It happened as Chief Justice John Roberts was administering the oath of office to President Obama as prescribed by Article II, Section 1 of the US Constitution:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
But Chief Justice Roberts was winging it (not using notes) and changed the order of wording in the second line. Review exactly what happened (taken from Talking Points Memo and youtube).
This, now well known event, provides an (ironic) contrast between the incoming and outgoing administrations (ironic because Justice Roberts is one of the strict constitutionalists championed by George W. Bush and yet it appears that he chose not to bring notes).
It seems to me President Obama realized there was a mistake in the wording and paused in mid sentence ….Roberts started to correct himself….and then Obama quickly repeated the phrase as Roberts had originally (but incorrectly) given it to him. The rest of the oath was administered correctly.
Having caught the mistake, it surely was a dilemma for Obama. Should he correct the Chief Justice, or repeat exactly as given? How could this be done correctly, yet graciously, in front of a world audience. Obama coolly chose to use the original words given to him. The oath always could be administered again if necessary. (It quietly was re-administered the next day by the Chief Justice.)
The cool gracious confidence of Obama contrasts with the insufferable (and often bungling) overconfidence typical of the George W. Bush administration. This mistake was easily corrected by a do-over. Unfortunately, we cannot do-over the past eight years (but , oh what a wishful thought).
John McCain’s acceptance speech last night brought back memories of how the last eight years began. What little there was that was not biographical in McCain’s speech sounded frighteningly familiar to George W. Bush’s speech eight years ago. McCain proposed the same Bush policies (lower taxes, smaller government, a balanced budget, etc.) and the same Bush “heart felt” promise to work with Democrats and Independents. Republicans must think hope the American people are clueless and getting more so. After all, McCain claimed all this in the name of CHANGE and the crowd in the hall ROARED in approval! I hope think that crowd was not representative of the average American voter.
Judging from McCain’s speech, when it comes to what he says he will do and how he will go about doing it, McCain = Bush doubled down.
The significant problems we face [today] cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. ——Albert Einstein
Or, put another way, suppose problems related to military, and other, actions taken by President Bush in Iraq grow faster than the president’s (or anyone else’s, for that matter) ability to solve them. What are we to do then now?
Bush (the decider) apparently ordered the government to put volumes of information captured from Saddam in the fall of Baghdad on a government website. Bush did this at the urging of republican congressional leaders and over the objection of John Negroponte, his Director of National Intelligence. It turned out that the posted materials included detailed information on the construction a nuclear bomb. The website was shut down Friday by the Bush Administration after being told of the content of the materials found on the site by the New York Times. The information (again apparently) was written in Arabic and was available for anyone to read for several months.
Talk about providing aid to the enemy! This should be a top story in the news for the next few weeks.
… and none of them are good. So when the republicans, or anyone else, ask democrats for a clear explanation of their plan for Iraq, it is a very good question….to which no good answer exists, only bad ones.
It is worth your time to watch (or read the transcript) of Keith Olberman’s “special comments” made on the signing (with as great a fanfare as The President can muster these days) of the Military Commissions Act and the loss of Habeas Corpus. Both (the video and transcript) are found at Crooks and Liars: Countdown Special Comment: Death of Habeas Corpus: Your words are lies, Sir.
…Couldn’t we agree that the treatment of our “detainees” in the war on terror would be a place to start changing tactics?…
I suggest that Democrats in congress who cannot bring themselves to vote against the President-GOP bills (currently under consideration) on our treatment of “detainees” in the “war on terror” should at least abstain.
Update: Unfortunately, Bush/GOP also seem to be losing the war in Iraq. We all can only hope that the Democrats are better on security than Bush/GOP has been.
The BBC On line reports on the first ministerial gathering of the (newly formed) Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. According to the report, the meeting is taking place in Sydney and includes representatives of (at least) the US, China, Japan, India, S. Korea, and Australia. I encourage you to read the full BBC report.
I provide some “teaser” quotes from the report:
The private sector will solve the problem of climate change, according to the US Energy Secretary, Samuel Bodman.
[Bodman said]…the job of governments was to help businesses take up clean technologies.
Critics say the talks are a way to avoid signing up to binding targets like those in the Kyoto Protocol.
The Partnership aims to develop ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions through clean technology.
…The Partnership does not [emphasis added] envisage financial incentives such as the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme, which rewards companies for reducing their carbon output.
…Asked at a news conference why business would adopt more expensive technologies in the absence of financial incentives, Mr Bodman replied: “I believe that the people who run the private sector, who run these companies – they too have children, they too have grandchildren, they too live and breathe in the world.
“And they would like things dealt with effectively; and that’s what this is all about.”
The purpose of this meeting, he said, was for governments to listen to the concerns of the private sector and ask what prevented companies from moving to already available clean technologies.
“Those of us in government believe it is the job of government to create an environment such that the private sector can really do its work.
“It’s really going to be the private sector, the companies… that are ultimately going to be the solvers of this problem.”
His view was endorsed by Australian industry minister Ian Macfarlane, who told reporters: “The real emissions are coming from industry.
Well, you get the idea.
At least the Energy Secretary thinks he is thinking about the problem. Perhaps that is a start.
The
NYTimes revealed on 15 Dec. 2005 that Bush approved a warrantless domestic eavesdropping program to be carried out by the highly secret National Security Agency (NSA) after the Sept 11 attack. Bush has indicated that this program will continue without seeking judicial warrants as long as we are engaged in the war on terror.
It is obvious that this warrantless domestic spy program raises many issues. Bush’s confirmation of the existence of the program prompted the following quote describing President Bush as :the first President to admit to an impeachable offense –
by John Dean (a former White House Counsel with relevant experience in such matters).
The last few paragraphs of this report are quoted below:
Despite a prohibition on eavesdropping on phone calls or e-mail messages that are regarded as purely domestic, The Times has reported that the N.S.A. has accidentally intercepted what are thought to be a small number of communications in which both ends were on American soil, due to technical confusion over what constitutes an “international” call.
Officials also say that the N.S.A., beyond actual eavesdropping on up to 500 phone numbers and e-mail addresses at any one time, has conducted much larger data-mining operations on vast volumes of communication within the United States to identify possible terror suspects.
To accomplish this, the agency has reached agreements with major American telecommunications companies to gain access to some of the country’s biggest “switches,” carrying phone and e-mail traffic into and out of the country.
It appears that the NSA is screening “vast volumes” of communication data to identify possible terror suspects. This is very problematic and would surely lead to the flagging of vastly more innocent than guilty as terrorist suspects. Analysis of such a screening technique involves Bayesian probability. This has been pointed out by other bloggers.
The problem is similar to what occurs in medical screening for a rare disease. Even if the screening technique is highly accurate, it will produce a very large number of false positives. The situation is appropriate for the application of Bayes’ theorem in probability theory. I go through the math in some detail below recasting the medical screening problem in terms of screening for suspected terrorists.
First, a very brief tutorial on applied probability:
Skip the tutorial by dropping down to the (End of Tutorial…) line below.
Let and represent two different traits that could be possessed by members of a large population. For example, could represent “male sex” and could represent “red hair”. A particular population of people could have males, red heads, and male red heads.
If we were to choose a person from the population at random, we would expect the probability of picking a male to be
and the probability of picking a red head will be .
Similarly, the probability of picking a male red head will be the joint probability .
All of these probabilities represent a random choice made from the entire population. We had no knowledge about the person being chosen in advance of making our choice.
Now suppose we make a random choice from a subpopulation. That is, suppose we have some knowledge about the person before making our choice. Say we choose from the male subpopulation and want to know the probability we will get a red head (male, of course). This conditional probability, ,
is the probability of B given we already know we have A.
For the population above, we have red heads out of males. So, for this particular population, we would expect the conditional probability of picking a red head given we have a male to be .
Note that we can also write this result as follows: .
The above expression is often taken as the definition of conditional probability.
Now, we are ready for the statement of Bayes’ theorem: .
Bayes’ theorem follows directly from the definition of conditional probability and the fact that . (The latter statement comes from the obvious fact that the set of red headed males is exactly the same as the set of male red heads.)
Finally, we introduce the notation for the complement of a set: not. Thus, in the example above, refers to “not male” and refers to “not red hair”.
You should now be able to accept the following relationships: ; ; ; and
.
(End of Tutorial on Probability)
Applying Bayesian probability to the problem of screening for terrorist suspects:
Let the set of all persons whose communications are screened, the set of all persons in who are terrorists,
the set of all persons in that are not terrorists, and the set of persons “caught” as terrorist suspects by the screening procedure.
The screening procedure can be characterized by two numbers describing its accuracy: probability a terrorist is caught by the screening process. For example, means the screening process is 99% accurate in identifying a terrorist correctly. probability a non terrorist is not caught by the screening process. For example, means the screening process is 95% accurate in identifying a non terrorist correctly.
We are interested in the probability of the screening process falsely identifying a non terrorist as a terrorist suspect, i.e., the conditional probability . Using Bayes’ theorem , and .
Drawing some (reasonable?) numbers out of a hat trying to estimate the order of magnitude of the probability of a false positive: suppose the total population screened is persons and suppose there are terrorists in this population.
Then, the probability of a terrorist in this population is , and the probability of a non terrorist is .
We also make the following assumptions on the accuracy of the screening process: (99% accuracy for identifying terrorists) and (95% accuracy for identifying non terrorists) , which implies .
Given these values, , and
the total number of persons “caught” as suspected terrorists by the screening process is
{Total suspects “caught”} .
The probability of false positive: .
(Note: I am carrying many more decimal places than warranted by the accuracy of the model, but I want to do a check at the end of the calculation which requires precise intermediate steps to eliminate the propagation of roundoff errors through to the final results.)
Thus, the number of falsely accused suspects produced by the screening process is !
The number of suspects correctly accused by the screening would be , or .
Checks: . (check)
Another way to get the number of terrorists caught by the screening process is . (check)
To summarize, it is very likely that a large number of innocent people would be are being flagged as suspected terrorists by a screening process applied to “vast volumes” of communication data.
Bush is apparently is doing this in secret and without any judicial oversight. Not even oversight by the special secret court (FISA) set up just for this purpose.
The above analysis shows that the screening process does produce a better pool of suspects. We started with a population where the probability of a terrorist was (1 in 10,000) and the screening process produced a new sub-population where the probability of a terrorist (given by ) has been increased to about 0.002 (2 in 1000). Still, a lot of additional work remains to be done to find the true terrorists.
What is being done by Bush to filter the sub-population of suspected terrorists produced by the eavesdropping program carried out by the NSA? Does this filtering have FISA, or any other judicial, oversight?
Several distressing articles turned up as I scanned the political blogs over the past few days. Perhaps the most depressing article (found from here) appeared in the 25 Nov. issue of the American Jewish weekly, “Forward.” The article on the Iraq war was written by a well respected military historian, Martin van Creveld, described at the end of the article as follows:
Martin van Creveld, a professor of military history at the Hebrew University, is author of “Transformation of War” (Free Press, 1991). He is the only non-American author on the U.S. Army’s required reading list for officers.
The article entitled “Costly Withdrawal Is the Price To Be Paid for a Foolish War” should be read to get the its full impact. According to this military historian we are in deep trouble and will be for a long time.
I wanted to include a few excerpts but finally decided against it to avoid taking things out of context. As a teaser let me just say that near the end he describes the Iraq war as
….the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them ….
We got rid of Saddam, and that was good. But now we have Zarqawi (and at least several mini-Zarqawis). Are we more safe now than we were before we invaded Iraq? I think the answer is clearly No, given what we know now about the status of Saddam’s Iraq before we invaded.
As the Bushites keep saying, we need to look forward not backward. And they are correct. What should we do now? Of course, I do not know the answer to this question. I only know that my trust in the Bushites to find the best answer has vanished and yet they are in charge. Unfortunately, it is even hard to picture how the Bushites could find enough good luck to get us out of this mess.
...where we ponder reality.
Whether in politics,
where laws are made,
or in physics,
where (other) laws are discovered,
the realities we find appear
to be persistently unstable.
Such behavior is like
Chaos,
as defined in Physics and Mathematics.
--Roger W. Rollins, your host.
and 
represent two different traits that could be possessed by members of a large population. For example, 
people could have 
males, 
red heads, and 
male red heads. 
. 
. 
,
. 
. 
.
. (The latter statement comes from the obvious fact that the set of red headed males is exactly the same as the set of male red heads.)
not 
refers to “not male” and 
refers to “not red hair”. 
;
;
; and 
.
the set of all persons whose communications are screened, 
the set of all persons in 
who are terrorists, 
the set of all persons in 
the set of persons “caught” as terrorist suspects by the screening procedure. 
probability a terrorist is caught by the screening process. For example, 
means the screening process is 99% accurate in identifying a terrorist correctly. 
probability a non terrorist is not caught by the screening process. For example, 
means the screening process is 95% accurate in identifying a non terrorist correctly.
. Using Bayes’ theorem 
, and
.
persons and suppose there are 
terrorists in this population. 
, and the probability of a non terrorist is
. 
.
, and
.
.
!
, or 
.
. (check) 
. (check)
(1 in 10,000) and the screening process produced a new sub-population where the probability of a terrorist (given by
) has been increased to about 0.002 (2 in 1000). Still, a lot of additional work remains to be done to find the true terrorists.