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Posts tagged as “Politics”

[twenty twenty-four day twenty-one]: it’s too cold to be stingy

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Look, I get it: giving money to pandhandlers is not necessarily the best way to help lift people out of homelessness, and can often be counterproductive. Out of all the money that I've given to people, I'd say one out of three of them I could tell benefited from it (for example, one guy immediately bought food), one third were scammers (for example, one "hungry" guy immediately bought alcohol), and one third, I dunno. That's one reason that signs like this go up in public squares all across the country:

But look at the kind of day that this sign was having. It didn't get above freezing until noon. It's too damn cold to be stingy to people who ask for things from you. Jesus said "Give to all those who beg of you" and while sometimes we can't follow that advice given the context, yesterday was not one of those days.

This is part of a whole trend of "hostile architecture" where we structure our societies to make things difficult for people who are homeless - closing the parks, making benches hard to sleep on, stealing the possessions of the homeless (either as a condition of going into a homeless shelter, or outright theft by the police) and eliminating low-cost housing that could provide a path out for the homeless.

I'm not sure what the right answer is, but when it's fifteen below freezing, the right answer is not "no".

-the Centaur

[twenty-twenty four day thirteen]: are you registered to vote?

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2024 is shaping up to be one of the most consequential American elections in recent history, in which our first twice-impeached ex-president is running AGAIN for the highest office in the land. When he ran for office the first time, it wasn't clear precisely what he would do if elected, and Clinton had her own problems.

But now, what Trump stands for - and would do - is clear. Even if you forget the two impeachments (no convictions) and the many indictments (not conclusive yet), Trump was more than just a poor loser hawking false claims of a stolen election: he actively tried to overturn it, and stoked the fires of insurrection on January 6th. He's a proven threat to American democracy.

And, not just a proven threat: he's an openly stated threat to American democracy. If elected, he openly admits plans to purse his enemies, Ron Desantis-style. And he's backed by the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 plan to reshape our civil-service-based federal bureaucracy into a Soviet-style system controlled by the Republican party apparatus.

American democracy is the light of the world. Whether you're Democrat or Republican, you should register to vote, and vote for almost anyone else than Trump. And if you're a Republican, you should contact your congrescritter and state your opposition to Project 2025.

Democracy is a wonderful thing - if we can keep it.

-the Centaur

[sixty-one] minus thirty-four: that trump business

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sunset in san francisco

You know, I don't comment on politics on this blog nearly enough, and I plan on changing that. But I just found out that the statute of limitations may have passed on the crimes Trump is accused of in New York.

Regardless of the merits of the case, we shouldn't be doing things like that. All too often we let things go that we should drop, or press things that we shouldn't, because of political appearances.

Hm. What does OpenAI"s ChatGPT language model have to say about this?

Has the statute of limitations passed on Donald Trump's indictment?
As an AI language model, I cannot provide legal advice or make a definitive statement about a specific legal case. However, to provide some general information, the statute of limitations varies depending on the type of offense and the jurisdiction. In the United States, federal offenses typically have a five-year statute of limitations, but this can vary depending on the offense. State laws also have their own statutes of limitations for criminal offenses.

Regarding any potential indictment of Donald Trump, it would depend on the specific charges and the applicable statute of limitations. It is also important to note that the decision to indict someone is made by prosecutors based on the evidence and legal standards, and is not determined by whether the statute of limitations has expired or not.

the Centaur in dialog with ChatGPT.; emphasis mine.

Gee, thanks, AI overlord! Seems like the prosecutor's job here may have been to bring the indictment if they believed a crime was committed, even if the statute of limitations had passed. Let's get more specific:

What is the statute of limitations in New York?
In New York State, the statute of limitations for criminal offenses varies depending on the severity of the crime. Here are some examples:

- For most felony offenses, the statute of limitations is five years. However, for certain serious offenses such as homicide or terrorism, there is no statute of limitations.
- For misdemeanor offenses, the statute of limitations is typically two years.
- For certain sexual offenses committed against minors, the statute of limitations has been extended in recent years. For example, the statute of limitations for second-degree rape of a minor is now 20 years from the victim's 18th birthday, or within 10 years of the offense, whichever is later.

It's worth noting that the statute of limitations can be tolled, or paused, under certain circumstances, such as when the defendant is out of state or in hiding. In some cases, the statute of limitations may also be extended if new evidence is discovered.

the Centaur in dialog with ChatGPT; emphasis mine.

According to Wikipedia, what Trump is accused of - falsifying business records - is normally a misdemeanor, but can become a felony if used to further another crime. From what I've read, the prosecution has withheld a lot of facts from the indictment to improve the surprise of their case at trial, so they may have more evidence forthcoming; but "The indictment raises novel and complex legal issues." Sheesh.

This isn't the way to do this.

I understand the desire to speak truth to power, and the importance of holding the powerful to account; but the way to uphold the rule of law is NOT to ignore the rule of law so we can bring a case. There's a word for that: a kangaroo court, "a court that ignores recognized standards of law or justice," leading to show trials.

Donald Trump certainly isn't my favorite politician, and perhaps he needs to be brought to justice; but we should also presume innocence until proven guilty. Here's hoping that either the District Attorney coughs up some very good evidence that justifies his actions, or that the case gets swiftly thrown out if his actions weren't justified. I just can't see any good coming from anything between those two extremes.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Sunset in San Francisco.

Remember January 6th

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Trump Calling for Insurrection

Recall to memory the Sixth of January,
Riot, insurrection and plot
For no justification should the January Insurrection
Ever be forgot

A little over one year ago today, lame-duck President Donald Trump directed an unruly band of his followers to "fight like hell" to overturn the election of Joe Biden, in the hope of disenfranchising me and the 81 million other Americans who voted to bring to an end Trump's dyscivic reign.

"Dyscivic" means "antagonistic to civilization." It's a word coined by alt-right pundit Vox Day to disparage the aspirations of "social justice warriors" like myself. I am a writer, and I hereby confiscate "dyscivic" and repurpose it to mean "antagonistic to the civic structures of our society" - which Donald Trump was.

Of my good friends who voted for Donald Trump, at least two voted for him precisely because they expected he would be disruptive to our existing system. One specifically said, "I voted for Donald Trump because I hoped he would blow up the Republican Party, and I'm waiting for the Democrats to go next."

Keep waiting. Even though progressives like AOC and moderates like myself don't always get along, we recognize that we share the same end goals, that our principles are compatible, and they're worth fighting for together, even if we might disagree on methods.

I don't get the same sense from my most right-wing friends, who viciously lambast politicians from their own party for not "getting on the Trump train" in every possible respect - even when those politicians have multi-decade records voting for precisely the positions my friends loudly advocate for.

Reliance on trust is toxic to any organization. It encourages dependence on personal relationships - even friendships - developed over years or decades, and makes the organization resistant to new information delivered by new people. When that trust is in leadership, it becomes loyalty ... which is deeply dyscivic.

The purpose of government is to put the use of force under rational control. To prevent one man from using that force to execute their own personal will, we create civic structures that corral the use of power. We loan power, not grant it; and when you loan power to someone, you watch them.

Over four years, we watched Donald Trump demand loyalty on an unprecedented scale in American politics - from his followers, from fellow politicians, from the machinery of government. He turned on his appointees when their understanding of their civic duties conflicted with his own petty desires.

And when the American people had had enough - when even some of my Trumpian friends switched parties because they could not abide what he was doing to our political system - Trump spat on those of us who dared to vote against him, and then tried to pretend to his followers that we did not exist.

Well, sir, our voices were heard. And we won't be silent. We know that you and your followers are going to try again - I remember watching your suppoprters meeting in the dark in the months leading up to the insurrection (holding 10pm rallies in the parking lot of a nearby grocery store). We'll be watching.

For I'm not the only one. Here's a few quotes from my fellow Americans around the web:

http://wilwheaton.net/2022/01/one-year-later/

We all know how that turned out. All but seven Republican Senators — forty-three of fifty members in the upper chamber — protected him and embraced his Big Lie. In the year since, they have doubled down on it, and they have not stopped insisting that we did not see what we saw one year ago today with our own eyes.

And:

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2022/01/06/january-6-one-year-on/

And yet, after perhaps 48 hours of unrehearsed shock, the Republican party rallied around this traitor to the republic and the constitution, and tried to rebrand an actual coup attempt into overexuberant tourism.

And not about January 6th, but important all the same:

https://angrystaffofficer.com/2022/01/03/american-war-and-american-memory/

Why is this important? Because as we look ahead into another year at the beginning of a new decade of a constantly changing world, America needs to take a hard look at herself and ask whether we are remembering or forgetting the right things. This is not only vital to our collective consciousness as to who we are as a nation, but to the success of future military operations.

I assert that remembering the right things isn't just vital to our success in military endeavors, but to each of us personally, in the aggregate, as a nation, and as a civilization. If we don't remember the true story - good and bad and ugly - then those who make up stories for their own convenience will rule the day.

Remember, the Big Lie was the foundation for the Final Solution.

Let's make sure that doesn't happen here.

-the Centaur

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

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chipman, pruitt, bolton tl;dr: Opponents of things should never be appointed to oversee them. So President Biden has nominated David Chipman to lead the ATF - and he was wrong to do so. It's not that Chipman isn't qualified to lead the ATF - he's a 25-year ATF veteran. It's that Chipman is explicitly disqualified to lead an agency that oversees firearms - because he's a gun control advocate. It's not that he can't be trusted to make good decisions: he can be trusted to make bad ones. Previous presidents have made the same mistake. To lead the EPA, Donald Trump nominated Scott Pruitt, a noted environmental skeptic who had sued the EPA. To serve as ambassador to the UN, George Bush nominated John Bolton, a noted United Nations skeptic who said that it does not really exist. Political cards on the table: I voted for Joe Biden, and I'm happy with him. And while I'm a gun rights proponent - if the Second Amendment didn't exist, we'd need to invent it - I recognize both the need for and constitutional legitimacy of gun legislation, which shouldn't be set in stone as our society evolves. But intellectual and moral integrity demands that if I call an opponent out for their misbehavior, that I also call out allies for the same behavior. Calling out misbehavior only on one side is worse than hypocritical: it undermines trust in the political system, and encourages further distorted value judgments. And humans are great at distorting value judgments when emotions are involved. From the most basic arguments all the way up to the most complex adjudication of fact and law, our moods and emotions affect whether we judge something to be true or false. In a way, we should expect this: researchers like Antonio Damasio have shown that rational decision making breaks down in people whose emotions are impaired, because the value judgments provided by our emotions are necessary for making mental decisions. But a functioning emotional system can also lead us astray: emotions can impair our judgments. Studies show we're more likely to screw up simple if-then syllogisms if they're emotionally charged. Even judges, trained to be impartial, are more likely to make mistakes with legal arguments on "hot" political topics. Heightened emotion distorts perceptions, leads us to attribute our feelings to arbitrary targets we come across, and reduces self-control - precisely what you don't want to have in someone who needs to make impartial decisions about something, and precisely what you do have in the person of a political activist. Now, I'm not questioning Chipman or Bolton's integrity (Pruitt's lack of integrity is well documented, down to his sound-proof booth), or Chipman or Bolton or Pruitt's patriotism, or their expertise. But all three of them are interested enough in the areas they later oversaw to have gone into them as opponents. In our public life, there is politics, and there is civics, and the two should not mix. Politics literally means deciding how to allocate scarce resources, and it is right and expected for us to dive in rough and tumble to ask for what we want - a participatory political system grants moral authority to a government. But government's purpose is to bring the use of force under rational control, and more broadly, to allocate resources correctly when policy has been made. Inevitably, decisions will need to be made on matters of fact at an agency - and a political partisan can be trusted to screw them up even if they're trying not to. When a partisan appoints a opponent of something to oversee it, the person that they've appointed will, very likely, whether they want to or not, "lean their hand on the till" to make things come out for their own partisan ends - meaning they will, sooner or later, fail in their civic duty to make an honest decision. If you're passionate about something, you might feel that it's all right to put a partisan in charge of it,  because then you'll get what you want. But that's evil, on two grounds - first of all, because you are subverting the political process to get a result through the back door that you can't through the front. But more importantly, impartial decisions will need to be made - and by putting a partisan in charge, you're explicitly hoping for them to make a wrong decision to help implement your political desires. Tyrants, bigots and the corrupt throughout history have employed the same tactic. Stop doing it. Regardless of our political desires, we need to step back and decouple our understanding of people into (at least) two parts: their politics, and their competence. If their political orientation isn't a direct conflict of interest for to the matter at hand, their basic competence is the primary qualification for doing the job. I was happy when Trump picked Bolton as National Security Advisor: whether I agree with their politics or not, Bolton had the experience to do the job and the attitude towards the job to do it right. Bush should never have appointed Bolton to the UN: even when he made the right decisions, we couldn't trust them. I might not have agreed with Scott Pruitt politically, but as a lawyer and state Senator, he was well qualified to be Attorney General of Oklahoma. It was morally wrong for Donald Trump to appoint a climate change denier to lead the EPA, and, predictably, that led to Pruitt lying about climate issues. I thank David Chipman for his service at the ATF, and would approve of his nomination to another agency. But the moment that he joined a political movement against guns, he disqualified himself from overseeing gun law enforcement, and if confirmed, he will inevitably make some serious mistakes. -the Centaur Pictured: Chipman, Pruitt, Bolton

A Day Without Women Would be the End of the World

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5ef96d03cb1820c79272ae79625681d2.jpg

Today, March 8th is International Women’s Day, a day that began commemorating the anniversary of a women workers strike – and so perhaps it’s also being celebrated as A Day Without a Woman, another strike designed to call attention to how important women are to our society. But, science fiction writer that I am, I couldn’t help but think of literal day without women - and so, over on the Adventures of Jeremiah Willstone site, I talk about how “A Day Without Women Would be the End of the World”.

-the Centaur

Effective Beverages

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So after a gut punch, one of the most important things to do is to take time out to recuperate.

effectivesangria.png

But funny thing is, the highly effective sangria above wasn’t the thing that broke me out of my funk. When something bad happens, I try one of the following strategies to feel better:

  • Take a nap. Or just go to bed. Sleeping can sometimes reset your emotional state. When I had my big crisis of faith in the 90’s, converting from Catholicism to Episcopalianism, I slept for like a day and a half, rethinking my whole life. Of course, if you can’t fall asleep, that’s no good - I was up to 5:50AM this morning, so blech.
  • Take a walk. This can also provide metaphorical distance from your problems. During my crisis of faith, I walked around my apartment complex again and again, taking an inventory of my whole life, weighing and evaluating everything I could think of. Today, when I tried the same strategy, I was snarling at the air, so blech.
  • Change your scene. Talking to uninvolved humans, not connected with your dramas, really can help. I had an interview with a candidate, a technical conversation about deep learning with a TL, and, later, after my mood was lifted, another technical conversation with my waitress at Opa! about the econometrics of developing nations.

As for why that last conversation happened …

20160211_192947.jpg

Which goes to the next item on the list ...

  • Try shopping therapy. Doesn’t work for everyone, but I’m a bookhound. I ended up going to the Stanford Bookstore to try to pick up a book on large scale machine learning (it had sold out). The books themselves weren’t the solution, but I’m getting to that - but it did involve the books in a tangential way.
  • Get some coffee. The inventor of the idea of separation of powers, Montesquieu, reportedly once said “coffee renders many foolish people temporarily capable of wise actions” and I’ve found that to be true - which perhaps suggests that we should install a Starbucks in the Congress and change the structure of our political debates, but nevermind. It helped.

You’ll note that nowhere in here is “get a drink.” That’s a terrible idea - if you think you need a drink, you probably shouldn’t have one, as needing a drink is the road to alcoholism. For that reason, and many others, I always stop at one drink per day - period. No matter how strong the drink, it’s almost impossible for a one hundred and eighty pound male to get drunk on just one.

Having a drink after you feel better, on the other hand, can be a great relaxer. But how do you get to that relaxed state? Well, one thing I try is, well, trying to resolve the problem.

  • Talk to the people involved. I have a theory that if you have a problem with a person and leave it alone, your emotional reaction will be frozen, even intensified over time - a theory based on my personal experience, but backed by cognitive emotional theories which say your emotions are derived from your stance, your relationship to the people, actions and events in the world - which doesn’t change if you don’t give yourself the chance to have new experiences with those people. Thanks to the fact that it’s the twenty-first century, this can be done via text, even when people don’t have time to talk.

But the point at which it turned wasn’t when I got a drink. It wasn’t after I took a nap, took a walk, talked to people, changed the scene, got a book on political economy, got coffee, or texted the involved parties to finalize the resolution of yesterday evening’s gut punch. It happened at very strange place, as I was drinking coffee, as I was reading, as I was texting with my friends to resolve the problem, I got sucked in to the problem that prompted me to get the book, a question I heard in an unrelated political debate from last night. As is usual in these cases, I found that the debate followed the rule of thirds: on a third of the topics, my buddy was definitively wrong, on a third, I was definitively wrong, and on the middle third, there were open unresolved questions worthy of debate. And as I started to look at those questions … I had a brainflash on how to solve them.

And then on a meta-brain-flash, as I realized what tacking the problem was doing to my mental state: it was fixing it.

  • Do the work. Find something you love, and cultivate the ability to throw yourself into it. If you’ve had a gut punch, you might have a bad taste in your mouth about a lot of the projects you were working on … but get your brain into a new space, and all those behavior programs will execute … and give you something new to fall (intellectually) in love with.

The particular question I was tracking - how to evaluate economic policies - is something I’m going to be working on for a while, but I can give you a flavor for it: how do you know whether a political candidate’s economic policies will work? Sometimes that’s easy: for example, Democrats like to spend when the economy’s doing well, and Republicans like to cut when the economy is doing poorly - and both sides are dead wrong. An economy is not a household - cutting spending in a slump will cut the state’s tax revenues and cause an austerity spiral and increased debt; spending in a boom incurs obligations that the state can’t sustain in the next slump and increased risk. These are pretty close to ironclad laws, that operate whether you believe in big government or small or low taxes or high; those are just the dynamics of economies whether you like it or not - whether you believe it or not, suck it up.

But looking long term, some policies promote growth, and some don’t; and it isn’t always clear which is which. What’s worse, exogenous factors - those pesky world events like wars and plagues and wardrobe malfunctions - throw an unavoidable amount of static on top of whatever we’re trying to measure.

The book I’m reading gives me, so far, the impression that individual outcomes are, roughly, helped by a country’s growth, and a country’s growth is affected by things it can't control, like the luck of history and geography, and things it can, like culture and institutions, with evidence strongly suggesting that institutions matter more than culture, since some countries have kept their cultures but changed their institutions and shown amazing growth. The factors that seem to affect this most are protecting private property, having enforceable contracts, reducing barriers for investment, having a level playing field for businesses, and creating equality of opportunity for citizens … but …

But how much of this is noise, and how much is reality?

And that got me thinking: if you assumed some randomness affecting growth, could you tell apart policies that caused 1 percent growth, or 2 percent growth, or 3 percent growth?

Turns out ... you can.

The Promise of Growth v1.png

The central red line is 2% growth, projected out over 20 years. The dotted lines above and below it are 1% and 3% growth … and the grey range is the max and min of a stochastic simulation of ten different histories, each with 5% random variation from year to year, which looks something like this:


The Alternatives to Growth v1.png

The point is, if you get a gut punch - like in the bottom trajectory above - it can look like you’re running a bad policy on a time range of a decade or more before things start to get back on track. On twenty year time horizons, however, you really can start to see an affect. On even longer time horizons, having the right polices can be the difference between a country like Nigeria - rich with oil wealth, yet having a flat growth range - versus a country like the US or Japan or even Botswana or South Korea.

This doesn’t show whether I or my buddy is right - in fact, this model, even as an abstract model, would need to be augmented greatly, to get a proper range of growth rates, of randomness, of the types of exogenous influences and their timescales. But even in its current state, it shows that under a very broad set of assumptions … I and my buddy were right to wrestle over this problem.

What we do now matters, not just in the next election, but twenty years down the road.

And doing that work took me out of my slump. It connected me to an earlier conversation, to earlier problem solving skills not engaged with what I’d been doing just prior to the gut punch. The gut punch still needs to be dealt with - but now it’s just an event, not a thing that causes random spikes of rage and anger when I’m trying to drink my coffee.

effectivecoffee.png

And that’s how I learned a new way to deal with a gut punch.

-the Centaur

Appendix. The graphs above were generated via the following Mathematica code:

RandomGrowth[initial_, rate_, fuzz_] :=
initial (1 + rate) (1 + RandomReal[{-fuzz, fuzz}])

ProjectGrowth[initial_, rate_, fuzz_, years_] :=
NestList[RandomGrowth[#, rate, fuzz] &, initial, years]

InterpolateGrowth[initial_, rate_, fuzz_, years_] :=

Interpolation[ProjectGrowth[initial, rate, fuzz, years]]

FuzzyGrowth[initial_, rate_, fuzz_, years_] :=
Table[InterpolateGrowth[initial, rate, fuzz, years], {iterations, 10}]


fuzzyTwoPercent = FuzzyGrowth[1, 0.02, 0.05, 100]

Plot[{
Min[Map[#[x] &, fuzzyTwoPercent]], Max[Map[#[x] &, fuzzyTwoPercent]],
InterpolateGrowth[1.0, 0.02, 0.0, 100][x],
InterpolateGrowth[1.0, 0.01, 0.0, 100][x],
InterpolateGrowth[1.0, 0.03, 0.0, 100][x]},
{x, 1, 20},
Filling -> {1 -> {2}},
AxesOrigin -> {1, 1},
AxesLabel -> {"Years Downrange", "Growth Rate"},
PlotStyle -> {Thin, Thin, Thick,
   Directive[Thick, Dashed],
   Directive[Thick, Dashed]}]


The Promise of Growth v1.png

and

Plot[{InterpolateGrowth[1.0, 0.02, 0.0, 100][x], Map[#[x] &, fuzzyTwoPercent]},
{x, 1, 20},
AxesOrigin -> {1, 1},
AxesLabel -> {"Years Downrange", "Growth Rate"},
PlotStyle ->
{Thick,
Thin, Thin, Thin, Thin, Thin,
Thin, Thin, Thin, Thin, Thin}]


The Alternatives to Growth v1.png

I hope you enjoyed this exercise in computational therapy.

That Ground Game

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trumped.png

Poll watchers may have noticed that Donald Trump has apparently failed to come first in the Iowa Caucuses. I know at least two people - one of them being my military advisor, and the other being Trumpwatcher Scott Adams - have predicted that Trump would win the caucuses, then run the table.

I have a number of bad predictions about the race - namely, that he would bow out as he’s bowed out before, as a result of his genius brand management. He didn’t. But I did also predict that winning the nomination takes more than leading in the polls - it takes a good ground game, and that with half of Republican voters unwilling to vote for Trump, he had a hard road ahead of him.

Now, there are forty-nine states left, and plenty of time for Trump to turn it around. And a lot says he might - Adams would say because he’s a Master Persuader, some of my friends because they think he’s awesome, and my old high school history teacher would say populist demagogues are always popular.

But, if Trump wants to bow out when the going gets rough, as Trump did before the last two times he ran, he will have accomplished a genius act of brand management. You can’t buy publicity like he’s gotten through his antics, and he’s made the things he cares about the focus of the campaign. Kudos to his skill.

To go on the record, I think Trump’s a poor choice for President. He’s anti-American, frequently insulting immigrants (like my grandfather) and veterans (like my father) and everyone who opposes him (like half the people a real President would have to deal with in office). He’s a loose cannon, frequently tossing out crap ideas that would sabotage our relations with our allies; some people call that “first offer in dealmaking,” I call that “being an untrustworthy liar.”

Now, not all his positions are anathema to me, and he’s got some good features. For example, he has a lot of business experience, though a number of his business ventures have failed or gone bankrupt; people who know a little about business (but think they know a lot) call that “compartmentalizing his ventures to protect him from losses”; people who know a lot about business at scale call that “gross incompetence” as a real businessman doesn’t let a business setback get spun into a public bankruptcy. But he has lots of experience running really big things, and would likely manage the running of the office passably.

But we can’t let him do that. We can’t trust Trump to respect his office. We had a bad enough time Bush skating on the edges of impeachable malfeasance until Obama took over and showed us how being a rogue president was done - but both Bush and Obama respected the office. If given the opportunity, Trump wouldn’t respect a congressional subpoena - he’s the one who does the firing, remember? So we need to make sure not to give him power he would have to give up when he’s impeached.

Sigh. Jeb!, why’d you stumble? Hillary, what was in your head when you set up that email server? And Sanders? Cruz? And what about Robert Jefferson Shmickelwhaite, former mayor of Benson, Arizona, that almost unknown guy who should have run who had all the experience and all the right positions but decided to sit it out this round?

Regardless, I love America, and whoever wins is my President.

But, if you’re going to run, even if you’re a “populist” or “Master Persuader” or even just “Making America Great Again”, it would behoove you to look at the math and make sure you’ve got a ground game when the time comes to stop polling and start voting. Ground game - that is, an actual nationwide campaign organization that, like, gets out the vote for your guy or gal.

Worth checking into.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Donald Trump, taken by Alex Hanson, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, under which you are free to share or remix the work as long as it is attributed to Alex Hanson.

Nobody knows nothing about the future except it’s going to happen

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Screenshot 2016-01-23 15.43.15.png

WTF? Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York, running for president as an independent? As a liberal Republican?

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2016/01/23/bloomberg-out-ruin-hillary-clinton-party/mKsbeYSs7I3ocd6O9mwZJI/story.html

Q. Why is this coming out now if Bloomberg doesn’t plan to make up his mind until March? What’s the game plan?

A. Michael Bloomberg realizes that he could be in the best position to become the first independent elected candidate, going all the way back to 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt ran as a Bull Moose and won 27 percent. Bloomberg is a nationally known figure, and he has financial resources — he doesn’t need the financial support and structure of a party. Both sides will say that Bloomberg is running to help the other side — that’s always the way it is with a third-party candidate. But Bloomberg does not like Bernie Sanders’s social democratic philosophy at all. And I don’t think he likes Donald Trump’s statements on deporting people who are here illegally. Bloomberg has very good political instincts, and he is sensing that a lot of Americans are probably concerned, too.

Regardless of how it turns out, I don’t recall anyone predicting this. Let’s check the Google for answers, doing a search from the beginning of last year to the middle of last week … welp, I’m wrong, someone’s been talking about it, though as of October they were predicting that he won’t run, and that this is yet another in a series of endless rumors:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/stop-trying-to-make-bloomberg-happen/411514/

Are you into gambling? You are? Well, here’s a tip: Don’t put any money on Michael Bloomberg becoming president, no matter what you read in the New York media.

[reviews history of unfulfilled rumors from December 2006 to October 2015]

Perhaps this is all a charade—Bloomberg playing it all off until the moment he launches his campaign. Or you could just take it from Mike, whose bluntness and frankness his friends always cite as an important qualification: “I’m not going to run for president, period … No way, no how … It’s just impossible … No is the answer. Plain and simple.”

So it looks like this is another Wild Biden loose in the theater - watch out, raar. On the other hand, few people predicted in advance Trump would run again - as far as I know, not even professional Trump-watcher Scott Adams - so I go back to the one thing I know about presidential politics (actually, this is a sum of many things I know, but this story tells it well), which is this:

The Parable of the Man Who Was Obscure

Back in the day, there was a man who was obscure. He was so obscure, in fact, that no-one ever remembered anything he did: he even went on a nationally televised game show and none of the contestants could recognize him - though one did figure out he was a former governor. The man decided to run for president, but he was so obscure he had name recognition of two percent, and in the Iowa caucuses, he came in second after Uncommitted.

Hopeless, eh?

We now call him former President Jimmy Carter.

[cue scratchy audio clip of Paul Harvey saying “And now you know the rest of the story.”]

Nobody knows nothing about the future except it’s going to happen.

-the Centaur

A mild political prediction

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In case you haven’t noticed (because you’ve been living under a rock), Donald Trump’s the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nominee. Seeing these three articles today, I noticed a common theme (other than that they’re all left leaning, but they’re not the only one seeing this, as you’ll see in a moment), and I’d like to make a prediction:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/23/opinion/coming-to-terms-with-donald.html?_r=0
Americans of all races, creeds and political persuasions are united today in the realization that, good grief, Donald Trump actually could become the Republican presidential nominee.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/national-review-donald-trump-debate_us_56a24a3ce4b0404eb8f14410
National Review's editors denounce Trump for shifting his political stances and describe him as "a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself.” … the magazine is paying a price in the short term for its anti-Trump issue, with the Republican National Committee disinviting it from a CNN debate next month.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-weigant/friday-talking-points_b_9057478.html?utm_hp_ref=politics
The essays were contradictory in their reasons for loathing Trump, and the editor himself was writing supportive words about Trump earlier this year, but never mind. Consistency is the hobgoblin of sane non-conservative pundits, after all ... We personally have long been predicting a Republican Party major freakout when they all woke up to the fact that Donald Trump has been their party's frontrunner all along. So we have to say that in the past few weeks (since this freakout has begun in earnest), we have been enjoying the fray from the sidelines.

My prediction?

My prediction is: cartoonist and pundit Scott Adams will point out that he predicted Trump’s rise all along. Scott's been chronicling Trump in his “Master Persuader” series, and if he doesn’t take the comment “the essays were contradictory in their reasons for loathing Trump” as a tell for persuasion, I’ll start wondering if Scott been replaced by a pod person:

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/135324448866/the-lucky-hitler-hypothesis-trump-persuasion A tell for a Master Persuader is the outlandishness of the criticisms. Jeb Bush is not a persuader, and no one accuses him of anything but running an ineffective campaign. No one believes Rand Paul is really an elf that makes cookies in a hollowed-out tree. But they would, if Paul were a master persuader instead of a policy wonk … Now compare Trump, Obama, and Hillary Clinton. Trump is routinely compared to Hitler. Obama is considered by many to be a Muslim sleeper cell. But Hillary Clinton is generally accused of ordinary flaws such as incompetence, dishonesty, etc. Clinton is not a master persuader. If she were, a third of the country would believe she is a practicing witch. A real one. And no, that is not a joke.

I don’t often agree with Scott Adams (mainly because he is well trained in what he calls the pseudoscience of hypnosis, but I’m trained in the science of cognitive psychology, and some of the things he thinks are true about how the mind works were refuted long ago; also, we have political differences), but he’s always, always entertaining.

-the Centaur