Ray McGovern: CIA, JFK, Deep State, and Ukraine Crisis — Manifold #54

 

Raymond McGovern is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst, serving from 1963 to 1990. 

His CIA career began under President John F. Kennedy and lasted through the presidency of George H. W. Bush. McGovern advised Henry Kissinger during the Richard Nixon administration, and during the Ronald Reagan administration he chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President's Daily Brief. 

He received the Intelligence Commendation Medal at his retirement but returned it in 2006 to protest the CIA's involvement in torture. 

Steve and Ray discuss: 

0:00 Introduction 

01:25 Ray McGovern's assessment of the JFK assassination 

26:10 Hunter Biden's laptop 

30:50 Ukraine and the U.S. intelligence services' role in the deep state 

55:20 Strategic implications of the Ukraine war for the U.S. 

01:03:38 Are things worse today, versus 1963? 

Books referenced in this episode: 

JFK and the Unspeakable 

https://www.amazon.com/JFK-Unspeakable-Why-Died-Matters/dp/1439193886 

Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy

https://www.amazon.com/Marys-Mosaic-Conspiracy-Kennedy-Pinchot/dp/1510708928/

Prof. Gilles Saint-Paul (Ecole Normale): the Yellow Vests, French Politics, and Hypergamy (Manifold #31)

 

Audio (podcast only)

Transcript 

Gilles Saint-Paul is Professeur à l'Ecole Normale Supérieure. He is a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique in Engineering and received his PhD from MIT in Economics. Gilles and Steve discuss the French elite education system, the Yellow Vest movement, French politics and populism, and Saint-Paul's paper on marriage markets and hypergamy. 

0:00 Introduction 

1:43 Gilles Saint-Paul's background and education 

6:31 French and American elite education - Les Grandes Ecoles 

14:44 The Yellow Vests 

41:46 Mating and Hypergamy 

Links: 

On the Yellow Vest Insurrection 

https://gillessaintpaul.wordpress.com/2018/12/18/on-the-yellow-vest-insurrection/ 

Genes, Legitimacy and Hypergamy: Another Look at the Economics of Marriage https://ideas.repec.org/p/ide/wpaper/9118.html

Dominic Cummings: Vote Leave, Brexit, COVID, and No. 10 with Boris — Manifold #28

 

Dominic Cummings is a major historical figure in UK politics. He helped save the Pound Sterling, led the Vote Leave campaign, Got Brexit Done, and guided the Tories to a landslide general election victory. His time in No. 10 Downing Street as Boris Johnson's Chief Advisor was one of the most interesting and impactful periods in modern UK political history.  Dom and Steve discuss all of this and more in this 2-hour episode. 

0:00 Early Life: Oxford, Russia, entering politics 

16:49 Keeping the UK out of the Euro 

19:41 How Dominic and Steve became acquainted: blogs, 2008 financial crisis, meeting at Google 

27:37 Vote Leave, the science of polling 

43:46 Cambridge Analytica conspiracy; History is impossible 

48:41 Dominic on Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of him and the movie “Brexit: The Uncivil War” 

54:05 On joining British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s office: an ultimatum 

1:06:31 The pandemic 

1:21:28 The Deep State, talent pipeline for public service 

1:47:25 Quants and weirdos invade No.10 

1:52:06 Can the Tories win the next election? 

1:56:27 Trump in 2024? 

Transcript

Audio Player

References: 

Dominic's Substack newsletter: https://dominiccummings.substack.com/

Nozick and Leftists

From this interview with Robert Nozick:

I had been at Harvard as an Assistant Professor in the mid-​sixties and then came back in 1969 as a Full Professor. That was immediately after the student uprisings, building takeovers, and so on, at Harvard the previous spring. When I arrived in the fall of 1969, there was a philosophy course listed in the catalog entitled “Capitalism.” And the course description was “a moral examination of capitalism.” Of course, for most students, then, it would be taken for granted that a moral examination would be a moral condemnation of capitalism. But that’s not what I intended. We were going to read critics of capitalism. But we were also planning to read defenses of capitalism, and I was going to construct some of my own in the lectures. Some of the graduate students in the philosophy department knew what ideas I held, and they weren’t very happy about a course being taught in the department defending those ideas. Now it was true that there was another course in the department on Marxism by someone who was then a member of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party and students did not object to that. But still some students objected to my giving a lecture course on capitalism. I remember early in the fall (I guess I was scheduled to give the course in the spring term), a graduate student came to me at a departmental reception we had, and said, “We don’t know if you’re going to be allowed to give this course.” I said “What do you mean, not allowed to give this course?” He said, “Well, we know what ideas you hold. We just don’t know whether you will be allowed to give the course.” And I said, “If you come and disrupt my course, I’m going to beat the shit out of you!” And the student was taken aback and said, “But you are taking all this very personally.” And I said, “What do you mean, personally? You are threatening to disrupt my course! you can do other things; you can stand outside the room and hand out leaflets. You can ask students not to register for my course. But if you come into my classroom while I am lecturing and disrupt the class, then I take that very personally.” In fact, at some point later in the term, this student and some others said they were going to make up leaflets and hand them out outside of my classroom. I said, “That’s fine; that would be really exciting.” Then they didn’t get around to doing it, and so I prodded them, “Where are the leaflets? I was counting on something special happening with the leaflets.” But it turned out that it was a lot of trouble to write up a leaflet, to get them run off on a mimeograph machine, and so they never got around to doing it. Thus I never had the privilege of being “leafleted” at Harvard. It seemed to me that sort of antagonism only lasted for a very short period of time and diminished fast. There was no longer any strong personal animosity after that. Maybe it was the general toning down of things in the country in the early 70’s, and I just benefited from the de-radicalization of the university.

More fun photos from this old post Forever Young :-) 

Richard Lowery: The War for American Universities — Manifold #17

 

Richard Lowery is a professor of finance at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, Austin. In this conversation, he describes the ideological climate of his university and the consequent negative effects on undergraduate education and freedom of expression on campus. 

Steve and Richard discuss: 

0:00 Richard Lowery's academic and political background  

9:01 Campus environment for academics and faculty members 

12:19 Cultural and political dynamics at academic institutions 

23:04 How students experience campus culture and political influences 

32:13 Public awareness and interest in campus culture 

35:50 What happened to the Liberty Institute at UT Austin 

53:44 Donor influence 

1:00:55 STEM professors: keep quiet, or else 

1:08:25 Lowery on the future of US universities 

Transcript

Links: 

Richard Lowery at UT Austin: 

https://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/faculty-and-research/faculty-directory/james-lowery/

National Review coverage: 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-brave-prof-fights-the-woke-faculty-at-university-of-texas/

 

Academic Freedom in Crisis: 

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2021/04/academic-freedom-in-crisis-punishment.html

Decline of the American Empire: Afghan edition (stay tuned for more)

There are photos and video to remind us of the ignominious US withdrawal from S. Vietnam after twenty years of conflict and millions of deaths.

Over the July 4th weekend, the US military abandoned Bagram airforce base in Afghanistan, without even informing the Afghan commander and his troops. 

Conveniently for our warmongering neocon "nation-building" interventionist elites, there are (as yet) no photos of this pullout.

BAGRAM, Afghanistan (AP) — The U.S. left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left, Afghan military officials said. 

Afghanistan’s army showed off the sprawling air base Monday, providing a rare first glimpse of what had been the epicenter of America’s war to unseat the Taliban and hunt down the al-Qaida perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks on America. The U.S. announced Friday it had completely vacated its biggest airfield in the country in advance of a final withdrawal the Pentagon says will be completed by the end of August. 

“We (heard) some rumor that the Americans had left Bagram ... and finally by seven o’clock in the morning, we understood that it was confirmed that they had already left Bagram,” Gen. Mir Asadullah Kohistani, Bagram’s new commander said. ...

I wrote the following (2017) in Remarks on the Decline of American Empire:

1. US foreign policy over the last decades has been disastrous -- trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended on Middle Eastern wars, culminating in utter defeat. This defeat is still not acknowledged among most of the media or what passes for intelligentsia in academia and policy circles, but defeat it is. Iran now exerts significant control over Iraq and a swath of land running from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. None of the goals of our costly intervention have been achieved. We are exhausted morally, financially, and militarily, and still have not fully extricated ourselves from a useless morass. George W. Bush should go down in history as the worst US President of the modern era. 

2. We are fortunate that the fracking revolution may lead to US independence from Middle Eastern energy. But policy elites have to fully recognize this possibility and pivot our strategy to reflect the decreased importance of the region. The fracking revolution is a consequence of basic research from decades ago (including investment from the Department of Energy) and the work of private sector innovators and risk-takers. 

3. US budget deficits are a ticking time bomb, which cripple investment in basic infrastructure and also in research that creates strategically important new technologies like AI. US research spending has been roughly flat in inflation adjusted dollars over the last 20 years, declining as a fraction of GDP. 

4. Divisive identity politics and demographic trends in the US will continue to undermine political cohesion and overall effectiveness of our institutions. ("Civilizational decline," as one leading theoretical physicist observed to me recently, remarking on our current inability to take on big science projects.) 

5. The Chinese have almost entirely closed the technology gap with the West, and dominate important areas of manufacturing. It seems very likely that their economy will eventually become significantly larger than the US economy. This is the world that strategists have to prepare for. Wars involving religious fanatics in unimportant regions of the world should not distract us from a possible future conflict with a peer competitor that threatens to match or exceed our economic, technological, and even military capability.

If you are young and naive and still believe that we can mostly trust our media and government, watch these videos for a dose of reality.

[ The video embedded above was a documentary about Julian Assange and Wikileaks on the DW channel, which I had queued to show the Collateral Murder video. It included an interview with the US soldier who saved one of the children in the rescue van that was hit with 30mm Apache fire. Inexplicably, DW has now removed the video from their channel. Click through to YouTube below for the content. ]

Some things never change. Recall the personal sacrifices made by people like Daniel Ellsberg to reveal the truth about the Vietnam war. Today it is Julian Assange...

Note Added: While it was easy to predict this outcome in 2017, it wasn't much harder to call it in 2011. See this piece from The Onion:

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN—In what officials said was the "only way" to move on from what has become a "sad and unpleasant" situation, all 100,000 U.S. military and intelligence personnel crept out of their barracks in the dead of night Sunday and quietly slipped out of Afghanistan. 

U.S. commanders explained their sudden pullout in a short, handwritten note left behind at Bagram Airfield, their largest base of operations in the country. 

"By the time you read this, we will be gone," the note to the nation of Afghanistan read in part. "We regret any pain this may cause you, but this was something we needed to do. We couldn't go on like this forever." 

"We still care about you very much, but, in the end, we feel this is for the best," the note continued. "Please, just know that we are truly sorry and that we wish you all the greatest of happiness in the future." 

... After reportedly taking a "long look in the mirror" last week, senior defense officials came to the conclusion that they had "wasted a decade of [their] lives" with Afghanistan ...

Six Ways From Sunday: Tucker vs NSA

 

Chuck Schumer: You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday to get back at you.

 

Tucker Carlson has potential as a politician -- there is at least a small chance that someday he'll be POTUS. The intelligence services are, I am sure, very interested in any kompromat they can acquire on him for future use. You mean foreign intel services? No, I mean our intel services :-(

Clarification, from comments: 

The post is not primarily about Tucker. It's about intel services spying on American citizens. 

Most importantly, Tucker's story is credible: some whistleblower saw intercepted Tucker emails and contacted him to let him know he is under surveillance. But as anyone paying attention knows, we are ALL under surveillance due to "bulk collection" revealed many years ago, e.g., by Snowden. The Rogers saga and FISC report show that this bulk-collected data is not very well protected from intel agency types who want to have a peek at it...  

Re: bulk collection, non-denial denials ("not an intelligence target of the Agency" ha ha), see

Wikipedia: According to a report in The Washington Post in July 2014, relying on information furnished by Snowden, 90% of those placed under surveillance in the U.S. are ordinary Americans, and are not the intended targets. The newspaper said it had examined documents including emails, message texts, and online accounts, that support the claim.

See Twilight Struggles in a Wilderness of Mirrors: Admiral Mike Rogers, the NSA, and Obama-era Political Spying.

Below is a Rogers timeline covering illegal spying using NSA data. This illegal use of data is a matter of record -- undisputed, but also largely unreported. The FISC (FISA court) report on this illegal use of data appeared in April 2017; the author is Rosemary Collyer, the head FISA judge. The report was originally classified Top Secret but was later declassified and released with redactions. Collyer uses the phrase "institutional lack of candor" when referring to behavior of federal agencies in their dealings with FISC over this issue. ... 

The court learned in October 2016 that analysts ... were conducting prohibited database searches “with much greater frequency than had previously been disclosed to the court.” The forbidden queries were searches of Upstream Data using US-person identifiers. The report makes clear that as of early 2017 NSA Inspector General did not even have a good handle on all the ways that improper queries could be made to the system. ... 

March 2016 – NSA Director Rogers becomes aware of improper access to raw FISA data. 

April 2016 – Rogers orders the NSA compliance officer to run a full audit on 702 NSA compliance. 

April 18 2016 – Rogers shuts down FBI/NSD contractor access to the FISA Search System. 

Mid-October 2016 – DNI Clapper submits a recommendation to the White House that Director Rogers be removed from the NSA. 

October 20 2016 – Rogers is briefed by the NSA compliance officer on the Section 702 NSA compliance audit and “About” query violations. 

October 21 2016 – Rogers shuts down all “About" query activity. Rogers reports the activity to DOJ and prepares to go before the FISA Court. 

October 21 2016 – DOJ & FBI seek and receive a Title I FISA probable cause order authorizing electronic surveillance on Carter Page from the FISC. At this point, the FISA Court is unaware of the Section 702 violations. 

October 24 2016 – Rogers verbally informs the FISA Court of Section 702(17) violations. 

October 26 2016 – Rogers formally informs the FISA Court of 702(17) violations in writing. 

November 17 2016 (morning) – Rogers travels to meet President-Elect Trump and his Transition Team in Trump Tower. Rogers does not inform DNI James Clapper. 

November 17 2016 (evening) – Trump Transition Team announces they are moving all transition activity to Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey.

I was recently in a Zoom meeting on geopolitics that included Admiral Rogers. I wanted to ask him privately about the above. Perhaps someday I'll get the chance.

 

Caption: NSA Director Rogers describes to Congress how little privacy Americans have from government surveillance. 

Alternate Caption: NSA Director Rogers tells Congress how much legal oversight remains over the activities of intel services.

Let The Bodies Pile High In Their Thousands (Boris Johnson)

In the UK:

Recording a conversation in secret is not a criminal offence and is not prohibited. As long as the recording is for personal use you don’t need to obtain consent or let the other person know.

The security man in the foyer of No 10 Downing Street asks that you turn off your phone and deposit it in a wooden cubby shelf built into the wall. I sometimes wondered what the odds were that someone might walk out with my phone -- a disaster, obviously.

But it is not difficult to keep your phone as close attention is not paid. (Or, one could enter with more than one phone.) I'm not saying I have ever disobeyed the rules but I know that it is possible. 

Of course the No 10 staffers all have their phones, which are necessary for their work throughout the day. Thus every meeting at the heart of British government is in danger of being surreptitiously but legally recorded.

Dominic Cummings 'has audio recordings of key government conversations', ally claims (Daily Mail) 

Dominic Cummings 'has audio recordings of key government conversations' and 'can back up a lot of his claims', ally of the former chief adviser says. 

Dominic Cummings kept audio recordings of key conversations, an ally claims Former chief adviser is locked in an explosive war of words with Boris Johnson. 

Whitehall source said officials did not know extent of material Mr Cummings has. 

Dominic Cummings kept audio recordings of key conversations in government, an ally claimed last night. The former chief adviser is locked in an explosive war of words with Boris Johnson after Downing Street accused him of a string of damaging leaks. 

No 10 attempted to rubbish his claims on Friday night, saying it was not true that the Prime Minister had discussed ending a leak inquiry after a friend of his fiance Carrie Symonds was identified as the likely suspect. But an ally of Mr Cummings said the PM's former chief adviser had taken a treasure trove of material with him when he left Downing Street last year, including audio recordings of discussions with senior ministers and officials. 

'Dom has stuff on tape,' the ally said. 'They are mad to pick a fight with him because he will be able to back up a lot of his claims.

Dom is an admirer of Bismarck. Never underestimate him.

"With a gentleman I am always a gentleman and a half, and when I have to do with a pirate, I try to be a pirate and a half."

Tories scramble to defend Johnson: Politics Weekly podcast (Guardian)

Note the media have no idea what is really going on, as usual.

The Post-American World: Crooke, Escobar, Blumenthal, and Marandi

 

Even if you disagree violently with the viewpoints expressed in this discussion, it will inform you as to how the rest of the world thinks about the decline of US empire. 

The group is very diverse: a former UK diplomat, an Iranian professor educated in the West but now at University of Tehran, a progressive author and journalist (son of Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal) who spent 5 years reporting from Israel, and a Brazilian geopolitical analyst who writes for Asia Times (if I recall correctly, lives in Thailand).

Thirty years ago, the United States dominated the world politically, economically, and scientifically. But today? 

Watch this in-depth discussion with distinguished guests: 

Alastair Crooke - Former British Diplomat, Founder and Director of the Conflicts Forum 

Pepe Escobar - Brazilian Political Analyst and Author 

Max Blumenthal - American Journalist and Author from Grayzone 

Chaired by Dr. Mohammad Marandi - Professor at University of Tehran

See also two Escobar articles linked here. Related: Foreign Observers of US Empire.  

Spengler (Asia Times): American Democracy died on Capitol Hill

Note although this appears in the Asia Times column Spengler, the byline is Paul Muir, not David Goldman.

American democracy died on Capitol Hill 

No Russian cyberspooks, no Chinese spies, no jihadi terrorists – no external enemies of any kind could have brought as much harm to the United States as its own self-inflicted wounds. 

I spent last evening taking calls from friends around the world, including a senior diplomat of an American ally who asked me what I thought of the first evacuation of Capitol Hill since the British invaded in 1812. “I’m horrified,” I said. “So is the entire free world,” the diplomat replied. 

There are belly-laughs in Beijing this morning. The Chinese government daily Global Times taunted: 

... The world is watching ... the country that they used to admire descend into a huge mess. Chinese observers said this is a “Waterloo to US international image,” and the US has totally lost legitimacy and qualification to interfere in other countries’ domestic affairs with the excuse of “democracy” in the future.  

[[ When protestors in HK occupied their legislature, US propaganda hailed it as a victory for democracy... when the same thing happens here it is declared domestic terrorism. ]]

It’s actually worse than the Global Times editors think. 

If it were only a matter of Trump’s misbehavior, this disaster would be survivable. The trouble is that the popular belief in a vast and nefarious conspiracy has a foundation in fact: Starting before Trump’s term in office his political opponents abused the surveillance powers of the intelligence community to concoct a black legend of Russian collusion on the part of his campaign. The mainstream media, staffed overwhelmingly by Trump’s enemies, slavishly repeated this black legend until large parts of the population refused to believe anything it read in the newspapers or saw on television. 

The leadership of the Democratic Party, its allied media, and the Bush-Romney wing of the Republican Party decided to play dirty to expunge an obstreperous, incalculable outsider from the political system. And in doing so, this combination, America’s establishment, destroyed public trust in the Congress and the media. It’s no surprise that two out of five Americans now believe that a vast conspiracy rigged the 2020 presidential elections. 

The spectacle of a serving president inciting a mob against the US Congress to stop the certification of his successor held the world in morbid fascination. But the biggest problem isn’t Trump’s misbehavior, egregious as it is, but the eruption of popular rancor against the constitutional system that has made America a model of governance for the world. Leftist mobs last spring burned police stations and destroyed shopping districts in a rampage against supposed systemic racism, and Trump supporters desecrated the Holy of Holies of American democracy, the chamber of the United States Senate. 

Behind the minority of violent actors is a majority that believes the system is rigged against them – whoever “them” might be. The Democrats say that the system is rigged against African-Americans, women, and other minorities, and the Republicans say that a global elite has rigged the system against middle-income Americans. “Rigged elections” has the same resonance as “systemic racism.” These by-words imply that disagreement is prima facie proof of villainy: To deny that there is systemic racism is to be a racist, and to deny that elections are rigged is evidence of complicity in a vast plot. 

A quarter of Americans believe that Covid-19 was a planned conspiracy of one kind or another, according to the Pew Survey; just under half of Americans with a high school education or less believe this. One out of three believes that a “deep state” is trying to undermine Trump. I reject the first and believe the second: my colleagues at Asia Times and I have regular access to virologists in a number of countries with scientific credentials and no political agenda to pursue, and can sift scientific evidence and opinion. By contrast, I know personally enough of the actors in the so-called “deep state” to conclude that they are acting in concert to wreck the Trump Administration. I also know many of the writers who have exposed the “deep state,” including Andrew McCarthy and Lee Smith, to trust their bona fides. I denounced this conspiracy repeatedly in these pages, most recently in an essay entitled “The Treason of the Spooks” (Dec. 4, 2020). For details, see Andrew McCarthy’s 2019 book Ball of Collusion, which I reviewed in Asia Times, or Lee Smith’s The Plot against the President. 

Sometimes there is a conspiracy and sometimes there isn’t. But Trump’s political supporters, bombarded daily by fake news about Russian collusion and other alleged misbehavior, have come to distrust any criticism of their president. 

If Trump was right that the whole impeachment business was an extra-legal conspiracy on the part of his enemies, why shouldn’t they believe that the election was rigged? This is a lose-lose proposition. Assume that Trump is right, and the election was rigged. In that case the United States has become a banana republic and American democracy a twisted joke. Assume that he is wrong, and that nonetheless – as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) intoned to justify his refusal to accept the election outcome – 39% of Americans nonetheless believe that election has rigged, because their president told them it was rigged. In that case the public trust that makes democracy possible has collapsed. The people, as Bertolt Brecht observed after demonstrations against the Soviet puppet government in East Germany, have lost the confidence of the government, and the simplest course of action would be for the government to dissolve and for the people to elect a new one. 

... Americans are frightened for their future, with good reason. They see enormous rewards accrue to a handful of tech companies, and stagnation and decay in large parts of the rest of the country. Donald Trump gave them a frisson of hope, and the Establishment reaction against Trump confirms the popular suspicion that a malevolent global elite has seized control of their country. Trump shamefully exploited this suspicion to direct a popular storm against the Congress. 

The US is living off borrowing from the rest of the world. Its net international investment position fell by about $12 trillion during the past 10 years. And the federal deficit is now 15% of gross domestic product, the highest since World War II. What can’t go on forever, won’t (in the late Herb Stein’s famous formulation).

YouGov on storming of capitol

I misread the last line of this when I first saw it... I thought 56% of all voters polled believed the election was stolen. Probably what it actually says is that 56% of people who believe the election was stolen think storming the capitol is OK.

These results suggest 30-40% of all voters think the election was stolen -- i.e., roughly 2x the number who approve of the storming:  0.21 / 0.56 ~ 38%

YouGov poll of 1,397 registered voters.

Bruno Maçães on the election and Trump 2024

 

Post-election observations from Bruno Maçães. 

TrumpTV? Spectacle over Substance in 21st century American politics? Ivanka 2024? The Meme Industrial Complex?

If Bruno is correct the best we can hope for in the US is managed decline -- which is at least better than unmanaged decline!

More Bruno.

Polls, Election Predictions, Political Correctness, Bounded Cognition (2020 Edition!)

Some analysis of the crap polling and poor election prediction leading up to Nov 2020. See earlier post (and comments): Election 2020: quant analysis of new party registrations vs actual votes, where I wrote (Oct 14)

I think we should ascribe very high uncertainty to polling results in this election, for a number of reasons including the shy Trump voter effect as well as the sampling corrections applied which depend heavily on assumptions about likely turnout. ... 

This is an unusual election for a number of reasons so it's quite hard to call the outcome. There's also a good chance the results on election night will be heavily contested.

Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London.

UnHerd: ... Far from learning from the mistakes of 2016, the polling industry seemed to have got things worse. Whether conducted by private or public firms, at the national or local, presidential or senatorial, levels, polls were off by wide margins. The Five Thirty-Eight final poll of polls put Biden ahead by 8.4 points, but the actual difference in popular vote is likely to be closer to 3-4 points. In some close state races, the error was even greater. 

Why did they get it so wrong? Pollsters typically receive low response rates to calls, which leads them to undercount key demographics. To get around this, they typically weight for key categories like race, education or gender. If they get too few Latinos or whites without degrees, they adjust their numbers to match the actual electorate. But most attitudes vary far more within a group like university graduates, than between graduates and non-graduates. So even if you have the correct share of graduates and non-graduates, you might be selecting the more liberal-minded among them. 

For example, in the 2019 American National Election Study pilot survey, education level predicts less than 1% of the variation in whether a white person voted for Trump in 2016. By contrast, their feelings towards illegal immigrants on a 0-100 thermometer predicts over 30% of the variation. Moreover, immigration views pick out Trump from Clinton voters better within the university-educated white population than among high school-educated whites. Unless pollsters weight for attitudes and psychology – which is tricky because these positions can be caused by candidate support – they miss much of the action. 

Looking at this election’s errors — which seems to have been concentrated among white college graduates — I wonder if political correctness lies at the heart of the problem. 

... According to a Pew survey on October 9, Trump was leading Biden by 21 points among white non-graduates but trailing him by 26 points among white graduates. Likewise, a Politico/ABC poll on October 11 found that ‘Trump leads by 26 points among white voters without four-year college degrees, but Biden holds a 31-point lead with white college graduates.’ The exit polls, however, show that Trump ran even among white college graduates 49-49, and even had an edge among white female graduates of 50-49! This puts pre-election surveys out by a whopping 26-31 points among white graduates. By contrast, among whites without degrees, the actual tilt in the election was 64-35, a 29-point gap, which the polls basically got right.

See also this excellent podcast interview with Kaufmann: Shy Trump Voters And The Blue Wave That Wasn’t 

Bonus (if you dare): this other podcast from the Federalist: How Serious Is The 2020 Election Fraud?

Added: ‘Shy Trump Voters’ Re-Emerge as Explanation for Pollsters’ Miss

Bloomberg: ... “Shy Trump voters are only part of the equation. The other part is poll deniers,” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster. “Trump spent the last four years beating the crap out of polls, telling people they were fake, and a big proportion of his supporters just said, ‘I’m not participating.’” 

In a survey conducted after Nov. 3, Newhouse found that 19% of people who voted for Trump had kept their support secret from most of their friends. And it’s not that they were on the fence: They gave Trump a 100% approval rating and most said they made up their minds before Labor Day. 

Suburbanites, moderates and college-educated voters — especially women — were more likely to report that they had been ostracized or blocked on social media for their support of Trump. ... 

... University of Arkansas economist Andy Brownback conducted experiments in 2016 that allowed respondents to hide their support for Trump in a list of statements that could be statistically reconstructed. He found people who lived in counties that voted for Clinton were less likely to explicitly state they agreed with Trump. 

“I get a little frustrated with the dismissiveness of social desirability bias among pollsters,” said “I just don’t see a reason you could say this is a total non-issue, especially when one candidate has proven so difficult to poll.”

Election 2020: quant analysis of new party registrations vs actual votes

I think we should ascribe very high uncertainty to polling results in this election, for a number of reasons including the shy Trump voter effect as well as the sampling corrections applied which depend heavily on assumptions about likely turnout. 

Graphs below are from a JP Morgan quant analysis of changes in number of registered voters by party and state, and the correlation with actual votes in subsequent election. Of course it is possible that negative covid impact has largely counteracted the effect discussed below (which is an integrated effect over the last 4 years) -- i.e., Trump was in a strong position at the beginning of 2020 but has declined since then. 

This is an unusual election for a number of reasons so it's quite hard to call the outcome. There's also a good chance the results on election night will be heavily contested.

The author of this analysis is Marko Kolanovic, Global Head of Macro Quantitative and Derivatives Strategy at J.P. Morgan. He graduated from New York University with a PhD in theoretical high-energy physics.

Anyone with high conviction about the election is welcome to post their analysis in the comments.

Orwell: 1944, 1984, and Today

George Orwell 1944 Letter foreshadows 1984, and today:

... Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, i.e. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving ... 

... intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side.

I am sure any reader can provide examples of the following from the "news" or academia or even from a national lab:

there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted  

the exact sciences are endangered  

two and two could become five

dictatorial methods ... systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side.

Of course, there is nothing new under the sun. It takes only a generation for costly lessons to be entirely forgotten...

Wikipedia: Trofim Denisovich Lysenko ...Soviet agronomist and biologist. Lysenko was a strong proponent of soft inheritance and rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of pseudoscientific ideas termed Lysenkoism.[1][2] In 1940, Lysenko became director of the Institute of Genetics within the USSR's Academy of Sciences, and he used his political influence and power to suppress dissenting opinions and discredit, marginalize, and imprison his critics, elevating his anti-Mendelian theories to state-sanctioned doctrine. 

Soviet scientists who refused to renounce genetics were dismissed from their posts and left destitute. Hundreds if not thousands of others were imprisoned. Several were sentenced to death as enemies of the state, including the botanist Nikolai Vavilov. Scientific dissent from Lysenko's theories of environmentally acquired inheritance was formally outlawed in the Soviet Union in 1948. As a result of Lysenkoism and forced collectivization, 15-30 million Soviet and Chinese citizens starved to death in the Holodomor and the Great Chinese Famine. ...

 

In 1964, physicist Andrei Sakharov spoke out against Lysenko in the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR: "He is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists."

Will Trump Pardon Obama?

I get that I'm supposed to hate this lady and her boss, but can someone do me a favor by answering the questions she posed?

1) Why did the Obama administration spy on members of the Trump campaign, during and after the campaign?

2) Why was General Michael Flynn unmasked by Obama's chief of staff, Joe Biden, Susan Rice, and others?

3) Why was Flynn's identity leaked to the press (a felony)?

4) Why did AG Sally Yates (DOJ) first learn about the FBI investigation of Flynn's communication with the Russian Ambassador from a conversation with Obama in the Oval Office?

5) Why did James Clapper, John Brennan, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice privately admit under oath (Congressional testimony, only declassified recently) that they had no evidence of collusion, while saying the opposite in public? (2017-2019)

If you have any pretensions to rationalism (or even to being moderately well-informed), please score your understanding, over time, of this scandal which has unfolded since 2016. My observations are well documented since the beginning.

In addition to items #4 and #5 above, which only became public through recent declassification, the other new fact is: On January 4 (day before the White House meeting which included Obama, Biden, Comey, Yates, and Rice, and which was memorialized by Rice in the infamous CYA email to herself weeks later), FBI field agents working on the Flynn investigation, who had access to the Dec 29 call with Kislyak, recommended closing the case on Flynn due to what they referred to as absence of derogatory information. Of course, as a result of the January 5 White House meeting, the case was NOT closed and the rest is history (like Watergate, only worse).

None of this information is disputed, but you won't hear much about it from NYT, WaPo, CNN, etc. But see WSJ: here and here.

Added: I wrote the post Lies and Admissions: Spygate in light of the IG FISA report in December 2019, after the DOJ Inspector General's report on FISA abuse became public. Media coverage of its content was extremely misleading (details at the link). The 3+ year timeline I described (reproduced below) has now reached its endpoint due to the recent (May 2020) declassifications.

Almost three years of hard work to bring the truth to light.

There was no spying [ WE STARTED HERE 2016 ]

Okay, there was spying, but it was all legal

Some illegal things happened, but by mistake

A few bad apples did the illegal things [ WE ARE HERE 12/2019 ]

Illegal spying was politically motivated and ordered from the top

Obama knew ???  [ BEYOND DOUBT NOW 5/2020 ]

No telling how far down the above list we will get, but:

Lisa Page (text to Peter Strzok 9/2/2016): POTUS wants to know everything we’re doing.

Scott Adams on Trump, and his book Loserthink – Manifold Podcast #47

Corey and Steve talk to Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert and author of Loserthink. Steve reviews some of Scott's predictions, including of Trump’s 2016 victory. Scott (who once semi-humorously described himself as “left of Bernie”) describes what he describes as Trump's unique "skill stack". Scott highlights Trump's grasp of the role of psychology in economics, and maintains that honesty requires admitting that we do not know whether many of Trump’s policies are good or bad. Scott explains why he thinks it is mistaken to assume leaders are irrational.

Transcript

Scott Adams (Blog and Podcast)

Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

Kihlstrom J. F. (1997). Hypnosis, memory and amnesia. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 352(1362), 1727–1732. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1997.0155

Hypnosis and Memory (Blog Post)


man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various.

In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.

Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.

Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.

Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.

COVID-19: CBA, CFR, Open Borders

Some observations related to COVID-19.

1. Cost-Benefit Analysis: I don't favor this kind of purely economic analysis when human lives are at stake, but at the crudest level we are talking about US policy choices (i.e., lockdown vs permissive sweep) that could lead to of order a million more or fewer deaths. EPA sometimes values a human life at ~$7M, which suggests that the last 10-20 years of life for an older person could be valued at ~$1M. Under these assumptions the economic value of a lockdown which saves a million lives is in the trillion dollar range. This is similar to the cost of shutting down big chunks of the economy for months. So a CBA could go either way depending on detailed assumptions.

2. Open Borders: Many areas of the world are likely to develop into reservoirs for COVID-19. When the US emerges from lockdown it will be in our interests to carefully test (and potentially quarantine) everyone entering the country. I believe Singapore already has such a regime in place, with a reported 3 hour turn around for test results at the airport!

How can we possibly exit lockdown without the kind of control that Singapore exerts? In the COVID-19 reality it is crazy for the US not to impose strict control over the southern border. This will impact the presidential campaign in interesting ways. I don't think it will be tenable for a candidate to tell the virus-weary citizenry that it is impossible to control entry into the country. Once the infrastructure is built to effectively control our borders, it will be difficult to dismantle.

3. Case Fatality Rate: What is the lower bound on CFR (or more precisely, IFR = Infected Fatality Rate)? I have been working under the assumption that about 1% of infected individuals will die from COVID-19, assuming access to good medical care. (IIRC the value from S. Korea data is just below 1%.) I think there is a factor of 2-3 uncertainty in this number, so it could be as low as 0.5 or even 0.3%. Lower numbers are typically justified by invoking many asymptomatic, undetected cases in the population. However, large numbers of undetected infections also imply very rapid spread of the disease.

Rapid spread (e.g., in the absence of a rigorous lockdown) would lead to an overloaded medical system, with a resulting IFR which could be several times higher than the value that applies under good conditions -- so 0.3% could become 1%. In a scenario in which the virus sweeps through most of the population in a relatively short time (e.g., 3-6 months), an overall death rate of 1% times, e.g., 50-70% of the population is still a reasonable estimate. For the USA this would be at least 1.5 million people.

Related posts on COVID-19.

Hospitals in NYC already under stress: WSJ , NYT


Note Added: I've yet to see any detailed calculations for an alternative plan which tries to isolate the most vulnerable while allowing the economy to continue to function. Could it work?

1. Define the vulnerable population: e.g., people over 65 or with pre-existing conditions. Let's say this is 15% of the total population.

2. Try to isolate these people as much as possible. Give them free accommodation in the now empty hotels and college dormitories, on military bases and in makeshift shelters. Guarantee them free food delivery and regular medical checkups in these new locations. Within these locations practice very good internal isolation, as on the Princess cruise ship: isolate each person in their room, require the wearing of (inexpensive; not N95) masks when they emerge for activities, etc. Use the National Guard and military to execute the strategy.

Alternatively, we could leave the vulnerable population in place where they are now and move out any younger people (e.g., family members) they live with into temporary housing, or even confine the younger people in place if they consent to isolation in order to help their elders. The shelter in place order only applies to 65+ instead of the whole population!

It seems that this could be less expensive than the lockdown currently in place.

Uber and Lyft drivers wearing gloves and masks, spraying down their cars periodically, could be used as people movers or for food delivery. Instead of shutting down restaurants, the government could employ them to produce the meals for the sequestered people... The government just has to pay Uber and Lyft through their existing platform. Beats mailing checks to the entire population!

Adam Dynes on Noisy Retrospection: The Effect of Party Control on Policy Outcomes - Manifold #35

Steve and Corey talk to Adam Dynes of Brigham Young University about whether voting has an effect on policy outcomes. Adam’s work finds that control of state legislatures or governorships does not have an observable effect on macroscopic variables such as crime rates, the economy, etc. Possible explanations: parties push essentially the same policies, politicians don't keep promises, monied interest control everything. Are voting decisions just noisy mood affiliation? Perhaps time is better spent obsessing about sports teams, which at least generates pleasure.

1:22 - What is retrospective voting?
5:43 - Research findings on retrospective voting
14:02 - Uniparty/Monied interests?
17:23 - Martin Gilens' research
23:10 - Are people just voting based on noise or mood affiliation?
27:13 - Bryan Caplan - Myth of the Rational Voter
34:35 - Is time better spent obsessing about sports teams, which at least generates pleasure?
39:42 - After the fall of Athens, was democracy commonly referred to as irrational mob rule?
48:22 - Does this research translate to the national level?
52:19 - Super Nerdy Stuff: Statistical Analysis, Reproducibility & Null Results
56:40 - Reactions to the results

Transcript

Adam Dynes (Personal Website)

Adam Dynes (Faculty Profile)

Noisy Retrospection: The Effect of Party Control on Policy Outcomes

Related: 2016 blog post on Martin Gilens' work: American and Chinese Oligarchies.


man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various.

In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.

Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.

Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.

Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.

Manifold #27 Bonus Content: Left and Right Student Bloggers at MSU

This is bonus content related to our interview with Professor Andrew Hartman, The Culture Wars Then and Now (Manifold Podcast #27).

Steve and Corey talk about political polarization and bias on campus with student editors of MSU’s dueling political blogs. The left-leaning students argue that the media has blown controversies over student politics out of proportion, while the conservative writers maintain that they do not feel comfortable expressing their views in many classes. Corey asks how beneficial is it to be white in America? Is the University as bastion of open debate no longer viable, especially in the current economic environment?

Transcript.