Paul Duncan

A few months back I noted a little story in the New York Times about special prosecutor Jack Smith's investigation that didn't get much circulation. It pertained to Donald Trump's classified documents case:

One of the previously unreported subpoenas to the Trump Organization sought records pertaining to Mr. Trump's dealings with a Saudi-backed professional golf venture known as LIV Golf, which is holding tournaments at some of Mr. Trump's golf resorts.

It is unclear what bearing Mr. Trump’s relationship with LIV Golf has on the broader investigation, but it suggests that the prosecutors are examining certain elements of Mr. Trump’s family business.

We knew they were. As the Times had earlier reported :

Federal prosecutors overseeing the investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s handling of classified documents have issued a subpoena for information about Mr. Trump’s business dealings in foreign countries since he took office, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The subpoena — drafted by the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith — sought details on the Trump Organization’s real estate licensing and development dealings in seven countries: China, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, according to the people familiar with the matter. The subpoena sought the records for deals reached since 2017, when Mr. Trump was sworn in as president.

Since the last flurry of activities around the Mar-a-Lago witnesses a few months ago, that documents case has gone very quiet. It's a national security case so one wouldn't expect any leaking and it's being run by an inexperienced Trump appointed judge who is clearly dragging her feet in order to delay the trial until after the election (or have it canceled if Trump happens to win.)

This little episode came back to me when I saw that the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee had issued a report Thursday about the millions of dollars Trump made from foreign countries while he was president. Anyone who's been charged under the Espionage Act, as Trump has been, would have their finances examined with a fine tooth comb, wouldn't they? And according to this new report there is ample reason to be suspicious.

The corruption was obvious from the start when Trump refused to divest himself of his business and instead put it into a phony "trust" ( from which he could “withdraw profits” whenever he pleased) run by his two sons. Everyone knew that he was still in control of anything in the business he wanted to be in control of which made the conflicts of interest unprecedented in the annals of the US presidency. He had buildings, hotels and resorts all over the world, even one right down the street from the White House where the entire Republican Party and administration staff hobnobbed with foreign dignitaries and wealthy offshore businessmen who were spreading around a lot of cash.

The Democratic majority on the House Oversight Committee opened an investigation into whether or not Trump was pocketing cash from all these foreign interests in violation of the Constitution's emoluments clause which states that a president cannot accept any gifts from Kings and Princes and foreign governments without congressional approval (which he never sought.) They were thwarted at every turn in their attempts to obtain financial documents from the Trump Organization and the case was tied up in court for years. The Supreme Court declined to review one case, upholding the ruling by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals that members of Congress lacked the legal standing to sue under the foreign emoluments clause. Later they dismissed two other cases as moot after Trump left office.

However, in late 2022, Mazar's, Trump's longtime accounting firm, reached a settlement with the Oversight Committee and agreed to start turning over financial information. The House Democrats finally got to see some of what they had been asking for for years. Needless to say, the Republicans promptly shut down the investigation when they took over in 2023 but the Democrats were able to see information about four of Trump's domestic properties and who spent money there in the first two years of his term.

Even with those limitations on their investigation, they uncovered a huge amount of potential corruption. According to the report, over 20 foreign governments put cash into Trump's pockets at just those four properties in 2017 and 2018, to the tune of $7.8 million. The greatest largesse came from just four countries:

-Kuwait paid him at least 300k and moved their lavish holiday party to his hotel, after which he proclaimed that he was proud to ensure they got a big $5 billion sale of American F/A-18 Super Hornet fighting jets.

-Qatar was declared by Trump as corrupt and a funder of terrorism when he first took office. But miraculously, after their Permanent Mission to the United Nations spent $6.5 million for an apartment in Trump World Tower (as well as almost half a million more in other expenditures), he feted their King at the White House and welcomed them as an ally in the fight against terror.

-Saudi Arabia paid Trump over $800k in those first two years, no doubt in gratitude for his unprecedented decision to visit there on his lavish first foreign trip and his decision to bypass congress to sell them 8 billion dollars worth of weapons. And they were very happy to cut him in on their new golf tour after he left office. 

And, of course, there's this:

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As president, Trump pulled in the most money at his properties during his first two years from China, which is richly ironic considering the current push to impeach President Biden without evidence for allegedly receiving money from China when he was out of office. (Oversight Committee Chair James Comer called the Democratic report "beyond parody" because Trump had "legitimate businesses.")

Chinese interests spent more than $5.5 million at Trump Tower and at his hotels in Washington and Las Vegas including millions from the Chinese Embassy and a state-owned bank which the Justice Department believes helped the North Korean government evade sanctions.

Remember this?

Keep in mind that this is likely the tip of the iceberg. He owns hundreds of properties around the world which were wide open to foreign money and there can be no doubt that this went on until his last day in office and beyond.

Trump was the most corrupt president in American history but the fact that he did so much of this in plain sight seems to have strangely inoculated him from accountability on any of it. It's possible that the special prosecutor is pursuing it as part of his espionage investigation and has discovered more evidence but we may never know about it. Even if we do it looks like it will almost certainly come after the election.

However, this absurd impeachment crusade against Joe Biden may just be the hook that pushes the media and the Democrats to refocus the people on what we know he did. It says everything that this man has so many scandals that corruption on this scale has been considered a minor offense by comparison. 

That’s the basic question that Andrew Gelman is asking in this post. He suggests one answer, in the specific context of American football:

I guess part of the problem is, to use some psychology and statistics jargon, a cognitive bias induced by ecological correlation. There always were some teams that tried unconventional plays, but they tended to be less successful teams that tried these tactics as a last resort. The Oklahomas, the Michigans, the Vikings and Steelers didn’t need this sort of thing. The only thing at all out of the ordinary I can remember being routinely played is Dallas’s two-minute offense with Roger Staubach in the shotgun, but that was a rare exception, as I recall it.

Consider a sequence over the decades:

1. Tactics are developed during the play-in-the-mud, Army-beats-Navy-3-to-0 era.

2. Conservative coaches stick with these tactics for decades.

3. Spectators are so used to things being done that way that they don’t even question it.

4. Analytics revolution.

5. Even now, coaches shade toward the conservative choices, even when stakes are high.

We’re now in step 5. In his above-linked post, Campos expresses frustration about it. And I get his frustration, as this is similar to my frustrations about misconceptions in science, or clueless political reporting, or whatever. But what really intrigues me is step 3, the subject of this post, which is how we were so deep inside this particular framework of assumptions that we couldn’t even see out. Or, it’s not that we couldn’t see out, but that we didn’t even know we were inside all this time.

I wonder what Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Kahneman, Josh “hot hand” Miller, and other experts on cognitive illusions think about this one.

The specific suggestion here is that tactics that might make sense in much lower scoring eras cease to make sense when scoring becomes higher, but neither coaches nor fans adjust to the new reality, or adjust very slowly.

This explanation doesn’t really work for the NFL, since scoring in that league has been remarkably stable for the entire post-WWII era. When we look at NFL scoring averages, it’s obvious that the game’s rules makers are constantly tweaking the rules to maintain a balance between offense and defense that results in a scoring average of about 20-23 points per game per team, with significant changes being made whenever — such as in the late 1970s when pass blocking rules were liberalized — scoring begins to fall outside this very narrow range. (By way of contrast, scoring averages in major league baseball have varied far more over time).

The most obvious cognitive illusion/failure that gripped football coaches for many decades, and has only recently begun to loosen, was the tendency to punt far more often than even the crudest statistical analysis would consider optimal. Here’s a passage from my new book A Fan’s Life:

I remember the precise moment when my frustration on this topic reached a boiling point: October 30, 1999. Michigan was playing Indiana in Bloomington, and the Wolverines featured an offense made up almost entirely of future NFL players, including eventual superstars such as quarterback Tom Brady and offensive lineman Chris Hutchinson. Meanwhile, Indiana’s quarterback Antwaan Randle El – also a future NFL star – was that afternoon a kind of offensive wizard, whom Michigan’s defense strove to contain with little success. Tied late in the third quarter, Michigan was faced with fourth down and one yard to go on the Indiana 41-yard line. To my amazement (this is a rhetorical phrase — I was completely unsurprised), Michigan’s coach, the classically conservative Lloyd Carr, decided to punt. Predictably, the punt went into the end zone, which gave Indiana the ball at their own 20—a net change in field position of 21 yards. Even more predictably, on the first play after the change of possession Randle El proceeded to gain back 19 of those precious 21 yards by eluding a host of befuddled Michigan defenders. So Michigan had given up the ball, foregoing an excellent chance of maintaining possession by converting on fourth down, just so Indiana could end up having the ball at almost exactly the same spot, one play later.

In so-called real life, I wanted to scream in frustration. Luckily, the [Michigan football message] Board, open on my laptop in front of the TV, allowed me to scream for the 200^th time to my fellow sufferers that a punt is a turnover.

Thus I considered it an almost personal vindication when, a few years later, University of California economist David Romer demonstrated with mathematical rigor that coaches did punt far too often, given the relevant probabilities. Romer’s paper – which is technically about the more academically respectable topic of the extent to which firms maximize profit-making opportunities – showed that the conventional wisdom about punting was radically wrong. His conclusions suggest that coaches punt far too often because they frame losing the ball on downs as a bad thing, while interpreting giving the ball away via a punt as, if not exactly a good thing, then not nearly as bad an event. And of course it isn’t nearly as bad – if you ignore the opportunity cost of foregoing the chance of keeping the ball. But that opportunity cost is, Romer demonstrated, massive: so much so that coaches should go for a first down in situations where, according to the conventional wisdom, doing so would be considered the height of recklessness. As big-money sports become ever-more profitable and competitive, the cost of ignoring the insights of people like [Bill] James and Romer becomes ever-greater. Indeed, shortly after Romer’s paper appeared, it found an apparently unlikely reader: New England Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick. Belichick adopted much of Romer’s analysis to his own in-game decision making, with predictably successful results. (In 2004, I authored, along with my friend and fellow Michigan fanatic Jon Chait, a piece for the New York Times, in which we discussed Belichick’s use of Romer’s work.)

Belichick was an early adopter of going for it on fourth down rather than punting in a wide variety of situations where the conventional wisdom required a punt. In the ensuing 20 or so years tremendous progress has been made in this regard, although punting still remains over-used, so tenacious is the psychological hold of the factors that made it so unjustifiably popular.

The larger question here is, as Gelman notes, why it takes so long for commitments to various suboptimal tactics and strategies to deteriorate, in the face of compelling data demonstrating that sub-optimality? (An example from the world of baseball was the many decade-long failure to recognize the value of walks, and the related failure to grasp that the hitter is a far more important variable in whether a walk is issued than the pitcher).

Part of the answer, I think, has to do with the relationship between anti-intellectualism in general and the culture of big money sports in particular. “Analytics” were for a long time considered to be some sort of nerdy black magic, that represented a kind of violation of the Code of the Game, which could only be understood by Those Who Had Played It. This attitude still very much exists, though it has been beaten back somewhat by the Moneyball generation, as the competitive and therefore economic costs of willful ignorance and stupidity become higher. (“What do the analytics say?” broadcasters will now ask on fourth down situations, as if our computerized version of the Oracle at Delphi was about to be consulted).

The application of all this to realms outside of sports is, as Gelman also suggests, quite striking, although in a culture in which a revanchist fascism is celebrating ignorance and stupidity as positive virtues, practitioners of “analytics” in every field find constantly that, as Camus noted, their rock awaits them.

There’s a meme commonly shared on social media that goes something like this: “If you drank from a garden hose, stayed outside till dark, rode in the back of a pickup truck, ate dirt, licked random amphibians, taunted apex predators, and slapped yourself repeatedly in the face just to feel something in the midst of your cosseted, banal, utterly meaningless existence, then SHARE.” I may be paraphrasing, but the meaning is plain enough. Kids these days need fresh air and a maybe a good dose of COVID-19 to teach them that life is an adventure!

The problem with that meme is that the person who drank from a garden hose and got a parasitic condition that turned their brain to ricotta cheese before they briefly took up prop comedy, and then unceremoniously shuffled off to an Elysian afterlife (where premium champagne flows 24/7 from sketchy garden hoses) never gets to share that meme. Because they’re fucking dead.

So, we’re a nation of rugged individualists. I get it. Unfortunately, that attitude has put us behind the eight ball when it comes to COVID-19 mitigation. As in, we pretty much suck at it. Because too many of our fellow citizens are, well, pretty fucking dumb.

Enter the Koch brothers. Or, rather, the Koch brother. (David Koch drank from too many garden hoses, apparently, and is no longer with us.) Turns out that the same deep-pocketed creeps who were behind the astroturf Tea Party are now associated with a burgeoning movement to keep masks off the faces of our precious, cherubic children. And I could not be more depressed.

The Washington Post has obtained a form letter suggesting that the recent “grassroots” effort to turn our schoolchildren into little disease vectors of freedom is not so grassroots after all. The Koch(s) is (are) behind it.

According to the Post, a letter that sounds “passionate and personal” has been circulating among parents who are concerned that their kids might be called nerds or something (really, who knows what the fuck they think?), and they’ve been pestering local school officials with it.

The Washington Post:

But the heartfelt appeal is not the product of a grass roots groundswell. Rather, it is a template drafted and circulated this week within a conservative network built on the scaffolding of the Koch fortune and the largesse of other GOP megadonors.

That makes the document, which was obtained by The Washington Post, the latest salvo in an inflamed debate over mask requirements in schools, which have become the epicenter of partisan battles over everything from gender identity to critical race theory. The political melee engulfing educators has complicated efforts to reopen schools safely during a new wave of the virus brought on by the highly transmissible delta variant.

The document offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a well-financed conservative campaign to undermine regulations that health authorities say are necessary to contain the coronavirus. The frustration of many parents who want a greater say is deeply felt, school superintendents say. But their anger is also being fueled by organized activists whose influence is ordinarily veiled.

Why? Seriously, why? What is it about the freedom to spread virus globules from sea to shining sea that’s so appealing? 

The letter has been distributed since Tuesday to members of the Independent Women’s Network (IWN), which calls itself a “members-only platform that is free from censorship and cancellation.” Unfortunately, these “mothers” don’t appear to care if COVID-19 cancels their kid.

You can follow the link to the form letter the group is circulating, but if you’d rather not step into that den of disinformation, here’s a particularly egregious excerpt:

It’s a great blessing that COVID doesn’t pose as serious a health risk to children as it does to adults. Critically, young kids do not significantly spread COVID either. Furthermore, now that the adults in our community (teachers, school staff, parents and family members) have had a chance to get vaccinated, the risk to adults of serious illness from COVID infection is even smaller.

Uh, no. As one doctor interviewed by the Post noted, that’s totally wrong. David Kimberlin, a physician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said the data “clearly [show] that children can transmit the virus, perhaps to a lesser extent than older adolescents and adults, but that second part is still not clear.”

Kimberlin added that letters like the one promoted by the Koch-funded IWN “will cause more deaths, more funerals and more white flags on the National Mall.”

Meanwhile, the phony grassroots aura that the IWN has cloaked itself in stands in stark contrast to most parents’ attitudes about masking mandates. According to an August Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 63% of parents think unvaccinated students and staff should be required to wear masks in school. But, hey, they tend not to show up on the news, ripping masks off people’s faces while screaming anti-intellectual nonsense.

So what’s the anti-mask furor about, really? Hell if I know. It’s like these people are from another planet. And with an entire major political party already on the side of the virus, knowing that big, evil money is backing this dangerous nonsense is beyond depressing. 

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

Following the huge success of PyCon Africa, the Django community in Africa is ready to bring a new major software event to the continent - the very first DjangoCon Africa! The Django Software Foundation is excited to endorse and support this initiative.

Plans are already in motion for a DjangoCon Africa to be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in November 2020. Actual dates to be announced as soon as key details are in place.

DjangoCon Africa will include 3 days of single-track talks, 1 day of workshops and sprints, and another day for touring for international visitors.

The event will also include a Django Girls workshop to be held the weekend before DjangoCon Africa. To make the conference as inclusive as possible, the event will offer financial aid to members of under-represented communities in software to ensure they can also attend.

The CFP, which is open to all, will also be announced as soon as key details are in place.

About Ethiopia

Ethiopia is a country in North East of Africa, commonly known as the Horn of Africa. It is a country with a rich history and many historical places to visit. The country is highly accessible to all, with African Union members having the option of applying for visa on arrival at Bole International Airport or applying for an e-visa like the rest of the world before traveling to Ethiopia.

The country also boasts of the largest airline in the whole of Africa, with the country’s airline, Ethiopian Airlines having 53 routes in Africa, 17 in Europe, 7 in the Americas, 14 in Asia and 10 in the Middle East. This makes this country very accessible to all of Africa and the rest of the world and hence an ideal location for the first DjangoCon Africa.

See you in Addis Ababa in November 2020 for the first ever DjangoCon Africa!