#norm ornstein

[marxduck]

Watch "Norm Ornstein on The Radical Right Takeover of the House" on YouTube

[mariacallous]

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.

Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.

Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”

Lamenting the state of the media recently on X, Jeff Jarvis, another former editor and newspaper columnist, said: “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?”

These critics are responding to how the behemoths of the industry seem intent on bending the facts to fit their frameworks and agendas. In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.

They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new – in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” – but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.

In July, ordinary people on social media decided to share information about the rightwing Project 2025 and did a superb job of raising public awareness about it, while the press obsessed about Joe Biden’s age and health. NBC did report on this grassroots education effort, but did so using the “both sides are equally valid” framework often deployed by mainstream media, saying the agenda is “championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America”. There is no valid case it brings less government oversight.

In an even more outrageous case, the New York Times ran a story comparing the Democratic and Republican plans to increase the housing supply – which treated Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as just another housing-supply strategy that might work or might not. (That it would create massive human rights violations and likely lead to huge civil disturbances was one overlooked factor, though the fact that some of these immigrants are key to the building trades was mentioned.)

Other stories of pressing concern are either picked up and dropped or just neglected overall, as with Trump’s threats to dismantle a huge portion of the climate legislation that is both the Biden administration’s signal achievement and crucial for the fate of the planet. The Washington Post editorial board did offer this risibly feeble critique on 17 August: “It would no doubt be better for the climate if the US president acknowledged the reality of global warming – rather than calling it a scam, as Mr Trump has.”

While the press blamed Biden for failing to communicate his achievements, which is part of his job, it’s their whole job to do so. The Climate Jobs National Resource Center reports that the Inflation Reduction Act has created “a combined potential of over $2tn in investment, 1,091,966 megawatts of clean power, and approximately 3,947,670 jobs”, but few Americans have any sense of what the bill has achieved or even that the economy is by many measures strong.

Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”

Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?, a Washington Post columnist declares in another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.

It’s hard to gloat over the decline of these dinosaurs of American media, when a free press and a well-informed electorate are both crucial to democracy. The alternatives to the major news outlets simply don’t reach enough readers and listeners, though the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica and progressive magazines such as the New Republic and Mother Jones, are doing a lot of the best reporting and commentary.

Earlier this year, when Alabama senator Katie Britt gave her loopy rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address, it was an independent journalist, Jonathan Katz, who broke the story on TikTok that her claims about a victim of sex trafficking contained significant falsehoods. The big news outlets picked up the scoop from him, making me wonder what their staffs of hundreds were doing that night.

A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.

Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.

Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”

Lamenting the state of the media recently on X, Jeff Jarvis, another former editor and newspaper columnist, said: “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?”

These critics are responding to how the behemoths of the industry seem intent on bending the facts to fit their frameworks and agendas. In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.

They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new – in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” – but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.

In July, ordinary people on social media decided to share information about the rightwing Project 2025 and did a superb job of raising public awareness about it, while the press obsessed about Joe Biden’s age and health. NBC did report on this grassroots education effort, but did so using the “both sides are equally valid” framework often deployed by mainstream media, saying the agenda is “championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America”. There is no valid case it brings less government oversight.

In an even more outrageous case, the New York Times ran a story comparing the Democratic and Republican plans to increase the housing supply – which treated Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as just another housing-supply strategy that might work or might not. (That it would create massive human rights violations and likely lead to huge civil disturbances was one overlooked factor, though the fact that some of these immigrants are key to the building trades was mentioned.)

Other stories of pressing concern are either picked up and dropped or just neglected overall, as with Trump’s threats to dismantle a huge portion of the climate legislation that is both the Biden administration’s signal achievement and crucial for the fate of the planet. The Washington Post editorial board did offer this risibly feeble critique on 17 August: “It would no doubt be better for the climate if the US president acknowledged the reality of global warming – rather than calling it a scam, as Mr Trump has.”

While the press blamed Biden for failing to communicate his achievements, which is part of his job, it’s their whole job to do so. The Climate Jobs National Resource Center reports that the Inflation Reduction Act has created “a combined potential of over $2tn in investment, 1,091,966 megawatts of clean power, and approximately 3,947,670 jobs”, but few Americans have any sense of what the bill has achieved or even that the economy is by many measures strong.

Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”

Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?, a Washington Post columnist declares in another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.

It’s hard to gloat over the decline of these dinosaurs of American media, when a free press and a well-informed electorate are both crucial to democracy. The alternatives to the major news outlets simply don’t reach enough readers and listeners, though the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica and progressive magazines such as the New Republic and Mother Jones, are doing a lot of the best reporting and commentary.

Earlier this year, when Alabama senator Katie Britt gave her loopy rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address, it was an independent journalist, Jonathan Katz, who broke the story on TikTok that her claims about a victim of sex trafficking contained significant falsehoods. The big news outlets picked up the scoop from him, making me wonder what their staffs of hundreds were doing that night.

A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

[nodynasty4us]

That the media are focused on Biden‘s age, while ignoring Trump’s infirmities is absolutely maddening. As James Fallows pointed out, in the New York Times there were headlines on Super Tuesday’s outcomes that Trump romped and Biden has trouble while Biden got a significantly higher percentage of votes than did Trump, which tells us all too much about media bias. Mainstream media may not consciously want Trump to win, but you wouldn’t know it from the frame of the coverage.

Norm Ornstein, interviewed in Salon.com

[goldenearth]

Meritokrasi untuk Republik

"Selama ratusan tahun," kata Michael Young dalam The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958)," masyarakat telah menjadi medan pertempuran di antara dua prinsip besar - prinsip seleksi oleh keluarga dan prinsip seleksi berdasarkan prestasi." Prinsip seleksi atas dasar meritokrasi telah menjadi kisah sukses dua negara maju

Singapura dan Amerika. Sementara Republik ini rentan terjerumus ke arah Indonesian Kakistocracy, yang ditandai dengan kepemimpinan yang tak kompeten dan sarat penyimpangan moral di semua lini penyelenggaraan negara.

Prinsip seleksi berdasarkan meritokrasi mengantarkan Singapura menjadi negara maju.

Berasal dari ayah yang lahir di Semarang, Jawa Tengah, pada 1903, Lee Kuan Yew menjadi arsitek brilian dalam kesuksesannya mentransformasikan

Singapura dari kota pelabuhan tropis kecil tapa kekayaan sumber daya alam menjadi negara maju dengan keunggulan modal manusia, kualitas hidup, kesehatan, pendidikan, dan pendapatan di dunia atas dasar prinsip meritokrasi yang non-diskriminatif.

Pidato Lee sejak 1971, "Singapura adalah meritokrasi dan orang-orang ini telah naik ke puncak dengan prestasi, kerja keras, dan kinerja tinggi mereka sendiri."

Spirit meritokrasi telah mendorong orang-orang berkecakapan dari berbagai latar belakang untuk berprestasi di Singapura.

21.53 1

< Pencarian

Opini

Kepemimpinan meritokratik yang berakar pada tradisi Asia, terutama Konfusianisme, ternyata meninggalkan keterpesonaan intelektual pada Ian Buruma ketika menulis di majalah Time (2005), " Lee's mark on history would have to be as a kind of Asian philosopher king."

Melihat Lee sebagai personifikasi Asian philosopher king, bukan sekadar mengingatkan pada tradisi Konfusianisme-karena Konfusius mengajarkan bahwa mereka yang memiliki keunggulan dalam kebajikan dan kecakapan harus memerintah masyarakat-melainkan juga pada tradisi Yunani. Ini karena Plato, dalam Republic yang mashur itu, berimajinasi tentang keunggulan the philosopher king yang berhak memimpin terwujudnya masyarakat yang adil.

Dalam perspektif Barat, negara-kota Singapura itu tampak seperti versi teknologi tinggi dari Republic Plato," tulis Adrian Wooldridge dalam The Aristocracy of Talent (2021), tetapi "dalam perspektif Timur, negara-kota Singapura tersebut terlihat seperti versi tinggi dari negara Mandarin Konfusian."

Lee Kuan Yew dikaitkan dengan Thomas Jefferson, bapak pendiri bangsa Amerika, dalam kontribusinya pada meritokrasi sebagai prinsip utama pemerintahan.

21.53 1

< Pencarian

Opini

Menurut profesor Harvard Michael J Sandel dalam karya terbarunya, The Tyranny of Merit

(2020), para pendiri Republik Amerika memandang dir mereka sendiri sebagai Men of Merit, dan berharap orang-orang yang berbudi pekerti luhur dan berpengetahuan akan terpilih untuk menjabat. Mereka menentang aristokrasi warisan, tetapi tidak tertarik pada demokrasi langsung, yang mereka khawatirkan dapat mengantarkan demagog ke tampuk kekuasaan.

Mereka berusaha merancang institusi, seperti pemilihan tidak langsung Senat AS dan presiden, yang akan memungkinkan orang yang cakap dan pantas memerintah. Thomas Jefferson menyukai aristokrasi natural yang didasarkan pada kebajikan dan bakat daripada aristokrasi buatan yang didasarkan pada kekayaan dan kelahiran.

Meritokrasi yang menjadi kisah sukses Singapura dan Amerika harus ditegakkan untuk kemajuan

Republik Indonesia. Meskipun meritokrasi telah menjadi tradisi mulia selama ratusan tahun, Amerika pun pernah terjerumus ke arah American Kakistocracy, meminjam istilah Norm Ornstein dalam The Atlantic (2017), untuk merujuk pada" pemerintahan yang dikendalikan orang-orang terburuk dan paling tidak bermoral di antara kita"-Donald Trump dan jaringan mafianya.

Agar tidak terjerumus ke arah Indonesian Kakistocracy melalui politik transaksional, nepotisme, senioritas, konflik kepentingan, penyalahgunaan kekuasaan, dan jaringan mafia, Republik in harus direformasi melalui prinsip meritokrasi. Hal itu adalah tata kelola pemerintahan yang benar oleh orang-orang yang memiliki bukan sekadar kecakapan dan prestasi, melainkan juga kebajikan dan kebijaksanaan.

Sebagai impian pendiri bangsa yang mendesain Indonesia berbentuk Republik modern ketimbang monarki dan aristokrasi, meritokrasi harus ditegakkan kembali sebagai prinsip utama pemerintahan untuk mengantarkan Indonesia Emas 2045 sebagai negara maju. Impian negara maju dapat ditegakkan melalui prinsip meritokrasi. Meritokrasi untuk Republik ini harus dimulai pertama dan utama dengan reformasi tata kelola pemerintahan secara benar di semua aspek penyelenggaraan negara.

Kita sudah mencapai puncak hipokrisi dalam penyelenggaraan negara. Saatnya kita semua, khususnya pemimpin, harus berbenah diri secara total dan jujur, now or never! Ini semua semata- mata untuk kebaikan dan kemaslahatan bersama.

Oleh: Sukidi

Sumber: Kompas, 9 Maret 2023

[nj-stone]

Al Franken - Norm Ornstein on The Debate & SCOTUS https://youtu.be/H3yvCjL6SuA?si=-n03KR2P3uEOaZlj via @YouTube

[truck-fump]

Norm Ornstein: <b>Trump's</b> second term plans make it impossible to treat this like a 'typical' election

New Post has been published on https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=https://www.msnbc.com/ali-velshi/watch/norm-ornstein-trump-s-second-term-plans-make-it-impossible-to-treat-this-like-a-typical-election-210265669547&ct=ga&cd=CAIyGjUzM2UwMTY5ZmFhZTIwMGQ6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AOvVaw0NTeMVJ0Oh_gaSPuz1KsJR

Norm Ornstein: Trump's second term plans make it impossible to treat this like a 'typical' election

A new interview with Time Magazine paints a disturbing picture of what a second Trump term could look like. Norm Ornstein, senior fellow emeritus …

[dserwer1]

Stevenson's army, September 15

– AEI’s Norm Ornstein suggests new rules to get around the Tuberville holds: Two simple rule changes could break the impasse. First, by majority, the Senate could require an up-or-down floor vote on a confirmation within 30 days after the nominee has been reported out by the relevant committee. An alternative would be for the Senate to create by rule its own variation of the House’s discharge…

[garudabluffs]

Don’t be Fooled PoliticsGirl

May 26, 2023 “To treat this like a normal political negotiation, or one where both sides are equally at fault, is to distort reality.” - Norm Ornstein

304 Comments

[panicinthestudio]

Admit it. Republicans have broken politics., October 29, 2018

Neither party is perfect, but Republicans in Congress have been drifting towards political extremism since long before Trump, and they’re making it impossible for Congress to work the way it’s supposed to. 

Over the past few decades, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have moved away from the center. But the Republican Party has moved towards the extreme much more quickly -- a trend that political scientists’ call “asymmetrical polarization.” 

That asymmetry poses a major obstacle in American politics. As Republicans have become more ideological, they’ve also become less willing to work with Democrats: filibustering Democratic legislation, refusing to consider Democratic appointees, and even shutting down the government in order to force Democrats to give in to their demands. 

Democrats have responded in turn, becoming more obstructionist as Republican demands become more extreme. 

And that’s made it really easy for media outlets to blame “both sides” for political gridlock. As political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein explain in their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” journalists feel a pressure to remain neutral when covering big political fights. So politics coverage has been dominated by the myth that both parties are equally to blame for the gridlock in DC.

But they’re not. And the only way to stop Republicans in Congress from continuing their drift towards the extreme is to be brutally honest about who’s responsible for breaking our politics. 

Read more of Ornstein and Mann’s work here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/02/opinion/sunday/republicans-broke-congress-politics.html

Vox

Still, if not even more, relevant alongside ongoing false equivalence between the American political poles, with the Republican Party openly not caring that their candidates are unqualified and/or declaring their own victory as the only legitimate result. The intentional erosion of trust in and the electoral institutions themselves is not just self-centred but corrosive to political legitimacy as a whole when denialism of factual results is permitted.

[kp777]

By Susie Madrak

Crooks and Liars

March 6, 2021

From the article:

Congressional historian Norm Ornstein was Lawrence O'Donnell's guest Thursday night to talk about filibusters.

"His new article in the Washington Post is entitled 'Democrats cannot kill the filibuster, but they can gut it," O'Donnell said.

"Norm, let's get to your two biggest ideas. Let's start with the present and voting way of determining the threshold here and how that actually used to be the rule."

"So, Lawrence, the last time the filibuster was changed for legislation in a fundamental way in 1975, the lore is that they lowered the threshold from two-thirds to three-fifths. But it didn't work that way," Ornstein said.

"It was before this, two-thirds of those present and voting and now it's three-fifths of the entire Senate. As you said, the burden now is on the majority. Now, if you have a 'present and voting' voting standard and you go around the clock, if the minority doesn't show up, if, say, 20 members don't show up, then under the three-fifths standard you only need 48 senators to invoke that cloture, stop the debate. And if it's a absolute standard, if you decided to go around the clock, the minority doesn't have to show up at all.

"A couple of members could be there -- one to deny the absence of a quorum or to keep from getting a unanimous consent agreement. It's the majority that has to show up. So if you move this back to a present voting standard, make it three-fifths of those present and voting, then Democrats can shine a spotlight on an important issue like HR1, democracy reform, make them go around the clock for two weeks."

"Make the 87-year-olds like Chuck Grassley and Dick Shelby and Jim Inhofe have to sleep on the lumpy cots all night long. If they don't show up, then you have got the opportunity to break that filibuster."

"Yeah, and this for Joe Manchin, this takes you back to an even earlier precedent. You are still listening to what Joe Manchin says he wants and try to work within that and say, okay, here is a Senate precedent that preexists the one they are using now. Let's go to the other idea, a new idea, which is switching the burden. Now it requires 60 votes to proceed and you're saying what if we switched that to 40 votes in order to basically continue debating the bill."

"I'd like to push the envelope a little bit, make it 45 votes. But the idea here is the burden is supposed to be on the minority. What Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have talked about, both of them, is this idea that you need to give the minority some skin in the game. The old filibuster, the one that they have lionized, it was about a minority feeling so intensely about an issue that they would take on a great burden and go to great lengths. Now they don't have to lift a little finger."

"Put the burden back on them. Every vote, the cloture comes if they can't muster the 41 or 45. They have to be there constantly. They all have to be around. If you make them debate on the floor while all of this is going on, you add to that burden. You are not eliminating the rule. you are restoring what it was supposed to be, what they have lionized. It's not perfect. Nothing is. But it gives us a fighting chance of getting things like democracy reform, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and other things that are very important to us, and the fact is, as you said earlier, we're not going to eliminate eliminate the rule. We are not able to do it with 50 senators with a couple who are dug in against it. We have to find a different way to operate," Ornstein said.

"I am not opposed to continuing lobbying Senator Manchin, but what you are saying is, okay, if that doesn't work, don't give up. There are some other ways that you can soften what we currently have. I know you talked to Al Franken about this idea. He told me what he is telling you about it, which is he used to sit on the Senate floor during these situations and say to Republicans, well, I have to be here this weekend and they would say, we don't. We're leaving because they don't have to be there to sustain their blocking maneuver and they get to go often on the weekend and the Democrats are sitting there trying to muster 60 votes, which they simply can't muster."

"Of course, the way it works now, you can filibuster everything. Little bills, big bills, take up a lot of time on the floor because it costs you nothing. If we change the burden back to the minority, they are only going to do it in a handful of cases. And when they do, we are going to get a public spotlight shined on them that's going to make it very different. Imagine if, for instance, you brought up the Voting Rights Act that would now apply to everybody, not just those five states, to satisfy the Supreme Court. And you make them go around the clock explaining why they are against voting rights when most of them voted for the original Voting Rights Act. You can make a difference this way. and we have a chance, I think, to get to all of those senators and get the 50 to make a difference.

"If we don't, then we are not going to get that legislation. You push Joe Manchin and you're gonna end up with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell."

[absurdlakefront]

Today's Republican Party...is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for "balance," constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance.

Thomas E. Mann and Norm Ornstein, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the Politics of Extremism, 2012

[narcbrain]

BIRTHDAY OF THE DAY: Norm Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute – Politico BIRTHDAY OF THE DAY: Norm Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute Politico Source link

[wordacrosstime]

Foundations of Stochastic Differential Equations in Infinite Dimensional Spaces

[Foundations of Stochastic Differential Equations in Infinite Dimensional Spaces, by Kiyosi Ito. Ist edition. 1 November 1984. ‎ Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. CBMS-NSF Regional Conference Series in Applied Mathematics, Series Number 47. Paperback: 80 pages. ISBN-10: 0898711932, ISBN-13: 9780898711936. Dimensions: 17.78 x 1.27 x 24.77 cm (thanks to Amazon for technical publication details)]

The late Kiyosi (sometimes spelled Kiyoshi) Ito is a true legend in the world of stochastic differential equations. His developments over several decades led to Nobel-Prize-winning work in economics by Black, Sholes and Merton, for example.  In 1983 he was invited to Louisiana State University in the United States to review some of his foundational work in this subject.  The present volume is a write-up of those lectures.

Differential equations are ubiquitous in applied mathematics.  They play pivotal roles in the modeling of physical, chemical and biological processes (examples are fluid flow, reaction kinetics, and ion diffusion across a membrane, respectively).  As mentioned in the first paragraph, they also appear in the modeling of the dynamics of economic and financial systems.  Quite often, a differential equation is proposed that attempts to capture some behavior of interest:  turbulence in the flow of a compressible gas; heat diffusion across a plate of a specific geometry; and so on.  However, these mathematical models rely on a number of parameters – measurements that control the behavior of the solutions to the differential equation at different scales – and it is the estimating of these parameters that can introduce uncertainty.  Under some regularity conditions, one can make assumptions about the probabilistic – that is, stochastic – nature of these uncertainties, and still derive families of solutions to the differential equation that intrinsically respect the uncertainties.

To do this, Ito proposed a number of constructs built from the foundations of probability theory to account for the uncertainties in a way that is amenable to mathematical analysis.  There is a sense of engineering about this, in that these constructs must respect realistic uncertainty while still remaining analytically tractable.  A standard tool for this is the so-called Hilbert spaces, which are mathematical objects that have nice, well-understood properties with regard to functions on them, etc.  One such property is a norm, which is a measure of the ‘size’ of something in the space itself (for example, it could be the integral of a function defined on an interval in the Hilbert space); norms can be used to define a measure of distance between objects in the space; and so on.  Implicit in this exercise is the notion of a measurable object, which has a strict mathematical definition.  Intuitively, the measure of an object is a numerical value reflecting the content of the object (an example might be the length of a line segment, or the area of a polygon).  Measure theory is quite subtle, though, so this intuitive notion can only carry one so far.  The intuitive view becomes less useful in the area of probability measures, which lie at the heart of Ito theory.

The latter sections of Ito’s monograph focus on applications of the theoretical toolbox created earlier in the book.  Ito briefly describes general solution results for both stochastic differential equations as well as stochastic integrals (which are sort of a complementary case of differential equations).  He also surveys some specific types of problems, namely problems of a type proposed by Ornstein & Uhlenbeck.  He doesn’t go into the specifics of why these are important; this is left to the reader to do further reading.

This monograph is fairly advanced; the reader is cautioned that at least a graduate-level knowledge of measure theory and topology is necessary to be able to follow the arguments.  The book is quite short and covers a lot of ground, so some supplementary reading and research might be necessary to really see what’s going on under the covers.  The reward is an enriched view of stochastic processes, especially those that are an endogenous component of physical and/or economic processes.

[Cover © Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics 1984; portrait of Kiyosi Ito, photographer not known]

Kevin Gillette

Words Across Time

19 January 2022

wordsacrosstime

[crimsonlocks]

Ⓐ ( ciaran for ornstein, maria for laurence! )

Disclaimer: Because Ornstein has only acted briefly with your Ciaran and Laurence hasn't with your Maria yet, this will mostly be headcanon based. Dynamics could change once our muses interacted more.

ATTRACTIVENESS:     repulsive ― hideous ― ugly ― not attractive ― unappealing ― not unattractive ― meh ― no preference ― ok ― mildly attractive ― nice looking ― cute ― adorable ― attractive ― pleasant on the eyes ― good looking ― hot ― sexy ― beautiful ― gorgeous ― hot damn ― would tap that ― perfect ― godlike ― holy fuck there are no words "Ciaran is looking quite fine, when she isn't hiding beneath her mask. But the same could be said about me, as a knight of Gwyn, not showing your face is the norm." PERSONALITY:     grating ― irritating ― frustrating ― boring ― confusing at best ― awkward ― unreasonable ― psychotic ― disturbing ― interesting ― engaging ― affectionate ― aggressive ― ambitious ― anxious ― artistic ― bad tempered ― bossy ― charismatic ― appealing ― unappealing ― creative ― courageous ― dependable ― unreliable ― unpredictable ― predictable ― devious ― dim ― extroverted ― introverted ― egotistical ― gregarious ― fabulous ― impulsive ― intelligent ― sympathetic ― talkative ― up beat ― peaceful ― calming ― badass ― flexible "I don't have much words for how I perceive Ciaran. I know I can depend on her with my life. I admit that she can be a bit unpredictable to me though." HOW LIKELY THEY WOULD BE TO HAVE SEX WITH THEM.     not if they were the last person on earth and the world was ending ― fuck no! ― never ― no way ― not likely ― not sure ― indifferent ― i’m asexual ― maybe ― probably ― it depends ― fairly likely ― likely ― yeah sure ― yes ― would tap that ― hell yes ― fuck yes! ― wishing that could happen right now ― as many times as possible ― we are already having sex "No offense, please, I am just not into women... Besides, we are friends." LEVEL OF FRIENDSHIP:     never in a million years ― worst of enemies ― enemies ― rivals ― indifferent ― neutral ― acquaintance ― friendly toward each other ― casual friends ― friends ― good friends ― best friends ― fuck buddies ― bosom buddies ― practically the same person ― would die for them ― true friends ― my only friend "I owe Ciaran with my life. And I also know that she would take care of me when I would ever think to betray the kingdom. It's a grim thought, but I am glad that she is able to deal with a person as strong as me." FIRST IMPRESSION OF THEM:     i hate them so much ― i don’t like them ― i don’t trust them ― they annoy me ― they’re weird ― i’m indifferent ― meh ― they seem alright ― they’re growing on me ― truce ― i think i like them ― i like them ― i’m not sure if i trust them ― i trust them ― they’re cool ― they’re genuine ― i think we’re going to get along ― i really like them ― i think i’m in love ― oh fuck they’re hot ― i love them "The first encounter was rather weird... but no harm was done. I just... didn't expect for anyone to laugh when I told them that I am lost." CURRENT IMPRESSION OF THEM:     i hate them so much ― i don’t like them ― i don’t trust them ― they annoy me ― they’re weird ― i’m indifferent ― meh ― they seem alright ― they’re growing on me ― truce ― i think i like them ― i like them ― i’m not sure if i trust them ― i trust them ― they’re cool ― they’re genuine ― i think we’re going to get along ― i really like them ― i think i’m in love ― oh fuck they’re hot ― i love them "Like I said, there is a lot of trust between us. I never would change the friendship with Ciaran for something else." HOW GOOD OF A KISSER:     worst kisser ever ― terrible ― bad ― awkward ― just okay ― alright ― pretty good ― good ― makes me moan ― excellent ― exciting ― oh god they’re good ― i dream about it ― fucking amazing ― absolute perfection ― we haven’t kissed "If the need for a kiss arises, a hand kiss is all I can offer."

ATTRACTIVENESS:     repulsive ― hideous ― ugly ― not attractive ― unappealing ― not unattractive ― meh ― no preference ― ok ― mildly attractive ― nice looking ― cute ― adorable ― attractive ― pleasant on the eyes ― good looking ― hot ― sexy ― beautiful ― gorgeous ― hot damn ― would tap that ― perfect ― godlike ― holy fuck there are no words "Look, she's really pretty, alright?!" PERSONALITY:     grating ― irritating ― frustrating ― boring ― confusing at best ― awkward ― unreasonable ― psychotic ― disturbing ― interesting ― engaging ― affectionate ― aggressive ― ambitious ― anxious ― artistic ― bad tempered ― bossy ― charismatic ― appealing ― unappealing ― creative ― courageous ― dependable ― unreliable ― unpredictable ― predictable ― devious ― dim ― extroverted ― introverted ― egotistical ― gregarious ― fabulous ― impulsive ― intelligent ― sympathetic ― talkative ― up beat ― peaceful ― calming ― badass ― flexible He sighs. "We clash quite a bit, but overall I think we are getting along." HOW LIKELY THEY WOULD BE TO HAVE SEX WITH THEM.     not if they were the last person on earth and the world was ending ― fuck no! ― never ― no way ― not likely ― not sure ― indifferent ― i’m asexual ― maybe ― probably ― it depends ― fairly likely ― likely ― yeah sure ― yes ― would tap that ― hell yes ― fuck yes! ― wishing that could happen right now ― as many times as possible ― we are already having sex "But only if she isn't in a relationship at the moment. I am not interested in breaking up a couple." LEVEL OF FRIENDSHIP:     never in a million years ― worst of enemies ― enemies ― rivals ― indifferent ― neutral ― acquaintance ― friendly toward each other ― casual friends ― friends ― good friends ― best friends ― fuck buddies ― bosom buddies ― practically the same person ― would die for them ― true friends ― my only friend "I am not as close to her as to the others, but I would think we are friends by default?" FIRST IMPRESSION OF THEM:     i hate them so much ― i don’t like them ― i don’t trust them ― they annoy me ― they’re weird ― i’m indifferent ― meh ― they seem alright ― they’re growing on me ― truce ― i think i like them ― i like them ― i’m not sure if i trust them ― i trust them ― they’re cool ― they’re genuine ― i think we’re going to get along ― i really like them ― i think i’m in love ― oh fuck they’re hot ― i love them "It was a bit of a weird first encounter, which ended with me being burned. My ego I mean. Gehrman was laughing about this for the whole evening." CURRENT IMPRESSION OF THEM:     i hate them so much ― i don’t like them ― i don’t trust them ― they annoy me ― they’re weird ― i’m indifferent ― meh ― they seem alright ― they’re growing on me ― truce ― i think i like them ― i like them ― i’m not sure if i trust them ― i trust them ― they’re cool ― they’re genuine ― i think we’re going to get along ― i really like them ― i think i’m in love ― oh fuck they’re hot ― i love them "Despite the mentioned differences, I think we get along?" HOW GOOD OF A KISSER:     worst kisser ever ― terrible ― bad ― awkward ― just okay ― alright ― pretty good ― good ― makes me moan ― excellent ― exciting ― oh god they’re good ― i dream about it ― fucking amazing ― absolute perfection ― we haven’t kissed "Look, I am not interested in having to discuss this out with Gehrman..."

[staneclectic]

Norm Ornstein on the crisis of democracy: "This is the same roadmap we saw in Germany" | Salon.com