The Real Facebook Game

I know we are all supposed to be outraged about the way that Cambridge Analytica harvested tons of Facebook data for the Trump campaign. But maybe it's the usual conventional wisdom, sound and fury signifying nothing.

I went to a Republican fundraiser yesterday -- in the heart of liberal Seattle -- and met a young man that reckons he knows how to run political campaigns using Facebook.

Forget the ruinously expensive TV campaigns that reach 20-30 percent of voters. Facebook reaches 60 percent of voters. Forget a commercial with a talking politician. Just paint a few slogans on the screen and put it on Facebook advertising.

Here is how Facebook advertising works. Suppose you have a quote from some local pillar of the community. Using Facebook's ad tools you draw a circle around the location of that notable's house and set up an ad for everyone within a mile, that's a homeowner, that meets other available criteria. You craft the ad so that it tells a quick story and you make it work without sound, because most people have the sound off.

The guys says that Mitt Romney, in 2012, should have run a Facebook ad during the Olympics. He should have said Go USA, and added that the most meaningful thing in his life was the opportunity to manage the Salt Lake Winter Olympics and turn it around and make it into a success. In other words, the idea is not to pump himself up, or beat up the opposition. The idea is just to give a little nudge, tell a little story, and leave the Facebook viewer with a warm fuzzy feeling.

OK. Is this a brilliant idea? Or a kid with a crazy obsession. Who knows? The point is that all new things in this world start out seeming improbable and unlikely. And if and when they take off it all seems inevitable.

This, for me, is an interesting story in the week where all the right people are outraged about Cambridge Analytica getting access to Facebook data -- the same sort of people that thought it was cool when the Obama guys got access to Facebook data in 2012. Really, who cares? You can just do straight Facebook ads, and it is way cheaper, and probably more effective, than regular TV ads.

Apparently, in 2016, Clinton spent $10 million on Facebook ads, and Trump spent $70 million on Facebook ads. Is that the difference between the win and the loss? Who knows? Maybe they do know, but they aren't telling.

Meanwhile, the current campaigns still seem to think that the key is the final-week artillery barrage and Big Push on TV. Are they still right? Or is the better tactic a special forces infiltration on social media? In another decade we will know for sure, and everyone will agree that the old way was for losers.

Midterm Madness

The question is: will the 2018 midterm election be a rout for Republicans, as nearly everyone seems to think, especially after the Democratic victory in the PA-18 special election that elected ex-Marine and pro-gun and anti-abortion Democrat Conor Lamb to Congress? Or not?

Well, yeah. I dare say that if Democrats run clones of Conor Lamb all over the place they will clean up.  But I thought that the Democrats were against a moderate chap like Conor Lamb. Because white privilege.

But would all those clean-cut moderate ex-Marine Democrat Conor Lamb clones all vote to impeach President Trump? I suppose they would, just like the moderate Democrats that Chuck Schumer recruited in 2006 that all loyally cut their throats and voted for Obamacare in 2010.

But I would say that the only thing that matters for the mid-terms is how the pending report of Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report on the handling of the Hillary Clinton email affair plays out.

See, I suspect that in the next month or two we will find out that the DOJ and the FBI were doing bad and illegal things with respect to Hillary Clinton and her email server, and that they illegally spied on the Trump campaign, and that it goes to the very top of the Obama administration. We have already seen several demotions and reassignments of the principals in this affair, culminating in the recent firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. I believe this is what they call "smoke" in respect of "no smoke without fire."

I dare say that from now until the mid-terms in November we are going to see a parade of revelations on the subvention of the Department of Justice and the FBI to the political needs of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, and it ain't gonna be pretty.

So the question will be: do the voters care? Honestly, I don't know, but I would guess that the fabled #Resistance will get somewhat demoralized. That's the way politics works. You want your own partisans to be motivated, the other side's partisans to be demoralized, and the independents in the middle to be pleasantly surprised by your side and disgusted with the other side.

Now I  expect that what the Trump people want for the mid-terms (and who knows what the official Republicans want) is to cry Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, trumpeting Trump's brilliant economic leadership, to demand we Build The Wall on immigration, and to demand that we Drain the Swamp on all the DOJ and FBI shenanigans.

What's not to like?

Meanwhile, I suspect, the Democratic cry on Russia Collusion is going to be getting a bit old in the tooth. Oh, and I wonder what happens if there is headline news on the Clinton Foundation and the Uranium One issue. Did you know that there is an ongoing investigation into this? Apparently, "FBI agents are interviewing people." Who knew?

Tonight I'm going to a Republican fundraiser for Dino Rossi who's running for WA-08 in November. I wonder if I'll learn anything about what the smart people think is going down this Fall? The Cook Political Report rates WA-08 as "Republican Toss-up." 

Humans Demand Good vs. Evil

Today in the American Spectator there's a piece by Christopher deGroot critiquing Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. The problem with chaps like Pinker is his naive faith in reason as the basis of society.

If your car breaks down, there’s a mechanic who can fix it, and so too, if only men and women would follow the way of reason and our Enlightenment heritage, we could count on amelioration like death and taxes.

 The missing link is that reason and science and not enough, and that humans, and I suspect all living things, are creatures of affect. We are what we feel.

For we are essentially passionate animals. The loss of a loved one, like the prospect of our own demise, would not matter to us if life did not already have an inherently affective value, which we feel long before we can have any idea of death.

And if reason and science were all there were, why haven't we solved all the world's problems by now? And why, after the triumph of Enlightenment reason, did the 20th century feature so many death cults, from Leninism and Hitlerism to Maoism? No, deGroot will not admit Pinker's line that Nietzsche was to blame for the "romantic militarism" of World War I. (Of course another lefty I have read, Michael Mann, blames World War I on the militarism of the old regimes, the pre-Enlightenment feudal regimes, of Russia, Germany, and Austria).

Now I happen to be in the middle of reading a couple of books on all this: Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning and Rodney Stark's Why God? They both emphasize the primary importance of "affect" in understanding humans. The point is that, while reason and science are super-duper, they only provide answers for what is already known.

Peterson goes on at great length to unearth the world that "primitive man" experienced and relates that world to religion and myth.

His basic notion is that man in life is suspended between the known and the unknown. Imagine a man walking in the lands close by his encampment, knowing and understanding all the plants and animals and humans around him. Suddenly he spies an animal he has never seen before. Now he is in the realm of the unknown, and the immediate feeling is Fear, and everything has changed. Now this man must stop everything, figure out what this strange animal is all about and also protect himself in case the animal is dangerous. In other words, the normal even life of the known is suspended by a period of exploration to bring the unknown animal into the realm of the known. The point Peterson makes is that emotion, feeling, or affect is a signal for us to stop everything and pay attention to an irruption of the unknown, the unexpected, into the known world.

But the rational world view leaves this out, on the assumption that we already know everything we need to know and therefore can proceed and live as though life was completely known and mapped out. No it ain't.

And Steven Pinker should know better. What, after all, is the reality of the Left, but that the world is in a complete mess, because injustice, and we must do something right now to bring it back to peace and justice. The left is insisting of the primacy of affect, the intolerable experience of misery of poverty, injustice, oppression. Here is Jordan B. Peterson arguing with a lefty that insists that kids should go straight out and solve all the world's problems with activism.

I am also reading Rodney Stark, about why people believe in gods, and why the rise of monotheism. The reason, as I understand it, is that people need to believe in the promise that good will win out in the end, and they will participate in the triumph of good. But why monotheism?

Two things, according to Stark. First of all, in the Axial Age, starting about 600 BC, humans started to live in larger communities, and the old informal social control methods of the village started to break down, requiring the substitution of expensive force to keep the malefactors under control. But gods could also help by dealing with the malefactors themselves, and, according to Stark, the more powerful the god, the more effective the god. Thus, he says, where gods get involved in good and evil there tends to be a move to monotheism.

According to Peterson, then, the basic trajectory of human life is that it is inevitably punctured by unforeseen events that require a non-rational response. And according to Stark, people are programmed to want a world in which good is rewarded and evil is punished.

You can see that the best-of-all-possible-world of Pinker does not compute with this approach to the human condition.

And indeed, if we just look around we see that everyone is all worked up about good and evil all the time, no matter that we have just raised per capita income by 30 times in 200 years. The left is concerned about the horrors all around us, from the under-representation of women in tech to the over-disciplining of minority youth in schools to the gun-violence problem to immigration and Muslims, oh and The Planet! Conservatives are worried about the evils of abortion, the decline of marriage, and the Muslim threat.

Hey, everything may be copacetic, as per Steven Pinker, but nobody seems to be listening.

And anyway, as deGroot writes, "civilizations are organic, rising and falling in endless cycles of progression and regression." So what do we do about that, Professor Pinker?

The answer is, of course, that each civilization is based upon some grand assumptions about how the world works, and, what with stupidity and corruption, the day comes when the civilization is suddenly confronted, like the primitive man above, with something completely unknown for which the current knowledge base does not have an answer. Typically, the civilization fails to adjust to the new reality, and so gets flushed down the toilet, maybe because it was ruled by a bunch of Steven Pinkers that know that they already had all the answers.

Actually, The Climate is the best illustration of all this. All of a sudden, various people in the Pinker educated elite have decided, on the basis of limited data (and data is always limited), that we are in the dangerous unknown, that the planet is heating up uncontrollably, and Something Must Be Done before The Climate eats us all for breakfast. The reality is that there really isn't much science and reason out there, just a few theories, a few climate computer models, and a lot of Fear and Emotion. The Pinkers say we should pay them a lot of money to study the problem and pay for their expensive answers requiring more center-left government. Other people say that there is nothing to fear but fear itself.

What's a mother to do?

Even Though Wealth is Knowledge, You Still Need to Build a Wall

In recent months I have been advancing the idea that the fundamental fact of human life up to now, that land is life, has been invalidated by the industrial revolution.

My argument is that in the agricultural age the essence of wealth and survival was to possess land that could grow the food that kept you and yours alive and to defend that border to the death. But today the possession of food-growing land is a footnote. What matters is the knowledge to make things and the means to trade those things across the world. Or just download stuff from the Internet.

In the terms of a World Bank paper on capital that you should read, learn, and inwardly digest, this question is the difference between physical capital and intangible capital. For instance, compare the US and Russian Federation, then the oil state of Iran, then two traditional enemies, Greece and Turkey.

Wealth Estimates by Country, 2000, $ per Capita

Country	Natural Capital	Produced Capital	Intangible Capital	Total Wealth
United States	14,752	79,851	418,009	$512,612
Russian Federation	27,217	15,593	5,900	$38,709
Iran	14,105	3,336	6,581	$24,023
Greece	4,554	28,973	203,455	$236,972
Turkey	3,504	8,580	35,774	$47,859
Germany	4,445	68,678	423,323	$496,447

With these numbers, you can see that it makes no sense to  invade another country, kill all the men and rape all the women, and loot and plunder it. Because the real wealth of the country is in the intangible capital that exists between peoples' ears.

First of all, do you see how the big story for the US is "intangible capital?" It's about 82 percent of the total wealth of half a million dollars per person. Hey, how about Russia where it is about 15 percent of $39,000? Or the oil state of Iran, where it is 26 percent of $24,000?

Now, I put in Greece and Turkey because I met with my Greek friend last week and he pointed out to me that for Greece, land is very important, because the Turks are always turning up with some government boat harassing some Greek island. In particular, the Turks are interested in the hydrocarbons beneath the Mediterranean Sea. The only policy for the Greeks is to stop the Turks  in their tracks, wherever those tracks appear.

You can see that for the Greeks, intangible capital is 85 percent of total wealth whereas for the Turks it is 75 percent of a much smaller number. Is it surprising that the Turks, with a very low intangible capital number, are still interested in territory and the natural capital of oil resources?

So I would adjust my argument about land vs. knowledge. The fact is that tons of people in this world are still obsessed with physical capital: land and oil wealth and factories. And until they are up in the stratosphere with the US in the intangible capital game they are still going to be living in the old world, where, in the words of fictional Gerald O'Hara, plantation owner, "land is the only thing that lasts."

But Gerald O'Hara was wrong, and his world was going away even as he spoke. It is knowledge and its application in human innovation that is the thing that lasts. The question is: what do we do while the world is still full of people that believe that land (or physical resources like oil and gas) is the only thing that lasts?

The answer is the one that my Greek friend gave me. It is all very well for us advanced types that have moved on from the old ways to say that land doesn't matter any more. That doesn't cut any ice when you are dealing with people that are still living in the past. You gotta stop the land fetishists dead in their tracks. You gotta defend your land while there are still people in the world that think that the answer to their problem is to acquire someone else's physical resources.

Of course, the great demonstration of the futility in the modern era of land conquest in search of wealth was the Hitler invasion of Russia, in search of Lebensraum in the east. No, Adolf, you idiot. Germany in the 1930s was one of the most advanced countries in the world, having just invented relativity and quantum mechanics. And hey, the Otto cycle for spark-ignition cars and the Diesel cycle for compression-ignition cars have German names: I wonder why? Germany had no need of Russian wheat-growing areas, nor yet of Caucasian oil fields. In fact Germany, by 2000, had more per-capita intangible capital per capita than the United States. Russia, to this day, is way behind. Its intangible capital is a pathetic $6,000 per person.

Of course, it certainly helped Germany that in the Cold War it had the United States defending its border and asserting that the Soviets better not put a foot into Western Germany, and forget trying to force that Fulda Gap, comrade.

So, even though land doesn't matter much any more, you still need to  garrison the border to keep the barbarians out.

Maybe build a wall.

Liberals and the Bill of Rights: They Just Don't Get It

Well, maybe liberals do get it, since they have the sense to run an ex-Marine and pro-lifer in Conor Lamb for PA-18. They get that intersectional non-binary whack-jobs ain't gonna cut in in Trumpland.

But what liberals really believe in is "activism" and, we might say, "activism now, activism tomorrow, and activism forever."

It is my argument that politics, whatever it was in the old days, is a very blunt instrument for ordering the affairs of communities and nations in the industrial age. Why? Because things are much too complicated to be conducted out of the feudal lord's manor, the absolute monarch's court, or the administrative state's bureaucracy.

Liberals don't get that, and so with every setback they think of one more Big Push, the bankrupt strategy of Britain and France on the Western Front.

You can see the bankruptcy in real time in the liberal retreat from the Bill of Rights.

Let's leave out the 9th and 10th Amendments. Who cares about maintaining state powers when all the world's a stage for liberals?

How about the 8th Amendment, on excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishments? Don't our modern prosecutors deliberately try to bury their targets in the bottomless expense of endless process?

How about the 7th Amendment and trial by jury, with the modern administrative courts where the administrative state is judge, jury, and executioner?

How about the 6th Amendment with the right to a speedy trial?

How about the 5th Amendment with Special Prosecutors all over the place and the idea that no "private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Good luck with that, pal, when liberals want your land to save the planet.

Hey, how about that 4th Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure, when liberals in Wisconsin were searching and seizing information from their political opponents in John Doe investigations?

The 3rd Amendment, about quartering soldiers seems pretty secure right now, although I dare say that liberals think that they should be able to force people to AirBnB their activists when they are gathering for a peaceful protest.

Well, we all know that liberals hate the 2nd Amendment, because who needs a semi-automatic assault rifle with a 30-round magazine that is fit only for gunning down kids in a public high school?

And now liberals are in the middle of abolishing the 1st Amendment, because hate speech.

Hey liberals! I guess you chaps really aren't that much into rights, and I get it. What are rights when it is time to bend the arc of history towards justice?

Today I happened to see write-by-the-numbers John Hawkins, with "7 Techniques Liberals Use to Silence Conservatives." Wanna know what they are?

1. Libsplaining. Yeah, it makes "mansplaining" look like a walk in the park.
2. Violence. Yeah, call ANTIFA's riots "mostly peaceful protest" why dontcha?
3. De-platforming. Because hate speech.
4. Political Correctness / Safe Spaces / Microaggressions. I'd say this is mostly a lefty Mean Girls thing. But you may disagree.
5. Liberal Fakes. Hawkins means the "David Brooks, David Frum, Brett Stephens, Max Boot, Michael Gerson, Jennifer Rubin, Kathleen Parker" folks that are represented as conservative in the mainstream media.
6. False Labeling. Shut up, you "white supremacist, Nazi, Fascist or racist."
7. The Ventriloquist Dummy. You know, the spontaneously activist Parkland kids that you are not allowed to criticize.

All of Hawkins seven by-the-numbers are ways in which liberals betray the First Amendment that they were all in favor of when it meant sticking up for the Hollywood Ten in the Fifties and lefty students back in the Sixties.

See, I think the real story here is that liberals have lost the plot. They are hanging on, trying to keep their Administrative State dynasty going, and trying to stave off the evil day when the whole thing collapses.

That's why liberals have completely abandoned the Bill of Rights. For them, power comes before rights, because their religion is politics and "activism."

Why don't you liberals just go quietly? Your hour upon the stage is over, and it is time for you to stop strutting and fretting. Go and watch "Russian Ark," the single shot movie about the end of Old Russia, which the camera ends up going out the side door of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg after a ball in 1913 and into an icy wilderness.

The Three Health Cost Drivers: What Could It Mean

There's a report from the Journal of the American Medical Association that fingers the three main reasons that US health care costs are higher than other first world countries, according to a piece in the American Spectator.

First, drug costs. "We expend almost double on pharmaceuticals than the mean for the peer group [of "ten other wealthy countries"). A lot of that is from drug prices being much higher in the US.

Second, "We pay healthcare professionals much greater salaries than every other nation examined." That includes generalist doctors, specialist doctors, and nurses.

Third, “Administrative costs of care (activities relating to planning, regulating, and managing health systems and services) accounted for 8% in the US vs a range of 1% to 3% in the other countries.”

The JAMA authors also write that usual explanations for high US costs,

such as underinvestment in social programs, the low primary care/specialist mix, the fee-for-service system encouraging high volumes of care, or defensive medicine leading to overutilization, did not appear to be major drivers of the substantially higher US health care spending compared with other high-income countries.

Another cost driver is that "Out-of-pocket spending was also surprisingly low in the United States" compared to other countries.

Well. The first thing to recognize is that, per Jason Riley in Rising Life Expectancy, "bio-medicine" is only one of several factors that contribute to modern life expectancy. Among the others are women's education, wealth, better food, better sanitation, and better disease control. So it really doesn't make much difference how much you spend.

But really, it doesn't seem a mystery to me why the US spends so much and gets so little. In the first place, countries like Britain and France have a two-tier system. The poor get a lousy government system that is "free at the point of delivery" while the middle class with jobs buy private insurance. Actually the same is true in the US, where the poor get a lousy Medicaid system for free while the rich pay a bit more and get a lot more.

But the obvious problem is the cartelization of health care. It takes a ton of time for doctors and nurses to get credentialed, and the doctors get to define what hoops medical students have to go through to get qualified, and what medical schools get chartered. So of course their salaries are inflated. That is what you get with a regulated industry, as in "regulator capture."

And drug prices? Well, most of the drug research is done in the US by US companies whereas other countries set low drug prices on the notion that the rich and greedy US can pay for all the research.

Administrative costs? Well of course, when you have third parties paying for most medical care then people are going to be scamming the system and you have to have bureaucrats in place to pretend to be doing something about it.

So what is to be done? I'm afraid I'm a complete whacko on health care, as on most things.

First, I believe that routine health care should be conducted on the WalMart model. You want basic health care? Go to WalMart. You want to be fussed over and get charged three times as much? Go to Neiman Marcus. No, really! Why not?

Second, let each person decide how much they want to get extraordinary care. Let there we bronze, silver, and gold plans that specify how much money you are prepared to spend on heroic life-saving measures. The point is that once your kids are grown then you are no longer a mission-critical human. Your continued life is a luxury, and I for one, as a fiendish Medicare recipient, don't think that young people in the middle of raising families should be paying big bucks for my health care. (Actually the majority of Medicare revenue comes from the federal income tax, meaning rich people. I would rather the rich people spend money investing their ill-gotten gains in new jobs for young people rather than health care for grandpa).

Third, de-cartelize health care. How much education is needed to become a physician? I don't know but I bet that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos could drive a bulldozer through the current system without impacting health outcomes. And let hospitals and doctors compete for business; let a hundred flowers bloom.

But really nothing will change because government is all over health care like a cheap suit. Nothing will get done; nothing will improve, because government rewards its supporters and its supporters include everyone from "our" doctors and nurses to individual men and women that want free if they can possibly get it. And government cannot cut its entitlement programs, not even if the whole country is going down the toilet.

Plus women. Liberated or not, women live by caring, and one of the things that women are always talking to their friend about is health care. And women understand that society just has to provide what women want. Whether it is health care or schools, women want and expect the necessary resources to be available for them as they raise their children or care for their ageing parents; it's in the DNA. When it comes to saving the life of their child or easing the pain of their parents women instinctively feel that the sky is the limit.

And that is the real reason why health care in the US is so expensive. It's what women want. For some reason women in the other countries haven't yet figured out how to get what they want. But they will.

PA-18 Moderate vs. Clinton Loser

In the late special election for PA-18 the apparent winner is a moderate Democrat that sounds like he wants to appeal to the more mild-mannered Trump voters. Shades of 2006 when Chuck Schumer recruited a whole slate of moderate Democrats to run for Congress and won the House and the Senate with his moderate candidates.

They say that's how you win elections, by appealing to the mushy middle.

But Hillary Clinton is another matter. She who found a "vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband back in the 1990s and wrote off half the country as deplorables in 2016 is still going strong. In India last week she declared that she won the coasts of America while the Republicans won the heartland.

But what the map doesn't show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America's gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.

Then she went in for the kill.

Then she turned to Trump's voters: “And his whole campaign — 'Make America Great Again' — was looking backward. You know, you didn't like black people getting rights; you don't like women, you know, getting jobs; you don't want to, you know, see that Indian American succeeding more than you are." 

 In a way this is comical. Used to be that Democrats railed at Republicans for telling everyone to get with the program and board the capitalist train. Because what about the people left behind, particularly "the workers?" Not any more.

Clinton is telling us what Democrats and liberals say to each other when no-one else is listening. They still think it is 1965 and blacks and women lack basic civil rights. And why not? The years 1964-1965 were the miracle years for Democrats, and things have never been the same since.

Civil rights for blacks? But 50 years later, with liberals cheer-leading every step of the way, blacks are still woefully lagging.

Jobs for women? But those meany-jellybeany tech firms won't hire enough women for STEM jobs.

Indian Americans? You know what? I doubt if Indian tech guys really exist for your average Trump voter in a Rust Belt state.

The point is that politics is always about the grievances of the left-behind. That's because the left-behind experience the head-winds of life, and very often they attribute their lack of progress to "the rich," "injustice," not to mention the black guy that got a Fire Department job because inclusion and diversity.

That's why my basic line is that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. Of course, it may be that there really is justice in a more perfect world, but in the real world the ruling class or the ruling majority writes laws and regulations to benefit itself and its supporters and they call it justice. Anyone that objects is guilty of "hate speech."

Such a situation is the history of the world, and the result can go one of two ways. One way is for the folks on the receiving end give up, and either die out or merge into the majority population. The other way is for the folks on the receiving end to get angry, form a head of rebellion, and determine to end the rule of injustice that the ruling class has lowered over their heads.

In this sense Hillary Clinton magnificently represents the existing ruling class. For this ruling class the whole history of the last century has been one of bending the arc of history towards justice by political means. First the liberal heroes gave the workers the vote, then they gave them wage and hour laws and unions, then they gave blacks and women the vote and now they are allowing gays and transgenders to emerge after an eternal marginalization.

But there is always a counter-narrative, even if the ruling class manages to shut it down. Maybe, the workers would have done better if they hadn't had labor union power to loot the great industrial corporations like steel and auto, for maybe they would still have their jobs. Maybe blacks would have thrived better if they just got civil rights in 1964 and then had to work their way up by picking up the mantle of middle-class culture. Maybe women would be happier now if the sexual revolution and abortion hadn't stripped them of the right to say No, and maybe the whole idea of women getting jobs is a conceit of educated women who want to differentiate themselves from "mere housewives."

Maybe. Or maybe not. But one thing is for sure. Ageing dinosaurs of the ruling class like Hillary Clinton are usually the last to know.