Tag Archives: world

Here Is What Blogging Has Done To Me

by WinfredBSB Posted on January 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Yesterday I wrote a post that listed a bunch of things people have said about Ted Cruz, along with a bunch of things I made up. But which were real and which were invented? Here was the answer:

All statements whose ordinal number takes the integer form 2n+1 or 2n-1 have been invented. The rest are real.

I got some pushback about this, mostly asking what the hell kind of crap was this, anyway? So here goes. Here’s where it came from:

  1. At first I was just going to toss in a few fake statements and put the answer key below the fold. But then I realized that anyone who got here via a direct link would see the answers right away.
  2. So then I figured I’d add eight fakes in all the odd slots. But if your eye drifted down to the answer, you’d see “odd” right away.
  3. So I put it in small type. But even that was readable.
  4. So then I figured that instead of “odd,” I’d say that all the fakes were of the form 2n+1. My geeky readers would appreciate it.
  5. Then I looked for a link that defined “odd,” so that my non-geeky readers had a fighting chance of figuring things out. The only simple one I found defined odd as 2n+1 or 2n-1. So I changed the text to match.

This was pretty obviously a pointless waste of time. Welcome to my world. This is what blogging has done to me.

Anyway, in case you didn’t figure it out, all the odd numbered statement are fakes. The rest are real. The scary thing is that I didn’t have any trouble coming up with eight plausible fakes.

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Here Is What Blogging Has Done To Me

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Quote of the Day: First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Women and Children

by EsmeraldaSalo8 Posted on January 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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From the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, after attending a Donald Trump rally in Arizona:

I had never previously been to a political event at which people cheered for the murder of women and children.

This is the crowd response to Trump’s confirmation that “he meant it when he said that he would ‘take out’ the family members of terrorists.” As usual, it’s pure affect. Trump talks big on national security: he’s the most militaristic guy you’ve ever met, he’ll ban Muslim visitors and crush ISIS, and other world leaders will unanimously back down under his steely gaze. But when you actually look at the policies he supports—giving him the benefit of calling them “policies” in the first place—Trump has made it clear that he’s actually pretty dovish. He doesn’t really want to intervene around the world. He doesn’t especially want to do the hard dealmaking of negotiating treaties. He wouldn’t instantly tear up the Iran deal because, after all, a deal’s a deal. He wants to boost military spending, but only because he thinks a big army will scare other countries away from messing with us to begin with.

But he’ll kill the families of terrorists, and his fans love it. Booyah.

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Quote of the Day: First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Women and Children

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Why Do So Many People Believe Donald Trump?

by ClaudiaMillican Posted on January 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’m sort of bored with the Republican race (and the Democratic race too—about which more later) but I do wonder if a lot of Republicans are getting things fundamentally wrong. Here’s Jonah Goldberg:

The level of distrust among many of the different factions of the conservative coalition has never been higher, at least not in my experience. Arguments don’t seem to matter, only motives do.

Here’s Rush Limbaugh on Friday: “Forget the name is Trump. If a candidate could guarantee to fix everything that’s wrong in this country the way the Republican Party thinks it’s wrong, if it were a slam dunk, if it were guaranteed, that candidate will still be opposed by the Republican Party establishment…. If he’s not part of the clique, they don’t want him in there.”

In other words, the GOP establishment has become so corrupted, its members would knowingly reject a savior just to protect their comfortable way of life.

This really does get at a key part of Trump’s popularity: a lot of people believe him. Hell, I’d almost vote for him if I believed him. We’re talking about a guy who says he’s going to grow the economy at 6 percent, save Social Security, cut taxes on everyone, get rid of unemployment, crush ISIS, rebuild the military, erase the national debt, and make America great again. And the icing on the cake for conservatives is that he claims to be solidly pro-life, pro-gun, pro-religion, and in favor of nice, right-wing Supreme Court justices like Clarence Thomas. What’s not to like? A few minor deviations from movement conservatism? That’s piffle. Why are all those establishment Republicans opposed to him?

There are reasons, of course. But primary among them is that no one with a 3-digit IQ believes he can do this stuff. Lots of it is flatly impossible, and the rest is politically impossible. And if you don’t believe Trump, then he’s just a charlatan with nothing left except bad qualities: he’s erratic, narcissistic, boorish, racist, thin-skinned, ideologically unreliable, opportunistic, etc. etc. It’s pretty obvious why you’d oppose him.

So, really, it all comes down to whether you believe Donald Trump can do the stuff he says. It’s pretty plain that he can’t. So why do so many people think he can? That’s the $64 trillion question.

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Why Do So Many People Believe Donald Trump?

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Quote of the Day: The Simple, Ever-So-Simple World of Donald Trump

by JerroldEdinburgh Posted on January 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Behold the business acumen of Donald Trump:

Donald Trump says he’s unfazed by the prospect of running against Michael Bloomberg….At one point, Trump cast doubt on Bloomberg’s business success, suggesting that the head of the Bloomberg media empire wasn’t actually worth the $36.5 billion estimated by Forbes. “I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it,” Trump said.

“I mean if somebody came in…and comes up with a better machine than him, people stop using it,” Trump said. “I don’t even know why other companies haven’t come up with a better machine. I mean why? It’s so simple.“

This comes from a man who managed to run into the ground an airline, a hotel, a casino empire, and an endless series of late-night shills. But he apparently has no idea why Bloomberg terminals are popular, nor any idea that Bloomberg has a number of large competitors. Compare to this:

“I mean if somebody came in…and builds a better car than Toyota, people stop buying them. I don’t even know why other companies haven’t come up with a better car. I mean why? It’s so simple.”

This is the same man who says it’s “so simple” to get Mexico to pay for a wall and force China to stop devaluing its currency; that he would “totally succeed” in creating jobs, reducing the budget deficit, stopping nuclear weapons in Iran, and saving Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; that it’s “easy” to get OPEC to produce more oil; and that it’s “very simple” to get ISIS to surrender.

Now you understand why Trump thinks everything is easy. It’s because he has no idea what goes into any of this stuff. Every time he tries to do something that’s even slightly out of his wheelhouse (namely property development and bluster) he fails miserably, but he still thinks everything is easy. And his fans believe him.

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Quote of the Day: The Simple, Ever-So-Simple World of Donald Trump

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Here’s What Passes For a Brilliant Jailbreak In Orange County

by Ethan0387xepklg Posted on January 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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My hometown of Orange County isn’t in the news much, so it’s a little sad that our latest brush with fame is the escape of three inmates from the central jail in Santa Ana. Here’s the long version of how they did it:

And here’s the short version: They cut out a vent cover and climbed to the roof. Then they rappelled down by tying together a bunch of sheets. This is what passes for brilliant in Orange County. Sigh.

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Here’s What Passes For a Brilliant Jailbreak In Orange County

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I Review NR’s "Against Trump" Issue

by MaryjoTrout Posted on January 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Everybody is writing today about National Review’s big “Against Trump” issue. I did that last night, so today I want to review their effort. I give it a D+.

This isn’t my usual liberal carping at NR. Normally I carp because I disagree with them, but this time we are joined in a mutual bond of disgust. Virtually every single thing that everyone said in their anti-Trump symposium was true. I applaud what they did.

But why was it so damn lazy? Every editor in the world knows that the easiest way to fill pages is to corral a bunch of writers from the ol’ office Rolodex and ask them each to write 300 words on some topic. Every editor also knows that unless there’s some serious adult supervision, these “symposiums” are usually flaccid and unpersuasive. Lots of contributors will repeat what others have said. They mostly just bang something out instead of working on tight pieces that make crisp points. Some of them just toss out a few bromides and email it off.

That’s what happened this time too, and it’s yet another example of what I was complaining about yesterday: no one seems willing to really attack Trump. Obviously I don’t expect NR to produce the written equivalent of a Willie Horton ad, but despite all my past (and future) kvetching about them, I have no doubt that NR’s stable of writers can produce very persuasive, very well-written agit-prop1 when they put their minds to it. I’ve seen it before, and it’s not always easy to respond to.

What NR should have done is simple: Figure out half a dozen of Trump’s weakest points—points that even Trump supporters might find troubling—and assign a writer to dive into each one. Give each one the time to really do some research and produce a tight, fact-checked piece that tears Trump a new asshole. Put them all together and you’d have the definitive anti-Trump manifesto. Something like this would have an impact beyond the mere fact of NR doing it.

I don’t know why this didn’t happen. Lack of time? Lack of staff enthusiasm? It’s a mystery.

1I don’t mean this in a derogatory way. (Not this time, anyway.) This is what political magazines do. It can be done well or poorly, subtly or noisily, but our mission in life is to persuade people and provoke change.

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I Review NR’s "Against Trump" Issue

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Should Bernie Sanders Support Reparations?

by OlenMcgehee Posted on January 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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A few days ago, someone asked Bernie Sanders if he supported the payment of reparations to African-Americans. He said he didn’t—and then, as with every other subject he’s asked about, used it as a springboard to talk about the “real issue” of poverty and income inequality. Ta-Nehisi Coates was pretty unimpressed:

Sanders says the chance of getting reparations through Congress is “nil,” a correct observation which could just as well apply to much of the Vermont senator’s own platform….Sanders is a lot of things, many of them good. But he is not the candidate of moderation and unification, so much as the candidate of partisanship and radicalism….Sanders should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy.

Coates is unhappy that Sanders is so reticent about reparations, but this strikes me as an odd criticism. A couple of years ago Coates famously wrote an Atlantic article titled “The Case for Reparations,” and after reading it I concluded that he was reticent about reparations too. He certainly made the case that black labor and wealth had been plundered by whites for centuries—something that few people deny anymore—but when it came time to talk about concrete restitution for this, he tap danced gingerly. Here are the relevant paragraphs:

Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for “appropriate remedies.”

….Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued…$34 billion….Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.

….Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely….What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.

If you say “reparations,” an ordinary person will almost certainly understand it in a very specific way: A disbursement of money to blacks to atone for slavery and its aftermath. But despite the provocative title of his piece, Coates never squarely endorses this. Instead, he suggests we pass a bill that would study slavery. He writes approvingly of Ogletree’s proposal for job training and public works. And he wants a “full acceptance” of our past along with a “national reckoning” about its consequences.

I’m not being coy when I say that after I read this, I couldn’t tell whether or not Coates supported reparations in the sense that most people understand them. And since I’m sure that’s the sense in which Bernie Sanders was answering the question, I’m not quite sure what Coates is criticizing here. To my ear, Sanders sounded a lot like Ogletree, who Coates seems to have no problem with. So what’s his problem with Sanders?

POSTSCRIPT: Since someone is bound to ask, I don’t support reparations myself because I don’t think they would do any good. But maybe I’m wrong. I can be convinced otherwise.

And if I am wrong, I’ve never thought that practical considerations are an insurmountable obstacle. A simple solution is to try to roughly equalize black and white net worth, which would require payment of about $50,000 to every black person in the country. That would be expensive but affordable over a course of 10 or 20 years. Nor would the supposedly sticky subject of “who’s black?” be all that difficult. About 95 percent of the cases would be easy, and the rest would go to an arbitration panel of some kind. The arbitration might be messy, but it would hardly be the first time we’ve done something like this.

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Should Bernie Sanders Support Reparations?

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We’re Still Waiting to Find Out What Happened Off Farsi Island Last Week

by JacklynHume Posted on January 18, 2016

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A week after two Navy boats were taken into custody in Iranian waters, the Pentagon still doesn’t seem to have any idea what happened:

The two boats were supposed to follow a course that would keep them in international waters. They were scheduled to refuel at a rendezvous with the Monomoy, a Coast Guard cutter, at about 5 p.m. But the two boats veered off course Into Iranian waters.

….The crews then stopped to try to fix a mechanical problem in one boat’s diesel engine. “This stop occurred in Iranian territorial waters, although it’s not clear the crew was aware of their exact location,” the report said.

At about 5:10 p.m., one of the boats apparently sent a brief radio report that Iranian boats were approaching. A second message was garbled. All communications were cut off by 5:45 p.m., the report said

This is all still pretty peculiar. On a trip from Kuwait to Bahrain, all these boats had to do was stay within 60 miles of the shoreline and they would have been fine. Why were they so far out? Where was the Monomoy? Did they really suffer an engine failure, two GPS failures, and two comms failures all at once? I know that a thorough investigation can take some time, but this one doesn’t seem very complex. What the hell happened out there?

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We’re Still Waiting to Find Out What Happened Off Farsi Island Last Week

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A Second Look at BernieCare

by ReganBobb049309 Posted on January 18, 2016

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Last night I wrote that Bernie Sanders’ universal health care plan was “pretty good.” Over at Vox, Ezra Klein says it’s vague and unrealistic. Who’s right?

Both of us, I’d say. The Sanders plan is mostly a sketch of how he’d fund universal health care, and at that level I’d say it was pretty good if you evaluate it as a campaign document rather than a Brookings white paper. His numbers mostly added up, and from my point of view, his funding sources were roughly appropriate. Half or more of the funding comes from the middle class, with the rest coming from the rich. I’m OK with that.

But how about the actual mechanics of providing health care? Klein is pretty scathing about Sanders’ promise that his plan will cover everything with no copays or deductibles:

The implication to most people, I think, is that claim denials will be a thing of the past….What makes that so irresponsible is that it stands in flagrant contradiction to the way single-payer plans actually work….The real way single-payer systems save money isn’t through cutting administrative costs. It’s through cutting reimbursements to doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and device companies.

….But to get those savings, the government needs to be willing to say no when doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and device companies refuse to meet their prices, and that means the government needs to be willing to say no to people who want those treatments. If the government can’t do that — if Sanders is going to stick to the spirit of “no more fighting with insurance companies when they fail to pay for charges” — then it won’t be able to control costs.

The issue of how often the government says no leads to all sorts of other key questions — questions Sanders is silent on. For instance, who decides when the government says no? Will there be a cost-effectiveness council, like Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence? Or will the government basically have to cover every treatment that can be proven beneficial, as is true for Medicare now? What will the appeals process be like?

This might sound technical, but it’s absolutely critical.

Klein is right that the mechanics of the plan are critical, and I probably should have done more than shrug that off as something that we’d get to later. Still, I think his criticism goes way too far. This is a campaign document. It’s obviously aspirational, and asking a presidential candidate to go into deep detail about the drawbacks of his policy is a little much. I can’t recall ever seeing that in my life. In a campaign, you sell the high points and then let critics take their shots.

That’s not to say that Sanders couldn’t have done more than he did. He could have and probably should have. In particular, he should have provided at least an outline of how his plan would work: who it covers, who employs doctors, what drives the cost savings, and so forth.

But my take is that Sanders was trying to accomplish something specific: he wanted to show that universal health care was affordable, and he wanted to stake out a position that Democrats should at least be dedicated to the idea of universal health care. I’d say he accomplished that in credible style. It’s fine to hold Sanders to a high standard, but it’s unfair to hold him to an Olympian standard that no presidential candidate in history has ever met. We health care wonks may be disappointed not to have more to chew on, but that’s life. We’ll get it eventually.

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A Second Look at BernieCare

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Donald Trump is a Mediocre Businessman

by Dewey2569v Posted on January 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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I know I’ve beaten this dead horse before, but I continue to be a little surprised that no one has seriously attacked Donald Trump on his business acumen. After all, it’s his big calling card: he knows how to negotiate great deals and he’s made a ton of money from them.

But this doesn’t seem to be true.1 In fact, he seems to be a pretty mediocre businessman. Today, for example, the New York Times tells the story of Trump’s 1988 purchase of the Plaza Hotel. As even Trump admits, he was so enamored of owning it that he overpaid significantly and managed it poorly, something which contributed to his eventual financial downfall:

Once he owned the hotel, Mr. Trump put his wife, Ivana, in charge of renovating it….By 1990, the Plaza needed an operating profit of $40 million a year to break even, according to financial records that Mr. Trump disclosed at the time. The hotel had fallen well short of that goal, and with renovating expenses, in one year it burned through $74 million more than it brought in.

But Mr. Trump didn’t spend a lot of time sweating over the Plaza’s finances. He was too busy with new challenges. A few months after the Plaza deal closed, he purchased the Eastern Air Shuttle for $365 million, and in 1990, he opened the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, which cost $1 billion to build. Some of the loans he took out to pay for deals were personally guaranteed.

….Mr. Trump’s brief ownership of the Plaza…marked the beginning of his transition from an owner of major assets to a manager of major assets. An increasing share of his wealth would come in the future from licensing his name, not just to builders but sellers of suits, cologne, chandeliers, mattresses and more. In professional parlance, he went from “asset heavy” to “asset light.”

The Plaza was a huge money loser. The shuttle was a disaster. Trump never understood the casino business, and his Atlantic City properties started hemorrhaging cash almost as soon as they were completed. All of this pushed him to the edge of personal bankruptcy, which he avoided solely because his banks decided Trump’s holdings could be liquidated at a higher price if they allowed him to stay solvent. In the aftermath of this bloodbath, he raised money by taking the remains of his casino and resort properties public. And since this was a public company, we know exactly how well it did: it lost money every single year and went into bankruptcy proceedings in 2004 (and again in 2009 for good measure). Since then, he’s mostly bought and managed golf resorts, which has been a good but not great business for him.

Bottom line: When it comes to building and managing tangible assets, there’s really not much evidence that Trump has much talent. He inherited a huge amount of money and nearly lost it all during his first couple of decades in the development business. However, before the money ran out he was able to use it to create the “Trump show” (his words), and in the couple of decades since then his income has come not from building things, but primarily from licensing and entertainment.

Trump seems to have two genuine talents. The first is that he’s apparently a masterful reader of people. The second is that he’s a hypnotic blowhard, which accounts for his success at both branding and TV, as well as his success at scams like Trump University.

Needless to say, we’ve seen both of these talents at work on the campaign trail. The first allows him to zero in unerringly on his opponents’ most sensitive spots—weaknesses that others frequently don’t even see, let alone exploit. The second allows him to mesmerize the media and the public while pulling off the greatest scam of his life.

But as a businessman, he’s so-so. He lets his decisions be guided by his gut, and his gut isn’t really very good. That’s where Trump Plaza, Trump Air, Trump football, Trump City, the Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Steaks, and Trump University come from. That’s not much of a recommendation for the presidency.

1Needless to say, he can prove his business mettle anytime he wants to. He just has to open up his books. Show us revenues and GAAP earnings over the past 20 years. Show us return on equity and return on assets. Break it all down by business line so we can see how much is from TV and branding vs. tangible projects. There’s nothing hard about it.

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Donald Trump is a Mediocre Businessman

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