Scientific & Mathematical Illiteracy in the Media

(On the internet, legacy media, scientific advocacy, and pop science)

(Please note — I wrote this in 2013 and just today copied it over into Squarespace’s tool for managing blogs. Doing so messed up scientific notation stuff in the section where I’m ragging on Bill McKibben and Rolling Stone for their messed up math. I am aware that this is a little ironic. I think I caught my errors; I may have missed one — but what I’m frustrated at McKibben/RS for is NOT their typo, but rather the underlying mathematical mistake and what I assume was the glazed expression every reader had when looking at that piece when they ought to have been applying a critical perspective — ed.)

One objective of scientific education is to reduce mathematical and scientific illiteracy. We would probably expect that this is a goal congruent with the goals and values of journalism, since both scientists and journalists are professionally committed to communicating the truth. Reasonable people would agree that one of the qualities of math and science are their resistance to manipulation – pace Disraeli’s quip about lies and statistics, numbers ought to be more immune to the exploitation of the subtleties of language that allow much public speech to be dishonest while not provably false. We might expect, therefore, that journalists would rely heavily upon math and science to support their work.

But this summer, amidst rising popular anger at far-reaching government surveillance programs, author and blogger Michele Catalano published an article (“Pressure cookers, backpacks, and quinoa, oh my!” Medium, Aug. 1, 2013) claiming that several ominous three-letter agencies had been monitoring her internet use. She claimed that her Google search history prompted investigators to search her Suffolk County house; in passing, Catalano repeated these investigators’ comment that they made about a hundred such searches per week.

This is an extraordinary claim. Catalano’s article essentially argues that we live in a ubiquitous surveillance state – and extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof (this axiom is due to Marcello Truzzi, though often attributed to Sagan). I expected that any journalist reading her account would immediately sit down with a pencil and the back of an envelope to estimate the number of visits this taskforce was purportedly making, in order to understand the scope of this surveillance. The mental calculation I made while jogging along the Lake Michigan shore was that her story implied that about 5,200 households were searched every year. I had to stop at the 47th Street pedestrian bridge to catch my breath, where I Googled “Suffolk County, New York” and read that the 2010 US Census found 499,922 households in what looks like a rather pleasant suburban bit of Long Island. If the G-men get two weeks paid vacation a year, we can approximate the relevant numbers as 5,000 searches per year in a county with nearly 500,000 households – so about 1% of Suffolk County, NY households are visited every year by the goon squad… yet no one else had spoken out about this serious breach of their constitutional rights?

Basic mathematical literacy would have immediately shown that there was a rather suspicious hole in Catalano’s account.  Her account was soon debunked, but not before a number of high profile news outlets reported Catalano’s version of the story. Apparently no one writing for any of these widely respected newspapers, magazines, and television networks suffered from the nagging doubt that surfaces in a numerically literate person’s mind when she or he reads a number that seems to be more than a couple orders of magnitude greater than or less than a broadly educated person ought to expect. There was some skepticism – the Washington Post stood out, proving itself less gullible than other, more hyperbolic news organizations – but no one commenting on this fiasco pointed out the very obvious mathematical holes in Catalano’s article. It was a seemingly minor aspect of the story, but it ought to immediately give rise to suspicion about other parts of her account.

Scientific and mathematical illiteracy are not a problem exclusive to online journalism – the national press struggle with high school physics as well. A copy of the March 1, 2009 edition of The Atlantic lived in a tree behind my apartment for a length of time that I’m certain my neighbors didn’t appreciate after I threw it there while reading its cover story. Mark Bowden’s article about the replacement of the USAF mainstay F-15 fighter with 5th generation F-22’s considers the changes in military aviation that have diminished the role of traditional air combat – dogfighting. Describing an advanced fighter’s combat information systems, Bowden states that radar works by emitting electrons and detecting those that are reflected back.

Which means that an author writing in a highly respected national periodical – The Atlantic has been published since before the Civil War, and endorsed Abraham Lincoln in 1860 – about technology’s influence on military aviation is scientifically illiterate at something like a high school level – and so is every editor and fact checker who proofed this article. The online version of that article now bears the embarrassing coda

Correction: The print version of this piece incorrectly referred to the particles emitted by radar as electrons. Radar's signals are electromagnetic waves made up of photons.

But what is a reader who knows that the photon is the quantum of electromagnetic radiation to conclude from this article? Or the non-specialist reader, who nonetheless remembers a high school physics class explanation of light – and radar – as a propagating disturbance of the electromagnetic field, who strongly suspects that an electron is a whole other thing? Perhaps both ought to conclude that any other information this article presents as fact may be nonsense. This error reveals not just the author’s forgivable if embarrassing fallibility, but also the lack of real diligence by The Atlantic’s fact checkers. Besides the importance to our civil discourse, shouldn’t we simply want to get stuff this basic right?

Mistakes like this speak to a kind of It Probably Isn’t Important school of thought. The replacement of an air force fighter aircraft or the deployment of an invasive security apparatus are enormously important projects and affect many people. Billions of dollars will be spent, and we want to think that our understanding of these matters is sufficiently sophisticated to offer a properly informed opinion upon them. But if we rely on this quality of reporting, we won’t understand the basic, fundamental aspects of what we’re talking about.

Some may counter that ignorance of this sort of detail is forgivable because these journalists understand the system as a whole. Perhaps they have synthesized an understanding of the science and technology that informs these issues without troubling to understand the details. But to me it feels like a scam. We cannot sit at a remove and make political decisions based on the opinions of experts we trust to understand the details for us, because clearly those representing themselves as experts aren’t close enough to the metal to understand what they’re writing about. It’s masquerade journalism, depending on the broader perception that scientific and mathematical details salted generously throughout an article lend credibility to one’s writing, and that one’s ignorance of those details’ meaning can be concealed. These writers treat scientific language mystically, hoping it can be manipulated on the page, and that as long as certain words stay in a certain order they’ll still have meaning. We see the sham for what it is when the cargo cultist confuses his incantation – when he writes electron where he ought to have written photon. But how frequently does such a writer keep his leptons and his bosons straight, and successfully pull off the deception – how many times are we failing to catch the deception because the writer gets his spells nearly right through dumb luck?

The situation isn’t getting better, and the consequences for journalists’ scientific and mathematical illiteracy grow graver. Bill McKibben is considered one of the foremost environmental reporters working in the United States, but in the very first paragraph of his August 2, 2012 Rolling Stone article “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” McKibben writes that the odds of a 327th consecutive month with global temperatures exceeding the 20th century average “occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.” The “10-99” error is presumably a typo that occurred when the superscript exponent -99 was dropped to a regular font without the use of a caret to indicate exponentiation. This is an unfortunate way to start an article about math; almost certainly McKibben means 3.7 x 10^-99.

But there is a much more serious error. 3.7 x 10^-99 is compared to a very large number (the number of stars in the universe) and said to be greater than that number. An article by a highly respected environmentalist, writing about the math of climate change – a topic subject to wild, unfounded attacks masquerading as skepticism, a subject that has always had recourse to defend itself in its scrupulous scientific record – asserts that the number 3.7 x 10^-99, or 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 0037, is larger than the number of stars in the universe. The generally accepted number of stars is between 10^22 and 10^24, or somewhere between 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. I feel quite confident stating that the number of stars is somewhat greater than 3.7 x 10^-99.

The source of this mistake is relatively easy to guess at. Presumably McKibben has previously estimated the likelihood of the 327 consecutive above-average months, and written that probability in the X-to-1 odds format, where X was large. If he assumed that a given month’s global temperatures were independent from the previous or succeeding months, and assumed a fair coin toss, 50%-50% chance for that month to be hotter than average, he would then guess that a 1 month hot streak had a probability of ½; a two month hot streak, 1/2^2; and an n-month hot streak, a probability of 1/2^n. 2 to the 327th power, or 2^327, is about 2.73 x 10^98. Expressed as a fractional probability, where the likelihood of an event is represented by a number from zero (no chance for it to occur) to 1 (certain to occur), the likelihood that this 327 month hot streak would occur by chance is 1/2^327=1/(2.73 x 10^98), or about 3.66 x 10^-99 – the same very small number that McKibben cites in his article.

With some very simple math, we can guess at his meaning, and deduce a reasonable statement about probability. But that’s not what McKibben wrote, and it’s not what his editor at Rolling Stone saw, and it’s not what any fact checkers responsible for scrutinizing this article would have seen. This mistake is, however, the very first thing that anyone with mathematical literacy will see. No one involved in the process of bringing this article to press balked at this elementary mistake in communicating mathematical information, which suggests that none of them have the (rather basic) mathematical fluency necessary to understand and verify any subsequent mathematical statements in the article. It is a mistake that does damage to the cause of hardworking scientists who need to communicate the dire risks of climate change, who have depended upon their scientific rigor to bring the unpleasant truth into the reluctant public eye. Unlike the Catalano and Bowden articles, no correction appears in the online version of this article as of October 20, 2013.

I don’t know if it makes it slightly better or slightly worse to realize that the comparison McKibben makes is itself meaningless – what has the number of stars in the known universe to do with the very real problems of climate change? If there were only one star in the sky, it would not change the probability of such a streak occurring by a statistically unlikely fluke. That information is already communicated in the fractional probability, and the fact that the universe is a very large place is not particularly germane to what is currently happening in our part of it. Has McKibben considered whether the odds against such a trend are greater than the total number of oranges ever grown in Spain? How does it compare to the number of atoms in my dog? Please let him know that she’s been gaining weight, and ask him to revise upwards any previous estimates.

I have attributed these errors to Bill McKibben, and to Mark Bowden and Michele Catalano, because their names appear as authors on these pieces, but that is perhaps unfair. It’s not troubling that an author makes a mistake; I’ve written thousands of pages of scientific and technical documents, and I know I’ve made errors. Rather, it’s the nearly unavoidable conclusion that the publishers of such articles lack the diligence to catch these mistakes that is a source of concern. In a final example from journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell, it becomes obvious that honest and accurate communication isn’t even the goal of this kind of numerically illiterate writing.

Perhaps no popular writer more embodies the problem of false scientific scholarship than Gladwell. His extraordinarily popular collection of essays What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures contains a passage recounting Nassim Taleb explaining a linear algebra calculation at a chalkboard, which entails finding the “igon value” of a matrix. Unfortunately for Gladwell, any undergraduate math major could tell you that Taleb is interested in eigenvalues, which are parameters related to linear equations, not “igon values,” which are absolutely nothing. When originally published in The New Yorker, that magazine’s fact checkers found and used the correct spelling, as University of Pennsylvania professor Mark Liberman points out at the Language Log blog (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1897, retrieved October 20, 2013). The error appears in Gladwell’s essay collection, revealing an interesting counterpoint to our other cargo cult journalists: The New Yorker’s fact checking process worked, but later we’ve learned that the author was simply throwing around the mathy stuff to appear more clever than he really is.

An author who has built a career upon counterintuitive results cherry picked from the social sciences and psychology, whose books repeat the theme everything you’ve been taught is wrong – but trust ME, must think that by smearing something that looks vaguely mathematical or scientific onto his writing he will inherit a certain amount of credibility from those subjects. The fact checkers and editors who turned Gladwell’s drafts into a published book looked at the words “igon value,” presumably thought something like “I don’t know what that means” (because it means nothing) but failed to reach for their dictionaries, because once again It Probably Isn’t Important.

There are an increasing number of critics stating that Gladwell’s books are misleading, that they rely on over-simplifications – reviewers for The New York Times and The New Republic, for example, have criticized the accuracy of his writing (Steven Pinker, “Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective”, New York Times, Nov. 7, 2009; Isaac Chotiner, “Mister Lucky,” The New Republic, Jan. 29, 2009) – but it’s not clear that these critical voices are being heard. Gladwell’s latest book, David and Goliath, is number two on the New York Times Best Seller list (http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/overview.html list for October 27, 2013, retrieved 20 October) where it appears under the hardcover nonfiction category – a category that is at least a half accurate description for his writing.

Artificial limb

Spring, 2017

1.

This letter is about how I went crazy.

2.

I want to tell you about two videos I've seen. Each was only perhaps twenty seconds long, filmed with someone's phone, and they felt as though they could have been recorded at opposite ends of human history.

In 2013 I was struggling at a job I hated. My boss disliked me; I was unsupported, working on a project that would go nowhere. I was withdrawn from friends and I spent too much time on Twitter talking to Syrian guys – mostly my age or younger – living in Az Zarqa or Gaziantep or somewhere they were purposefully vague about. They were lucky that they had found the aperture and resources necessary to flee the charnel house Syria had become, and shockingly unlucky in that they all knew someone who was killed by mortar fire or who became ill in the cold or who was murdered by Shabiha or who just disappeared. They were a lot more like you and I than anyone might sensibly guess, and we mostly talked about pizza and Iron Maiden. I liked almost all of them immediately.

The price I thought I had to pay for friendship with these young Syrians was to quietly act as a disorganized, incomplete, horror stricken witness to the artifacts of violence their country now exports. They retweeted photos and videos their friends and family took at home in Homs or Rif Dimashq. These gory pictures showing the al-Assad regime’s response to the Syrian Revolution were never going to be broadcast in the rest of the world, and I couldn’t convince myself that I wasn’t obligated to look. Videos of the maimed and dead made my ears ring and my face flush – made me feel like I was going to pass out – but if someone captured these images and sent them out to the internet, I believed it was because they wanted someone else, somewhere else, to see them. If the images of these deaths went unseen, would the people whose destroyed bodies they showed be reduced to unexamined data on a server in metro Atlanta? Would they become absences, instead of the dead?

And in early 2013, I saw a video from Douma, a suburb of Damascus, taken in what appeared to be a grimy, ad hoc triage ward. The camera’s view revolved quickly as an unseen photographer moved toward a bed where a baby was screaming because both her legs were blown off at what been her chubby knees. Long tendrils of tissue depended from the wounds, and she screamed in confusion that there could be a pain like this that wouldn’t cease – outraged at the failure of those meant to comfort her. She waved her arms and her leg stumps in agony and anger.

I watched this video only once, sitting in my apartment at dawn on a March morning in Chicago, warm and soft from persistent insomnia, listening to the pinging of the radiators. In the interest of honestly and accurately describing what I saw then, I have gone back to Twitter and YouTube now to look for the footage, but the original post is gone. There’s a video of another little girl from Douma, posted to YouTube by an account called Syrian4all World on February 27, 2013, depicting an eight month old, orphaned infant named Masa, in a hospital. But she still has one of her legs, and more curly black hair than I remember. There is no shortage of dead or dying or grievously wounded children in Syria, and I do not think that I have confused my memory of the baby girl with no legs with this other baby girl with one leg. Another wrong video shows a different baby missing just one leg. His hair is different, his face has worse cuts; he was wounded outside Idlib, in al-Ma’arra (the only geography I know of Syria is a gazetteer of cities that used to not be bombing targets). There are many videos of other children, but they’re older, or the injury is different, or it’s a boy wearing tracksuit pants instead of the fractional baby I still see four years later. I know there was a video of a little girl from Douma with two missing legs, with two bloody, almost chewed stumps. I know there’s a video of filaments dangling grotesquely from a baby’s ruined legs, I know it showed a child furious at an intolerable pain, but I can’t find it, and I don’t know what that absence means (1) .

(1) While this essay was being prepared, a ten-year-old boy identified as Abdel Basit Al-Satouf achieved the worst kind of fame there could be, when a video of him went viral on Twitter. Both his legs were blown off at the knee in an air raid in Idlib. The video shows him firmly but calmly repeating "Baba, carry me, Baba!" Syria is a nation of vivisected children and high explosives.

3.

The other video is from the future. It’s 23 seconds long and shows a young girl with curly blonde hair. She has one arm – her left – that ends where it was amputated above the wrist. Her right arm is a different thing.

She is an eleven-year-old British girl named Tilly. Meningitis nearly killed her, and she lost both hands to the disease when she was still an infant. Surviving meningitis cost her hands and toes and caused other health problems that she will have to manage, but this video shows her a few minutes after she put on a new 3D printed prosthetic cyborg right arm for the first time. She’s picking up objects from a table she stands behind: a Koosh ball and something that looks like a tube of paint. The actuators in her arm make the small half-buzz, half-hiss sound you’d recognize from every science fiction movie robot you’ve ever seen. Her fingers move delicately. The expression on her face isn’t the one of shock I had when I saw this and started crying at work again. It’s the expression of a child working on a puzzle. The unseen woman filming Tilly tugs on the ball she’s holding, testing the bionic arm’s grip. I do not understand what we see in the face of this child; she lives in the future.

The arm she is using is built by Open Bionics in Bristol, England, a company founded in 2013 that uses 3D printing technology to fabricate low cost prostheses. The firm uses 3D scanners to model the limb of the person for whom a prosthesis is to be fitted, and is working toward providing prosthetics for approximately £2,000 each – about $2,500 at the time of this writing.

This video is the first thing I have seen in my life that makes me believe we actually do – or at least could, if we choose to – live in the future. This is the first time I have seen a technology that isn’t just an incremental improvement on something familiar – I grew up watching space shuttle launches on television; some of my earliest memories are writing HELLO WORLDs in BASIC on the IBM 5155 my father brought home to do something hard-to-care-about with spreadsheets. I remember, five years old, sitting in my parents’ den in Colorado, watching the television news about an accident in Ukraine – I remember thick, scratchy brown curtains, the quiet voices of my parents in the kitchen, and a late April snow (from this long ago epoch I more clearly remember sitting underneath the built-in telephone desk in the breakfast nook, listening to my mom tell Mrs. Takayama next door that we would in fact quite like to take one of the Golden Retriever puppies off their increasingly enervated hands). An iPhone is really just a better VGA monitor and a Dr. Sbaitso smooshed into one, and I guess it can call people (you never use it to call people). I know that automotive engineering has been revolutionized and now I drive to work every day in a car that uses electricity generated by wind power, but it still kind of looks like my mom’s ’89 Honda Accord LX with the flip-up headlights. In kindergarten, happy in a middle class/YMCA soccer/Iowa Tests/grill out all summer long neighborhood in Northern Kentucky, I had a children’s book with beautiful illustrations of a proposed power station that would generate electricity using columnar ammonia-filled heat exchangers that depended from buoys into cold ocean water below the thermocline, and we sure never built any of those. Am I losing the thread? Maybe the point is that I’m losing the thread. In this video I saw something that made me think that now everything was different; I felt like I’d just observed the beam of alpha particles carom backwards off a gold foil in Rutherford’s lab at Manchester, and I had realized that the very matter of the world had changed.

4.

$2,500 per prosthesis. The Syrian American Medical Society estimates that there are some 5,000 amputees in East Ghouta, the neighborhood in Damascus gassed by Bashar al-Assad’s forces on the 21st of August, 2013 – the Sarin attack that we had promised would mean (should it come, if it were to happen, were it to come) dire consequences for the rule of a dictator who believes his country to be something more akin to a farm than a republic: a thing to be owned (it came, it happened, and we did nothing).

I don’t think anyone really knows how many amputees have been made across Syria. One report filed in Newsweek in 2015 suggests a figure of 80,000, but that article puts the death toll at only (only!) 230,000, with 4 million displaced – the right numbers in 2017 are likely closer to 500,000 dead, approximately 6 million displaced within Syria, and another 5 million refugees outside the country. But let us be conservative. Let’s consider a need to provide 100,000 prosthetic limbs. At the $2,500 sticker price – for this back-ofthe-envelope calculation let us ignore both the economies of scale and frictional costs of establishing a new, large medical program – that’s a cost of $250 million.

That’s not nothing, $250 million.

But in 2016 the Washington Post reported the loss of $125 billion to wasteful Department of Defense administrative spending over a five-year time scale. We’ve stopped asking frequent questions about Iraq and Afghanistan, but Reuters reported in 2013 that something like $2 trillion has been spent on the Iraq War, depending on how you count the costs, and the price of that conflict may hit $6 trillion by the time we stop thinking of it as a catastrophe we own. A 2015 article in Time suggests that Afghanistan cost the United States something approaching $700 billion. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has warned that mothballing the A-10 fleet, destined to be phased out by the USAF partly to justify the buildup of the F-35 force – is likely to save far less than the $4.2 billion that the Air Force suggested, as other military aircraft will be needed to fill the vacancies left by the A-10. These are big numbers. There are smaller ones, closer to the $250 million price tag.

Where else might we look for savings to fund this notional plan to try to undo some small amount of the damage that occurred while we studiously looked elsewhere(2) ? Consider that in 2013, New York City spent approximately $168,000 per inmate per year of incarceration. The city had reduced its prison population from a peak of 23,000 in the early 1990s to something like 12,000 prisoners by 2013. Further reducing the number of prisoners in New York City by slightly under 1,500 for just one year would provide sufficient savings to pay for 100,000 prosthetic bionic limbs – for the sake of completeness, I admit that this is another over-simplification, as there are fixed costs in the correctional system that cannot be reduced by marginally reducing the number of prisoners. That counterargument is true, but it is also missing what logicians call the goddamn point. The point is that $250,000,000 – observe all its terminal zeroes, signifying enormity – is a staggering sum of money. It is also the kind of staggering sum that we can easily afford to spend, and this would be a very fine way to spend it.

(2)Recall that 2013, when this kid from Douma got her legs blown off, was a moment the internet’s commentariat spent ferociously arguing about Is Game of Thrones Too Sexist? and doing absolutely anything to avoid mentioning Syria.

But some will doubtlessly maintain that $250 million is an absurd amount for Americans to spend building limbs for Syrian refugees who had their bodies blown apart. I would like to know what amount would be reasonable. $50 million? Enough for 20,000 prostheses that would radically change lives. $1 million? Still enough to buy 400 3D printed bionic limbs. You could put a sticker on these 400 robotic arms from the future: A GIFT FROM THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WHO ARE HOPELESS AND TERRIFIED BY THEIR TOLERANCE FOR WHAT HAS BEEN DONE TO YOU.

But what I suspect is that $1 is likely to be too expensive to satisfy many people who raise this complaint. I do not know how viewing a video of a screaming baby in Douma, weakly thrashing the stumps of her legs, would affect their commitment to thrift.

Q.: Is this argument unfair – is it an emotional attack? Yes, yes it is. What of it?

5.

I live in Maine now, an empty place with aureolin sunsets that needs people. Our governor sometimes interrupts his incoherent growling about the need for an authoritarian president in America to insist that the state will never accept Syrian refugees. I think most of us have given up hope that we as a nation will do something to help the displaced. But at a quiet, intimate New Year’s Eve party, friends still spoke earnestly about what such a moonshot effort might look like – we’ve seen pictures of Syrian refugees trapped at the tank berm on the Jordanian border. What if 100,000 came to Maine, what if we brought a million refugees to America? I wrote out Emma Lazarus’s ‘New Colossus’ in longhand, I keep it tucked into my wallet now. We’re not going to do it; we’re too afraid of these guys who like pizza and Iron Maiden.

There's a great chance I'll never really be wholly sane again, not if I keep seeing the ragged stumps of a baby's legs behind my eyelids half a dozen times a day. I’ve caught myself occasionally interjecting a description of some recent horror I’ve seen third-hand into a conversation that has nothing to do with war, because the conversation I’m having in my mind is mostly about watching a Hashd fighter in Iraq carving pieces off a charred body, or a father in Aleppo screaming in a sunny, smoky street for his third dead child. But my preoccupation with this violence is not very important.

There is something the United States can do to help Syrians who have lost so much – who have lost parts of themselves to this conflict we have insistently kept as far from us as possible. We have the resources. And for the very first time in history, we have a technology that can change the lives of people who have suffered grievous injuries. We can spend money to try to undo the damage that occurred during a moral vacuum.

6.

But we’re not going to do that, are we?

It's still what's going to happen

Ok. Here’s what I wrote on twitter (I know. FUCK!) the day of the Iowa caucuses. I’ve made a couple of annotations to what I tweeted then, which are indicated by square brackets. I’d love to check my calculation, but I did it when I was still living in Maine, and all I can find are emails I sent people with that 288,230,… number, in order to, you know, scream. About the horror.

Ok, it's all over but the shooting, so here's my [another!] marker. In 2016 I decided to commit to voting for a woman until one was elected president; I used a demographically accurate model of the male-female population split and considered how many people were over the age of 35. It turns out that if a man were to win the presidency in 2020, it would mean that he pulled off the 1-in 288,230,376,151,711,744 chance miracle of being the n-th male president elected in a row, assuming that men and women are equally likely to be elected. That's a pretty good proof that the opposite is true, of course. It means that if you walked out on the street in 2016 and picked the first man you saw over the age of 35, he apparently is a nearly two billion times favorite to become president when compared to the most experienced candidate ever, assuming she is a woman (and discounting some other candidates you could make the same case for – some people will argue G W B had an equally impressive resume, for instance).

So. I decided to vote only for women.

Now, of course, it is time to pay the piper. I was perfectly happy to vote for Kamala Harris. I'd be ok voting for Gillibrand. I'm pretty uninterested in voting for Klobuchar. Tulsi literally hangs out with members of the literal Syrian nazi party, so I will not vote for her. Williamson is a gag candidate [she is a gag person; it is not a funny gag].

By process of elimination we arrive at Elizabeth Warren. I do not think she can win a general election, and I do not think she has made very good decisions in the last four years – she has been dedicated to trying to peel off voters from Sanders's cult of personality. That is a waste of time, and it builds this constraint into her campaign that she keeps banging into and rebounding from. It has forced her to pretend that people earning $250k a year need college loan relief. It's fucked up her candidacy.

Ideologically, my preferred candidates are probably Inslee or Castro. I like Booker. I think O'Rourke actually made a compelling case by running on just one or two issues that should overwhelmingly concern Americans. I think a lot of candidates are fine; I think twitter has absolutely brain poisoned a lot of people – Biden is fine. He is not a messiah. You shouldn't look to politics for messiahs; you should look to it for someone who will arrest the country's slide into authoritarianism and white nationalism. But, if I have the courage of my convictions, I should stick to my guns. I will dither about whether I will vote for Elizabeth Warren in the KY primary, or write-in another woman; that race happens in late May, and if anyone's still pretending it matters, it's an 80-year-old blowhard with a heart made out of dehydrated and partially reconstituted dolphin vaginas. He cannot win in a general election; he probably won't lose as badly as McGovern because of increasing national polarization. But I find it unlikely Warren can win, either.

So, if I vote for any of the declared candidates I am sad to say that it is for someone who I do not think can win. She's made bad decisions since 2016. And the moment she started trying to shoehorn "#butshepersisted" into non-sequitir tweets, it was obvious she doesn't have the used car salesman skillset that the job needs.

She'd be a pretty good executive, all things being equal. I'll vote for her in November, and maybe for her in May. I do not think she can win in November.

I worked my ass off in 2016 for Clinton. I do not know that I have it in me to do the same in 2020 for anyone. Maybe it's your turn to make some fucking calls and knock on people's doors.

Oh, and Bernie is an egotistical shithead who's accomplished nothing in life except to promote himself. That's just as true today as it was in 2016. He's encouraged conspiracy theory bullshit and dealt a permanent wound to the only party remotely interested in fixing America.

Here's what's going to happen

I’m putting a marker down: it is Tuesday, 16 April, 1:57pm, I’m sitting in my office at Bowhunting State Technical University, and I predict that Bernie Sanders is going to win something like 18%-28% of the pledged delegates and be nominated as the Democratic Party’s 2020 candidate for president, a contest that he will go on to lose badly against Trump.

My argument is based on how his candidacy is shaping up: whom he’s hired (there’s… an uncomfortably high fraction of new campaign hires who are twitter poisoned cultists, like Sirota and all of his JV team), Bernie’s absolutely undisguised fury at Neera Tanden and CAP (which very clearly serve as a proxy sink for his rage against Clinton and the Dem establishment he became deeply unhinged about late in the 2016 primary — I think this is the mid-mortem article I’m remembering , but I haven’t reread it to make sure: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/bernie-sanders-campaign-last-days-224041 ), his generally vituperative attitude… if I add more elements to this comma-ed off list, it will make this sentence into even more of a run-on, and make it look like I have my own Bernie-esque rage problems (sure, fine, whatever). We will draw a curtain of charity over the rest of the list to conceal both his & my Issues.

To return to the thesis: his campaign is not going to expand his base. It’s going to lose some of it, in fact, but that doesn’t matter in the calculus for 2016 — what matters is ensuring that his most committed supporters never waver. If the Dem field stays this large, it’s easy to imagine Sanders marching into the Fiserv Forum (someone’s going to say something about the serendipity of a firm named Populous serving as architects for the Milwaukee arena, but decent people who can still get into heaven will disregard them, close their eyes, & think of Giannis) with a higher number of pledged delegates than any other candidate. I cannot see him getting anywhere close to a majority; he has essentially 100% name recognition but doesn’t get above the mid-20%s in the early primary states that have had a significant number of polls, so he doesn’t really have much room to build a majority. He doesn’t need one; he needs his plurality. If no candidate can win on the first ballot, and if Sanders has a plurality, his supporters would riot before they would let any other candidate accept a brokered nomination. I don’t mean this hyperbolically. I served as a delegate to the state convention in Maine in 2016, and his supporters in the Cross Insurance Arena (I can’t quite connect the dots on a bad pun about Certainly Were Cross!, mostly because insurance gets me nowhere along any kind of wordplay axis, I guess) in Portland were completely unhinged. They largely had no real civics education, favored a couple of mankind’s favorite dysphemisms for Hillary and other prominent Dem women, and yelled some pretty gross things at Barney Frank, the guy Bernie mostly pretends to be. Their political aesthetic was essentially indistinguishable from the ads you see for CBD oil on highway medians.

So. Don’t worry about shooting the moon in a field of something approaching twenty candidates. Bernie can win by showing up with the largest delegation, and threatening to burn down the party if he isn’t named on the second ballot. There’s a very good chance he’d do the same thing if he had the third largest number of delegates, or the fifth. His supporters are not going to be deterred this time, and the party is not built to permit any faction to put down and to subsequently reassert control over a rebellious wing. He’ll be beaten handily in the general, but his supporters are not going home without winning the nomination in Milwaukee. It may be that in summer 2021 Trump will order all remaining dogs to be vivisected and burnt in offering below the unfinished carving of his face on the south side of Denali — executive orders for these projects to be found in communiqué #3, written with menstrual blood from a failed chaos clone of Salma Hayek —, but Bernie’s the 2020 nominee. We can’t stop it/(he can’t win in 2020).

CAVEAT: I thought Scott Walker was going to be the GOP nominee in 2016.

I threw a shit fit.

I’ve spent the last three days trying to figure out what the first sentence of this should be, and if it’s meant to be something that represents me properly, the title of this post is the only thing that’s appropriate. I have a habit.

I want to return to a previous one: when I was a junior or senior in high school I started carrying a hip pocket notebook, and this very simple and flexible medium immediately Marshall McLuhan’ed me into writing things that were more like what I want to write than what I’m writing now, or what I’ve been writing for a long time. I studied poetry in college, but left that coursework in favor of classes on essay and fiction writing, and that was where I was happy. A few times since, I have tried to revive that regular writing habit, but all my energy has been lost instead into twitter — which has the same immediacy and ease, and it’s a good place to dump almost anything, but using twitter never leads me to create real things in the same way as those notebooks. About a week ago I declaimed (this guy, always with such overwrought intensity!) that twitter is what if toilets worked in reverse, where you press a small handle and a medieval, chthonic pipe system delivers terrible things to your home and pours them up inside you. Everyone already knows that, but you can’t quit twitter and stay on twitter. So I’m here instead.