Paul Krugman has a new column in the NYT called “Trump, the Siberian candidate” (a play on “The Manchurian Candidate”, a movie describing a fictional Chinese plot to assassinate a presidential candidate) that states a shocking, scary possibility: the Donald is a puppet of Vladimir. This is based on a Slate story from yesterday that explicitly calls Donald the puppet of Vladimir, and has some very specific reasons for saying so. For example, Donald’s campaign manager Paul Manafort was on the payroll of Victor Yanukovitch, who was the Ukraine’s leader and an ally of Vladimir’s before he was overthrown just a few years ago. The Atlantic also has a story from yesterday that describes Hillary as running directly against Vladimir because Donald is Vladimir’s handmaiden.
Donald gave the secret away when he said that if he was president, he would hesitate to come to the aid of NATO countries under attack from Russia “unless they met their obligations to us” (meaning unless they paid through the nose for the privilege.) Donald ignores our treaty obligations to NATO countries, which closely resemble the obligations Western countries undertook to Poland before WW II– and which led to Great Britain declaring war on Germany and Russia when they overran Poland in September 1939.
The Atlantic says that Russia has been supporting “right-wing populists” in Europe; for example, they lent money to Marine Le Pen in France. Silvio Berlusconi of Italy has received personal gifts from Vladimir and has profited from energy deals with Russia. Russia even propagandized in favor of Britain’s exit from the European Union.
Donald has been unstinting in his praise of Vladimir, and called his piece slamming American exceptionalism “a masterpiece.” For almost a decade, Donald has made fawning statements lauding Vladimir’s abilities and his drive to control all of Russia. He even denied that Vladimir has had overly-critical Russian journalists assassinated, a conclusion which seems obvious to most observers. Donald has praised Vladimir’s leadership, famously grading him as “an A.”
In turn, Vladimir’s propaganda apparatus has pushed Donald’s candidacy and thrashed Hillary. Russian hackers broke into the Democratic National Committee’s servers, taking opposition research on Donald and whatever else was laying around. The research on Donald is critical to Donald’s campaign because he needs to know what dirt Hillary has that she is planning to expose during the next few months, in order to counter it– as if they could find effective defenses to the facts about Donald’s shady business life and four bankruptcies from which he has skimmed millions of dollars.
Last month, Bloomberg news reported that suspected Russian government intelligence hackers had broken into the servers of the Clinton Foundation. Bloomberg stated, “Trump said the hack was a political ploy concocted by the Democrats.” The Russian hackers apparently have broken into the computers of over 4,000 individuals associated with all sides in the US campaign for president, according to government investigators who have been monitoring their activities. A Clinton spokesman was quoted as saying, “What appears evident is that the Russian groups responsible for the DNC hack are intent on attempting to influence the outcome of this election.”
The hackers have apparently threatened to release the contents of thousands of internal memos from the computers of Democratic campaign officials. In addition, confidential files from the Clinton Foundation could be the subject of attacks by Donald’s campaign, which has threatened to make the activities of the Foundation a campaign issue. Donald has claimed that the Clintons have enriched themselves by donations to the Foundation and their internal documents could prove to be a rich source of negative propaganda. Donald’s campaign work could be made much easier by access to these secret materials, which the Russian government has spent considerable time and money to obtain.
The bottom line: Donald is a potential right-wing fascist dictator who would, even without changing the US government’s nominal organization, turn the US into an inward-looking, xenophobic country that would fail to counter Russia’s expansionist policies. We would abandon NATO and fail to protect Western Europe from Russia’s incursions, while allowing Syria’s al-Assad to continue his murderous campaign of civil war. Donald’s foreign policy would suit Vladimir and so he gladly helps Donald’s campaign for the Presidency.
As patriotic Americans and in support of democracies that protect human rights and the rights of the individual all over the world, we must prevent Donald from achieving his aim of taking over our government. The Republicans, who claimed to be internationalists in support of democracy under George W. Bush (and went overboard with waterboarding, torture, and “rendition”), have taken control of the Congress and nearly taken over the Supreme Court (in spite of the timely death of Antonin Scalia.) They will happily become isolationists in order to win the Presidency, and they will readily accept Vladimir Putin’s support to do so.
Despite American blunders in stepping on nascent freedom movements all over the world over the last hundred and fifty years, we still have the largest and most effective military in the world. We must use our power to support freedom and human rights, not just to stop the Islamic State, but to counter Russia’s right-wing fascists under Vladimir Putin. Please vote against Donald in November; if you must hold your nose to vote for Hillary, do so, and if you think it’s the lesser of two evils, then vote anyway.
Here are some (most?) of the things that Republicans claim that Hillary Clinton has been guilty of, according to Chris Christie (based on a NYT account of his speech at the Republican Convention):
- Libya: supposedly Hillary is responsible for the collapse of governance in Libya because she advocated the NATO bombing of Moammar Gaddhafi’s troops when they threatened to overwhelm Libyan rebels in Benghazi in 2011. In fact, Christie called Hillary the “chief engineer of the disastrous overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya.” To blame Hillary as the “chief engineer” for the troubles of Libya seems overblown, to say the least. She certainly counselled support for the Libyan rebels, but she wasn’t chiefly responsible for the bombing campaign; that was a decision made by President Obama and the heads of the NATO countries. To blame anyone other than Gaddhafi for the situation in Libya is to be ignorant of history. Gaddhafi was the dictator who ruled Libya with an iron hand for many years, and who made a deal with President Bush to slide out from under responsibility for terrorism and the Lockerbie bombing by paying reparations and turning over one of the suspects in the bombing to Scotland for prosecution (in addition to cooperating with “rendition” of terror suspects and secret torture). If anyone, Bush was responsible for allowing Gaddhafi to remain in power after that pivot. Gaddhafi was clever, and he saw the handwriting on the wall after the attacks of 9/11/2001; he decided to curry favor with Bush by making it appear that he was cooperating in the “war on terror.”
- Terrorism in Nigeria and Boko Haram: Christie blamed Hillary for keeping Boko Haram off the State Department list of terrorist groups for two years. He called it “amazing.” In fact, she was advised to leave the organization off the list by “Islamic scholars and regional experts [who] had urged it to try other means of confronting the group’s tactics.” Christie claimed that Hillary’s “actions had led directly” to Boko Haram’s kidnappings of over two hundred teenaged girls. To blame Hillary Clinton for the actions of a terrorist group in Africa is disingenuous, to say the least. Boko Haram’s behavior would not have been inhibited by the State Department’s putting them on a terrorist list, nor anything else the State Department could reasonably have done short of assassinating their entire leadership.
- Trade with China: Christie claimed that Hillary was “desperate for Chinese cash” and that she pushed Obama to oppose the “Buy American” provision of his economic stimulus legislation in turn for a promise to China. He claimed that she supported “big-government spending financed by the Chinese” in opposing the “Buy American” provision. This provision was “protectionist” and could have provoked a trade war with the Chinese, not to mention the fact that it would have had little effect on our balance of trade with China. To call the stimulus package “big government spending” is just name-calling. There was no “promise to China” in any case; she opposed the protection provision for practical reasons.
- Syria: Christie claimed that Hillary had defended Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and called him “a reformer.” He then laid partial responsibility for the 400,000 deaths in the Syrian civil war so far at her feet. In fact, what she really said (in 2011, at the beginning of the protests against Assad) was “some members of Congress in both parties ‘believe he’s a reformer.’ ” She never defended Assad, nor said anything remotely positive about him after 2011. To blame her for anything Assad has done is simply false.
- Iran: Christie blames Hillary for the Iran nuclear treaty and claims that it is indefensible, allowing Iran to continue its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. This is false, and a complete mischaracterization of the treaty. It is true that Hillary had a hand in the treaty but not that it is a bad treaty. Iran made significant concessions in the treaty and, as the NYT says, has disposed of 98 percent of its nuclear materials and dismantled most of its centrifuges. There is no evidence that the treaty makes us “less safe”; in fact, there is more safety with the treaty than without it. Iran gave up most of its nuclear ambitions in order to end a crippling economic blockade; if the blockade had continued, it is likely that Iran would have become more radical than before.
- Russia: Christie blames Hillary for “that stupid reset button.” This is disingenuous when Donald has made admiring statements about Putin. It merely plays to the crowd’s (warranted) suspicion of Russia.
- As the NYT states,
Finally, Mr. Christie accused Mrs. Clinton of choosing to set up a private email server in her home in order to protect her personal secrets. “Let’s face the facts: Hillary Clinton cared more about protecting her own secrets than she cared about protecting America’s secrets,” he said.
It is unclear what “secrets” Mr. Christie thinks Hillary is protecting, but it is unlikely that she would be able to keep any of her secrets from the prying eyes of the Republican attack apparatus. Armed with subpoenas and lawsuits, as well as House Committee hearings, there is little that would escape the scrutiny of the right-wing investigators. It is also unclear how government servers could have protected American secrets any better than Hillary’s private servers; there is no magic about government computer equipment that makes it immune from Chinese military hackers. Fortunately, there are no allegations that any of our government’s secrets have been disclosed due to insecure emails sent or received by Hillary.
The bottom line is that Christie, and the Republican attack apparatus in general, is (successfully) trying to smear Hillary with every perceived foreign policy failure of the United States in her lifetime. The result is that the general public has unfairly come to view Hillary as untrustworthy and untruthful. The “untruthful” attitude is particularly ironic when we compare Donald’s acknowledged tendency to gross exaggeration and documented history of downright falsehoods, which he refuses to correct when confronted with the truth.
Sculpture of a Child in a Garden
More comments today on the New York Times online, to a piece by David Brooks about Donald’s Republican convention:
Mark Young
San Francisco, CA
Folks, this is becoming a little too scary for any sane person’s comfort.
People need to remember that the US possesses thousands of nuclear weapons ready to be launched on the authority of one person—the President. Trump could invoke this authority on the smallest of errors or pretense. He has said as much. He would show any nation the consequences of questioning the US’s or his authority.
There is no one to question, debate or check this authority held by the President. Once an order to launch is given, the military will follow orders without question.
The smallest of weapons in the US arsenal will vaporize everything within 2.5 miles. Millions would die. If the exchange is big enough, the survival of everyone on the planet would be in question.
Do we really want to grant that authority to a man who’s ego is this fragile and who describes outright lies as creative hyperbole?
There is no place on this planet that you could move to to escape the risk of a Trump presidency.
David Blum
Daejon, Korea
It’s one thing to have a twitter feed and go off on that.
It’s another thing to have the nuclear codes.
I could understand his nutty tweets if he drank, but he supposedly doesn’t.
This man is unstable.
DH
Miami-Dade County
Trump hasn’t slipped off the rails, Mr. Brook, he has been on no rails all campaign. Mexican Rapists. Build a wall that blocks Mexico from the US. The Mexicans will pay for it all. Woman are dropping on their knees. The Central Park rapists are still guilty. One could go on all day with Trump quotes that show he has no sense of reality.
What has slipped off the rails is the US Press Corp that has allowed this Nabob of Narcissism to get this far as to claim the Republican Nomination for the Presidency. And don’t be coy Mr. Brooks; after all, at least George Will had the decency to give up his Republican Party voting preference. When will you?
All the candidates for president, on both sides, complain that their news coverage has been unfairly negative. You don’t hear this much from Clinton, but you do hear it a lot from Sanders, and particularly from Donald– he has banned some news outlets from his press conferences.
A study by Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy says that Clinton has, by far, been treated most negatively in news coverage, especially in the year preceding the beginning of the primaries. Donald was treated positively, even before he began his rise to the top of the primaries. The data collected by this study is detailed in a report from the Center that makes for good reading and goes into great detail. The Center also studied news reporting of the primary season from January to June of this year and found the same problems: Clinton has received substantially more negative coverage than Sanders, and Sanders was relatively ignored early in the primary season. Donald was treated positively in the news before he won the primaries, but then the reporting switched to highly negative after he had cinched the nomination.
The impressions that we have been getting about the news coverage of presidential candidates have been confirmed by these in-depth studies. Clinton has been treated in a very negative fashion by the news. Some would argue that’s because she’s got a lot of negative aspects– but how do we know? We only know what we are told by the news media.
Vox posted a report about the Shorenstein Center’s studies, and they mention another study by a different group, Crimson Hexagon, a “social media analytics firm in Boston” that they reported on back in April. The Hexagon studied reporting from a different angle but got similar results: Clinton was treated more negatively than any other candidate, and received fewer positive stories as well. Sanders was relatively ignored early on in the race, but then got more positive reports than Clinton– belying the complaints of Sanders supporters that they were being treated unfairly.
The Hexagon’s methodology was quite different, and involved an analysis of retweets and mentions on Twitter that indicated the most discussed media outlets. These outlets, whose names turn out to be the publishers of the most popular news stories, generated some 170,000 stories in the first four months of 2015. These outlets included some of the biggest names: the Washington Post, Politico, Fox News, the Huffington Post, and CNN.
The stories produced were analyzed by computer for their positive, neutral, or negative content– and most turned out to be negative, for all the candidates. However, the number of positive stories was least for Clinton and the most for John Kasich (who also had the fewest negative stories.) Kasich turned out to be an also-ran, but then so did Sanders, who was treated in an average way. Aside from the positive or negative slant of stories, there is also the way the candidates are treated as “most likely to win” or “not a winning candidate.” This treatment, the Hexagon asserts, has the most effect on voter’s perception of the candidates as winners or losers. Thus, the media’s initial treatment of Sanders had an inhibiting effect on his chances and made voters look upon him as a loser, at least according to the Hexagon.
The most important point to be gathered from these analyses is that Clinton has been treated most negatively by the press, and this has had an effect on the way she is perceived: as untrustworthy or dishonest. The perception of Clinton as dishonest compared to Donald is risible, considering the practiced way in which Donald lies his way through every speech. Donald even brags about his lies in the books he has written, and everyone who has been involved with him in a business deal has a story to tell about the lies he has inflicted upon them in an effort to look more successful than he really is.
The bottom line is that Donald is unlike almost every other candidate for President who has ever ran. He is the most dishonest, the most narcissistic, the most manipulative, and he has proposed the most disruptive policies of any candidate. He makes an appeal to the racist, xenophobic, and misogynist sentiments that lurk in the hearts of the under-educated, middle-aged, white males who lurk in the most economically depressed areas of this country. He brings out the hatred and distrust that have been generated by the systematic deprivation of jobs and livelihoods of the white underclass by corporations that have sent all the manufacturing capacity of this country overseas.
The people who support him had jobs and lives that were removed from them by these corporations, and they have no prospects to get new jobs that would support them in the way to which they had become accustomed. Unlike the black underclass, who have never had good prospects and suffer from despair and learned helplessness, these people have only recently been put down and still have plenty of rage to express. At the same time, the minorities (mostly black but also Latino) who have been oppressed for many years are beginning to express themselves in opposition to the police state that has had its foot on their necks. The black people who feel oppressed are sympathetic to Clinton– who has been rational and reasonable, unlike Donald, who has been irrational and unreasonable.
Who would you support– a narcissistic demagogue who is supported by a relatively privileged white underclass, or a rational leader who has the support of the truly oppressed? It is no wonder that people don’t believe the news media when they treat this extremely polarized election as a horse race.
Here is a long article about how big egos can perpetuate stupid mistakes in social science: it seems that a graduate student noticed mistakes in a paper by an established professor. He asked to see the scientist’s data, nicely, and got nowhere. So eventually he published a paper detailing the mistakes the professor made, and the professor got all bent out of shape about it. This is worth reading for those who are interested in why science, especially social science, is so full of mistakes that take decades to correct.
The basic problem was that a social scientist had misread his data in a fairly obvious way: his conclusion was that conservative people tend to be more likely to be individualistic and less likely to “fall into line.” This is the opposite of what you would think if you were just guessing, and the opposite of what most of the research literature had shown up to that point. The student, on reading this paper, thought that the scientist must have miscoded his data. He had his advisor send an email to the scientist asking for his raw data, so he could evaluate for himself if this was the case. He never got the data despite repeated requests.
A couple of years later, the student had graduated, and with his new job as a professor, was able to muster the resources to re-examine the data on his own. He did the evaluation and wrote a paper, which he submitted to a journal. But the journal sent the paper for review to the original scientist who had made the mistake. This scientist suddenly turned around and wrote another paper correcting his own errors. At the same time, he developed a false narrative that the student was out to get him. Fortunately, the student wasn’t made to suffer for the scientist’s ego and back-tracking. It’s a long story, and well worth reading, in New York magazine.
Horse of a retouched Color
Using Photoshop, I drastically darkened a distracting light area to the left of the horse’s head, which simplified an otherwise somewhat complex image.
Water Faucet in Rest Area
Here is a paper, posted for free by JAMA Oncology online, which explores the difference between doctor’s expectations about prognosis and patient’s beliefs. It seems that the majority of patients disagree with their doctors about how long they have to live, they do not realize that their doctors differ, and the doctors are substantially more pessimistic about their chances than the patients are. In addition, nonwhite patients tend to be more discordant from their doctors about their prognoses.
In summary, patients are usually more optimistic than their doctors about their chances, and do not realize that their doctors differ; this problem is especially acute for nonwhite patients. This could be ameliorated by better communication between doctor and patient, but there is a chance that even good communication will not put the patients straight. It is possible that patients are just more optimistic than their doctors are, for reasons that bear some speculation.
Importance Patients with advanced cancer often report expectations for survival that differ from their oncologists’ expectations. Whether patients know that their survival expectations differ from those of their oncologists remains unknown. This distinction is important because knowingly expressing differences of opinion is important for shared decision making, whereas patients not knowing that their understanding differs from that of their treating physician is a potential marker of inadequate communication.
Objective To describe the prevalence, distribution, and proportion of prognostic discordance that is due to patients’ knowingly vs unknowingly expressing an opinion that differs from that of their oncologist.
Design, Setting, and Participants Cross-sectional study conducted at academic and community oncology practices in Rochester, New York, and Sacramento, California. The sample comprises 236 patients with advanced cancer and their 38 oncologists who participated in a randomized trial of an intervention to improve clinical communication. Participants were enrolled from August 2012 to June 2014 and followed up until October 2015.
Main Outcomes and Measures We ascertained discordance by comparing patient and oncologist ratings of 2-year survival probability. For discordant pairs, we determined whether patients knew that their opinions differed from those of their oncologists by asking the patients to report how they believed their oncologists rated their 2-year survival.
Results Among the 236 patients (mean [SD] age, 64.5 [11.4] years; 54% female), 161 patient-oncologist survival prognosis ratings (68%; 95% CI, 62%-75%) were discordant. Discordance was substantially more common among nonwhite patients compared with white patients (95% [95% CI, 86%-100%] vs 65% [95% CI, 58%-73%], respectively; P = .03). Among 161 discordant patients, 144 (89%) did not know that their opinions differed from that of their oncologists and nearly all of them (155 of 161 [96%]) were more optimistic than their oncologists.
Conclusions and Relevance In this study, patient-oncologist discordance about survival prognosis was common and patients rarely knew that their opinions differed from those of their oncologists.
Authors:
Robert Gramling, MD, DSc1,2,3,4,5,6,7; Kevin Fiscella, MD, MPH4,5,6,8; Guibo Xing, PhD9; Michael Hoerger, PhD10,11,12; Paul Duberstein, PhD5,6,12; Sandy Plumb, BS5; Supriya Mohile, MD, MS13,14; Joshua J. Fenton, MD, MPH9,15,16; Daniel J. Tancredi, PhD9,17; Richard L. Kravitz, MD, MSPH9,16,18; Ronald M. Epstein, MD5,6,7,12,14
Affiliations:
1School of Nursing, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York
2Division of Palliative Medicine, University of Vermont, Burlington
3Department of Family Medicine, University of Vermont, Burlington
4Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, New York
5Center for Communication and Disparities Research, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, New York
6Department of Family Medicine, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, New York
7Division of Palliative Care, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, New York
8Center for Community Health, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, New York
9Center for Healthcare Policy and Research, University of California, Davis, Sacramento
10Department of Psychology, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana
11Tulane Cancer Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana
12Department of Psychiatry, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, New York
13Department of Medicine, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, New York
14James P. Wilmot Cancer Center, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, New York
15Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of California, Davis, Sacramento
16UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of California, Davis, Sacramento
17Department of Pediatrics, University of California, Davis, Sacramento
18Division of General Medicine, University of California, Davis, Sacramento
Here is a quote from Public Policy Polling, a national polling organization:
President Obama’s approval rating stands at 49/48, the first time we’ve had him with a positive approval spread in a considerable amount of time. There continues to be a lot of misinformation about what has happened during Obama’s time in office. 43% of voters think the unemployment rate has increased while Obama has been President, to only 49% who correctly recognize that it has decreased. And 32% of voters think the stock market has gone down during the Obama administration, to only 52% who correctly recognize that it has gone up. In both cases Democrats and independents are correct in their understanding of how things have changed since Obama became President, but Republicans claim by a 64/27 spread that unemployment has increased and by a 57/27 spread that the stock market has gone down.
“It’s a fact that unemployment has gone down and the stock market has gone up during the Obama administration,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “But GOP voters treat these things more as issues of opinion than issues of fact.”
It is truly bizarre that Republican-leaning voters believe the stock market has gone down and unemployment has increased. Isn’t there any reality to be had in these minds?
Conrad Theodore Seitz 