLC, in 2012, which housed several top staffers, and every candidate works with consultants and businesses. While the approach raises questions among transparency advocates, it does allow a candidate to have fewer campaign tax obligations and less paperwork<b>. </b><br /><b> </b><br />What is unusual is the extent to which Carson relies on LLCs and consulting firms, and the fact that many of the LLCs appear to have been established for individual staffers only as his campaign got underway, experts say.<b> </b><br /><b> </b><br /> “That [LLC-reliant] practice is surprising, and it definitely is not the cleanest way to do it,” said a campaign finance lawyer aligned with another candidate. “It’s surprising that it’s to that scale.”</p><p>Carson's biggest single expenditure overall of $3.25 million went to Eleventy Marketing for database management. The firm took in an additional $1.5 million for web services and earned fees associated with direct mail). Eleventy Marketing has long worked with Murray's firm, TMA Direct. Precision Data Management, where Murray is a partner, also was paid for web services and list rental, efforts that could be used to target donors<b>. </b><br /><b> </b><br />Web services overall were Carson’s second-biggest expense, totaling around $2.8 million, costs that went in part to seeking online donations.</p><p>Murray and the president of Eleventy Marketing, Ken Dawson, didn't respond to multiple requests for comment. Murray, a GOP fundraising and marketing consultant, previously worked with Carson on an anti-Obamacare effort run through a PAC Murray founded, the American Legacy PAC. In the 2014 cycle, that organization’s biggest <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/expenditures.php?cycle=2014&cmte=C00488304">expenditure</a> was to the telemarketing firm InfoCision<b>. </b><br /><b> </b><br />InfoCision is the same firm the Carson campaign used this year for fundraising calls, shelling out $1.4 million to that firm over the summer quarter. (In 2014, American Legacy PAC also spent at TMA Direct and at Armstrong Williams Productions, the firm of Carson’s confidant and sometime spokesperson, Williams, who isn’t officially working for the campaign.) </p><br><p>Carson's strategy so far appears to be working, even as experts in direct mail and marketing say these tactics require big upfront investments that may take awhile to pay dividends. Jeb Bush was second to Carson in fundraising totals but <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/jeb-bush-orders-across-board-pay-cuts-on-campaign-215106">spent</a> much of his money on ads, consulting and payroll, according to POLITICO calculations.</p><p>But while Bush languishes toward the bottom of polls, Carson overtook Donald Trump in the latest national poll and has registered in first place in a series of recent Iowa surveys. His overall spending on direct mail dropped a bit after the second quarter, but he’s still spending a lot on an approach that is among the most expensive ways to raise money. And once a candidate invests heavily in direct mail, experts say, it can be hard to significantly reduce spending on that effort<b>. </b><br /><b> </b><br /> "Direct mail is a really hard thing for campaigns and organizations," said Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who represents GOP candidates, campaigns and conservative issue groups. "Once they get into it, they can't get away from it. Even if they would like to lower their fundraising costs, the direct mail fundraising is their life blood, their income ... it's like crack cocaine. It's very difficult to get off of the direct mail merry-go-round.<b>"</b></p><p>In another sign of the interconnected nature of Carson campaign spending, founders of InfoCision also <a href="http://www.infocision.com/CompanyInfo/People/Executives/Pages/GaryTaylor.aspx">founded</a> the Taylor Institute for Direct Marketing at the University of Akron, where Murray is a <a href="http://www.tmadirect.com/about/tma-leadership/mike-murray-president-ceo/">board member</a>. InfoCision representatives also did not respond to a request for comment. <br /><b> </b><br />Plenty of campaigns use closely connected firms to handle various aspects of campaign business, said Bob Biersack, a senior fellow at the Center for Responsive Politics and a former staffer at the Federal Election Commission. That's par for the course. It's just that direct mail and telemarketing approaches are particularly expensive and require more labor for following up than, say, investments in online advertising, so they stand to benefit more from the campaign.<br /><b> </b><br /> "It's not wrong, it's not obviously bad," he said. "It's kind of old-fashioned and it's expensive. It means you don't get as much bang for every buck." </p><p>Carson’s campaign does disclose names of some people designated as political consultants. His list includes a couple of college students and a photographer, as well as two firms whose primary expertise is in promoting books — including some of Carson's previous bestsellers. </p> <p>But representatives for Carson’s campaign did not respond when asked whether other people, beyond those listed on the LLC registration forms, were being paid and for what activities.</p><p><b> </b>“Whether or not this practice raises transparency issues depends on whether or not the LLCs are in turn paying a number of individuals,” said Paul Ryan, a campaign finance expert and senior counsel at the Campaign Legal Center. “And we don’t know what the LLCs are paying various people for.”<br /><b> </b><br /><b> </b>Carson’s reliance on political consulting via LLCs for jobs normally done by paid staff contrasts with other grassroots-focused candidates, including Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz. Those candidates disclose many of their staffers, advisers and consultants by name, usually under the “payroll” section of their most recent finance report. <br /><b> </b><br /><b> </b>“The bigger point,” Ryan said, “is this is yet another example of federal disclosure laws being frustrated by candidates and political committees using LLCs and other intermediaries to conduct campaign activities.” </p><p>Carson's report also shows his willingness to go beyond the usual stable of GOP vendors. Andrew and Nathan Garcia scored a $35,000 deal with the Carson campaign courtesy of an unsolicited tweet to Carson campaign manager Barry Bennett<b>.</b></p><p>The brothers, who run Idaho-based Second Mile Films, say they were impressed by Carson’s Aug. 6 debate performance — so they reached out to Bennett to offer their services. </p><p>“Love to hear them,” Bennett replied. The Garcia brothers will meet Carson for the first time in less than two weeks, when they’re scheduled to shoot an ad with the candidate during stops in Nashville and Memphis. </p><p>The ad, which is slated primarily for social media, is about “the need for Americans to reunite,” said Nathan Garcia in a phone interview.</p><p>“It’s more creative than the average political ad, we feel,” he said, adding that their outside-the-box effort is why Bennett responded. </p><p>Andrew Garcia said he started filming “ministry-oriented videos” a few years ago. But after seeing the debate and watching what he described as Carson’s “ballsy” speech at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast — when Carson criticized President Barack Obama’s policies while Obama sat just a few feet away — he decided the company should offer to help Carson<b>. </b></p><p>“A lot of people can give money and stuff,” he said. “This is something that we can offer.”</p><br>
"Some of the financiers who support Bernie Sanders, like Enrique Diaz-Alvarez, the former head of proprietary trading at the French bank Sociétée Générale, very publicly break the Wall Street mold. Diaz-Alvarez, now the New York-based chief risk officer of Ebury, a firm that helps businesses hedge their currency exposure, has racked up bylines in the socialist Jacobin magazine.
<p>On a recent Friday afternoon, in a private room at a steakhouse in midtown Manhattan, the bankers at Scarsdale Equities, a boutique investment firm, were talking politics when their conversation took an untraditional turn.</p><p>Several participants claimed over their porterhouses that the only “serious” candidate in the 2016 race was Gov. John Kasich, Republican of Ohio. Then, one of them turned to chief operating officer and known liberal Wade Black. “Wade, do you feel the Bern?” the investor teased him. “Are you a Bernie supporter?”</p><p>“Yeah,” said Black. “I am.” The startling admission drew snickers. </p><p>“They said ‘Oh, he’s going to bankrupt the country.’ I said, ‘Do you actually know what you’re talking about?’” recounts Black. “They probably never met anybody who was a Sanders fan.”</p><p>Even by the standards of high finance, Black, 41, can claim membership in an ultra-exclusive club. He belongs to a small minority defying stereotypes and shattering taboos across New York City’s finer eateries and trading pits this primary season: Wall Street financiers who support the presidential bid of Vermont’s self-described “socialist” senator, Bernie Sanders. </p><p>“I don’t know anybody in this industry who supports Bernie,” one financier who gave to Sanders writes in an email. “I’m not aware of anyone else who might also be a Bernie supporter,” writes another, a former financial analyst at Goldman Sachs. “Best I can tell, I am the only one,” writes a third, while confessing to being hung over from a night out with clients.</p><p>But a dive into Sanders’ donor rolls from the second and third quarters reveals that of the tens of thousands of Americans listed as contributors on Sanders’ campaign finance reports, well over a hundred work in the financial services sector. Most are west of the Mississippi at small firms and local bank branches, where Sanders’ calls to rein in Wall Street do not hit so close to home. More noteworthy are the lonely few—roughly two dozen—who work in high finance in Manhattan.</p><p>Sure they’re capitalists, but they’re also iconoclasts—Wade Black’s Twitter feed includes several retweets of the dissident journalist Glenn Greenwald and the contrarian finance blog Zerohedge. They do not worship at the altar of the market, and having seen the American economic system from the inside, they’ve come to agree with Sanders’ conclusion that the game is rigged in favor of the well connected and a handful of big banks. Some also work at small Wall Street shops that could actually benefit if Sanders succeeded in his No. 1 goal: breaking up the biggest banks.</p><p>And what they lack in numbers, these pro-Bernie Wall Streeters make up for in chutzpah: There’s a former world champion player of the fantasy trading-card game “Magic: The Gathering,” a guy named Paul Ryan and the man who oversaw legal, compliance and auditing for Lehman Brothers until its September 2008 collapse. </p><p>To the rest of the street, these people can be hard to fathom. Sure, Sanders praises entrepreneurship on the stump—local business <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/how-bernie-sanderss-radical-ideas-entered-the-municipal-mainstream-118447">thrived</a> during his tenure as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1980s. And sure, there are plenty of Democrats on Wall Street. But few would call themselves “democratic socialists” as Sanders does, and that bronze bull in Bowling Green is not a tribute to universal health care. Sanders has called for breaking up the big banks, imposing higher taxes on the wealthy and waging “a moral and political war on the billionaires and corporate leaders on Wall Street.”</p><p>Which is why Fox Business Network senior correspondent Charles Gasparino—who took to the airways three weeks ago to express shock at his discovery that two brokers in Washington state listed as employees of Merrill Lynch had given Sanders a total of $3,700—tells <span class="cms-magazineStyles-smallCaps">Politico Magazine</span> he wants to know: “When you gave that contribution, did you have a heroin needle sticking out of your arm?”</p><p>Hillary Clinton has turned up her anti-Wall Street rhetoric as Sanders has gained ground, but her husband’s administration deregulated the industry in the ’90s, and she maintained good relations with it as a senator from New York. Today, she carries the seal of approval of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. The top 20 contributing organizations to Clinton include Morgan Stanley (whose employees have given $133,000), JPMorgan Chase ($97,000) and Bank of America ($90,000). Meanwhile, no bank broke into Sanders’ top 20, which would require less than $7,700. Not a single soul currently employed by Goldman Sachs chipped in for Sanders—an impressive feat of restraint given that at least three current or former employees of the Koch brothers appear on his donor rolls.</p><p>But among the bankers for Bernie there is Steven Berkenfeld, whose role at Lehman landed him on the list of <i>dramatis personae</i> laid out at the beginning of <i>New York Times</i> journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin’s account of the financial crisis, <i>Too Big </i><i>t</i><i>o Fail</i>.<b> </b>Since overseeing compliance for Lehman Brothers and serving as chief investment officer of its private equity division up until the firm’s collapse, Berkenfeld, a renewable energy banker who sits on the board of directors of the Sierra Club Foundation, has landed at Barclays. It is unclear whether his environmentalism, his experience at Lehman or something else motivated his contribution to Sanders. He did not respond to requests for comment.</p><br><p>Some of the financiers who support Bernie Sanders, like Enrique Diaz-Alvarez, the former head of proprietary trading at the French bank Sociétée Générale, very publicly break the Wall Street mold. Diaz-Alvarez, now the New York-based chief risk officer of Ebury, a firm that helps businesses hedge their currency exposure, has racked up bylines in the socialist <i>Jacobin</i> magazine. His Twitter profile includes a quote from “The Way We Live Now,” an 1875 satire of greed in English society. </p><p>Others let their socialist tendencies emerge more slowly. At 50 years old with close-cropped dark hair, former Harvard rugby player Paul Ryan certainly looks like a lot of other investment bankers.</p><p>Even Ryan’s name evokes limited government and the profit motive. Last week, he received an errant email from his old acquaintance Ken Mehlman, the former Republican National Committee chairman-turned-Wall Street lawyer. Mehlman, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, had apparently intended it for the Republican congressman on the cusp of becoming the speaker of the House of Representatives. The actual recipient thought about responding, “You’re talking to that other rat bastard Paul Ryan who stole my name,” but settled on a more courteous reply.</p><p>And when it comes to, say, the current Republican front-runner, Ryan, the managing partner of Hayfield Capital, certainly talks like other investment bankers: “Trump is an old, well-known shithead in the business,” says Ryan, adding that when he worked at Barclays’ real estate group 25 years ago, his boss refused to deal with the developer on account of his “slippery business practices.” (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.) Ryan adds, with a hint of admiration, “He doesn’t seem to give a fuck.”</p><p>But then Ryan starts to talk politics, and the words between the four-letter ones start to sound different. “Anyone with any sophisticated understanding of what’s going on takes that Republican free market bullshit and just calls it out,” he says. “Nobody even knows what the fuck a socialist is anymore.”</p><p>Ryan grew up in Buffalo, New York, and as an undergraduate at Harvard and banker at Barclays in the 1980s, he was sympathetic to Reagan’s pro-market message that government had grown too big. In 1992, he voted for George H.W. Bush because Bill Clinton “didn’t understand the economy.”</p><br><p>After Harvard and Barclays he enrolled in night classes at Fordham Law School and worked for hedge fund manager Buddy Fletcher. In 1996, he switched sides and voted for Clinton, because he couldn’t stand Bob Dole. He stuck with the Democrats in 2000. “I didn’t care for [Al] Gore,” he says. “But [George W.] Bush was a moron.” </p><p>In 2001, he founded Hayfield, an investment bank for the smaller businesses that places like his hometown—devastated by corporate consolidation and globalization—so badly need. Its website’s homepage declares, “This is not a business for aristocrats.”</p><p>Ryan says he was horrified by the quick-buck mentality that preceded the 2007-08 financial crisis. “Who would’ve put your name on this shit?” he asks rhetorically of the faulty financial products that precipitated the crisis, then explains, “The idea was people did not give a fuck, because there was no shame. You could move on.” </p><p>As the crisis was unfolding, he was becoming an enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama. He says his perch on Wall Street is exactly what’s convinced him of the need for dramatic reform.</p><p>But Ryan says the president did not go far enough in overhauling the sector, and he decries the continued flight of capital from small business and publicly traded companies to structures like private equity firms that are both large and opaque. “If you’ve actually had a front row seat to this you can see what’s going on, and it’s not a good trend. Money gets made in the dark, and you can’t figure out what’s going until there’s a massive fuck-up.”</p><p>Seeing the pendulum swing too far in favor of unregulated markets, the onetime supporter of the Reagan revolution says he’s ready for another revolution. “I think there’s a balance, a dialectic, if you read Karl Marx, that has to pull things back towards the middle.” </p><p>Now, he’s pinning his hopes for reform on the blunt Brooklynite Sanders. “If he’s president, then he’ll probably enforce the labor laws,” says Ryan with anticipation. “Amazon should probably shit its pants.”</p><p>If Sanders loses the nomination, Ryan says he’s considering bypassing Hillary Clinton, whom he disdains as much as her husband, for the nuclear option. “I might just want to see some Republican run it and let the shithouse burn down.”</p><p>Clearly, Ryan is not shy about expressing his views, but he understands the reluctance of many in the industry to follow his lead. “For many people, I think it would be like coming out of the closet to come out as a Sanders supporter on Wall Street.” </p><p>That includes Jon Finkel, head trader at the quantitative hedge fund Landscape Capital Management. He was one of several financiers contacted for this story who agreed to interviews but then backed out. </p><p>In an email, Finkel wrote that he needed to consult with his partners about “any potential business costs to speaking on the record.” Then he declined to be interviewed at all.</p><p>But unlike others, Finkel had a second change of heart and decided to speak. He has already been outed once as a Wall Street oddity after going on a date with a Gizmodo editor who proceeded to write about his success in the world of “Magic: The Gathering,” a fantasy card game filled with magic and mythic beasts. Finkel is a former world champion, and has a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Finkel">Wikipedia page</a> dedicated to his career in the game. </p><p>He says he sees no conflict between his day job and his politics. “There’s this idea that somehow there’s a disconnect between being in a profession where you’re going to be in a high tax bracket, like finance, and social justice … that’s sort of a fallacy.”</p><p>Finkel also has less to lose from reform than many of his peers. Because his investments turn over quickly, the capital gains are taxed at the same rate as regular income, and he does not benefit from the carried interest loophole, which Sanders, as well as Clinton, Trump and Jeb Bush, support closing. </p><p>Besides, Finkel does not identify strongly with the culture of Wall Street.</p><p>“I never really thought I’d end up in finance; I just backed my way into it,” says Finkel, who says he was invited to try his hand at trading by fellow Magic players who saw a connection between the skills employed by the card game and in quantitative trading: examining problems, understanding variance in the world, patience for long-term strategies.</p><p>He does not hide his socialist sympathies from the other partners in his hedge fund and says he’s even had productive discussions with his most conservative colleague. “On some level, we really do agree a lot about how the world should look and what would make the best world. We have strong disagreements on what is the right way to get there, but I think those discussions are probably very good for allowing us to see other perspectives.”</p><p>But he says he rarely interacts with members of his industry outside of his fund, except for the occasional investor gathering, where he tends to hold his tongue. “Every now and then someone will say something in an investment meeting,” he says. “Some comment about a tax rate or some economic thing, and then I don’t say anything and just move on with the meeting.”</p><p>Says Finkel: “I grew up awkward and nerdy, so I got used to feeling out of place.” </p><p><i>Correction: This article has been updated to correct Berkenfeld's current and former roles.</i></p><br>
On why the free market won’t develop new forms of energy fast enough:
Well, there’s no fortune to be made. Even if you have a new energy source that costs the same as today’s and emits no CO2, it will be uncertain compared with what’s tried-and-true and already operating at unbelievable scale and has gotten through all the regulatory problems, like “Okay, what do you do with coal ash?” and “How do you guarantee something is safe?” Without a substantial carbon tax, there’s no incentive for innovators or plant buyers to switch.
And for energy as a whole, the incentive to invest is quite limited, because unlike digital products—where you get very rapid adoption and so, within the period that your trade secret stays secret or your patent gives you a 20-year exclusive, you can reap incredible returns—almost everything that’s been invented in energy was invented more than 20 years before it got scaled usage. So if you go back to various energy innovators, actually, they didn’t do that well financially. The rewards to society of these energy advances—not much of that is captured by the individual innovator, because it’s a very conservative market. So the R&D amount in energy is surprisingly low compared with medicine or digital stuff, where both the government spending and the private-sector spending is huge.
On the surprising wisdom of government R&D:
When I first got into this I thought, How well does the Department of Energy spend its R&D budget? And I was worried: Gosh, if I’m going to be saying it should double its budget, if it turns out it’s not very well spent, how am I going to feel about that? But as I’ve really dug into it, the DARPA money is very well spent, and the basic-science money is very well spent. The government has these “Centers of Excellence.” They should have twice as many of those things, and those things should get about four times as much money as they do.
Yes, the government will be some-what inept—but the private sector is in general inept. How many companies do venture capitalists invest in that go poorly? By far most of them. And it’s just that every once in a while a Google or a Microsoft comes out, and some medium-scale successes too, and so the overall return is there, and so people keep giving them money.
On the centrality of government to progress on energy, historically:
Everyone likes to argue about how much the shale-gas boom was driven by the private sector versus government; there was some of both. Nuclear: huge amount of government. Hydropower: mind-blowingly government—because permitting those things, those big reservoirs and everything, you can’t be a private-sector guy betting that you’re going to get permitted. People think energy is more of a private-sector thing than it is. If you go back to Edison’s time, there wasn’t much government funding. There were rich people funding him. Since World War II, U.S.-government R&D has defined the state of the art in almost every area.
But energy moves really slowly. There’s this thing Vaclav Smil says: If Edison were reborn today, he would find our batteries completely understandable, because it’s just chemistry. He would say, “Oh, cool, you found lithium, that was nice.” Nuclear-power plants, he would go, “What the hell is that?” That, he would be impressed with. And chips, which we can use for managing data and stuff, he’d be impressed with. But he could visit a coal plant and say, “Okay, you scaled it up.” He would visit a natural-gas plant and that would look pretty normal to him; he would look at an internal-combustion engine and he wouldn’t be that surprised.
This is a guest post by a neuroscientist who may or may not be a graduate student somewhere in Massachusetts.
You asked me about the Human Brain Project. Well, there is only one way to properly address that topic: with a rant.
Henry Markram at EPFL in Switzerland was the leader of the “Blue Brain” project, to simulate a brain (well, actually just one cubic millimeter of a mouse brain) on an IBM Blue-Gene supercomputer. He got tons of money for this project, including the IBM supercomputer for the simulations. Of course he never published anything showing that these simulations lead to any understanding of brain function whatsoever. But he did create a team of graphics professionals to make cool pictures of the simulations. Building on this “success”, he led the “Human Brain” EU flagship project into being funded by some miracle of bureaucratic gullibility. The clearly promised goal was simulating a human brain (hence the name of the project). Almost everyone in Europe publicly supported the project, although in private the neuroscientists (who, if they have done any simulations, know that the stated goal is completely absurd) would say something more like “hey, maybe it’s crazy, but it’ll bring a bunch of money.”
Now, some simple observations must be made, which are true now, and will still be true in ten years’ time, at the conclusion of this flagship project:
(1) We have no fucking clue how to simulate a brain.
We can’t simulate the brain of C. Elegans, a very well studied roundworm (first animal to have its genome sequenced) in which every animal has exactly the same 302-neuron brain (out of 959 total cells) and we know the wiring diagram and we have tons of data on how the animal behaves, including how it behaves if you kill this neuron or that neuron. Pretty much whatever data you want, we can generate it. And yet we don’t know how this brain works. Simply put, data does not equal understanding. You might see a talk in which someone argues for some theory for a subnetwork of 6 or 8 neurons in this animal. Our state of understanding is that bad.
(2) We have no fucking clue how to wire up a brain.
Ok, we do have a macroscopic clue, this region connects to that region and so on. You can get beautiful pictures with methods like DTI, with a resolution of one cubic millimeter per voxel. Very detailed, right? Well, apart from DTI being a noisy and controversial method to begin with, remember that one cubic millimeter of brain required a supercomputer to simulate it (not worrying here about how worthless that “simulation” was), so any map with cubic-millimeter voxels is a very coarse map indeed. And microscopically, we have no clue. It looks pretty random. We collect statistics (with great difficulty), and do tons of measurements (also with great difficulty), but not on humans. Even for well studied animals such as cats, rats, and mice, it’s anyone’s guess what the fine structure of the connectivity matrix is. As an overly simplistic comparison, imagine taking statistics on the connectivity of transistors in a Pentium chip and then trying to make your own chip based on those statistics. There’s just no way it’s gonna work.
(3) We have no fucking clue what makes human brains work so well.
Humans (and great apes and whales and elephants and dolphins and a few other animals that we love) happen to have a class of neurons (“spindle neurons”) that we don’t see in the animals that we spend most of our time studying. Is it important? Who knows. We know for sure that we are missing a lot about what makes a human brain human — it’s definitely not just its size. There’s a guy whose brain is mostly not there, and he was probably one of the dumber kids in class, but still he functions fine in human society (has a job, family, etc.). Is this surprising? Not surprising? How would we know, we don’t know how brains work anyway.
(4) We have no fucking clue what the parameters are.
If you try to do a simulation to see how neurons behave when they are connected in networks, you need to know a bunch of biophysical parameters. For example, what’s the time constant for voltage leak across the cell membrane? And a ton of other parameters, which are of course different for different classes of cells. So let’s just take the most common excitatory cell class and the most common inhibitory cell class and try to make a network. Luckily, there are papers that report numbers for this or that parameter of these cells. But the reported numbers are all over the place! One lengthy detailed study will find a parameter to be 35±4, and the next in-depth study will find the same parameter to be 12±3. So what should you use in your simulation for this or the many, many other uncertain parameters? Who the fuck knows.
(5) We have no fucking clue what the important thing to simulate is.
Neurons in vertebrates communicate (*) via “spikes”, where the neuron’s voltage level suddenly goes way up for a millisecond or so. This electro-chemical process, involving various ions flowing across the cell membrane, is very well understood. But now, what do these spikes mean? Is it the number of spikes per second that matters? Or is it the precise timing of the spikes? Who the fuck knows. For certain types of cells in certain areas, we see that they are active (producing a lot of spikes) under certain conditions. For example, in the primary visual cortex of a cat, a cell will be active when the eye sees a line at a certain position and a certain orientation moving in a certain direction. Is the timing of these spikes important? We don’t know! Some experts believe one way, some experts believe the other, and the rest admit they don’t know. And primary visual cortex of the cat is the most well studied area of any brain in any animal.
(*) How does a spike allow communication? The voltage spike triggers the release of chemicals at “synapses” (the connections to target neurons), which in turn dock with the target cell’s membrane in various ways to allow ions to cross the membrane, thereby affecting the voltage of the targeted cell. If the voltage in a cell reaches a certain threshold, a spike will occur. Each neuron targets (and is targeted by) thousands of other neurons. And the total number of neurons in a human brain is about a fourth of the number of stars in the milky way. You wanna map that circuit?
So, the next time you see a pretty 3D picture of many neurons being simulated, think “cargo cult brain”. That simulation isn’t gonna think any more than the cargo cult planes are gonna fly. The reason is the same in both cases: We have no clue about what principles allow the real machine to operate. We can only create pretty things that are superficially similar in the ways that we currently understand, which an enlightened being (who has some vague idea how the thing actually works) would just laugh at.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has long boasted about his lead in the polls as an indication of the number of Americans who love him, said on Tuesday that such measurements are "not very scientific" after four surveys showed him dropping to second place in Iowa.
The current state of affairs in Congress is such that it risks a true train-wreck both literally and figuratively. Unless Speaker Boehner can pull some rabbits out of his hat before he leaves at the end of this coming week these unresolved bills could produce the most serious crisis since 2011.
So, given all these urgent matters what does the House do this week? It passes a Reconciliation Bill to de-fund the Affordable Care Act knowing that President Obama will veto it. The problem is that the Republican Caucus in the House is badly split between the 40-45 members of the Freedom Caucus and the remaining 200 or so Republicans. Using our Weekly Common Space DW-NOMINATE Scores, below we show smoothed histograms of the Democrats and the two Republican Parties in the House. Note that the area under the curves adds to 1. Click image to enlarge
The House Freedom Caucus is concentrated on the far Right of the Republican Party and has enough votes to prevent the Republicans from passing bills with 218 votes without assistance from the Democrats. Speaker Boehner was forced out by this group because he was willing to violate the “Hastert Rule” — that is, put bills on the floor that a majority of Republicans oppose. The House Freedom Caucus is demanding that the Hastert Rule be enforced by Paul Ryan. In effect this will lead to gridlock and give the HFC veto power over controversial legislation (many Republicans are afraid to challenge the far Right for fear of Primary challenges, hence the veto power).
Speaker Boehner threw some red meat to the HFC by passing a Reconciliation bill that defunds most of the Affordable Care Act. This vote is shown below:
Click image to enlarge
This is a pointless exercise because, even if it gets through the Senate, President Obama will veto the bill. Indeed, Senators Rubio, Cruz, and Lee will vote against the bill in the Senate because they feel it does not go far enough in the defunding of the ACA.
The current state of affairs in Congress is such that it risks a true train-wreck both literally and figuratively. Unless Speaker Boehner can pull some rabbits out of his hat before he leaves at the end of this coming week these unresolved bills could produce the most serious crisis since 2011.
Using crowd-sourced and traditional mathematics research, Terence Tao has devised a solution to a long-standing problem posed by the legendary Paul Erdős.
22nd October 2015 This interview with well-known philosopher Slavoj Zizek was conducted for Kurdish MedNuçe TV in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana. In...
"The Incredible Machine" (not to be confused with the 1975 film) is a 1968 documentary about experiments at Bell Labs focusing on graphics, voice, and other art and media applications. Technicians draw circuits using an electric stylus, animate titles for a movie presentation, and look at sound waveforms of different words trying to replicate speech.
It's a treat to see the state-of-the-art the year of 2001: A Space Odyssey, especially when one of the Bell Labs computers sings "Daisy Bell"/"A Bicycle Built For Two".
Also, mind the rabbit hole: the related links bar on YouTube leads to dozens of similar vintage computing videos.
this was pretty great. going to have to watch more of these...
The Nerdwriter takes on Children of Men, specifically what's going in the background of Alfonso Cuarón's film, both in terms of references to other works of art & culture and to things that push the plot along and contribute to the tone and message of the film.
Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus said on Thursday that the 2016 presidential election will make or break the party.
In an interview published early Friday morning, he told the Washington Examiner that even during a presidential election year, the RNC is still responsible for supporting House and Senate candidates.
"However, I think that we have become, unfortunately, a midterm party that doesn't lose and a presidential party that's had a really hard time winning," Priebus told the Examiner. "We're seeing more and more that if you don't hold the White House, it's very difficult to govern in this country — especially in Washington D.C."
The chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi on Sunday accidentally leaked what he had characterized as classified information in a testy back-and-forth with the panel's ranking Democrat, Politico reported.
