Today’s photo was taken near sunset in the Angeles National Forest. When I first saw it on the computer when I got home, I didn’t care all that much for it. In fact, I almost didn’t bother saving it. But I did, and ever since it’s been sitting in the lunchtime queue, where I see it every day.
The black blob running across the top is cloud cover. It never rained that day, but the clouds were threatening and dark most of the time, and got even darker toward dusk. The result is a thin band of orange sunset, and that’s what either makes or breaks the picture. At first I disliked it, but that single patch of color grew on me the more I looked at it. Obviously, your mileage may vary, but it’s become one of my favorites. It works better at a larger size, but the blog is 630 pixels wide, so that’s what you get.
March 24, 2018 — Angeles National Forest, California
I’ve been vaguely wondering for a while if fentanyl will upend the market for heroin, cocaine, and other opioids. Fentanyl is not only super powerful, but you can make it in a lab, like meth, which means it should be pretty attractive to both users and sellers. Keith Humphreys agrees:
Opium poppy-sourced drugs depend on control of arable land in countries where law enforcement is a minimal or at least corruptible presence. Plant-based opium production also requires a substantial number of agricultural worker….Even if old-line agriculturally based producers shift some of their opioid business to fentanyl, as have a few Mexican cartels, they find themselves in a weaker position because they no longer gain the political capital they once did from providing plentiful drug-production jobs to local residents.
Transnational criminal organizations with smuggling expertise are also being financially squeezed by fentanyl….Fentanyl, being enormously more potent per gram, is so compact that people with no particular smuggling expertise can ship it overseas in a regular-size piece of mail with little chance of it being detected.
….If synthetic drugs become dominant, the United States and other consuming nations will no longer be concerned about developing-world drug crops, removing a burr from under the saddle of international relationships and potentially weakening insurgencies abroad at the same time.
Well, that’s interesting. But fentanyl has been around for a long time, and only recently has its use become widespread. Why? Is it hard to make outside an industrial lab? Is it just too dangerous? A few grains can be deadly, after all. Is there more here than meets the eye?
I don’t know. But if you’re interested in a little ground-level perspective, read “The Walter White of Wichita,” by Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster. It’s about the guy who started the first fentanyl epidemic in the early 90s.
The two parties were pretty even until 1990, when Democrats started a steady rise in the number of women who ran for a seat in Congress. This opened up a wide gap against Republicans.
Then came Donald Trump and women responded in huge numbers. The number of women running for office skyrocketed, nearly reaching parity with men. Meanwhile, Republicans saw a noticeable decrease in the number of women.
The gender gap between Democrats and Republicans has always been around, but if this chart is telling us anything, it got way bigger when the groper-in-chief took up residence in the Oval Office. That’s not really surprising, but the size of the Democratic response is.
Republicans have now lost not just nonwhites, and not just the young, but women as well. All they’ve got left are white men over 30. They’re managing to do pretty well with them so far, but how long can they keep it up?
This should be fun. As instructed, I took the evil dex two hours before coming in to the infusion center. Now I’m here, and it turns out they have to push some Benadryl into me before they start the chemo itself. So I’ve got dex fighting to keep me awake and Benadryl fighting to make me drowsy. Exciting! Which drug will win?
Today I start my second round of chemotherapy. The big difference this time around is a new drug—Darzalex—which takes way longer to infuse than the drug from the 2014 round of chemo. As a result, my weekly sessions are scheduled to last seven hours starting at 8:30 am.
But! The medical center has plenty of electricity and plenty of WiFi, and I have plenty of portable technology. So I intend to blog my way through the whole thing. It may be a little slower than normal, since I’ll have to use the cursed virtual keyboard instead of my beloved clicky Das Keyboard, but them’s the breaks. With any luck, I’ll be back online in an hour or so, right after they’ve finished poking and prodding me and connecting me to a machine that goes beep.
Hmmm. President Trump’s use of ALL CAPS on Twitter seems to be growing. This morning produced half a dozen examples:
SPY
SPYGATE
SPYING
RIGHT TO TRY
DODD FRANK
WITCH HUNT
This seems like an increase to me. Is it? Can someone please check? And what does it mean? Perhaps it’s just a phase he’s going through. Or maybe it polls well. Or maybe it relates to Trump’s mental state. Then again, it might actually be the work of Trump’s Twitter team. The Boston Globe reports:
West Wing employees who draft proposed tweets intentionally employ suspect grammar and staccato syntax in order to mimic the president’s style, according to two people familiar with the process. They overuse the exclamation point! They Capitalize random words for emphasis. Fragments. Loosely connected ideas. All part of a process that is not as spontaneous as Trump’s Twitter feed often appears.
….When a White House employee wants the president to tweet about a topic, the official writes a memo to the president that includes three or four sample tweets, according to those familiar with the process. Trump then picks the one he likes best. While staff members do consciously use poor grammar, they do not intentionally misspell words or names, one person familiar with the process explained.
So there you have it. Bad grammar: OK! Bad spelling: SAD!
A couple of days ago I saw a link to a new study suggesting that Russian Twitter bots had cost Hillary Clinton three percentage points in the 2016 election. This seemed pretty unlikely to me, so I was curious to read the paper and see what the authors really said.
Long story short, they amassed a huge database of tweets starting a month before two events: the Brexit vote and the American presidential vote. They identified human tweeters vs. bots using criteria that seem pretty reasonable. They confirmed that the share of human tweets in a geographical area closely predicted the vote in that same area. Then they applied a big ol’ econometric model to figure out how much influence bots had.
Before we get to that, though, here are some of the conclusions they drew about Twitter:
With rare exceptions, retweets are all done within two hours of the original tweet. After that, your tweet is effectively dead.
Bots don’t retweet much—about a tenth as much as humans.
Humans retweet other humans much more than they retweet bots.
Bots generate a lot of activity from humans who are on their side: each bot tweet, on average, produces two new human tweets.
Bots are more effective than humans at generating tweets from humans who are on the other side.
And now for the net effect of bots. The authors calculate actual tweet traffic and then compare it to a model counterfactual in which bots don’t exist. Generally speaking, there are bots on both sides of any issue, and they mostly cancel each other out. But not totally. The tweet pattern they predict in the counterfactual is a little different than the actual tweet history:
At this point, I think I was right to be skeptical. The bot effect is small and random, and depends heavily on the precise specification of their model. The biggest effect appears to be that in the counterfactual, pro-Trump tweets dwindle away in the two weeks before Election Day, but in the real world, where bots were working tirelessly away, pro-Trump traffic stays pretty strong.
However, the authors ignore all that and look solely at tweet traffic on the day before the election. Oddly, pro-Clinton traffic spikes way upward in the five days before the election while the pro-Trump traffic dies off in the day before. As a result, for this single day there’s more pro-Clinton traffic than pro-Trump traffic, and the difference between pro-Trump and pro-Clinton traffic is bigger in real life than it is in the bot-free counterfactual. This suggests that bots helped Clinton on the last day before the election, and the authors estimate that the bots contributed to an increase in the Clinton vote of 3.23 percentage points.
This is pretty thin stuff, but if Fox & Friends picks up on it then Trump will finally have his excuse for losing the popular vote: the bots did it! For the rest of us, I wouldn’t take this very seriously. In fact, even for the authors it’s more of a passing comment than a real conclusion of their paper. There’s not a ton of evidence for their model; there’s very little evidence for the causal effect of higher tweet volume on voting; and there’s no evidence at all to support the idea that only Twitter traffic on the last day before the election makes a difference. All in all, there’s some interesting stuff in this paper, but the effect of bots on voting behavior isn’t part of it.
Obviously McGrath has a great story, but note that she also has a great voice. This is one of the most underrated things in politics, and it’s not really something you can teach. You can improve your speaking skills with practice, but voice control is really, really hard. It’s what separates great actors from mediocre ones.
Anyway, McGrath will now be up against Republican Rep. Andy Barr in the general election. He’s won his last couple of elections pretty comfortably, but only against weak competition. The Cook Political Report rates the district as Lean Republican, but I wouldn’t be surprised if McGrath manages to win anyway. Tim Murphy has the whole story here.
Deliver a full account of the “military dimensions” of its prior nuclear program.
Verifiably abandon all work on nuclear weapons “in perpetuity.”
Stop all uranium enrichment, which includes closing its heavy water reactor.
Never start up plutonium reprocessing.
Provide the IAEA with “unqualified access” to “all sites throughout the entire country.”
Halt development of nuclear-capable missiles.
End proliferation of ballistic missiles.
Release all citizens of the US and its allies.
Stop support of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Permit the disarming and demobilization of all Shia militias in Iraq.
End all military support of the Houthi militia in Yemen.
Withdraw all forces from Syria.
End support for the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Stop harboring senior al-Qaida leaders.
End the Quds Force’s support for terrorists and militant partners around the world.
End all threatening behavior against its neighbors, including threats to destroy Israel, firing of missiles into Saudi Arabia and the UAE, threats to international shipping, and cyberattacks.
Everybody in the world has already made this point, but I’ll add one more to the chorus: this is just a longwinded way of saying that the US will never, ever remove sanctions on Iran. They will be in place forever. This is the Trump Doctrine on Iran. Dan Drezner describes it like this:
The Trump administration is hoping for the foreign policy equivalent of lucking into an inside straight. They hope that renewed sanctions can tip Iran’s civil society into open revolt and destabilize the regime. I’ll leave it to the Iran experts to assess the likelihood of that outcome. As a sanctions expert, I will say this: Trump has given Iran’s theocratic regime the perfect scapegoat to offer up to explain Iran’s stagnant economy. Now everything can be blamed on the renewed sanctions, rather that Iran’s indigenous dysfunctions.
This sounds right, except that drawing to an inside straight isn’t all that unlikely. Pompeo’s plan is more like hoping to hit a hole in one: it’s not going to happen and everyone knows it. Trump’s real plan appears pretty simple: tighten the screws on Iran until he provokes them to do something stupid, and then join up with Israel and Saudi Arabia to wipe them off the map.
Real lefties would call me naive, but I never really thought I’d see the day when you could reasonably say that Iran is a more reliable negotiating partner than the United States. But now I’ve seen it.
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