Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

ranked choice voting

Larry Diamond on BillMoyers.com talks about a referendum in Maine that could lead to ranked-choice voting being used in that state in the future. The basic idea is that if no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes on the first ballot, then votes from the lower-ranked candidates get redistributed based on how people ranked all the candidates. Ultimately, this results in a winner who is acceptable to a majority of the voters even though they may not have been the top choice of a plurality of voters. This could encourage a Bernie Sanders or Ralph Nader (or Ross Perot or future Donald Trump) to run as a third-party candidate rather than competing for a major-party nomination.

…the issue at stake in Question 5 (a citizen-initiated referendum) is whether Maine will adopt a system called ranked-choice voting (RCV) in all its elections. If they approve the measure, Maine voters will have a unique opportunity to showcase the transformative potential of US democracy and to send a much-needed signal for reform at a crucial moment.

In RCV, voters select not just one candidate, but a list of candidates in order of preference. If no candidate gets a majority of first-preference votes when tabulating the results, the least popular candidate is eliminated and the second-preference votes of his or her supporters are redistributed to the other candidates. The process continues until someone gets a majority.

The ability to rank all the candidates running for office, rather than voting for only one, is intrinsically more democratic. But, because it forces candidates to try to appeal to a broader cross-section of the public, RCV also makes it much more likely that the winner will be open to moderation, compromise and building governing coalitions…

How often do we have a Presidential winner who did not get a majority of the popular vote? George W. Bush and Bill Clinton are the obvious examples from my lifetime, but it has happened before. This article on History News Network answers the question.

Seven of the Presidents who won without a majority were Democrats—Polk, Buchanan, Cleveland both times, Wilson both times, Truman, Kennedy, and Clinton both times. Six of the Presidents who won without a majority were Republicans—Lincoln, Hayes, Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Nixon, and George W. Bush. One Whig, Zachary Taylor, and one Democratic-Republican, John Quincy Adams, finish the list.

giants of Cold War era nuclear strategy

This New York Times Book Review article goes through some of the key architects of Cold War era nuclear strategy.

The theories of Cold War defense intellectuals now seem the stuff of a surreal madness that seized Washington during the last half of the 20th century. The core doctrine of nuclear deterrence was Mutual Assured Destruction, aptly known as MAD. It postulated that the best way to prevent a nuclear war with the Kremlin was to build an enormous atomic arsenal that would annihilate the Soviet Union if it dared attack the United States. Effective, yes, but a White House or Kremlin miscalculation would have left millions dead, nations destroyed and the planet reeling.

Albert Wohlstetter, an analyst at the RAND Corporation, was one of the most formidable of the nuclear policy savants. A combative champion of defense spending, he argued that the balance of terror inherent in MAD was unstable. Instead of assuming the MAD standoff would assure a durable cold peace, he feared a Pearl Harbor-like Soviet attack outside the imagined scenarios of defense planners, and he pressed for a nuclear war-winning policy. His ideas coursed through American defense strategy for decades, swaying presidents, attracting acolytes, infuriating opponents and igniting furious debates that ricochet through official circles to this day…

Robin, president of the University of Haifa in Israel, recalls many of the thinkers and baroque theories of the nuclear age. Some attracted national attention at midcentury, including Henry Kissinger, whose 1957 book, “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,” became an unexpected best seller, and Herman Kahn, whose chilling ruminations on winning and surviving a nuclear conflict made him an oracle of the unthinkable. Bernard Brodie, the intellectual father of nuclear deterrence theory, played a pivotal role in shaping Cold War nuclear policy.

civilians in Mosul

The United States and Iraq are planning a major offensive against ISIS in Mosul Iraq. This description in The Week about what is expected to happen to civilians is a bit shocking. If we are doing this to keep civilians from being oppressed, is it really worth it?

About 4,000 Kurdish peshmerga are fighting to retake a string of ISIS-held villages east of Mosul, with support from U.S. warplanes, artillery, and special operations commandos. The main attack is being launched from Qayyarah air base, some 40 miles south of Mosul, where 560 U.S. military advisers, 22,000 Iraqi government troops, and 6,000 mainly Sunni tribal fighters have gathered in recent months. Backed by coalition air support, liberation forces will advance along the Tigris River, clearing ISIS from towns and villages before reaching the city’s edge in early November. Experts say the main urban battle will probably last through December. Much of the battle could be fought street to street and house to house — the winding, narrow streets of Mosul’s Old City are inaccessible to tanks or artillery…

Its [ISIS’s] roughly 5,000 fighters in the city have spent months creating an elaborate network of defenses. IEDs have been hidden underneath roads and in buildings, and five bridges have been rigged with explosives. Residents told Reuters that a 6-foot-wide, 6-foot-deep moat has been dug around Mosul’s perimeter, which will be filled with oil and set on fire, creating plumes of smoke to make it difficult for warplanes to spot targets. To evade airstrikes, ISIS is funneling men and equipment through underground tunnels. Former Iraqi finance and foreign minister Hoshiyar Zebari says militants are “shaving their beards to blend in with the population and constantly moving their headquarters around.” The jihadists are desperately trying to boost their numbers: Local men who refuse to take up arms have had their ears cut off, and locals say children as young as 8 have been handed pistols and knives and ordered to spy on citizens…

Relief agencies say the battle for Mosul will trigger a mass exodus: Many of the city’s remaining residents are expected to flee at once, leaving their possessions behind. “We’re facing this enormous tsunami coming at us,” says Lise Grande, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Iraq. Coalition forces will have to screen out jihadists from the refugees, and, with some 3.3 million Iraqis already displaced by violence, overstretched aid agencies will struggle to feed and house all of Mosul’s desperate civilians. Says Matthew Nowery of U.S. relief group Samaritan’s Purse, “This is going to be a very large-scale catastrophe.”

So is it worth it? This made my think of Obama’s Nobel speech, where he argues that there is such a thing as “just war”.

And over time, as codes of law sought to control violence within groups, so did philosophers and clerics and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war.  The concept of a “just war” emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when certain conditions were met:  if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.

Of course, we know that for most of history, this concept of “just war” was rarely observed.  The capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible, as did our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God.  Wars between armies gave way to wars between nations — total wars in which the distinction between combatant and civilian became blurred.  In the span of 30 years, such carnage would twice engulf this continent.  And while it’s hard to conceive of a cause more just than the defeat of the Third Reich and the Axis powers, World War II was a conflict in which the total number of civilians who died exceeded the number of soldiers who perished…

Moreover, wars between nations have increasingly given way to wars within nations.  The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts; the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states — all these things have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos.  In today’s wars, many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sown, economies are wrecked, civil societies torn asunder, refugees amassed, children scarred.

It also reminded me of Human Smoke, where Nicholson Baker puts forth the heretical view that the human cost of the fight against the Third Reich and the Axis powers itself may have exceeded its benefit.

insurance and smart homes

According to MIT Technology Review, some insurance companies are giving discounts for smart devices.

Insurers across the U.S. are offering incentives to install one of half a dozen connected devices, ranging from moisture sensors to video doorbells. State Farm offers a discount on your home policy for installing a Canary home security monitor, for example. Liberty Mutual will send you a Nest Protect smoke detector, worth $99, free of charge and cut the cost of fire coverage.

 

free images and videos online

Canva has a helpful article with links to a large number of sources of free visuals – photos, videos, even Infographics. There is more than just Google Images and Youtube out there. There is even more here than it seems like at first because as you drill down some of the links are to additional lists…of lists…of…you get the idea.

JFK and drugs

Has there ever been a case where a politician used drugs to improve their performance in a debate? Well, according to a 2013 story in the New York Post:

The night of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate, Kennedy met with Jacobson just a few hours before he took the stage. The senator was “complaining in a voice barely above a whisper of extreme fatigue and lethargy,” the authors write. Jacobson plunged a needle “directly into Kennedy’s throat and pumped methamphetamine into his voice box.”

The result was clear within minutes, and an artificially energized Kennedy changed American history that night by upstaging Nixon.

Edward Glaeser on infrastructure

Edward Glaeser questions the idea of massive federal spending on infrastructure.

While infrastructure investment is often needed when cities or regions are already expanding, too often it goes to declining areas that don’t require it and winds up having little long-term economic benefit. As for fighting recessions, which require rapid response, it’s dauntingly hard in today’s regulatory environment to get infrastructure projects under way quickly and wisely. Centralized federal tax funding of these projects makes inefficiencies and waste even likelier, as Washington, driven by political calculations, gives the green light to bridges to nowhere, ill-considered high-speed rail projects, and other boondoggles. America needs an infrastructure renaissance, but we won’t get it by the federal government simply writing big checks. A far better model would be for infrastructure to be managed by independent but focused local public and private entities and funded primarily by user fees, not federal tax dollars.

I get the argument that investing without a plan leads to waste. We don’t really have any real planning at the federal level. I think it would help for the federal government to set a vision and direction for what the smart infrastructure of the future should look like, and not just transportation (public, private and human muscle-powered) but energy, water, communications, freight, manufacturing, housing and even green infrastructure. One of the problems with local authorities and companies doing the planning is that they focus on only one of these things at a time, so they miss out on potential synergies and opportunities for hybrid infrastructure. An example might be highway corridors that serve as rights of way for high speed rail, high-voltage lines, pipelines and movement corridors for wildlife. Another might be a system of parks that move water resources, improve water and air quality, absorb floodwaters, counteract climate change, provide habitat and improve peoples’ health.

He is right though that a lot of planning needs to be at the metropolitan area scale and incorporate hard-nosed cost-benefit analysis. This is already done to a certain extent by designated “metropolitan planning organizations”, but this only applies to transportation. It could be more comprehensive. I also see a middle ground between pure local funding and pure federal funding. Federal funds can be targeted only to projects that are in line with the national vision and the local comprehensive plan. They could be low- or no-interest loans rather than outright grants. They could be grants but require local matching funds and encourage private investment. They could be loans that are partially forgiven if the projects meet performance and cost-effectiveness criteria.

Having both federal and local plans ready to go, along with a federal infrastructure bank able to issue bonds, would also mean the country could really take advantage of periods of unemployment and low interest rates both to stimulate the economy in the short run and boost productivity and prosperity in the long run.

the GOP’s “Growth and Opportunity Project”

After their 2012 election loss, the Republican Party made some surprisingly candid admissions and drew some surprisingly logical conclusions. I could almost begin to support a party that focused on sound, evidenced-based policies to create accelerated economic growth and true equal opportunity, while preserving a minimal but effective safety net for people who need it through no fault of their own.

We are the Party of private-sector economic growth because that is the best way to create jobs and opportunity. That is the best way to help people earn an income, achieve success and take care of their families.

But if we are going to grow as a Party, our policies and actions must take into account that the middle class has struggled mightily and that far too many of our citizens live in poverty. To people who are flat on their back, unemployed or disabled and in need of help, they do not care if the help comes from the private sector or the government — they just want help.

Our job as Republicans is to champion private growth so people will not turn to the government in the first place. But we must make sure that the government works for those truly in need, helping them so they can quickly get back on their feet. We should be driven by reform, eliminating, and fixing what is broken, while making sure the government’s safety net is a trampoline, not a trap.

Too bad their primary voters resoundingly rejected these reasonable ideas in favor of bigotry, science denial, and downright childishness. I doubt I will so much as glance in their direction again, even though I get frustrated with the subserviance to big business, warmongering and relatively narrow range of policies in consideration by the Democrats.

“virgin soil epidemics” in the Americas

This is a seminal 1976 paper by Alfred Crosby on the epidemics that devastated Native Americans after Europeans first came. I’m sure there is plenty of scholarly work since then that may have refined this, but it is horrifying even if some of the details have changed. The most extreme estimates are that as many as 100 million people lived in the Americas pre-Columbus, or one-sixth of all humans alive at the time, and only a few million survived. If true, this is much worse than the Black Death in Europe. This would mean that Native American civilizations might have been equivalent in size and sophistication to European and Asian ones. We just don’t know.

I think this is also a cautionary tale for what a novel disease or combination of novel diseases could do to our current civilization, whether natural or man-made. He does point out though that genetic factors and never having been exposed before were only some of the factors. People at the time did not understand quarantine for example, and some practices for dealing with the dead led to more contagion. People might have been weakened by exotic diseases like smallpox, then finished off by diseases they would have experience with like malaria or pneumonia. They didn’t understand how hydration, nutrition, and keeping warm could keep their strength up to fight off secondary infections, or else people may have been too sick to fetch water and food and keep fires burning. Hopefully we can do much better today if and when some terrible epidemic strikes.