Tag Archives: glasgow

Friday Cat Blogging – 15 January 2016

Mother Jones

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A few days ago Marian went out to buy some new cat toys because, you know, a couple dozen clearly wasn’t enough. You can see her haul below, all with nice, fresh tails. Once the tails come off—which doesn’t take long—they’re no fun anymore. But you can’t please everyone. Hilbert looks like he’s saying “What? That’s all? I jumped all the way onto the counter just for this?”

In other cat news, my sister points us to this YouTube video of a cat invading a Liverpool-Spurs soccer match. It’s three years old, but who’s counting?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 15 January 2016

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Charts of the Day: Which One Do You Believe?

Mother Jones

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Over at the motherblog, Kristina Rizga has an interesting piece about what happens when you try to integrate majority-black schools. Basically, nobody likes it. The poorer (mostly black) parents don’t like the idea of a bunch of rich folks coming in and pushing them around. The richer (mostly white) parents don’t like the idea of their kids going to a low-performing school. But Kristina points to a substantial body of research showing that, in fact, white kids do fine when they move to schools in poorer black neighborhoods. In fact, they might even do better on a variety of metrics.

The whole piece is worth a read, but because I’m a nerd I going to use it as an excuse for a statistics lesson. One of the links in the piece is to a recent report from the federal government about the black-white achievement gap. It contains three charts of note. The first is on the right, and it shows white test scores in schools with different densities of black students. Basically, it confirms the worst fears of white parents: as the percentage of black kids goes up, the test scores of the white kids go down.

But wait. Maybe the white kids in majority-black districts are lower performing to begin with. So let’s control for income. That gets you the chart on the bottom left. Not so bad! Then let’s control for some other characteristics. Bingo! If we do a proper job of comparing apples to apples, white kids actually do better when they go to schools with very high densities of black students. White fears turn out to be entirely unfounded.

So here’s the question: which chart do you believe? The one with the raw data? Or the ones with all the fancy-pants statistical controls? Are the controls legitimate? Or are they just the result of a bunch of liberal analysts in the Department of Education torturing the data until they get the politically correct result they want?

Even statisticians might disagree about this. So how are laymen supposed to understand it? If you were a parent and these were your kids we were talking about, which chart would you believe?

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Charts of the Day: Which One Do You Believe?

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SIM Card Manufacturer Says Its Encryption Keys Are Safe From NSA Hacking

Mother Jones

I’m passing this along without comment since I don’t have anything substantive to add. I just wanted to keep everyone up to date on the Intercept story about the NSA stealing cell phone encryption data stored on SIM chips:

Security-chip maker Gemalto NV said Wednesday that American and British intelligence services could be responsible for a “particularly sophisticated intrusion” of its networks several years ago, but denied that the alleged hack could have widely compromised encryption it builds into chips used in billions of cellphones world-wide.

….Company executives also asserted that the interceptions wouldn’t have compromised the security of its newer SIM cards for 3G and 4G cellular networks, only older 2G networks. The reason: Gemalto says the new technology no longer require it to send telecom companies the keys to decrypt individuals’ communications—so they couldn’t have been intercepted.

Hmmm. On the one hand, many of the Snowden documents are indeed fairly old, dating back to 2010 or 2011. So they could be out of date. On the other hand, the NSA didn’t necessarily have to “intercept” anything here. A sufficiently sophisticated hack could presumably have given them direct access to the Gemalto database that contains the encryption keys. And needless to say, Gemalto has a vested interest in assuring everyone that their current products are safe.

So….who knows what really happened here. We’ll likely hear more about it as Gemalto’s internal investigation continues.

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SIM Card Manufacturer Says Its Encryption Keys Are Safe From NSA Hacking

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Five Quick Things to Know About Bowe Bergdahl

Mother Jones

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It’s an open question whether the White House handled the recovery of Bowe Bergdahl well. Probably not, and it’s a legitimate topic for speculation. But on the substantive question of the prisoner exchange itself, here are five things you should keep firmly in mind:

  1. We don’t know if Bergdahl is a deserter. We’ll only know that after the military legal process has run its course and rendered a verdict. Obviously nothing is going to shut up the hotheads and Fox News blowhards, but the rest of us on both left and right would be wise to reserve judgment until that happens.
  2. Either way, we still should have gotten Bergdahl back. We don’t leave prisoners behind to face justice from the enemy. We dish it out ourselves.
  3. The evidence suggests that, in fact, probably nobody died searching for Bergdahl after he left the base.
  4. When wars end, you exchange prisoners. This is always distasteful and contentious: the issue of POWs was so fraught at the end of the Korean War that it actually extended the fighting for more than a year. But eventually you agree to an exchange, and the Afghanistan war is no different. Foreign policy hawks might not like it, but America’s longest war is finally coming to an end, which means our Taliban prisoners would have been exchanged fairly soon no matter what. We didn’t actually give up much in this deal.
  5. As Michael Hastings reported two years ago, Bergdahl didn’t think much of his unit, and his unit didn’t think much of him. Given the rancor between them, it’s not surprising that his teammates have plenty of lurid things to say about him now. They never liked him much in the first place. For the time being, you should take everything they say with a big grain of salt.

Practically everything you’re hearing right now about Bowe Bergdahl is being driven by extreme partisans with a huge ax to grind. You should view the entire feeding frenzy with intense skepticism until we learn more about what actually happened.

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Five Quick Things to Know About Bowe Bergdahl

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Latest Gallup Numbers Confirm 10-12 Million Newly Insured Under Obamacare

Mother Jones

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Gallup’s latest poll number for the uninsured is out, and it’s stabilized now that the open enrollment period for Obamacare has ended. It was 13.4 percent in April and it’s 13.4 percent in May:

The fact that the rate stabilized provides some confidence in Gallup’s polling, since that’s what should have happened once open enrollment ended. This is a drop of about 4 percentage points from the 2011-12 baseline, and represents about 10 million newly insured—a figure that’s been confirmed elsewhere and now seems like a pretty good estimate. Add to this the number of children and sub-26ers who are newly insured, and you’re probably up to 12-13 million who are newly insured under Obamacare. Some of this comes from people buying insurance through the exchanges; some comes from Medicaid signups; and some comes from people signing up for insurance at work thanks to the individual mandate.

It’s possible that other estimates will upend this number over the next few months, but I doubt it. This is probably about what we got from Obamacare. It’s up to you to decide if you think it’s worth the price.

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Latest Gallup Numbers Confirm 10-12 Million Newly Insured Under Obamacare

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Chip-and-PIN Credit Cards Coming in 2015?

Mother Jones

Sam’s Club has announced that it will soon be issuing a chip-based credit card. Hooray! However, it’s a chip-and-signature card, not one of the more secure, more logical, and more universal chip-and-PIN cards. But wait:

The other major security technology widely used on credit cards elsewhere i.e., every country on the planet except ours is PIN codes, which are more difficult to fake than a scribbled signature. The Sam’s Club cards will be PIN enabled but will primarily verify users by signature. The next generation of the cards, however, will primarily require PIN verification when they are issued next year.

Hold on. When did this happen? A few months ago, America’s credit card issuers were insisting that chip-and-signature was the way to go. The transition plans were all in place and it was what everyone had agreed to. Retailers didn’t have the technology for chip-and-PIN and consumers didn’t want it, because we were all too stupid to get used to using a PIN code with our credit cards.

Now, suddenly, chip-and-PIN is right around the corner? What’s going on?

UPDATE: I guess I haven’t been paying attention. In December Wells Fargo announced that it would offer chip-based cards on request. “Technically speaking, they are chip-and-signature,” says a Wells Fargo spox, “though the chip does have a PIN and can accommodate a PIN-based transaction if the situation required it (e.g. an unattended or offline kiosk.)” And JPMorgan Chase says it will be offering chip-and-PIN cards later this year. I guess the chip-and-PIN bandwagon is starting to gain momentum.

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Chip-and-PIN Credit Cards Coming in 2015?

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Yes, Let’s Gid Rid of the White House Press Secretary

Mother Jones

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After President Obama announced Jay Carney’s resignation as White House press secretary last Friday, a number of people suggested we just do away with the position. Dave Weigel’s take was typical:

The tragedy of the White House beat, as hacks like me keep pointing out, is that the White House is forever innovating ways to make it useless. A specific question about the administration? Why, there’s another department you can direct your questions to. What news there is gets generated by reporters acting on their own, not by anything pulled from the White House press secretary. Jay Carney’s role, and Josh Earnest’s role, is to dodge….

Why do we need this particular public official? As the White House pioneers ways to avoid questions, what’s the point of the job Jay Carney’s now leaving?

This is all true. And yet….I wonder if this lets reporters off too easily? Every once in a while I happen to catch a White House press briefing, either live or on YouTube, and what strikes me is that reporters are less interested in gaining actual information than in simply playing gotcha. Do press secretaries dodge? Sure. But then again, if you ask whether the president still has confidence in Eric Shinseki (this is Weigel’s example), what do you expect? It’s a dumb question, designed to produce theater, not information. Everyone knows perfectly well that you have to express confidence in your deputies until the day you don’t. If you ask about it, you’re just going to get mush.

Ditto for lots of other press room fodder. White House reporters seem to be in love with asking questions that they know perfectly well aren’t going to be answered, for no reason except that it provides a soundbite for the evening news that shows them being “tough.”

If I had to guess, I’d say this culture started with Ron Ziegler and Watergate. In that case, tough, relentless questioning was legitimate. In general, it’s legitimate whenever you’re probing a genuine scandal of some kind. But after Watergate was over, White House reporters somehow got in the habit of treating everything like a scandal, and press secretaries got in the habit of treating every question as an attack. After 40 years of this, it’s become a dysfunctional relationship that does no one any good.

So yeah, get rid of the press secretary. Get rid of the televised daily briefing. Maybe the president should just have a low-level staff that distributes schedules, answers basic questions about presidential actions, and coordinates interview requests. Since these would be low-level aides, nobody would expect them to have direct access to the president, and therefore there’d be no point in badgering them.

And then, everyone could go back to doing actual reporting, instead of pretending that either the press secretary or the president himself will ever produce real news. Tough questioning hasn’t produced any real news from either one of them for years, and that’s unlikely to change.

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Yes, Let’s Gid Rid of the White House Press Secretary

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Don’t Believe the Doom Mongering About Obama’s New Carbon Regs

Mother Jones

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For deep coverage of President Obama’s decision to roll out new limits on CO2 emissions from power plants, I commend to you the fine folks who cover the environment for us. Their real-time reporting on today’s events is here.

For now, I’ll just make a couple of points. First, EPA administrator Gina McCarthy sure is right about this:

McCarthy said critics who warn of severe economic consequences of the rules have historically decried all environmental protections. She described them as “ special interests” who “cried wolf to protect their own agenda. And time after time, we followed the science, protected the American people, and the doomsday predictions never came true. Now, climate change is calling our number. And right on cue, those same critics once again will flaunt manufactured facts and scare tactics.”

Before the rules came out, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it would cost the economy $50 billion annually and hundreds of thousands of jobs. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, from the coal-heavy state of Kentucky, called it “a dagger in the heart of the American middle class.”

You should basically ignore cries of doom from conservatives and business interests. They’ll be producing reams of data showing that the new EPA regs will cost untold billions of dollars, millions of jobs, and thousands of plant closures. This is what they’ve done with every environmental regulation ever proposed. In virtually every case, they’ve been wrong. The cost of compliance turns out to be a lot lower than we expect, as does the impact on jobs and energy prices. Roughly speaking, this is because capitalism really does work, something these fans of capitalism always forget whenever it becomes inconvenient. But work it does: we invent new ways of compliance and new ways of generating energy, and it all turns out far better than the doom-mongers expect.

But you probably knew that already. So here’s something else to ponder: What is Obama’s real goal in announcing these new regulations? The reason I ask is that today’s announcement is just the first step. We now have to go through the normal drafting and public comment phase, and this is a lengthy process—even if the courts don’t get involved, something I wouldn’t bet on. Obama may have directed the EPA to issue the final rule by June 2015, but that seems hopelessly optimistic to me. At a minimum, for a complex and powerful regulation like this one, I’d expect a minimum of two or three years.

In other words, it probably won’t go into effect during Obama’s presidency. And that makes me wonder if it’s as much a bargaining chip as anything else. Back in 2010, when cap-and-trade was being considered in the Senate, Obama warned that if it didn’t pass, he’d take executive action on his own. That wasn’t enough to scare Republicans into supporting the bill, but now he’s actually doing it, which means there’s a concrete regulation to compare alternatives to. And I wonder if that isn’t the main point: Produce something specific enough that it’s possible to get some Republican support for an alternative. Even now, I suspect that Obama would be much happier with congressional legislation than with an executive action.

I’m just noodling here, and I might be entirely off base. God knows Obama has no reason to think that anything short of Armageddon will provoke any serious compromising from Republicans in Congress. Still, the timing certainly seems a bit peculiar. It’s been four years since cap-and-trade failed. Why did it take this long to produce the EPA regs that he had threatened as the price of failure?

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Don’t Believe the Doom Mongering About Obama’s New Carbon Regs

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Surprise! Democrats Benefit More From Obamacare Than Republicans.

Mother Jones

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Sarah Kliff points today to an interesting new Kaiser poll about Obamacare. The question is whether Obamacare has directly helped or hurt your family. It turns out that far more Democrats think it’s helped them than Republicans.

Now, there are some reasons to think this is objectively true. Obamacare exchanges have generally been more effective in blue states, signing up more people. Medicaid expansion has been almost entirely limited to blue states. And Obamacare is directed primarily at those with low incomes, who lean heavily Democratic. Put all this together, and you’d expect that a lot more Democrats have benefited from Obamacare than Republicans.

However, Kliff thinks this doesn’t explain the entire gap. A lot of it is just plain partisanship: “Democrats likely overestimate the health law’s reach, Republicans underestimate and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.” I suspect that’s true, and it’s the chart on the right that demonstrates it most clearly. Take a look at the question in the middle. A full 34 percent of Republicans say they personally know someone who lost their insurance thanks to Obamacare. Given the rather small number of people who actually fall into this category, it’s vanishingly unlikely that 34 percent of Republicans truly know someone who lost coverage. But since they don’t like Obamacare, I suppose they’re more likely to count friends of friends, or someone that Aunt Millie told them about, or someone they heard about at that party last Christmas. Democrats probably act the opposite.

On the other hand, the results of the question about gaining coverage actually seem fairly reasonable to me. I’d expect about a 2:1 difference between Republicans and Democrats, and that’s what we see. For some reason, I suspect that people are answering questions about gaining coverage fairly honestly. It’s only on the issue of losing coverage that partisan loyalties are skewing the results.

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Surprise! Democrats Benefit More From Obamacare Than Republicans.

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Chris Wallace Demands Answers to Yet More Benghazi Questions That Have Already Been Answered Dozens of Times

Mother Jones

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I was channel surfing this morning and happened to catch a few minutes of Chris Wallace talking to Claire McCaskill. The subject, yet again, was Benghazi. Why did Susan Rice blame the video? Also: Two sources said they knew it was a terrorist attack immediately, so why didn’t Rice say that? We need these questions answered!

I know, I know. It’s my fault for watching TV. But Jesus. Chris Wallace knows the answers to these questions. He has to know. But just in case he still doesn’t, here they are:

Why did Susan Rice blame the video?

On Chris Wallace’s own show aired four days after the Benghazi attack, here’s what Susan Rice said:

Well, first of all, Chris, we are obviously investigating this very closely. The FBI has a lead in this investigation. The information, the best information and the best assessment we have today is that in fact this was not a preplanned, premeditated attack. That what happened initially was that it was a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired in Cairo as a consequence of the video. People gathered outside the embassy and then it grew very violent and those with extremist ties joined the fray and came with heavy weapons, which unfortunately are quite common in post-revolutionary Libya and that then spun out of control.

But we don’t see at this point signs this was a coordinated plan, premeditated attack. Obviously, we will wait for the results of the investigation and we don’t want to jump to conclusions before then. But I do think it’s important for the American people to know our best current assessment.

Rice was very clear that she was providing a preliminary judgment. She was very clear about the role of the video: It had inspired protests in Cairo earlier in the week. She was very clear that we believed the Cairo protests sparked protests in Benghazi. She was very clear that we believed this provided extremist groups with a chance to launch an opportunistic attack.

In the end, almost all of this turned out to be true. The video did spark protests in Cairo. Some of the Benghazi attackers were motivated by the video. The attack wasn’t premeditated: it was planned no more than a few hours previously. The only part Rice got wrong was that there were, in fact, no initial protests in Benghazi. That was the best reporting we had at the time, but it turned out to be incorrect.

A couple of sources said they reported immediately that it was a preplanned terrorist attack. Why didn’t Rice and the rest of the Obama administration say that?

Because the intelligence community had multiple sources of reporting about Benghazi, and they conflicted. How hard can it be to understand this? Besides, the best evidence we have today is that it wasn’t a preplanned attack. It was an opportunistic attack organized in less than a day. What’s more, the groups that led the attack had only the most tenuous ties to Al Qaeda.

Aside from that, there’s this continuing weird totem around the word “terrorist.” What’s the point of this? Hillary Clinton called the attackers a “small and savage group.” Susan Rice called them extremists. Others used different words. It’s hard to understand why this matters. The attack was carried out by mostly local militant groups with mostly local grievances and no serious ties to Al Qaeda. The precise word you use to describe these folks can’t possibly be that important, can it?

And an aside….

Critics have focused heavily on the fact that the Obama administration blamed the “Innocence of Muslims” video for the violence that had erupted around the Middle East and then, indirectly, provoked the attacks in Benghazi. But I think everyone needs a trip down memory lane here. That video was a very, very big deal at the time. Maybe everyone has now forgotten this, but it did spark riots all over the region and it was the subject of nearly constant coverage in the local media both before and after the Benghazi attacks. The notion that it was responsible for regional violence at the time and at least partially responsible for what happened in Benghazi was hardly some bizarre flight of fancy.

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Chris Wallace Demands Answers to Yet More Benghazi Questions That Have Already Been Answered Dozens of Times

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