Category: Analysis

Anything that I have tested empirically, or explain with detailed calculations, or just generally bother to get all the facts straight.

Post #2024: Have Republicans finally jumped the shark/turned the corner/gotten fed up?

 

An amazing thing happened over the weekend.  Or, rather, didn’t happen.

Recall the “13,000 illegal immigrant murderers” story that got a flurry of press coverage last Friday.  Including, of course, prominent mention by the Republican candidate for President.

Post #2022: 13,000 murderers … something something something … illegal immigrants? It’s our theme for the coming week.

It now appears that Republicans have stopped citing that number, merely because it’s total bullshit.  This seems like a new development in the campaign, i.e., letting go of something that juicy, just because they had no idea what they were talking about.

Contrast that to the theme from just two weeks back, Haitians Eating Pets.

There, not only did the Republican ticket refuse to quit spreading that lie, they went into a tizzy over being “fact-checked” about it, AND the Republican VP candidate (whatever his name is*) went so far as to admit that even if it isn’t true, they were justified in exploiting the lie for political gain because …  something something something lamestream media fake news … something.

* JD Vance (no periods), James David Vance, James David Hamel, James Donald Bowman.  reference.

Two weeks ago, they wouldn’t back off that lie despite pleas from the Republican Governor of Ohio, and the Republican mayor of the city in question. Heck, even after tacitly admitting that it was not true, they justified continuing to use it.

But now, is it possible that the Party of Trump has finally hit its limit on folks makin’ shit up, just to get people riled up?

A bifurcated distribution

The polling pretty clearly shows that about half the population is die-hard pro-Trumpers.  No amount of (e.g.) messy divorces, extramarital affairs, sexual assaults, bankruptcies, fraud convictions, felony convictions, a private no-witnesses tête-à-tête with Putin, praise for dictators, praise of pro-Nazi groups, incoherent speeches, flagrant lies, riots at the Capitol aimed at interrupting the peaceful transfer of power, threats to jail political opponents, and just plain ordinary nastiness will make them reconsider their choice.

I sat down just now to figure out how many of the Ten Commandments Trump routinely has broken.  Lie?  Check.  Steal?  Check.  Adultery?  Oh yeah.  Then I realized that if he had adhered to the Fourth Commandment (Sabbath), he wouldn’t have been out on a golf course two Sundays ago, making himself a potential target.  In any case, giving him the benefit of the doubt, he does not routinely appear to break six out of the ten.  I can only assume that above-average performance is why he’s such a favorite among self-described Christian fundamentalists.  That, and his crystal-clear stance on abortion, whatever it is this week.

 

Instead, they just lap that up.  No amount of hate-centered chaos is too much. Near as I can tell, as far as mainstream Republicans are concerned.

For example, most recently, when Trump asserted that Harris was born mentally retarded, Republicans cheered.  (Some?) Apparently, that’s exactly the sort of useful political debate that mainstream Republicans long to hear.  Claim that your political opponent rode the short bus, and you’ll get (some) cheers from a mainstream Republican audience.

This, despite some obvious evidence that if anybody has cognitive problems, it’s — wait, is that a fly in here? — the old fat guy, not his opponent.

So, to current Republicans, this is self-evidently funny:

But this stuff?  Maybe not so much.

 

There seem to be some Republicans who, for whatever reason, react negatively to Trump’s habit of (e.g.) pissing on our war dead, on the Congressional Medal of Honor, and on the democracies that are our long-term allies in maintaining international order.

Or just the general atmosphere of lies, hate, and puerile name-calling that is the core of the Trump campaign.  All of which they were willing to overlook … until some some red line was crossed.

Maybe for some, it was shoving an Arlington National Cemetery employee out of the way so that the Candidate could be filmed, grinning and thumbs-up, standing by the graves of recently deceased U.S. soldiers, to make a campaign ad.

Obviously, that wasn’t objectionable to the core of the Republican party.  But, plausibly, a few were mildly put off by that.

In any case, here’s why I think Republican election strategy has finally changed.

The core of the Republican Party is going to vote for Trump no matter what.  No matter how fundamentally un-American or anti-democracy his behavior is.

But now, as the election nears, every red line he crosses, he manages to alienate just a few more self-described Republicans.  Who then join the long list of prominent Republicans who say they aren’t going to vote for him.

They (Republicans) may have finally reached the point where the over-the-top bullshit is counterproductive.  As fun as it may be, it doesn’t get Trump any additional votes from his base.  Instead, each new outrage now seems to be chipping loose just a few more rock-ribbed Republicans who have (finally) decided that enough is enough.

And so, now that they have maxed out the gains from this strategy of generating outrage at every possible opportunity, and the truth be damned, it’s time to switch to pretending that the Trump candidacy is sane, normal, typical Republican fare.

So that’s what I expect to see, for the last month of the election.  I expect to see a concerted effort to portray the Republican candidate as a sound and serious proponent of democracy and the American Way.  Contrary to all existing evidence to the contrary.

They have to give Republicans who are on the fence some degree of plausible deniability for all the un-American positions and actions their candidate has taken so far.  Plus the tacky grifts.  They need to smother the voices of the many prominent Republicans who have said they aren’t supporting Trump.

So, my prediction is for a return to pseudo-sanity for the Republican presidential campaign.  A push to remake Trump as a Statesman.  Just for the next month.  Just enough to make those on the fence forget the recent past.

I guess we’ll see what happens next.

Post #2022: 13,000 murderers … something something something … illegal immigrants? It’s our theme for the coming week.

 

Today there’s a big splash in the news, that (something-something-something) illegal immigrants have 13,000 convicted of homicide among them.  This, based on what Rep. Gonzales posted on Twitter.  You can see images of the original ICE letter.

That immediately struck me as odd.  Number-wise.  Very odd.  For a few reasons.

First, that’s a lot.

The population that is drawn from is the roughly 7 million cases on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement “non-detained docket”.  That is, persons pending (in effect) their deportation trial or hearing, that are not being held in custody, but instead have been sent out into the community while they await trial.

So, rough cut, that 13,000 works out to a rate of about 185/100,000 population.  Where the population at issue is illegal immigrants who have are living in the community while awaiting their deportation trial.

Compare that to the annual homicide rate in the U.S., which works out to be about 6/100,000.  Even then, only about half of homicide cases are ever resolved (i.e., somebody is convicted).  So the number of persons convicted of homicide in the U.S. works out to be about 3/100,000.  Restrict that to adults, and you could stretch that to 4/100,000 adults per year.

So the apparent rate of homicide conviction (or maybe just being accused of homicide) in this docket population appears to be about 50 times higher than I would have expected.

But …

Multiply by 3 for the high Latin America homicide rate.  Homicide rates are higher in the countries that account for the bulk of souther-border immigration.  So, where the U.S. runs about 6/100,000, the median for Latin America appears to be about 3 times that amount (per eyeballing Wikipedia).

Multiply by (say) 10 for the fact that this ICE number is lifetime history of having been charged with or convicted of homicide.  The U.S. homicide statistics were per year, an annual rate.  The ICE figure isn’t an annual rate.  It’s “any history of” conviction or pending charges for homicide.  But this is something akin to “ever been convicted or or charged with a homicide”, over their prior lifetime.  A fudge factor of 10 years seems at least plausible, given the ridiculously large fraction of the U.S. population that has “a criminal record”, as opposed to persons charged in any one year (reference).

And at that point, the number starts to make sense.  Those two adjustments:

  • For the higher violent crime rate in typical countries of origin.
  • For “any criminal record” versus “convicted last year”.

And those two factors take you from 3/100,000/year homicide convictions in the U.S., to an expected value of about (3 x 3 x 10 = ) to an expected rate of 90/100,000 with any history of homicide within a relatively young, mostly Latin-American population.

So, just assuming these are average Latin Americans, and that ICE has (belated) access their full criminal history, the ICE figures now begin to make sense.  Just those two adjustments put you in the ballpark of their 13,000 murderers (180/100,000).

But “ICE Docket” is a wild card.

What’s a docket?  That’s a list of pending ICE court cases.  Where those cases are about whether or not to deport the person.

Now it all comes together.  I think.  Here’s my guess as to what’s going on.

First, as the original letter makes clear, if the ICE knows that an illegal immigrant in their custody has a history of serious crime, they do not let go of that person.  For sure, convicted of murder would qualify. So this 13,000 is people that the ICE found out about, after-the-fact.  How many were kept in detention, and so did not end up on this “docket”, is not known.

That factor, by itself, should have depressed the overall rate, and so does not explain why the observed rate is about twice what you would reasonably expect.

Second, it’s a good bet that “the docket” is enriched in individuals with history of serious crime, relative to other immigrants.  That is, of the 7M persons currently on the ICE “docket”, a lot of those people will have some adjudications, and will move rapidly onto and off of the docket.  By contrast, once the ICE finds out that an individual was convicted of a serious crime, that individual remains “on the docket” until that person is given a court order for deportation. And if that that person then does not obey that deportation order, they come back onto the docket and get convicted of failing to obey that court order.

What I’m saying is, it’s a good bet that those cases stay “on the docket” a lot longer than average. Which means that at any point in time, “the docket” is enriched in those cases, relative to plain-vanilla deportation hearings.

Just to drive that home, the mix of crimes on the ICE table (Twitter reference above) is oddly skewed.  rom the same data source showing 13,000 murderers, there are just 77,000 convicted of a traffic offense.  So, on the ICE docket, for every six persons convicted of a traffic offense, there’s one person who was convicted of murder.(?)

For the U.S. as a whole, by contrast, there are about 630,00 DUI convictions per year.  (Calculated from the data table in this source.)  Conversely, there appear to be about 10,000 homicide convictions per year (out of 22,000 or so homicides — the rest are unsolved.)  So each year, the U.S. as a whole has 60 DUI convictions for every homicide conviction.  Or about 10 times as many as show up among the immigrants on the ICE’s list.

So that’s a bit odd.  Whatever the underlying list is, it doesn’t appear to be a cross-section of crime.  It seems heavily skewed toward homicide.

Addendum, the next day, say no more:  As it turns out, the ICE list contains people who are literally in state and federal prison, that is, not detained by ICE.  Presumably, ICE continues to track them so that ICE can kick them out of the country when their prison term is up.  Here’s a quote from CNN reporting on this issue, quoting the Department of Homeland Security:

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a Saturday email: “The data in this letter is being misinterpreted. The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration. It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”

Summary

All this tells me is that whatever you think this 13,000-murderers figure represents, it’s not the risk of murder in a given year. 

To be clear, near as anyone can tell, the legal immigrant population is more law-abiding that average, and the illegal immigrant population is about as law-abiding (otherwise) as the U.S. native population.  This, based on analysis of data from Texas, it was just over 2.2 individuals per 100,000 population, just a bit below the U.S. average.

Source:  Cato institute

 

You could, in theory, I guess, avoid any chance of this happening by locking up everyone on the ICE docket — everyone awaiting a deportation hearing.  Change the law so that you have to lock up all 7M people who are currently on the ICE docket, but have been released back into the community.  Taking $50,000/person/year as a reasonable guess at the cost of incarceration (based on eyeballing this map), it would only cost about a third of a billion dollars per year.  Plus some large up-front cost to triple the size of the U.S. prison system, which currently incarcerates just over 2M.

To be clear, you couldn’t just lock up that 13,000.  That’s because, as noted above, their history of homicide conviction was not know at the time the ICE (briefly) held them.  (If it had been known, ICE would not have let them go.  They aren’t crazy, after all.)  At the time they were in ICE custody, you don’t know which 13,000 persons had some prior (unknown-at-the-time) homicide conviction.

So to get them all, you’d have to lock up all of them.  And good luck getting that decision past any reasonable judge, under current law.  You’d likely have to amend the laws to make that legal.

None of this matters.  Republicans have found a statistic that has really horrible optics, so they’re running with it.  Whatever it means. 

As with Haitians eating dogs, there’s no way they’re not going to flog that until their base loses interest.  I’m guessing that, as Haitians-eating-pets was the theme for last week, and 13,000 murderers is going to be the theme for the week ahead.

But passing legislation to reduce the logjam in these court cases, and get these people out of the country sooner?  I’m guessing the Dems aren’t going to be smart enough even to mention who is responsible for killing the legislation that would have helped resolve this issue, within the law.  And the Republicans who killed a seemingly bipartisan attempt to address this huge backlog of cases are certainly never going to mention that they did that.

So, we’re up for another week of macho-sounding stuff on this issue, from the Right.  But no attempts to address it.

It’s just too good a story to pass up.  Even if the people telling it have no idea what it means.  Or whether 13,000 is an unreasonably high or low number.

And, for sure, the folks flogging this are going to ignore any hard numbers on the rate of crimes committed by illegal immigrants in the U.S.  Because those numbers don’t tell the story they want to tell.

This is the way my country works now.

Post #2021: Animal-based protein supplements, digested.

 

Skim milk is too high in calories.

Just saying that … leaves me shaking my head.

Think of this as round 2, of this prior post below, that briefly profiled burgers, eggs, and beans as protein sources.  This time around, it’s off-the-shelf animal-based protein supplements. 

Less-than-meat, in a good way, is how I look at this. Continue reading Post #2021: Animal-based protein supplements, digested.

Post #2020: Reflections on my 66th birthday

 

Today is as dreary as it gets.  Cold drizzle all day long.  Might as well write something to match.

My retirement

Is not a cruise ship ride.

My retirement currently shapes up like this:

  1. I have many regrets about my life.
  2. I can’t do anything material about any of them.
  3. I’m going to die before I spend all my money.
  4. I don’t believe in an afterlife.

Suppose, for a moment, that’s the hand you’d been dealt.

What are you supposed to do with that?

So far, the only answer I’ve come up with is “live with it.”

And, thanks to an early retirement, contemplate it at length.

A well-stocked purgatory

Most retirement-related advice will have been written by or about “successful” retirees. Those who have managed to arrive at a fulfilling and meaningful golden-age promised land.

I, by contrast, would best describe my retirement as a well-stocked purgatory.

Physically, I want for nothing.

The joke being that, unfortunately, I want nothing.

To the contrary, I’ve been focusing on döstädning.  Or, at least, getting rid of enough unwanted items and junk to start approaching a state of döstädning.

Now throw in a year-long diet, on top of that.  No, scratch that.  A permanent state of diet.

For 11 straight months, I lost five pounds a month.  But this month, the weight loss stopped.  I have reached a “plateau”.  Apparently this is a near-universal phenomenon of significant weight loss, though damned if I can find any coherent explanation of it.

I’m still obese by any standard measure. I’m not losing any more weight.  And I must continue “to diet”, lest I put that weight back on.   All pain, no gain.

Apparently my body was OK with losing the beer gut, but the man-boobs have to stay?  I’m not seeing a lot of cosmic justice there.

And then there’s the whole thing Dave Barry wrote about in a column titled “Red Hot Memories”.  The propensity of your brain to bring up memories of the most cringe-worthy moments of your life.  As I age, I increasingly suffer from the ailment he described.

If I were tasked with designing purgatory, that would surely be part of the plan.

Conclusion

The weather sucks today.  Maybe I’ll go out to the garage and throw some stuff away.  Maybe I’ll buy myself a nice new sweater.

Nope, got it:  Chicken soup.  I’m gonna make a pot of chicken soup.  Then I’m going to eat some.  Then we’ll see what’s next on the agenda.

Welcome to my retirement.

Post #2018: The five prices of silver, while I can still recall them.

 

I just want to write this down before I forget it, in case I ever need to know this again.

For a silver bullion item of a given weight and purity (fineness), the following prices should occur, from lowest to highest:

Lowest:  Scrap value is what a refiner will actually pay you, to take your silver for re-melting.  It’s what you can sell silver for, if all you can sell it for is scrap.

Generic bar sell-to price is what a bullion dealer will pay for “any bar, any condition”.  If it’s a bar, of the stated weight and purity, they’ll pay that for it.

Coin and good delivery list bar sell-to price.  This is what a dealer will pay for name-brand or mint-issued coins and bars.

Spot:  The price you see quoted on the business news.  This is the price for current delivery of bulk metal of a known fineness, per troy ounce of pure silver content.  This is flanked by or maybe is one of the bid and asked price.  Doesn’t much matter as bid and asked are rarely far apart in an orderly market.

Generic bar buy-from or list price.   This is what a dealer will sell you a generic, any-issuer any-reasonable-condition bar for.

Coin and good delivery list bar buy-from price. This is what a dealer will sell you these items for.

Note that I don’t list “melt value”.  That phrase gets tossed around a lot, and a whole lot of people will show you the “melt value” of your purchase as spot price (maybe even spot asking price) times your weight of pure silver.  I don’t think that’s how it works, for selling silver as scrap (to be re-melted).  Near as I could tell, the price I’d get is the scrap price.  If all I could do is have the silver melted down.  But this fictitious “melt value” shows up often enough to be worth calling out.

As Gresham’s Law would suggest, for silver bars, dealers seemed to be one or the other, with regard to “good” bars or any bars.  Kitco (top-drawer) seemingly only deals in name-brand like-new-quality merchandise.  Buy or sell.  By contrast, those who bought generic bars sold both generic and name brand bars, at different prices.  I think that all makes sense.  Maybe.

The only practical upshot is that if a bar can be sold as a name-brand good-quality bar, it should be.  It’s worth several percent of the value of the bar.  Barring that, if it can be sold as “a bar”, instead of scrap silver, it should be.  Likewise.  And only as a last resort would you send a bar of any sort, in good condition, off to be remelted, and only receive scrap value for its weight in silver.

Conclusion.

God willing, I will never need to know this again.

Post #2016: Two Black Women Stole the Election, the re-run

 

If this is already obvious to you, just skip it.  The gist is that the current Springfield, OH kerfuffle is kind of a re-run.

Do you recall the thumb-drive-vote-fraud-two-Black-women thing?  Republicans alleged vote fraud, based on a clip of routine surveillance video in some polling place.  They were completely wrong, but The Right ruined the lives of the poll workers in that video.

And now, instead of death threats for two Black women, it’s a barrage of bomb threats (and who knows what else) for Springfield, Ohio.

But if you trace the arc of the story, these stories really run parallel, and they spring from the same root.

And that root is Republicans’ willingness to promote stories based on their “stickiness”, truth optional.  I argued this point two posts back.

What I’m saying is, the Republicans constructed or merely “amplified” these false stories because they were “sticky”. They were memorable for their target audience.  And not for any higher purpose, unless you consider lying to make a fictional point an adequate substitute for actual government policy.

Take the first one.  I mean, that just ticks all the boxes, doesn’t it?  Name your phobia.  Fear of a) computers, b) black people, and c) women.  In addition to “vote fraud”.

For the Republican base, that’s a triple-sticky story, and way too good to pass up.  I think it literally made no difference whatsoever to the Republican party whether or not that story was true.

Promulgating that particular lie ruined the lives of the poll workers involved.  Who, I am guessing, where chosen solely because they were Black women, and they made some movement over the course of the day that could plausibly be (mis)-interpreted as something nefarious passing from one to the other.

So, school’s closed in Springfield, OH due to bomb threats?  Not intrinsically different from death threats against those two poll workers.  Just not as well-targeted.

Haitians eating pets.  Again, they just could not pass that up. As discussed earlier, that’s at least a double-sticky.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice?  I guess that’s the viewpoint.  And when they’ve run that dog until it won’t run any more, I’m sure there’ll be something to take its place.

I prefer a more reality-centered discussion, if possible.

OTOH, the explicit defense, by the Republican Presidential candidate himself, is that he heard it on TV.  He most emphatically heard somebody on TV talking about Haitians eating cats and dogs.

In effect, he said he just retweeting.  So it’s OK, then, right?  Whatever it is, somebody else said it first.

Truth optional?  I think that overstates it.  It gets every bit as much consideration as the inevitable fallout.  Which is to say, none.

People re-tweet things because they like them.  And for a lot of people, I’d say truth is optional there, too.  So maybe Trump is the way the world works now.