Coming Soon

Some interesting thinking.

1. Watch Ohio
2. Political shift
3. The return of manufacturing
4. Resurrection of Labor
5. The new swing voter

The Erroneous Predictions Multilith

Behaving stupidly isn't a new thing, of course, and it's not a particularly American thing either - recent events notwithstanding.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Few things in life are as satisfying as serving up a heaping helping of “I told you so.”

Something like that must have been on the mind of the U.S. politician or bureaucrat who in the mid-1960s commissioned a wonderfully readable 48-page government report known internally as “The Erroneous Predictions Multilith.”

The document was produced by the Legislative Reference Service — what we today call the Congressional Research Service — and it is a compilation of some of history’s most spectacularly wrong forecasts. (Why “multilith”? That refers to the printing process used to produce such publications.)

The full title of the report is “Erroneous Predictions and Negative Comments Concerning Exploration, Territorial Expansion, Scientific and Technological Development; Selected Statements.”

I learned of the report from Dennis Chesters and Cynthia Lockley of Adelphi, Md. Dennis is a retired NASA scientist. Cynthia is a senior fellow of the Society for Technical Communication. They are curious who commissioned the report — and why — and wondered if I could find out.

We’ll get to that, but first, here’s a taste of “The Erroneous Predictions Multilith.” It starts in 1486 with the royal committee that advised the king and queen of Spain not to fund a numskull named Christopher Columbus. Sailing west to Asia, the committee insisted, would take an impossibly long three years. And, besides, there was nothing between Europe and that destination but a vast, featureless ocean.

Speaking of vast and featureless, nearly 400 years later, New York Rep. Orange Ferriss couldn’t believe the United States paid Russia $7 million for the Alaska Territories. “Of what possible commercial importance can this territory be to us?” he fumed in Congress.

In 1892, Alabama Rep. Hilary A. Herbert wanted to “put in the knife” into funding for the U.S. Geological Survey. Herbert said the agency wasn’t necessary to “carry on the government” and it didn’t contribute to “the protection of life or liberty or property.”

Rep. Henry C. Snodgrass of Tennessee felt the same way about establishing the National Zoo. “I do not believe the American people, hundreds and thousands of whom are today without homes, ought to be taxed to afford shelter and erect homes for snakes, raccoons, opossums, bears and all the creeping and slimy things of the earth,” he said in 1892.

Three decades earlier, Sen. Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania wondered why Congress was being asked to fund the Smithsonian Institution. “I am tired of all this thing called science here,” Cameron said.

Wrong calls on technology make especially delicious reading now.

Writing about airplanes in the March 1904 issue of Popular Science Monthly, Octave Chanute proclaimed: “The machines will eventually be fast, they will be used in sport, but they are not to be thought of as commercial carriers.”

Astronomer William H. Pickering didn’t see much of a future for airplanes, either. Replace Atlantic steamships with passenger airplanes? Pshaw!

Said Pickering: “It seems safe to say that such ideas must be wholly visionary, and even if a machine could get across with one or two passengers the expense would be prohibitive to any but the capitalist who could own his own yacht.”

Capitalists with their own yachts made me think of today’s space-obsessed billionaires. And space, I think, is what prompted the creation of the report. It was compiled by a Legislative Reference Service researcher named Nancy T. Gamarra, who wrote other reports of a technical nature.

She prepared it at the behest of the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences. The first draft came out in 1967. A revised draft was issued in 1969. My guess is that someone on the committee was getting grief from constituents about the cost of the U.S. space program. “The Erroneous Predictions Multilith” was a way to silence critics: You don’t want to go into space? What if Columbus hadn’t sailed the ocean blue?

This is only a guess because the current policy of the Congressional Research Service is to treat all research requests as confidential. I can see why. I bet a bunch of senators and representatives are even now badgering CRS with “How do I delete — I mean really delete — my browser history and all of my text messages?”

It would be just awful if the names of those congresspeople were made public.

Anyway, back to the report. In 1839, the French surgeon Alfred Velpeau wrote that he saw no future for anesthesia, insisting that “ ‘Knife’ and ‘pain’ are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient.”

There’s even a section on early opposition to vaccination. Edward Jenner’s attempts to use relatively harmless cowpox to prevent deadly smallpox prompted one 18th-century doctor to complain: “Smallpox is a visitation from God, but the cowpox is produced by presumptuous man; the former was what Heaven ordained, the latter is, perhaps, a daring violation of our holy religion.”

The more things change, eh?

Isaac Newton said that he was able to make his discoveries only by standing upon the shoulders of giants. All too often, we have to stand under the heels of idiots.

A Blast From The Past

Smart guy Carl Sagan via Brian Williams at MSNBC

Today's Tweet

From an interview in 1999.

David, this internet thing will never catch on... 🤦‍♀️ #davidbowie @timberners_lee pic.twitter.com/XKoSBVqZGU

— BBC Radio 6 Music (@BBC6Music) January 13, 2019

Don't Be Fooled

Richmond Times-Dispatch

Democrat Hillary Clinton has opened a 15-point lead over Republican Donald Trump in Virginia among likely voters following the release of a 2005 tape in which Trump bragged about groping women, according to a new tracking survey by Christopher Newport University.

In the CNU survey out Sunday, Clinton leads statewide among likely voters with 44 percent to 29 percent for Trump, 11 percent for Libertarian Gary Johnson, 3 percent for independent Evan McMullin and 2 percent for Green Party nominee Jill Stein.

Clinton has more than doubled her advantage in Virginia since CNU released its first tracking poll on Sept. 26.

“It’s crystal clear why the Trump campaign pulled staff out of Virginia this week,” said Quentin Kidd, director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at CNU.

But did you catch that delicate undertone?
44 Hillary
29 Trump
11 Johnson
  3 McMullin
  2 Stein

If it holds - and if it indicates a strategy of the anti-Trump establishment GOP to help the vote-splitting 3rd parties maintain a double-digit total - this opens the shitty little negativity narrative of "Hillary has no mandate - too many Americans don't like her / don't trust her / think she's always lying etc etc etc".

Gingrich and Lott (I think) used the plurality thing against Bill Clinton in the 90s.  There's no reason for me to think we shouldn't expect McConnell and Ryan et al to come out with "Someone has to represent the x% of Americans who didn't vote for Mrs Clinton".

Whatever that percentage actually is, they're likely to do their damnedest to spin it twist it and warp it into something they can pretend is a majority. Just listen for one of their favorite weasel-terms - "the American people" - and know they're simply inviting the inference that they have the majority on their side and those "others" are trying to steal things away from us and blah blah blah.

And here we go again.

Ya heard it here first, kids.

But Don't Get Happy

We have Clinton's lead up to 5 points now. https://t.co/WLXtJodIzD pic.twitter.com/rcbE00H4iY

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) October 6, 2016

...Get to work. 
Make the calls. 
Hand out the fliers. 
Put up the yard signs.
Elect the people who'll keep the pressure on. 

Today's Chart

With today's polls 538's Now-Cast gives Hillary a WHOPPING 78% chance of winning. Last week Trump was at 57%. pic.twitter.com/QjyxBYbiLV

— Mark Elliott (@markmobility) August 1, 2016

A Quick Check

As of this morning, there are 18 states in the US where it's legal (in one way or another) to marry someone of your own gender:
CA, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, IA, ME, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, RI, VT, WA

There are also 8 aboriginal tribes in the US who say it's alright.

And, here's a list of other countries and/or cities with some kinda of accommodation for Marriage Equality:

Argentina
Belgium
Brazil
Canada
Denmark

England
France
Iceland
Mexico - Quintana Roo and Mexico City
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Portugal

Scotland
South Africa
Spain
Sweden

Uruguay

Wales

I like to go back and check on certain things - particularly things that politicians say when they peer into the mists of the future and make bold predictions of outcomes and consequences when they're either in favor of or opposed to the enactment of policy.

So I did a cursory search, and I've found a coupla things I think are worth noting.

1) In places where Marriage Equality is the rule, more people are getting married, and the Marriage Failure Rate is unchanged. "Gay Marriage" is not destroying anybody's marriage or anybody's family.  Families and marriages are in fact being destroyed - by unemployment, PTSD, Wall Street leeches and phony foreclosures, boredom, doctor bill bankruptcies, infidelity (whatever the fuck that even means), etc - but people getting married to people they love?  That one just ain't on the list.

2) There has been no increase in the reporting of "Criminal Bestiality" - which happens to remain a legal activity in 12 states btw - so there's been none of the dread Man On Dog Sexual Perversions that all the "conservatives" knew had to follow closely on the heels of any and all attempts to pull the ginormous Religiosity Stick out of Rick Santorum's ass.

Can we get on to the important shit now, please?

Start The Clock

I get pretty sick of these mush-brained jagoffs and their predictions of dire horribleness.



So let's see if there's anything true about any of this crap 5 years from now.  Oh, gosh.  I forgot.  Beck and others of his stripe always put these things far enough out so we're sure  not to recall what they actually said way back 5 years ago.

I don't know how to chronicle all of the doofery, but let's see what happens a few years down the road (assuming I'm still here), when somebody comes back to my little blog and clicks on the "predictions" tag.