monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Well, confirming Blatham's prediction, Betsy DeVos was confirmed today as Secretary of Education, with helpful votes by (still) Senator Jeff Sessions and the VP, Mike Pence. I assume Jeff Sessions' confirmation as AG will follow soon. His job cleaning out the debris of our highly politicized Justice Department will be Herculean .... like the Augean stables.

Betsy's kinda HOT!

Well, I mean, for an old-ass broad, ya know?

If anyone's interested (probably not) I hear-tell that, startin at 6:00 Eastern, they will televise oral arguments by attorneys made to the cheese-eating 9th District Court of Appeals regarding the immigration order.

I heard a California attorney say that if the 9th circuit (includes CA) ruled against you, then you knew you had a good case. They call it the "nutty ninth."

It is notoriously ultra-liberal and is, by far, the court most often over-ruled by the Supreme Court.

I agree, and just watching her manner in a couple of interviews I get the vague impression that she's a woman who's lived fully and well.

Why of course it's complicated and one could say that any moment is pivotal in one way or another. Yet the end of the cold war (or Cold War 1) was a pivotal moment of greater historical significance, IMO, than the founding histories of the Hashemite kingdom and the state of Israel.

The 9th is indeed the most overturned court in the US, they get it wrong so often.

I've got a friend on that court, a very elegant Hispanic gentleman from San Francisco who just might be the Northern California Rep on this one. He's one of the few sane voices in the 9th Circuit.

They are also the court with the most cases affirmed.

Maybe by sheer volume (virtually every ruling is appealed), but certainly not by percentage.

The latest in our "Fake Polls, Fake News, Fake Judges, Fake Media and Fake Popes" round-up:
TPM

I agree with you that some moments are truly pivotal, and that the collapse of the USSR waas indeed one of them. Moreover your insight about the accelerating flow of history that followed Fukuyama's rather pretentious and untimely declaration proved to be ironically accurate.

Complexity theory is something that has interested me since my grad school days working on complex numerical simulation of turbulent fluid flows. Led by a skeptical Meterorologist who produced some vivid demonstrations that it wouldn't work, the really smart guys in the field developed what became Chaos theory and the general proposition that the future state of non linear dynamic systems cannot be accurately predicted. That, of course had immediate consequences for Weather and Economic forecasting and many other established fields, and controversies that continue today.

Few things in life are more complex and full of contradictions than human behavior and the implications for the study of human history are profound. One interesting consequence of Chaos theory is that the gross properties of certain non linear complex systems do appear to present some quasi predictable features, even though the detailed "microstate" remains intractable. Your insight about the pivotal nature of events in 1990 got me thinking of others and the notion that this may be a model for productive analysis. Now that I think more about it this is merely an already commonplace notion among historians.

Anyway you got me thinking ....

My copy of Discourses on Livi arrived today. Looking forward to it.

In fact, the seller sent me two copies so if anyone would like a free copy, just message me with your address and I'll send it along (when the streets clear a bit as we've had over two feet of snow in the last 5 days)

On DeVos... she received more opposition than any Ed secretary in history (prior record was 40, she was 50) and the use of the VP to cast a tie breaker vote on a cabinet appointee has no historical precedent.

Isn't that because they used to need 60 votes until Reid decided that wasn't needed anymore?

Economic forecasting is impossible, because nothing is static. Even historic numbers are often revised.
I rely on macroeconomics to make decisions on investments. As long as our economy continues to grow, I feel comfortable about our investments. I don't listen to naysayers who predict drops in our stock market by 50% and 80% that's been predicted the past couple of years. Also, I don't listen to pundits who recommend increasing bond holdings as we age. My funds are 80% equity and 20% bonds, and I'm 81.

There is a reason the left didn't like Devos, she wasn't a union supporter. I'm sure she plans on taking power away from the Unions and giving it to the parents who actually pay for the schools.

No. I just checked Wikipedia and found that Harry Reid has been in place as Majority/Minority leader of the Senate since the founding of the country.

Thanks for my laugh for today.

I was interested in this today -

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/02/06/reddit-co-founder-alexis-ohanian-on-trump-s-muslim-ban-deleting-the-alt-right-and-the-internet-s-future.html