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Jack Marshall Watch 2018-09-18

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Jack had a lot to say last week about the Serena Williams incident at the U.S. Open, but since I’m not interested in Serena Williams, the U.S. Open, or sports ethics in general, I have nothing to say. I also have nothing to say about Mark Knight’s editorial cartoon about the incident. Or any of Jack’s other posts about Serena Williams. Nor will I make more than a passing mention of Jack’s tiresome pretense of not understanding why players are kneeling during the Anthem at football games.

Later in the week, Jack touched on some science-related issues, starting on Wednesday, when he wrote about a report put out by something called the Center for WorkLife Law that examines bias in the legal workplace. Jack’s not impressed by the study.

At least the New York Times headline, for once, was accurate., at least the online version: “Lawyers Say They Face Persistent Racial and Gender Bias at Work.” Yup, that’s what the survey showed. What it didn’t show is that there really is such discrimination, how much there is, or how it manifests itself. Here’s part of the executive summary:

Prove-It-Again. Women of color, white women, and men of color reported that they have to go “above and beyond” to get the same recognition and respect as their colleagues.

  • Women of color reported PIA bias at a higher level than any other group, 35 percentage points higher than white men.
  • White women and men of color also reported high levels of PIA bias, 25 percentage points higher than white men.
  • Women of color reported that they are held to higher standards than their colleagues at a level 32 percentage points higher than white men.

This demonstrates, at least within the reliability of the survey, that minorities and women perceive that they are being discriminated against more than white males.

Jack is correct about the general nature of the study. It’s not a statistical smoking gun, it is based on self-reports by employees, and it is based on subjective perceptions. However, Jack slightly mischaracterizes the study when he says it is about perceptions of discrimination. From what I can figure out from the executive summary (the main report is hidden behind an expensive ABA paywall), the perceptions are actually about behavior and actions which can reveal discrimination. This is a subtle distinction, and I can’t really blame Jack for missing it.

A survey about perceptions of discrimination might ask lawyers a direct question like “Are women in your firm more likely to be the target of personal insults by their bosses?” The results would then be reported directly from the responses. E.g. “49% of lawyers report that women in their firms are more likely to be the targets of personal insults by their bosses.”

The survey under discussion uses a different approach. It would ask lawyers a question about specific behavior, such as “Have you been the target of personal insults by your boss?” The answers of men and women could then be compared. E.g. “49% of women report being the targets of personal insults by their bosses, verses 28% of men.” That’s a more powerful conclusion, because it compares women’s reported perceptions of their treatment against men’s own reported perceptions of their own treatment.

The quoted example above falls into the latter category, as do other questions mentioned in the executive summary. Obviously, there’s still room for bias in any survey this subjective, but it’s not as bad as Jack claims.

That’s a useless result. We have seen and read, for example, how various African American activists and celebrities like Charles M. Blow and Ta’ nahisi Coates teach their sons that police are racists, and that they must fear them. As a result, they interpret all interactions with police through this prism. One doesn’t have to be a research ethicist to conclude that this warps their perception.

Oh, geez, I can’t even with this… Does Jack really think black people wouldn’t worry about racist cops if they weren’t being deceived by race-baiting activists and celebrities?

In other science news, on Friday Jack attacked the Milken study on the death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane María. I addressed the Milken study in detail in an earlier post.

On Sunday, Jack brought up the Kavanaugh hearing and the accusations of sexual misconduct coming from one of his former high-school classmates. Unsurprisingly, Jack thinks her accusation is unethical.

2. The accusation was over 30 years old, meaning that all aspects of it, including the recollections of the alleged participants, would be inherently untrustworthy. This is why we have statutes of limitations. UNFAIR, and IRRESPONSIBLE.

There is no statute of limitations on Senate hearings for Supreme Court nominees. It’s up to the Senators to weigh the value of her testimony

3. The accusation was, and still is, unsubstantiated by anyone else. UNFAIR, and IRRESPONSIBLE.

This isn’t a civil suit. Substantiating her claims is not really her responsibility.

4. The accusation was made against a distinguished public servant and family man with no documented blemishes on his record or character as an adult, stemming from an alleged incident that occurred, if it occurred, while he was a minor. UNFAIR

And? And?

Look, it wasn’t an “alleged” incident to her. She knows what she believes happened. So unless we’re sure she’s lying, there’s nothing unethical about saying things she believes to be true.

5. No complaint had been made against Kavanaugh by the accuser at any time in the intervening years, until his nomination by President Trump became a political rallying point for the Left. IRRESPONSIBLE.

I’m really tired of this argument, from Jack and everyone else who makes it. You say she should have complained earlier? Well then, in what forum should she have made her complaint? In 1982 she was a 15-year-old high-school girl attending a party with boys and drinking and no parents, and she may have been drinking herself. From her point of view, admitting any of that to her parents or school authorities or the police would just get her in trouble, making the whole incident even worse.

And once a few years went by, telling her parents or the school wouldn’t do any good, and telling the police after so long probably wouldn’t help either. There’d be no one she could tell that would be able to do anything about it…until the nation’s political engines presented her with an opportunity to get revenge. Kavanaugh’s nomination is the first time in decades she’s been able to tell her story to someone who could make it matter.

On Monday, Jack again touched on the Kavanaugh hearing, and Jack’s outrageous response deserves note:

Apparently the Trump administration has decided to pander to the worst of #MeToo fanaticism. I just heard Kellyanne Conway say “This woman should not be insulted, and not be ignored.”

Yes, she should be. She should be insulted because she has interjected herself into a Supreme Court confirmation based on a distant memory she cannot prove, denigrating a veteran professional based on alleged conduct that he may have engaged in as a minor

I can’t see any way Jack’s response is ethical.

On the Puerto Rico Hurricane Study

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A lot of Trump opponents are claiming that a recent study by the Milken Institute School of Public Health shows that after hurricane María hit Puerto Rico, the Trump administration’s relief effort was so shoddy that 3000 people died.

I’ll admit that letting 3000 people die sounds like something Trump would do, but that’s not actually what the study shows. It’s not an evaluation of the relief effort, and it doesn’t attempt to assign blame for any deaths. The study concludes that 3000 people died as a result of the hurricane, but it doesn’t have much to say about the specific causes of their deaths. In fact, the Milken press release announcing the study specifically says:

Additional research must be done to understand how the hurricane was involved in the excess deaths identified in this study. This would involve interviews of family members and others, as well as in-depth statistical analyses, to learn about the circumstances leading up to individual deaths. 

It’s important to realize that this study does not address the effectiveness of the relief effort. This study is about the inclusive death toll from the hurricane. That would include any deaths caused by an inadequate relief effort, but the study does not and cannot separate out those deaths from any others. So while the Trump administration’s relief effort might have contributed to the excess deaths described in this study, the study itself is silent on the matter.

That doesn’t mean Trump supporters are right about the study either. Let’s start with Trump himself:

“3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000…” –@realDonaldTrump

These deaths were not reported immediately because they did not happen immediately. And nobody reported the numbers until a long time later because it took a long time to gather and analyze the data. Public health studies take time.

…..This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico! — @realDonaldTrump

The Democrats are certainly trying to make him look bad, but that doesn’t make the study wrong, and the study was not exactly done by the Democrats. It’s not hard to understand why Trump thinks this way, however, when you look at what other people are saying. Here’s Lou Dobbs’s nearly logic-free take:

Picking a few choice bits,

The President, by the way, is right. The study the president alluded to is one produced last month by the Milken Institute at George Washington University. Almost a year later, the number went from 65 people killed to 2,975 people, attributed to the storm.

Dobbs is clever with words. Saying “almost a year later, the number went from” implies that there’s some kind of trickery about the delay, rather than the boring truth that it takes time to do public health studies.

The finding wasn’t the result of a death toll count, a body count, nor a study of death certificates, but a public health study that subtracted the number of people who theoretically should have died over the same period from the number of people who were reported dead over that period.

This is why I called Dobbs take almost logic-free. He’s accurately described the study, but then he does nothing with it. He simply pronounces it wrong without ever actually making an argument.

After the report came out on August 28, last month, Puerto Rico’s Democratic governor officially revised the death toll from 65 to the new estimate. And why did he choose to Trust that study? Why not the Harvard study back in June, that found deaths related to the hurricane fell within a, well, a narrow range…are you ready? A narrow range from about 800 to 8000 people. By the way, that’s also an abstract and unconnected-to-any-evidence estimate, that even the liberal Washington Post found ludicrous.

The declaration that these two studies are “unconnected to any evidence” is simply false. The Harvard study was based on a geographically distributed random sampling of over 3000 households which gathered data about 9522 people. Based on the number of deaths found in that sample, they extrapolated to obtain rates for the whole island, and from that estimated excess deaths. This methodology is commonly used to estimate deaths when death records are unavailable, such as poor countries and war zones, and it is understood to give only a very rough answer, thus the extremely wide confidence interval.

The more comprehensive Milken study was based on thousands of official death records from the Puerto Rico Vital Statistics Registry (PRVSR), and its confidence range is a much narrower 2658 to 3290, which is probably one of the reasons the Puerto Rican Government prefers it. It’s just a better study. (Also, the government commissioned it.)

The numbers were inflated, and the President was right to call out the organizations who threw out science, statistics, and evidence to discredit the Trump administration.

Lou Dobbs is an ignorant ass. There’s a lot more legitimate science and statistics in these studies than in anything he said. And as for his assertion that the study is an attempt to discredit the Trump administration, the only actual evidence he offers is the original report of 65 dead immediately after the hurricane. And he gets even that wrong: Until the Milken study was released, the official death toll stood at 64.

John Hinderaker at Powerline has his own take, which is equally silly:

This is what is going on: Some “scientists”–read anti-Trump Democratic Party activists–constructed a theoretical baseline of how many deaths would be expected to occur in Puerto Rico during the months after Hurricane Maria. They then compared this baseline to the actual number of deaths, and voila! The actual number was higher than their hypothetical guess by 3,000.

Hinderaker’s use of scare quotes around “scientists” and his accusations that they are “activists” is complete bullshit that he just made up. There isn’t even any need to attack the study to defend Trump, because the study draws no conclusions regarding the Trump administration or the relief effort.

Hinderaker’s description is, however, a reasonably accurate description of the methodology. The only thing I’d add is that the theoretical baseline is produced by analyzing death rates in Puerto Rico in past years (the Milken study goes back to 2010) to produce a statistical model of deaths, and then using that model to project past trends onto the period of the study to estimate the expected deaths.

So all of those deaths–whether caused by cancer, car accidents, or whatever–are attributed to the hurricane. The study doesn’t even attempt to figure out which 3000 excess deaths are caused by the hurricane. These activists have not made any attempt to count the actual number of hurricane-related deaths.

When discussing “all of those deaths,” it’s important to remember that the death toll of 2,975 is an excess figure. From September 2017 through February 2018 (the period of the study) the PRVSR recorded 16,608 deaths. But the statistical model used in the Milken study estimate the expected number of deaths during that period at 13,633. The difference between the actual and projected death tools is where the figure 2,975 comes from. In other words, according to the study, only about 18% of the deaths during that period were caused by hurricane María. The rest were the result of normal causes, “cancer, car accidents, or whatever,” as Hinderaker says.

But that doesn’t change the fact that there was still a higher than expected number of deaths, which raises the question: If the excess deaths were not caused by the hurricane, if they were due to “cancer, car accidents, or whatever,” then why did those causes of deaths increase? If it wasn’t the hurricane, what was it? Hinderaker offers no alternative.

No one would use such a foolish methodology except for political reasons.

This is actually a standard methodology for estimating deaths in public health science. It’s necessary in situations where it is difficult to identify and observe the causal channels.

Estimating the number of deaths from a disease like Ebola is fairly easy: You find people who tested positive for Ebola and who died from Ebola-like symptoms. Count them, and you’ve got your answer.

Estimating deaths from a disease like HIV is a lot more complicated, because people don’t die from HIV. They die from things like tuberculosis, hepatitis C, Kaposi’s sarcoma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and a variety of other diseases that kill people whose immune systems have been weakened by HIV. It can be hard to untangle the causes in these cases, and scientists have created the Coding Causes of Death in HIV (CoDe) protocol to help decide, in a consistent way, which deaths to attribute to HIV.

Classifying the causes of death can be complicated. Say a person with HIV is taking drugs which can produce vomiting as a side effect, and one day that person starts vomiting while driving, loses control of their car, and dies in a crash. Does that count as a death from HIV?

I have no idea what CoDe says about that scenario, but in general the answer to questions like that depend on why you want to know. If you are an actuary for an insurance company providing group life insurance to a company that employs people with HIV, it certainly counts, since you will have to pay that claim. And if you’re an economist studying the cost of HIV to society, not only would you count that death, but you would also count the collateral deaths of any passengers or pedestrians killed in the crash as well.

With a hurricane, the causal channels are even harder to analyze. The immediate deaths from storm surge, windblown debris, and collapsed structures are relatively easy to identify, but the hurricane also disrupts the infrastructure of civilization, and that can lead to more deaths. People with diabetes could face hazardous disruptions to their food, their insulin supply, and their healthcare. People on supplemental oxygen could lost power for the oxygen concentrators, and delivery of tanked oxygen could be disrupted. Patients on blood thinners could miss blood tests and fail to adjust their dosage correctly. Kidney dialysis centers could be out of power or supplies, forcing patients to travel further for care.

In fact, with random destruction taking out buildings, people will likely have to travel further for everything, and the extra driving alone will kill some people, even before the added risks from driving on debris-strewn roads with no traffic signals or street lights. People will die because they can’t call an ambulance with the phones down, or because the ambulances are all busy, or because the ambulances have to take longer routes to hospitals, or because hospitals are unable to operate at full capacity, or because hospitals can’t get supplies of needed drugs. People will kill themselves trying to salvage property from collapsed houses. People will fall off their roofs while repairing storm damage.

Hurricanes are a mess of causes that are difficult to sort out, which is why this study used a method that doesn’t depend on knowing the cause of every single death. A conceptually similar methodology was used to establish that cigarettes caused lung cancer. When the global lung cancer epidemic hit humanity at the end of the 19th century, nobody knew the cause. The cellular mechanisms of cancer would not be understood for many decades (and are still the subject of research today), so scientists had no way to determine the causal chain that led to lung cancer in specific patients. Nevertheless, by the 1930s scientists had gathered statistical evidence showing that the lung cancer rate was far higher in people who smoked cigarettes than in people who didn’t smoke. By the 1960s, the link was established well enough (even over the obstructive efforts of tobacco companies) to discourage people from smoking and to affect public policy.

The Milken study is similar in concept, except for the choice of control population. Cigarette studies used non-smokers as controls, because they could be drawn from otherwise similar populations. There’s no similar control population for Puerto Rico — no otherwise identical island population that wasn’t hit by a hurricane — so as a control the researchers used the same population that was hit by the hurricane, but from the years immediately before the hurricane.

By this point, someone will be screaming that “correlation does not prove causation!” That’s true, but it can certainly imply causation in a properly done study, especially when accompanied by a good explanatory theory. In this case, the theory is that hurricanes destroy infrastructure, thus increasing the danger to human life. That’s not a particularly controversial theory, and when you observe a hurricane followed by an increase in deaths, that tends to confirm the theory. Critics are welcome to offer better theories to explain the data.

(I should mention that the Powerline post also argues that Puerto Rico’s death rate declined in 2017. I’m not sure where those figures come from, but the IndexMundi source they site appears to get its data from the CIA World Fact Book, which describes the Puerto Rico Death Rate entry as a “2017 estimate.” Furthermore, since the death rate is calculated as the number of deaths divided by the number of people, it is sensitive to changes in the population size, and I suspect this estimate is based on U.S. census estimates of the Puerto Rican population. However, after María struck, about 8% of the Puerto Rican population, 300,000 people, decided to leave the island. That mass emigration did not make it into census estimates, but the Milken study used travel records to adjust its figures to account for the decline in population.)

My regular nemesis, Jack Marshall, also attacks the study:

I’ve covered the revised hurricane death tolls before. Nobody knows what the real figure is, and it is fair to question the newer estimates, which were produced by public health experts at George Washington University in Washington. Their report was commissioned by the U.S. territory’s governor, Ricardo Rossello, and he was looking for big numbers: the more deaths, the more U.S. aid.

That’s no reason to smear the scientists with accusations of falsifying data.

The news media misrepresented the study as well. Here’s Reuters:

[..] The study found that those deaths could be attributed directly or indirectly to Maria from the time it struck in September 2017 to mid-February of this year.

False! the study didn’t “find” that at all. It assumed it; it theorized it; it argued it. There is a material difference between finding something and assuming it’s there.

The results of a study are commonly referred to as its “findings.” Jack is either (1) an ass for pretending he doesn’t know that or (2) an idiot for not knowing that.

Jack also references a blog post by Peter Grant at Bayou Renaissance Man:

I find this study highly suspect. One can find similar increased death tolls in other areas, but with autopsies, witness statements, etc. that make it possible to analyze them properly. Example: the opioid epidemic that’s ravaging several US states at present. Death rates due to the misuse of opioids are climbing dramatically, but in every case, the cause of death can be measured, medically confirmed, and verified. How do we know that opioids weren’t responsible for at least some of the “excess” deaths in Puerto Rico?

I’m sure opioids were the cause of some of the 16,608 deaths in Puerto Rico in the five months after the hurricane, and it’s possible there was even an increase in opioid-related deaths after the hurricane, and if someone can dig up those figures, the Milken institute should probably revise its data (assuming that the increase in opioid-related deaths is not itself due to the hurricane).

What about deaths caused by vehicles? How do you know whether an accident was due to increased traffic, caused by aid distribution after the storm, or a drunk driver? The first might be blamed on the hurricane; the second, certainly not.

Again, the 2,975 deaths are an excess figure, so offering alternative causes of death is insufficient. Any alternative theory for the deaths needs to explain why the death rate for that cause increased when it did. If some of the excess deaths are due to drunk driving (or opioids for that matter), what happened to make the drunk driving rate increase in the months after the hurricane?

Without medical and other evidence, one can’t assign a definitive cause to each casualty; but the study conducted there did not examine such evidence. It only looked at numbers, and made assumptions.

Obviously, the Milken study is not definitive. We could get a much better idea of the death toll from hurricane María if someone did a careful study of each of the 16,608 deaths during this period to determine the cause. Unfortunately, the data just isn’t available. The CDC has guidelines for a special death certification process to be used after a natural disaster which would have gathered some of the needed data, however the Milken study reports that those guidelines weren’t followed in Puerto Rico, largely due to lack of training of medical personnel and poor communication by authorities. In addition, the PRVSR offices were damaged by the hurricane, and death certificate filings were substantially disrupted.

To gather the necessary data now would require defining a protocol and training a team to review medical records and interview friends and family members of the deceased to determine the complete causal chain leading to their death. That’s the (very expensive) study you’d need to do to lay this question to rest.

But no one has done that study, or any study better than this one. So until someone does, the Milken study remains the best and most accurate attempt ever made to estimate the death toll from hurricane María.

Jack Marshall Watch 2018-09-10

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Jack started the week with a bang, as he tore into… wait, let me check my notes… Senator John McCain’s funeral, which he describes as “a perfect example of hypocrisy for the ages.”

It was undeniably uncivil to dis-invite the President of the United States from what would otherwise be a display of unified and bi-partisan Washington community respect for a departed public servant. That was an insult, and intended as one.

Maybe, but it was also a courtesy to McCain’s family and friends. I certainly wouldn’t want President Trump at my funeral, because I love my family and wouldn’t want to subject them to that. It’s arguable that McCain also did Trump a favor, because you know that if Trump was there he would have said some stupid shit.

Jack likes rules, so here’s a rule that applies: Don’t invite a clown to perform at a funeral.*

Insults are not civil. The retort to this is that the President was not civil to McCain, which is true. However, if the professional duty of civility is waived by another’s breach of it, then there is no such duty.

Correct. There is no such duty. This is not like a customer service situation, where employees are supposed to remain unilaterally polite even to the rudest of customers. Civility is a two-way street. If you don’t give it, you have no right to claim it from others. Trump is reaping what he has sown.

McCain’s own daughter launched the proceedings with her own uncivil rant, saying in part, “We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness—the real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.” Later, she added, “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again, because America was always great.”

Defending her father at his funeral? What a bitch! Why wasn’t she thinking more about Donald Trump’s feelings!

In addition to being uncivil […] the attacks on the President, like Meagan McCain’s, were cowardly. The man (and the office) being savaged wasn’t present, and the crowd was united in its hostility to the target. George Washington’s 110 Rules of Civility cover that kind of conduct neatly:

89. Speak not evil of the absent, for it is unjust.

I guess by the time Washington got to number 89 he was just padding out the list, because that makes no sense. It’s an impossibly restrictive standard. Also, I’m no historian, but I’m pretty sure Washington had some nasty things to say about King George. And if Jack is really concerned about speaking ill of the absent, why is he calling Meagan McCain a coward when she’d not around? For that matter, Jack also criticizes Senator McCain, who is about as absent as it gets.

Seriously though, I don’t know what Washington meant when he wrote this, but the usual social rule about not speaking ill of someone behind their back is an admonition against spreading rumors that they won’t know about therefore cannot attempt to counter if they are untrue. That’s not relevant here because Meagan McCain was’t passing around rumors. She was expressing an opinion. And she wasn’t saying this behind Trump’s back. She spoke in public, in front of the news media, where Trump could easily find out about it and respond.

On Tuesday, Jack complains about this passage from a story about the family of 15-year-old Jordan Edwards, after a police officer was sentenced to 15 years in prison for killing him:

Edwards also acknowledged that before the start of the murder trial she was pessimistic about the prosecution’s chances, after watching police shooting cases like those involving Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castille, Clinton Allen, Alton Sterling, Terence Crutcher and others.

Jack objects, not without some merit, to the article’s grouping together of those cases.

Michael Brown attacked a police officer and was shot.

That’s a fair description, given what we know. But Jack doesn’t stop there.

Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy, died as the result of a series of mistakes by all involved, at the hands of a police officer who never should have been allowed to carry a gun. Rice’s death was negligence, not murder.

Tamir Rice was innocent, and he was shot dead by a police officer, and no one was ever charged for killing him. Jack’s remark about it being negligence changes nothing. No one was charged with negligence either. It’s not hard to see how this would make someone worry that a child shot dead by a police officer might not receive justice.

Philadro Castile, a black motorist who insisted on reaching into his pocket for his license after announcing to a panicky officer that he was carrying a gun, was shot after the officer screamed, “Don’t pull it out!” more than once. I don’t think any jury would guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in that fact pattern, and the officer’s jury didn’t.

This is a bit disingenuous. For one thing, you wouldn’t know from Jack’s description that after the officer screamed “Don’t pull it out!”, Castile did not, in fact, pull out his gun. Jack also omits the salient fact that the officer also asked Castile for his driver’s license and registration. In other words, he told Castile to get something he’d have to reach for, and then shot him for reaching for something. This is bad police work and arguably a criminally bad shooting.

Jack also has this to say:

I honestly don’t know what the right approach is to sentencing police officers who kill citizens without justification or cause in the throes of panic, bad judgment, poor training, or tragic error. I believe that the perilous job police officers perform should be a mitigating factor in sentencing.

Which contrasts disturbingly with his next post, about some people who encountered a moose near a bike path and accidentally frightened it into a body of water, where it drowned:

This is a pointless, tragic, negligent killing of an innocent animal. No photograph is worth the life of a vole, much less a moose, yet too many human beings are so addicted to recording the images of their oh so fascinating lives that they disconnect the ethics alarms and common sense alerts that should tell them instinctively that…

  • Intruding on nature threatens and harms it.
  • Reality is not best experienced through a camera lens.
  • Nobody else can enjoy a natural scene when human beings insist on imposing on it.
  • The welfare of the wildlife should be the first consideration, not an afterthought.

What is an appropriate practical punishment for tourists who do things like this? Fines are not enough, and I guess public flogging is excessive.

These people didn’t intrude on nature. They were in their community. The moose was the intruder. That’s not the moose’s fault — moose will be moose — but Jack wants these people punished for not understanding the risk of a situation they stumbled into by accident.

On the other hand, when a trained police officer working for by the community deliberately inserts himself into a situation where he unnecessarily shoots someone, Jack is all “Eh…I don’t know…it’s complicated…there are mitigating circumstances…”

I doubt Jack literally thinks Moose Lives Matter more than black lives, but the juxtaposition of those posts is food for thought.

On Thursday, Jack wrote about the an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times by a member of the Trump administration who claims that Trump’s staff are managing him like a toddler to keep him from screwing things up real bad.

If the op-ed is not a hoax, and if there are, as the writer says, highly placed members of the Trump Administration who are pretending to be loyal government employees but who are actually trying to undermine the President and his policies from within, then the assertions by conservatives and Trump supporters of the existence of a “deep state,” much mocked by the news media and Democrats, have been accurate all along.

Not even close. The “deep state” refers to career bureaucrats who are so well entrenched that pretty much just keep doing what they’re doing no matter who is president. The author of the op-ed, and everyone he refers to, are the “best people” that Trump picked to be in his administration. This is a problem he brought on himself.

In his Friday morning round-up, Jack took on Twentieth Century Fox for removing actor Wilder Striegel’s scenes from the new version of Predator after actress Olivia Munn discovered he was a registered sex offender. He had served six months in jail on charges of risk of injury to a child and enticing a minor by computer in connection with a 14-year-old girl.

Jack’s response is a thing of beauty:

This reminds me of the scene in Ship of Fools when a passenger is exiled from the captain’s table on a German ship because a Nazi complains that he is Jewish.

I did not see that coming. I know Jack supports the War on Drugs, but he must have been smoking something to think it was appropriate to compare this situation to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. 

I don’t like the way we treat sex offenders in this country. The registration requirements and living restrictions are draconian, yet there is little evidence that sex offender registration reduces crime rates. But not wanting a registered sex offender to appear in your big studio film does not make you Hitler.

I know some registered sex offenders. One of them is a good friend, and a terrific human being in all respects that I have observed. I would cast him in a play I was directing, and in fact have. If an actress objected, or anyone else, my response would be the same as it would to a performer who complained that he or she had discovered that my friend was part black, Muslim, or a transsexual.

On the other hand, if she discovered that one of the performers had been brought to American illegally by his parents when he was eight, Jack would probably want her to call ICE on him.

On Saturday, Jack posted from his business trip to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and the second item is 100% classic Jack. He’s angry about an article listing countries where you would probably enjoy retirement more than in the United States, based on something called the 2017 Global Retirement Index.

The entire attitude underlying this article, “16 countries where you can retire ‘happier’ than in the US.” is selfish and irresponsible. You are an American citizen and this is a participatory democracy. I don’t care if you’re retired; you still have a lifetime obligation to contribute to society, your community, and the nation.

No. No you don’t. Nobody owns you like a piece of fucking property. And you certainly aren’t owned by the government. You’re free people and you can do what you want.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a guy who gets so angry over people coming here from other countries would also get angry over people leaving. This is just Jack showing his ugly totalitarian streak. It’s values like this that make me think it’s a waste of time to leave comments on his posts.

Jack also writes about some unexpected encounters he had with transgender people on his trip. Don’t worry, it’s more amusing than horrifying.

At our hotel in Ft. Lauderdale, a convention of either transvestites, transgender individuals, or some combination of the two dominated the hotel. The organization was “Himmaher”…I think I’m spelling it right.

He’s not spelling it right. The first entry Google finds for the word “”Himmaher” — and I had to force a literal search — is Jack’s post.

I’m just guessing, but I think Jack must have been staying at the Riverside Hotel in Ft. Lauderdale, which from September 6 through 8 was hosting the Southern Comfort Transgender Conference. The conference occupies four of the hotels’s conference rooms: The New River room, Abeona room, Merritt room, and…the Himarshee room. I’m guessing Jack saw or heard that last room and thought it sounded like some kind of transgender reference. It’s actually the Native American name for a nearby river. (Jack has sort of corrected this in his post since.)

I had several illuminating encounters. I don’t know that this is true of all such people, but the members of this association or club all seemed to want to make any non-club member they saw as uncomfortable as possible. Yes, that’s unethical.

Yes, that must be what they were up to. They’re freaking the squares. It’s the only possible explanation for a convention of hundreds of transgender people walking around looking like they are transgender people.

But what these people seemed to be seeking was imposed ethics zugswang. If you looked directly at them, the response was a chip-on-the-shoulder, “Go ahead and stare, honey: never seen a freak before?” If you appeared to be avoiding staring—I regard a six-foot ex-male standing in the middle of a hotel lobby in a wig, skimpy bathing suit, 6 inch heels and speaking loudly in a base voice as parading a psychological problem or ten, and deserving the same social courtesy I would offer to a Tourette’s victim or a hebephrenic—then the individual decided to make it a project to get you to stare, as if your failure to provide the attention they craved was an insult.

So it’s all a trap, you see. Transgender people are trying to make you feel guilty for not starting at them, but when you look at them, they snark at you. Don’t say Jack hasn’t warned you!

*Unless, of course, the deceased and/or close family and friends are actual clowns, in which case a sketch suitable for the somber occasion may be appropriate. Windypundit does not discriminate against clowns. We are less tolerant of fools.

The Mystery Of the Oscillator That Didn’t

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I am continuing my attempt to self-educate myself at electronics by working through Charles Platt’s book Make: Electronics: Learning Through Discovery, 2nd Edition.

I’m currently working on an oscillator circuit. I was going to take a picture of my actual breadboard with the circuit on it, but this representational diagram from the book is a lot cleaner:

The idea is that when you turn on the power, the red LED in the lower right will flash on and off. The book has a lengthy step-by-step explanation of how the circuit works, with capacitors charging and turning on transistors which discharge other capacitors in a never-ending cycle.

The explanation was a little complicatde for me, so to help my understanding, I wanted to get an idea what was happening at various points in the circuit. I knew that when I built the circuit I could see the voltage on any component lead with my multimeter, but I wanted to get a better mental picture of how things were changing over time. The ideal tool for that would be a digital oscilloscope that can sample the wave form as the capacitors cycle, but I don’t own one, and a decent hobbyist-grade oscilloscope costs more than I’m ready to spend on this.

I decided to try a different approach. Here’s the schematic diagram from the book, showing all the component values and interconnections:

As it happens, I have an old license for the home edition of Wolfram System Modeler. I downloaded the appropriate version of System Modeler and re-activated the license, and I built a digital model of the circuit. (I’ve substituted a resister and a current sensor for the LED.)

Then I ran the simulation and…it didn’t work. Capacitors charged and then everything came to a stop as the simulation assumed a steady state. Every output I sampled was a straight line. Nothing ever changed. The oscillator did not oscillate.

I had never tried to use System Modeler before, so I figured I must have done something wrong. Maybe I didn’t configure the simulation method correctly. Or maybe I setup the transistors wrong. Unlike capacitors, they don’t have simple values that describe their behavior. I had tried entering some values from a 2N2222 data sheet into the simulation, but the simulator used different terminology and had a lot more configurable values than the data sheet had answers.

In any case, I went back to the breadboard and finished plugging in the components, cutting wire, and adding jumpers. Then I turned on the power supply, and…it didn’t work either. I started testing leads with the multimeter, and I saw the same problem. Nothing ever changed. The oscillator did not oscillate.

To make a long story short, it turned out I had used the wrong components. In several earlier experiments I had been using 470 Ohm resistors, and when I saw “470” next to some resistors on the diagram, I used the 470 Ohm resistors again. What I missed was that the diagram was actually labelled “470K” meaning 470,000 Ohms. I was using only 1/1000th the resistance needed.

Once I swapped the correct resistors into the circuit, it worked correctly. The oscillator was at long last oscillating. After about 2 hours of tinkering, I got a little LED light to blink on and off about once per second.

The cool part was that having found my dumb mistake, I could go back to System Modeler and fix the simulated circuit too. I swapped in the correct resistors, and the simulated oscillator worked.

That allowed me to visualize the behavior of the circuit over time, such as this chart of how the voltages changed on both sides of one of the capacitors:

After that, I changed the capacitors to speed up the oscillation into the audio range, which I played through a small speaker to produce a quiet buzzing sound. Then I put the slow capacitors back in the first oscillator and added a second high-speed oscillator powered by the output from the first. This gave me an intermittent buzzer: Bzzzz……bzzzz……bzzzz….

That’s what it looked like when I was done. It’s not very pretty. And I’m not at all handy with electronics, so even this meager accomplishment took me a ridiculous amount of time — several hours spread out over two or three days — but it felt kind of cool to do something I could not have done before, and I felt like sharing.

On Heroic Op-Eds From Disobedient Employees

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If I declare myself to be Emperor of the United States, it’s safe to say not much would come of it. Just because I say I’m in charge doesn’t mean I’m actually in charge. To be in charge, you have to have people willing to follow you, and I don’t have a lot of people who want to be my minions.

(Yes, I know I wouldn’t be the first Emperor of the United States. God rest Emperor Norton.)

For better or worse, American Democracy works the same way. The 537 elected federal office holders do not run this country through some sort of magical compulsion. They run this country because millions of people believe they do, and are willing to continue to let them. There is nothing special about Donald Trump that makes him any more qualified to be President of the United States than I am qualified to be Emperor of the United States. The reason he’s President and I’m not Emperor is because millions of people believe that he is, and no one believes that I am.

That’s why I’m not comforted by words like this from an anonymous Trump administration insider:

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.

This is not a good sign.

To be clear, I want much of Trump’s agenda to be defeated. To the extent that he has policies, I think many of them will be very bad for this country. And even where I might agree with some of his policies, I don’t trust him to actually implement them in a competent manner, because my biggest problem with Trump is the same problem the anonymous op-ed author identifies:

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

I don’t want someone like that as President. But since someone like that is President, I want to minimize the damage. And I’m somewhat comforted to learn from this op-ed (and the excerpts from Bob Woodward’s book about Trump) that there are people inside his administration trying to do exactly that.

But…

[…] many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

[…]

But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.

That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

That last sentence contains a conundrum: Can you really preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting the will of the democratically elected president?

We only have a democracy because everyone believes we do. Some people will stray from that belief, but as long as there is still a critical mass of democracy believers to bring them back in line, we will continue to have a democracy. But if belief in our democracy declines far enough, eventually there won’t be anyone with the power to correct the problem.

I don’t want to be too alarmist here. It’s not an all-or-nothing situation. Everybody with a difficult boss (or even just a boss) learns to manage up. In one form or another, pushing back or ignoring the boss when he wants something stupid is part of every job. That’s got to be especially true for the presidency, which requires far more knowledge and skill than any one person possesses. Many successful leaders with volatile personalities are wise enough to choose subordinates who know how to stop them from breaking things.

That can prove useful when the boss acts like this:

From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.

Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.

As a libertarian, I’m tempted to see anything that prevents Donald Trump from exerting power as a good thing. However, my real goal is to reduce the power of the entire federal government, and I don’t see this resistance accomplishing that. It doesn’t do much good to wrest power away from Trump if we’re turn it over to someone arrogant enough to write this op-ed.

The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House.

Yeah…no.

I don’t want to get off into a deep state conspiracy here. This is not some persistent class of high-level bureaucrats who run the government their own way regardless of who is in office. The people described in the op-ed were all brought in with the Trump Administration, and they will leave with the Trump administration.

Good riddance to the lot of them.

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