Petraeus will open the final act of the drama in Scene 1 (sounds very Shakespearean, if not Sophoclean). The principal dramatic tension is whether he and Ambassador Crocker will be allowed to mouth their own words, someone else's or whether their words will be "interpreted" by loyal Bushite officials. Regardless of the dramatis personae, the import of the message will be the same and the outcome will, as well.
The Bushite Scourge in Iraq has approximately 8 more months to run (I'd set the over-under bet on the first withdrawals without replacement--sort of like my scalp follicle policy--to begin approximately February 29). By that date, the probable or certain Republican nominee's identity should be known (as it certainly is not today). That White Northern European Male, after evaluating the political challenge posed by his likely or certain November opponent(s), can signal the national party leadership of his political needs, which will most likely be to go the "John Warner" route, i.e., begin token withdrawals now.
Natural rotation out with lesser replacement, along with a new focus on avoiding casualties (a la Vietnam in election years) will bring the level down to 75-80k American forces by the election, which should leave all options open for the 2009-inaugurated President, whatever his/her party affiliation and previous stance on the war.
I continue to find the "debate" a waste of time and effort, even politically (at the strategic level). Few points will be gained for either party in November, 2008 by the outcome that is clearly indicated.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Jack of Hearts, Ace of Spades
Alberto Gonzales bites the dust in typical ignominious Bushite fashion. The honorary family member and never-quite-up-to Attorney General can go back to legal stenography for the Dubya Presidential library. He was scapegoated quite effectively by the legal community when it was clear that he couldn't "not remember" convincingly.
Not so the top-ranked card in the deck, domestic adviser Karl Rove. His plan to build a national Republican dominance is in shambles. He showed himself tactically brilliant but strategically flawed. Since every decision (especially those relating to GWOT) in this White House is politically motivated, if not politically determined, it is hard to pick any Bushite fiasco for which he should not bear personal responsibility.
Still, it is not over, and Rove's move to the outside reflects that. Republicans' re-capturing either house of Congress would seem to be out of the question in 2008, barring a complete Democratic swoon (not out of the question in any election year). The numbers of seats at risk in the Senate put the Republicans in a position to lose 3-5 seats even if they run a good campaign with a good Presidential nominee (both seem unlikely at this point). Larry Craig's is just the latest seemingly-safe Republican-held seat to come into play.
Despite an uninterrupted series of bad news for the party (even the successes they might claim on the ground in Iraq are double-edged, politically), there's still a real chance that the Presidential race could fall their way. About a 41% chance, if one believes the political futures market (I'd say that's about one-fourth too high).
Of the original Bushite deck, the only active face cards are Cheney (Ace of Clubs), Mitch McConnell (Jack of Diamonds), and Dubya (Ace of Hearts). Not enough for an opening bid.
Not so the top-ranked card in the deck, domestic adviser Karl Rove. His plan to build a national Republican dominance is in shambles. He showed himself tactically brilliant but strategically flawed. Since every decision (especially those relating to GWOT) in this White House is politically motivated, if not politically determined, it is hard to pick any Bushite fiasco for which he should not bear personal responsibility.
Still, it is not over, and Rove's move to the outside reflects that. Republicans' re-capturing either house of Congress would seem to be out of the question in 2008, barring a complete Democratic swoon (not out of the question in any election year). The numbers of seats at risk in the Senate put the Republicans in a position to lose 3-5 seats even if they run a good campaign with a good Presidential nominee (both seem unlikely at this point). Larry Craig's is just the latest seemingly-safe Republican-held seat to come into play.
Despite an uninterrupted series of bad news for the party (even the successes they might claim on the ground in Iraq are double-edged, politically), there's still a real chance that the Presidential race could fall their way. About a 41% chance, if one believes the political futures market (I'd say that's about one-fourth too high).
Of the original Bushite deck, the only active face cards are Cheney (Ace of Clubs), Mitch McConnell (Jack of Diamonds), and Dubya (Ace of Hearts). Not enough for an opening bid.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
August Excuse Posting
A tough month in which to find time to post has been compounded by the life-and-death struggle for control of this computer with some bad spyware (I blame the kids' downloading for getting it started). So far, it's winning, but this post shows we haven't given up the struggle. Now I know why James T. Kirk would blow up the Enterprise rather than letting powerful alien forces gain control of it. With regard to my predicament, I resist Iraq references playing on "surge", the Iraqi parliament's taking the month off.
We're working on a possible new endorsement (our reader(s) are invited to guess), additional book reviews from the summer reading, and a belated diatribe marking the passing of the Bushite Ace of Spades, that real hot potato head, Karl Rove. Visit this site soon.
We're working on a possible new endorsement (our reader(s) are invited to guess), additional book reviews from the summer reading, and a belated diatribe marking the passing of the Bushite Ace of Spades, that real hot potato head, Karl Rove. Visit this site soon.
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Summer Reading II, III--The Predictors; The Black Swan
I've put these two together because they share a theme, one I'm particularly interested in these days: the problem of prediction.
The Predictors, by Thomas A. Bass, is subtitled "How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory to Trade Their Way to a Fortune on Wall Street". The subtitle takes most of the mystery out of the telling of the story, as they work through their organizational issues, find funding, generate reams of unworkable models, and finally--in the last chapter--actually start making some bucks (1997 or so). The author had chronicled some of the physicists' earlier (unsuccessful) attempt to devise a casino-breaking roulette calculator, and he was in on the discussions from the very beginning. So, that part of it was interesting.
Also interesting, and one that took me back to my own career efforts in the mid-90's, was their attempt to bring in huge data streams, address the predictive qualities of the data, and develop and operationalize models which would predict specific outcomes from the data.
The author made a lot--too much--out of the notion that these geniuses chose to launch their envelope-stretching endeavor from the puny backwater town of Santa Fe.
Their methods made a lot of sense from a model-development and validation point of view, but I felt they were overreaching. Essentially, they wanted data feeds of most everything in order to develop models predicting--almost everything. They should have focused on a few key trading indices and bent all their efforts to find the occasional opportunities these markets produce, instead of trying to get involved in a whole bunch of different markets and trading all the time.
The book needs a postscript, epilogue, or second edition for today's readers to understand how well the approach worked in the long run, through the vagaries and changes in the marketplace (some of which this group may have, in fact, driven), and especially in response to the calamity that occurred 9/11/01. How well did chaos theory (which seems to have more inspired the model-building effort than drving the actual functional models) anticipate and deal with that one, and its aftermath?
Which brings us to the tougher read and subject of critical analysis, The Black Swan (subtitled "The Impact of the Highly Improbable"), by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This new volume has been a major success (#25 in Amazon's nonfiction titles, last I looked).
The key notion of the book is that nonlinear processes describe key events in society (also a key idea in The Predictors). Forecasters are deceived by their need to place narratives on phenomena that may not fit well, and statisticians and economists are deceived in their efforts at risk management by using faulty assumptions of normality. The events that disrupt things in a nonlinear way Taleb calls "the black swans" (let's not go into why--suffice to say it yields a catchy title).
Taleb hits particularly hard on those whose job is to control risk but never consider the possibility of new events, ones that have never occurred and thus not easily considered empirically. Chaos theory also comes out here.
Taleb is a man who has given up reading newspapers and magazines and watching the news; he claims the time it freed up has allowed him to read many more books. He is certainly well-read. His style is gruff and off-putting; rather gratuitously, he throws an insult in the first 20 pages at anyone who stands for a woman's right to choose (regarding abortion) and dares to call oneself a humanist. He doesn't suffer fools gladly, and everywhere he looks he sees mostly fools, so he's irritated all the time.
I agree with many of Taleb's arguments and find it to be original and thought-inspiring. So why did I want to disagree with him constantly? It was that style.
I have done many projects to look at future behavior based on past behavior, carefully constructed as those with the Predictors. I would agree that the conditions of normality are usually absent and that that fact is often ignored. The proof of the model is simply how well it predicts, not the theoretical basis, though, in the end, we would always only include factors for which we could conceive some sort of a priori justification (a blind spot--though we tested the others, too). Taleb would hate that narrative externalizing.
The real issue comes from the only type of business Taleb finds interesting--complex and highly-leveraged derivatives. With these, there is no room for an occasional off day. Taleb advocates a highly conservative strategy (e.g., T-bills) while leaving oneself open for the big score. My strategy was always to select a small number of high-likelihood gambles, each providing a reasonable return and avoiding excessive exposure in each.
I have to commend his ending for the main text: "Thank you for reading my book." Dignified, courteous.
The Predictors, by Thomas A. Bass, is subtitled "How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory to Trade Their Way to a Fortune on Wall Street". The subtitle takes most of the mystery out of the telling of the story, as they work through their organizational issues, find funding, generate reams of unworkable models, and finally--in the last chapter--actually start making some bucks (1997 or so). The author had chronicled some of the physicists' earlier (unsuccessful) attempt to devise a casino-breaking roulette calculator, and he was in on the discussions from the very beginning. So, that part of it was interesting.
Also interesting, and one that took me back to my own career efforts in the mid-90's, was their attempt to bring in huge data streams, address the predictive qualities of the data, and develop and operationalize models which would predict specific outcomes from the data.
The author made a lot--too much--out of the notion that these geniuses chose to launch their envelope-stretching endeavor from the puny backwater town of Santa Fe.
Their methods made a lot of sense from a model-development and validation point of view, but I felt they were overreaching. Essentially, they wanted data feeds of most everything in order to develop models predicting--almost everything. They should have focused on a few key trading indices and bent all their efforts to find the occasional opportunities these markets produce, instead of trying to get involved in a whole bunch of different markets and trading all the time.
The book needs a postscript, epilogue, or second edition for today's readers to understand how well the approach worked in the long run, through the vagaries and changes in the marketplace (some of which this group may have, in fact, driven), and especially in response to the calamity that occurred 9/11/01. How well did chaos theory (which seems to have more inspired the model-building effort than drving the actual functional models) anticipate and deal with that one, and its aftermath?
Which brings us to the tougher read and subject of critical analysis, The Black Swan (subtitled "The Impact of the Highly Improbable"), by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This new volume has been a major success (#25 in Amazon's nonfiction titles, last I looked).
The key notion of the book is that nonlinear processes describe key events in society (also a key idea in The Predictors). Forecasters are deceived by their need to place narratives on phenomena that may not fit well, and statisticians and economists are deceived in their efforts at risk management by using faulty assumptions of normality. The events that disrupt things in a nonlinear way Taleb calls "the black swans" (let's not go into why--suffice to say it yields a catchy title).
Taleb hits particularly hard on those whose job is to control risk but never consider the possibility of new events, ones that have never occurred and thus not easily considered empirically. Chaos theory also comes out here.
Taleb is a man who has given up reading newspapers and magazines and watching the news; he claims the time it freed up has allowed him to read many more books. He is certainly well-read. His style is gruff and off-putting; rather gratuitously, he throws an insult in the first 20 pages at anyone who stands for a woman's right to choose (regarding abortion) and dares to call oneself a humanist. He doesn't suffer fools gladly, and everywhere he looks he sees mostly fools, so he's irritated all the time.
I agree with many of Taleb's arguments and find it to be original and thought-inspiring. So why did I want to disagree with him constantly? It was that style.
I have done many projects to look at future behavior based on past behavior, carefully constructed as those with the Predictors. I would agree that the conditions of normality are usually absent and that that fact is often ignored. The proof of the model is simply how well it predicts, not the theoretical basis, though, in the end, we would always only include factors for which we could conceive some sort of a priori justification (a blind spot--though we tested the others, too). Taleb would hate that narrative externalizing.
The real issue comes from the only type of business Taleb finds interesting--complex and highly-leveraged derivatives. With these, there is no room for an occasional off day. Taleb advocates a highly conservative strategy (e.g., T-bills) while leaving oneself open for the big score. My strategy was always to select a small number of high-likelihood gambles, each providing a reasonable return and avoiding excessive exposure in each.
I have to commend his ending for the main text: "Thank you for reading my book." Dignified, courteous.
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