In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

 Am I referring to myself?  Clearly not.  Am I full of shit?  Yes.  I just demonstrated that I know that I am full of shit.  However, upon reading my own statement, I become aware of my own knowledge.  Also, my own navel.  Your navel is Cthulu.  Gaze upon it, and go mad.  In game theory, one of our core assumptions is "common knowledge of rationality."  Each player is rational.  Each player knows that every other player is rational.  Each player knows that every other player knows that every player is rational, and so forth, turtles all the way down through the infinite regress.  Why do we rely upon this assumption?  It becomes important for the solution to many types of games.  Consider, for example, The Princess Bride .  In the famous scene during which Vizini tries to determine the location of the poison, he goes through contortions based on knowledge of who is and is not a great fool.  The poin...

 One of the most important tasks, intellectually speaking, is to make an effort to think about an issue from the perspective of those with whom you disagree, no matter how vehemently.  One need not agree, nor even find a point of agreement, but one should seek to understand why others disagree.  Russia presents a unique problem in this respect.  When we study a country like Afghanistan, we can study their interpretations of religion, and how those interpretations of religion lead to political beliefs.  This is not a popular thing to say among some quarters, but in ideological terms, the distance between the median Afghani and the Taliban just is not that great.  Afghanistan is a country that, separate from the Taliban, embraces religious doctrines in which apostates are put to death.  I shall not vacation there.  If we think of ideology in spatial terms and Euclidean distance, as I do, the Euclidean distance between most Afghan citizens and the Ta...

 Yes, Ginni Thomas is a few notes short of a scale.  A few beats short of a measure.  She'd sound better performing John Cage's 4'33" .  She's crazier than Thelonious Monk and Sun Ra tripping balls on hallucinogenic toad together, except that Monk and Sun Ra were geniuses, and Ginni is riding the short bus instead of flying on George Clinton's Mothership.  What I mean to say is that, um, Clarence?  Well matched.  Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) doesn't like your interracial marriage, but me?  I say that you two are perfect  together.  Now go off to an island together.  One with nobody else around, and leave us alone.  Please.  Go make each other very happy. Anyway, here's the thing about Ginni.  Should Clarence have recused himself on that series of cases?  Obviously.  What check is there?  What balance?  None.  What check or balance could  there be, for the highest court in the land?  The co...

 Miles Davis, "Tout de suite," from Filles de Kilimanjaro .

 There is precisely nothing good about Russia's invasion of Ukraine.  Actually, there is precisely nothing good about Russia.  My family fled from that "shithole country" long ago, and despite each sequential political change, they remain the worst.  But hey, as long as we are paying attention to the latest villainy to come from the land of vodka and totalitarianism (kids, don't experiment with blackout drinking or blackout totalitarianism), we don't have to pay attention to the absurdist political theater of this week in domestic politics, by which of course I mean a Supreme Court confirmation hearing.  These things are useless, meaningless and irrelevant.  Ketanji Brown Jackson will be confirmed.  Nothing that happens will matter.  Senators will give speeches and mug for the camera.  Jackson will give canned answers.  Blah-blah.  Ignore it.  Make yourself a nice cup of relaxing tea, turn off the news, curl up with a relaxing ...

 It was with some trepidation that I read Ball Lightning .  If Liu's name sounds familiar, he wrote the Three Body Problem  trilogy.  I've heard something about a tv series, or something?  I dunno.  Does tv still exist?  Anyway, the first book in that series is absolutely amazing.  All-time classic, must-read, stop everything right now (except your school work, and even then, a case could be made...).  The premise is that physics experiments stop working.  Why?  Aliens are fucking with us, as a prelude to an invasion.  They're traveling at sub-light speed, so we have time to prepare, but there are traitors among us, paving the way for them.  It's really cool. The second book had some fascinating ideas, and a really cool main character, but a lot of tangents, and lack of focus.  That book-- The Dark Forest -- was well worth reading, but it did not quite live up to the first book.  Still, you should read it.  ...

 Rep. Don Young (R-AK) died.  Of the many things that can be said about him, the most important is that he once held a knife to Speaker John Boehner's (R-OH) throat.  And Boehner stared him down like Clint Eastwood.  The party moved on.  A case can be made that Marjorie Taylor Greene and the other wackos of the party today are actually more harmless than Don Young.  After all, none of them, to my knowledge, have actually, literally held a deadly weapon to a fellow Member of Congress.  See?  This is actually improvement.  You didn't realize that, did you?  Greene is basically just a loudmouthed idiot.  Don Young?  That  dude was scary. Young asked to be buried with his whetstone and a strop.  His biopic will be directed by Lynn Thompson.

 The state Supreme Court here in Ohio has rejected the redistricting plan.  Again.  Actually, let me reformat that.  Shall we go with bold or italicization?  Let's do both.  Again .  After all, this was the third time the Court rejected the redistricting plan.  If you aren't following the ins and outs of this lunacy, basically, the Republicans who run the upper and lower chamber are trying one helluva power grab.  The redistricting reforms the state adopted were intended to prevent partisan gerrymanders, and the Republicans are basically saying, nah, let's do a partisan gerrymander.  The courts are blocking them.  Kinda.  Lemme see if I can explain this. It's a game of chicken.  Only we're  the car being driven off the road.  Here's the deal, kids. Remember, not all gerrymanders are created equal.  They are separate and unequal.  Bipartisan gerrymanders, also called incumbent protection gerrymanders, ar...

 Cannonball Adderley, "Hear Me Talkin' To Ya'," from Money In The Pocket .

 Enough real world craziness, time for a science fiction post.  Honestly, my latest read was not the greatest nor the most insightful book ever, but I'm just writing a science fiction post this morning.  Palate cleanser.  I am catching up a bit on The Laundry Files  series, by Charles Stross.  I just got around to Dead Lies Dreaming , which Stross published in 2020.  This is now a long-running series with the following gimmick:  magic is real, and based on mathematical computation.  Some variation of that statement is given in nearly every book.  Essentially, if you prove certain postulates, that act opens the doors between universes and lets extra-dimensional beasties into our universe, allows you to "cast spells," and at the extreme end, lets eldritch elder gods into the world to do very bad things.  The British government created an agency to handle these threats-- the Laundry.  The series is something of a cross between The...

 I teased this post during the week, so here it is.  OK, so we are in one of those holy shit  moments of world history.  A nuclear-armed madman has started a land war in Europe.  That is a holy shit  moment.  Ben Bradlee, the long-time honcho of the  Washington Post , used to say that he wanted people to open up the paper every day and say,  holy shit!   My grad school advisor, Nelson W. Polsby, used to say that reporters would then call up professors, prodding us to say, "holy shit, right prof?  Holy shit?"  Nelson said that it was our job to say, "no, not holy shit, this is normal and boring and ordinary, and here's why," and most days, he was right, but every once in a while, the light of the divine, or perhaps the demonic, shines upon a whole, big mess of shit, and by the power vested in me by the high priesthood of political science, I do hereby declare this shit to be holy.  Yet let not the holiness of this shit be t...

  Dick, not Liz.  The bad guy.  Remember him?  Remember the 1% doctrine?  This was the idea that if there was even a 1% chance of some unimaginably bad outcome, treat it as a certainty.  In utilitarian terms, this is not as wacko as it sounds.  In microeconomics, we calculate expected utility by multiplying your utility for an outcome by the probability that it occurs.  If your utility for  X  is unboundedly negative, then even if pr( X ) is quite small, then  X pr( X ) may be unboundedly low.  That means you'll do some extreme things to take  X  off the table.  In the case of the 1% doctrine, it meant stuff like worrying about terrorists getting... nukes. You know what we'd do if Putin tried this without nukes?  We'd flatten Russia.  We would bomb the shit out of it, and send it back to its pre-Bolshevik days of agrarian barbarism, as opposed to its current state of nuclear-armed barbarism.  I'd l...

 This weekend, I'll ask the crass, but unfortunately important question:  has Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine done anything to change the 2024 electoral landscape here?  My current thinking, reserving the right to change my mind about anything, anytime, is that yes.  It has.  Perversely, it helps Trump.  By any moral standard, it should destroy Trump, but he should have been undone by his obvious lack of intelligence or qualifications, the "grab 'em by the pussy" tape, and any number of other traits and events in his political career.  Yes, he lost in 2020, but he didn't go away.  Like herpes, he never goes away, but he is far more deadly.  "Surely, this  will be the thing that makes Republicans see how bad he is and abandon him," and it never happens.  And stop calling me "Shirley."  And stop making me make that reference.  That movie sucked. Yes, the Ukraine invasion reveals the moral cost of Trump's subservience to...

 For this type of rant, I will sometimes think in the voice of a relative, or perhaps some old codger from shul, or at least, my memory of shul, having not been in a while, but this morning, I am thinking in the voice of Sheila Broflovski.  Why?  Dunno.  I will occasionally type phonetically, based on the accent in my head as I rant.  Just deal.  And here.  We.  Go! ______________ So I had this thing.  It was a thing.  And there was this shiksa there!  Oy, so woke  she was!  Have you ever met such a woke shiksa?  Oh.  So this shiksa, she says, "Well I  think everyone  should be requiyah-ed to take ju day icah studies coahses!"  Shiksa, mind you!  She does not stop there!  She says this  studies and that  studies and everyone  studies!  But she stahted with ju day icah studies!   Why  did our little shiksa do this?  Half the room?  Chosen people! I...