Month: January 2021

I find it more than ironic that one party in the political spectrum has so closely aligned itself with a proven loser now holed up at a resort in South Florida, that it cannot shed its skin even when the loser has left office. We see the examples of state Republican parties castigating its members for inadequate fidelity to said loser, censuring the apostates in Arizona, in Oregon denouncing the betrayal of the 10 Republicans in the House who voted for impeachment, in Wyoming where rallies are planned decrying Liz Cheney’s act of independence, and supporting the QAnon-supporting elected member of Congress (Marjorie Taylor Greene) in Georgia. At the same time, they are vociferously calling for unity in their desire to not call the ex-President to account for his actions in inciting the crowd to storm the Capitol on January 6.

Though the party in control in Washington has changed, the tone of the discussion has not. Fox News and those on the extreme right of the political discussion now claim that any utterance from a Democrat is evil, socialistic, and reprehensible. Thus the sincere efforts to reach a bipartisan solution seem doomed before they start. If the proposal for additional relief due to the pandemic is shoehorned into a reconciliation bill, then maybe at least the Biden administration will be ahead of the Obama administration. It took a long time before Obama ever gave up on trying to include Republicans into signing on to legislation. Even 14 months after his inauguration, Obama tried to gather Republican support in favor of his Affordable Care Act legislation. If President Biden learns within the first month that it is not possible to seek agreement on a bipartisan basis, then he will be more than a year ahead of his predecessor in recognizing political reality, and dealing with the actual landscape instead of the idealized vista one could hope for.

In the long term, it is not Trump that is the problem. He is the nucleating center around which the precipitate of the party came crashing out of solution. But it is the toxic solution that is the problem, rather than the current center of attention. In the short term, even if Senator McConnell wants Trump neutralized, the belated second impeachment trial is unlikely to serve as an adequate repudiation. Maybe the two sides will at least agree to a censure, which will have as much impact as being repeatedly poked with soft cushions. But don’t look for any resolution to come from the trial in the Senate, because the upcoming failure to convict will only have the effect of validating Trump’s actions in the months after his defeat in the election.

The real question is how to detoxify the solution that resulted in Trump’s elevation to the Presidency. That solution has grown more concentrated as continued exposure to lies has convinced many more to identify with the conspiracies that drip with ease from the mouths of those whose only goal is to manipulate. I almost feel sorry for the followers of Q who had to face severe disappointment when the storm was not released on the day of Biden’s inauguration. To have such a strong belief ripped apart before their eyes as the A-list stars lent their voices to the inauguration, that dissolution of their belief system physically hurt many who had burrowed deeply down the Q rabbit hole. It is no wonder that there is a small remnant who have latched onto the Sovereign Citizen movement, and still expect Donald Trump to be inaugurated in early March as the successor of the true Republic of the United States. This is instead of the corporation we became as we signed our control over to the banks of London and the Rotschilds. (I’d better watch it or I’ll give myself a cheek hernia.)

In a way, it will be better if Donald Trump attempts the formation of a new MAGA party, aimed at perpetuating his hold on a segment of the population. We could become the new Argentina where we reminisce 60 years from now on how good things were under the Perons, and reach for each new generation’s version of a Peronist.  But realistically that would result in even more politicians like  Marjorie Greene being elected, thus legitimizing the totally ludicrous belief system she espouses.

No, right now it is instructive to see those elites in the political right stir up the emotions of their true believers. According to them, we are only weeks away from rounding up all dissenters on the right, forcibly removing their guns, and sending them off in boxcars to the nearest FEMA camp.

In this day of images substituting for content, one image stands out. On one side, the title says Young Democrat, and under it is an image of Amanda Gorman. On the other side, it says Young Republican, and beneath it is the image of Kyle Rittenhouse. Nowhere else can you find a more succinct description of the dichotomy we see here today. One side believes only in the power of their weaponry, and its ability to sow destruction, and the other side believes in the power of their words, and the ability of language to bring about unity around an ideal.

Way back in March 2017, when this blog was barely a month old, I penned a post titled Experimental Decay Curve In Politics. That post was intended to show that the effectiveness of Donald Trump’s tweets was likely to follow an exponential decay curve. In May of 2019, I wrote an update of that post that showed the frequency of retweets of his posts, seemed as if it were following an exponential decay curve. In order to keep the same impact from his account, he had to post more tweets to counteract the lessened effectiveness of any individual tweet.

Even though I had tried to update my original post with new data, it is the older post that keeps getting read across the globe. Many of my “hits” on this blog go back to the first post. Well, as of January 8 2021, it will no longer be possible to measure the “effectiveness” of Trump’s tweets, since he has been banned from the platform. In some ways this is the logical conclusion of this administration, with its pledge to bypass the media and speak directly to his followers through his social media platform. After much deliberation, and perhaps the threat of removal of the safeguards of Section 230, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have all banned posts from Donald Trump as long as he remains in power. It has become clear that since the election, where he was effectively repudiated, his own posts had increasingly become reflections of the violent fringe of the internet rather than any sort of meaningful posting.

So there will not be another post discussing the further decay of the effectiveness of Donald Trump’s tweets. It is obvious that the ones that he had been posting were adequate to inflame the fires of passion of his most ardent supporters, and provided the fuel that energized the crowd that overwhelmed the outmatched security forces at the Capitol. I for one am hoping that the interim time till Joe Biden’s inauguration passes without further violence, either aimed at domestic enemies, or directed at foreign adversaries in misguided attempts to justify his own sense of power. Then I do hope that the much-maligned justice system in this nation does hold Donald Trump accountable for his actions of this week, and by extension, for his actions since he was inaugurated on that dark day in 2017.

Here again is the text of my original post.

Today’s topic concerns exponential decay curves. This is what happens when “something” declines over time. A classic exponential decay curve is shown here:

Exponential decay curves are often found in nature. The classic one that is taught in classrooms concerns radioactive decay. For a given radioactive isotope of an element, the half-life of the isotope determines the shape of its decay curve. A half-life is defined as the amount of time for 1/2 of the radioactive decay for an isotope to have occurred. This can vary among isotopes from fractions of a second, up to 4 billion years in the case of Uranium 238. Half-lives are very important when calculating the potential radiation exposure to a radioactive isotope. Isotopes like Cobalt 60 are powerful radiation sources that are used industrially to examine welds and metals for defects. They provide plentiful gamma rays since the half life of this isotope is only 5.3 years. That is why there is concern about the use of this isotope in a dirty bomb, since the radiation from an explosive dispersal of Cobalt 60 would cause significant exposure to high powered gamma radiation.

Exponential decay curves may be found in other natural and also artificial systems. A new example of an artificial system that appears to be following an exponential decay curve is the Presidential tweet. The response to a Presidential tweet appears to be following a typical decay curve function. It is too early to get an accurate measurement of the half-life of tweet effectiveness, but a preliminary estimate is that the half-life of the response to a Presidential tweet is about two months.

Since this system of Presidential tweets is an artificial system (one not normally found in nature), it is uncertain as to what the response of the originator of the Presidential tweets will be to an ongoing decrease in tweet effectiveness. Most observers believe that the originator will greatly increase both the frequency and objects of tweets so as to continue to receive a total response to the tweets that approximates the effect of the first tweets.

However, it is nearly certain that since the effectiveness of any individual tweet will continue to decline, eventually the response to all Presidential tweeting may approach zero. There is a school of thought though, that maintains the belief that we may begin to see an inverse function develop for the tweet response. That is, instead of receiving a positive response to tweets, each subsequent tweet may result in a negative response. It is possible that the magnitude of the negative response may increase with additional tweets, so that Newton’s third law may be given a test in the political arena. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Observers of politics will be watching this process with rapt attention.