I didn't know Donald Trump had ever published in a peer-reviewed journal.
We do not gratefully thank T. Apourchaux for his useless and very mean comments.
I think I would have left out "gratefully" in this sentence.
This paper is desperate. Please reject it completely and then block the author's email ID so they can't use the online system in future. It is sad to see so much enthusiasm and effort go into analyzing a dataset that is just not big enough. The biggest problem with this manuscript, which has nearly sucked the will to live out of me, is the terrible writing style. Reject - More holes than my grandad's string vest! The writing and data presentation are so bad that I had to leave work and go home early and then spend time to wonder what life is about.
More than once I've reviewed papers where there was just a pile of poorly implemented attempts at answering incoherent questions that didn't add up to either a test of a hypothesis or to a presentation of an empirical result. Not even wrong piled on top of muddy regurgitation.
On the other side, after saying "there might be part of a paper here after we answer X." (X means more work) I have gotten back "let's organize what's done now into 2 papers"
There is a recent attempt at answering an interesting question (Hamiltonian approach to the Riemann hypothesis) that produced an informative but harsh takedown:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.02644
context:
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/266935/pt-symmetry-and-the-riemann-hypothesis
I recently reviewed a paper that was so weirdly written that I honestly couldn't figure out what claims the authors were making.
They used bizarrely convoluted sentence structure and constantly introduced their own idiosyncratic terminology without bothering to explain what it meant. It reminded me of my days as an English major when I had to wade through turgid pomo "Theory".
After I reviewed it I got to see the other referees' comments, and we all basically said "I'm unable to assess the science in this manuscript because I can't figure out what on earth the authors are trying to say".
I just found out that a paper a wrote a couple years ago has been cited by three other papers. Woohoo!
Maybe that's nothing to you academic types, but I am not actually an academic type.
||
The Council of Ministers Bodyguard Building Project Consignment Letter was signed by Vissoth and Chinese Minister of Commerce Zhong Shan.|>
I've been ignoring an invitation to review, successfully until you fucked it up.
9: Congratulations, Spike! You have now officially contributed to the Human Quest for Knowledge.
Sweet! There is a lot of money in that, right?
I just found out that a paper a wrote a couple years ago has been cited by three other papers. Woohoo!
OMG! Did it involve a very specific algebraic computation??
No, it was on the topic of "Why blockchain tech isn't going to solve your problems".
||
Autocrats of the world unite!|>
Autocrats and awkward-turtle Mexico. Any Middle Eastern governments (including Israel) leaning one way or the other, besides Turkey?
Iran for Maduro! Shockingly. Otherwise don't know. My half-assed research on Venezuelan crude indicates that Mexico hosts one of the very few non-US and non-EU refineries that can handle it. Assuming for practical purposes it has tanker access on the Caribbean side. Which is probably unrelated, but hey who knows.
Marco Rubio is bringing the moral authority of Florida to bear on this international crisis. (Cheap shot but I couldn't resist.)
It's fed from the offshore platforms across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, so that doesn't seem unreasonable.
22 is actually just a guess, but I really wanted to write "Isthmus of Tehuantepec". Opportunities are rare.
Caribbean side as opposed to Gulf or to Pacific?
The refinery is on the Pacific.
I guess strictly it's Gulf (of Campeche! Mexican toponyms rule.) not Caribbean.
Forbes has a brief-ish thing on the Venezuelan petroleum industry implications at the moment.
Should we have a Venezuela thread, in which somebody can explain to me why the Third World War isn't going to break out over some damn silly thing in South America?
28: I take it you mean Russia threatening the U.S. not to intervene? Um, my guess is the U.S. will comply and not intervene, and the whole thing will disintegrate, as usual. Which makes me angry, but I suppose I also don't want a nuclear war.
I guess we've wandered away from the original topic enough that I can drop this Florida man story in here.
The Russians are bullshitting and so is Trump. There's no prospect of military action. Russia and China will veto in the UNSC, as usual, and there'll be multinational sanctions instead, also as usual.
31: That was the subject of my "moral authority of Florida" link in 21, but the more the merrier! Sort of.
It's long been standard practice to comment here without reading the post, the thread, or any links therefrom.
Mine are heavy, sour, and crude.
https://twitter.com/pppenaloza/status/1088442147605487616 -- "They say they can cut light, water, and telephone service to the U.S. embassy and leave it without food and medicine. This chavista method has been shown to be very effective, in fact they're already using it and 3 million Venezuelans have left the country..."
33: Aha! You through me off the scent with the citation of Marco Rubio, whose opinion on Venezuela holds no conceivable interest for me.
I have mixed feelings about the Florida secretary of state. On the one hand, it's incredibly appalling -- not just race-based mockery, but raced-based mockery by an adult specifically in the context of Katrina. On the other hand, I have been worried lately about my gradual desensitization, frog-in-an-apochryphal-boiling-pot-style.
Turns out, I can still be appalled.
So. this guys says, "I'm the interim president" and now he's just walking around Venezuela doing whatever an interim president does? That suggests that maybe the incumbent president doesn't have as much control as he thinks. You can't let somebody basically coup at you and then not arrest them. Or at least, hardly anybody does.
My impression of Venezuela is it was doing pretty well under Chavez for many years, the economy was weird because petroleum was subsidized to the point of being nearly free, and all the government revenue came from petroleum, but it was doing pretty well. And then the government started nationalizing non-petroleum things unpredictably and then they had hyperinflation. And hyperinflation caused the disaster. No other Latin American government has had hyperinflation of this sort, right? They keep having inflation, but in Venezuela it became Zimbabwe-style, making an economy, at all, impossible.
Question: How does nationalizing things unpredictably lead to hyperinflation? Is it dispossessed investors telling their investor friends (the international finance community) that Venezuela is not to be trusted, thus leading to their bonds being worthless, thus leading to the government having no money anymore? Is that rational on the part of the investors?
There was no income but oil and the price of oil collapsed.
Not just to pay debt, but for foreign exchange, they don't have any other exports (unless you count the labor of expatriates sending home wages).
Anyway, he really does deserve to get coup-ed. It's just that the United States has a really bad record on that kind of thing in that region.
Other oil-dependent countries didn't have hyperinflation though.
And while the price collapsed PDVSA production also collapsed (see really poorly run).
If they painted "Chavez" on the side of the pumps in gold letters and stole more from poor people, Trump would support them as fellow shitty managers.
This is a pretty good summary of what's going on in Venezuela on a political level. (Via Chris Hayes on Twitter.) I don't know anything about the organization that published it though.
47: Right -- a bunch of the PDVSA people quit because they didn't like Chavez, and then a bunch got fired because PDVSA employees were now politically suspect, and then Chavez put a bunch of inexperienced people (and later the military, who don't know how to run an oil company either) in charge. Eventually it showed up in their ability to produce oil, and then on top of that the price of oil collapsed.
49: thanks! Looks like a think tank/research center affiliated with NYU, judging by the address at the footer.
The fundraiser for this woman separated from her 15-month-old blew past its goal in six hours and reminded me of what effective terrorism this all is. And it's extortion, right? Don't they just fly commercial?
The way you get hyperinflation is that tax revenue drops, and then the government makes up the shortfall by just printing money. So the economic mismanagement led to an economic crisis, but hyperinflation is a result of government action to deal with that crisis.
Back on topic, I discovered a great bit of "academic" criticism in an old geology book on the Niagara Falls. (I thought I had posted it here before, but not finding it.)
The book is Evolution of the Falls of the Niagara 1907 by Winthrop Spencer. The copy I have was apparently a gift to BF Taylor. inscribed to him "in admiration of his good work cited here with the regards of the Author." Taylor was free with marginalia (often criticisms such as "wrong" or "no good") but it reaches a crescendo when Spencer specifically critiques Taylor's work, culminating with "Shame!" and the drawing seen here of a giant hand pushing a stick figure off a cliff*. At the end of the section Spencer congratulates Taylor on "his conjectures" leading Taylor to note "sent check for $1000.00 for this but forgot to sign it."
*I am amused that the cliff shows geologic strata.
53 is splendid, also the "thud!" sound effect as the hapless Spencer lands broken at the foot of the geologically correct cliff.
Back off topic, apparently Pence spoke on the phone with Guaidó before he started this thing. But no mention of whether he (Pence) even mentioned to Trump that he was going to place the call. Is he now operating as an independent political entity?
Sending Pence to deal with the imaginary presidents seems like the pinnacle of his influence with Trump.
Pence's accent in Spanish is atrocious. But, in his defense, his only prior experience speaking Spanish was ordering chimichangas one time in Merrillville.
56: If so him and State. Because, like I said, coordinated. Anglo media keeps chattering as if this is all about the US, but Latin Americans have been agitating for months. I'd be unsurprised if the policy is actually being led by Colombia.
-s
I haven't checked the Venezuelan Constitution, but this says that under Venezuelan law Guaidó is in fact interim president. I think maybe we're conditioned (not unreasonably) to react to these things in the frame of Ahmed Chalabi and fire & fury, but this is a different kind of thing.
The law in question seems be making accommodations for when a president is dead or incapacitated. It is perhaps a creative interpretation to say that it applies when an election is deemed illegitimate. Not saying its wrong, just saying its a thin peg to hang your hat on.
Latin America seems to be in the midst of a huge lurch to the right. Trust no one.
I'm just thinking about who has the army.
So basically it's a "I, Al Haig, am in control here at the White House," situation?
There are armies available in Colombia and Brazil, both of which have recently elected right-wing leaders.
By the way, the link in 60 goes to a think tank that would have Henry Kissinger on the board of trustees, so... grain of salt, here.
64: Trump mouthed off about invasion months ago, all the Latin Americans made clear they were entirely opposed. That's before Bolsonaro was elected, but he wants his army for shooting Brazilians.
65: They publish good scholarship all the time.
There's no money in that, let me tell you.
Which is why you need big name has-been assholes on your board to help with fundraising.
"Occupied Venezuela"? The article in 60 might be right about the constitutionality of declaring a new president of Venezuela, but that article is all about laying the groundwork to declare a military intervention legitimate. Which I guess is better than illegitimate interventions.
71: Agreed I hate that framing. I think the text is more subtle than the headline though - de facto vs de jure government, mechanisms for government-in-exile and a frame for negotiations.
If the forward Venezuela is occupied you may not form a line at the front of the continent.
To 59, regardless of who's driving the car, the US retains unchecked power to make it crash, so the US-centered framing isn't *all* wrong.
Which is why you need big name has-been assholes on your board to help with fundraising.
Sure. But with those kind of big name has-been assholes on your team, who exactly is it you trying to raise funds from?
Apparently its the military industrial complex + oil companies.
Hmmm, I wonder what their interest would be in Venezuela....
So, Twitter is saying that the U.S. and Venezuela have have a temporary deal to leave U.S. diplomats in place in Venezuela while negotiations happen. I can't tell if it is real or parody.
76: The military industrial complex + oil companies + Big Finance + Silicon Valley + Japanese conglomerates + pharmaceuticals + corporations of all descriptions. People who can write checks. If you're going to present any actual argument, do so. Your reflexive anti-Americanism is tiresome and sterile.
77: AP confirms. (Negotiations for an alternative US diplomatic office.)
Your reflexive anti-Americanism is tiresome and sterile.
Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and not engage with that...
The legal analysis (PDF), by this guy. He admits the situation is extraordinary, but this is the best the constitution offers.
Let's all reflect on the sanctity of heterosexual marriage.
If you're going to present any actual argument, do so.
I'm going to go ahead and assume you aren't going to engage with that either.
That the CSIS has Kissinger on the board says much more about the United States foreign policy establishment than it does about the CSIS in particular. It won't occur to anybody to shun him until after he's dead.
Sure, that's one reason I don't give a lot of credit to what the United States foreign policy establishment thinks the Venezuelan constitution means.
Unfortunately, I guess that makes me reflexively anti-American.
Quiet, or you'll hurt Sam Nunn's feelings.
You could try to look on the bright side. Somebody in the Trump administration trying to fuck with Venezuela is somebody in the Trump administration who can't easily fuck with America.
83 and 78 last were uncalled for and I apologize.
On the substance, I refer to 81. The legal analysis is by a Venezuelan constitutional law professor. No doubt he is partisan, but every constitutional citation he makes checks out.
Trump 2020: Marginally more competent than Maduro. Slightly less cruel than Bolsonaro. A bit less dead than Peron.
Slightly more attractive spouse than Eva.
Thank you for your apology.
The legal analysis is by a Venezuelan constitutional law professor. No doubt he is partisan, but every constitutional citation he makes checks out.
Can we agree that neither you nor I are qualified to evaluate creative new claims made about Venezuelan constitutional doctrine?
And in the end, does it matter? I mean, maybe the enforcement of a 70-year old treaty on Belgian neutrality is important to the maintenance of our national honor, and maybe its not, but the heart of the question is not really about Belgian neutrality, is it?
The important thing is the Belgians you meet along the way.
Also, who the army is willing to follow.
If you're committing peer review and somebody cites a review paper that cites a paper of yours but does not cite your paper, can you make them cite your paper directly? Asking for a friend.
Can the army be bought? Because if the US is really going to commit to this, buying off the Venezuelan army would be preferable to sending an expeditionary force. Also cheaper.
"Ok, Venezuelan soldiers.... you are now on salary for $5000 US per month in hard currency, your job is to supervise a new election."
I don't think that would actually work. A lot could go wrong.
Or rather, it could work fine, but only if the goal is to replace a left-wing autocrat with a right-wing autocrat.
Which I think is probably the goal, or is at least its what Mike Pence sees as an acceptable solution. My problem is that I really don't like that goal.
Sure, the left-wing autocrat needs to go, but starting a new round of the vicious cycle isn't a good way to do that.
Maybe we send them Howard Schultz and/or Bloomberg.
Can we agree that neither you nor I are qualified to evaluate creative new claims made about Venezuelan constitutional doctrine?
Yes. I raise the issue because, as I said in 60, this guy proclaiming himself president appears to have a case, and in evaluating their countries' foreign policies I think people should take that into account.
And in the end, does it matter?
I think it does matter, because international law matters. International law presupposes sovereignty and thus non-interference in domestic affairs; but that doctrine isn't realistic when domestic affairs aren't really domestic, because (as here with Venezuela, as increasingly with literally everywhere) their consequences cross borders. The world needs mechanisms for dealing with cross-border problems, and sometimes that involves interfering in domestic affairs, as in this case recognizing a rebel government.
Of course states have always done that anyway, by right of brute force; but in this case they are doing so in support of rebels who (as best I can tell) have a defensible legal claim to legitimacy. I think this (if it doesn't go to shit) sets a valuable precedent for less arbitrary, more predictable, more rule-bound interventions in domestic affairs; another way to make the international system less anarchic.
In the very real eventuality that the Republicans manage to entrench a de facto one-party state, you yourselves would have need of just such a precedent; and that precedent would be executed by exactly the legal mechanisms of multinational sanctions which are being, and will be, used against Maduro.
It may be working. Apparently, the Venezuelan military attache in D.C. just flipped to Team Interim. Presumably, they didn't give that job to somebody they figured was one of the least loyal.
95 et seq: And the reason I wrote 60, and the reason I've been emphasizing the Latin American support all along, is that people are talking about this as if the next step is inevitably invasion*. It isn't: the next step is offers to negotiate an exit for Maduro (apparently in progress), followed by primary and secondary sanctions coordinated by the US and EU; the same kind of sanctions that produced the Iran nuclear deal, which I think we can all agree made the world a much safer place while it lasted.
*Post 2003, and with Trump in office, that reaction is inevitable, and justified. In this case, so far, I think it's still wrong. What we're seeing so far is diplomacy done right; and the US AFAIK has no war lobby at all beside Trump himself (admittedly huge exception).
And the secondary sanctions system is what the PRC is fighting so hard to sabotage right now in the Meng case. They're doing that precisely because it is a manifestation of international law which makes the world more dangerous for autocracy.
I guess I wasn't so much concerned that the U.S. would invade, but that we would trigger a civil war and/or massacres and then go, "Oops." I think the past few days have shown that is less likely than I had feared.
People know how to massacre each other without any help from America. It isn't all about you.
Not me. I'm very reliable. Trump is big on promising shit he can't deliver.
Minor point: "Ruling party chief Diosdado Cabello" -- I thought that was a joke when I saw it in a Spanish-language tweet, but no, it seems the man's actual legal name is God-Given Hair. This is going to take me a second to process fully.
Mossy, email me whenever you get a chance (no rush)... I have a question for you.
Of course, we just hide stuff like that better because of Greek. Another way to translate "Diosdado' is "Theodore."
Well, shit, I'm all for a rules-based world order. But I don't think that's what this is.
Or, maybe that's what this aspires to be, but in reality its just a part of the dance of picking a justification for whatever it is the Great Power decides that it wants to do in support of establishing a new client state.
Sure, I guess there is a case that a clause of a constitution that was written to cover what happens when there is a dead president could, if you squint, be applied to the political aftermath of what happens when one side calls an election that the other side boycotts. One might ask what the Venezuelan Supreme Court has to say about it.
Of course it doesn't matter what they would say, because they aren't seen as having legitimacy either. But if you can dismiss the legitimacy of the court that adjudicates constitutional law, doesn't that make the constitution itself a dead letter? And I guess, as long as you - the opposition - get to start picking and choosing which parts of the constitution you accept, it makes sense to accept the part that says "a fucked-up election puts you in charge."
So, the opposition can sell that story to foreign sponsors, and I guess that's good as far as it goes and its much better to have a plausible story than not. However, its a story that smells a lot like bullshit to me - bullshit in the sense that its not so much wrong, but that its one of those things that doesn't matter whether it is right or it is wrong. Rather, what matters is whether one chooses to accept it as true or not, and the decision of whether one accepts it is determined by the side which one is on.
"Roosevelt" is probably Dutch for "hair".
I guess "Roosevelt" means "rose field." In retrospect, I should have guessed that.
people are talking about this as if the next step is inevitably invasion
Invasion isn't the risk I'm concerned about. Setting up a right-wing strongman in Venezuela is the risk I am concerned about. And all the associated death squads and misery.
There is a peacemaking process that needs to happen here between the left and the right - or, really, between the poor and the upper class. Unless there is a deep restructuring of how power is shared in that country, I don't think just having a new election and sticking our thumb on the scale for our candidate is the answer here.
One thing I noticed about the Latin American countries is that Mexico is remaining neutral. I hope they can build on that to act as an honest power broker here, because its not a good role for the United States to be taking on, for a lot of different reasons - both contemporary and historic.
Uruguay and Mexico are neutral and calling for diplomacy, at least as of yesterday. Regarding the right-wing-strongman risk, what about an outcome like Colombia's current government? I don't know how path-dependent that one is.
109: Quibbles: AFAIK the most recent election was actively rigged, not boycotted, and the opposition claims the judges of the constitutional court were appointed in unconstitutional ways, and/or by officers that were themselves elected/appointed in unconstitutional ways. So the constitution is being presented not as a dead letter but as a system that needs to be reset; the lawyer cites some clauses which can be read to permit or require such a reset.
On the court question generally, there are in practice lots of international courts pulling judges and scholars from multiple countries and I think sometimes interpreting laws they don't have jurisdiction over. In principle there's no reason there couldn't be such courts recognized as being reliable good-faith interpreters of certain constitutions.
In practice, situations aren't always as difficult as Venezuela. The ECOWAS intervention in Gambia last year, for instance looks like a fairly straightforward international defence of that country's constitution. (Admittedly an unusually simple situation, both legally and in realpolitik.)
To be clear, I don't claim for a second that this Venezuela policy is perfect, or that the precedent I talked about couldn't or wouldn't be abused. I just think this could be a movement in the right direction.
112: Setting up a right-wing strongman in Venezuela is the risk I am concerned about.
Fair enough. I got the invasion talk elsewhere in the discourse.
AFAIK literally everyone of consequence is advocating precisely the kind of negotiated settlement you talk about.
Mexico is taking exactly the honest broker stance you talk about. I wonder in fact if that wasn't coordinated behind the scenes as well.
AIUI the Maduro government is no longer a leftist government in any real sense; more a division between the regime and almost everyone else. There are reports of protests in historically Chavista neighborhoods, for instance. In any case the economy has been so totally destroyed any pre-Chavez class analysis is probably out of whack by now.
On the court question generally, there are in practice lots of international courts pulling judges and scholars from multiple countries and I think sometimes interpreting laws they don't have jurisdiction over. In principle there's no reason there couldn't be such courts recognized as being reliable good-faith interpreters of certain constitutions.
Maybe, but in the absence of a treaty spelling out what exactly the international court's role and jurisdiction is with respect to national constitutions, such a process would, in itself, be extremely unconstitutional in most countries.
116: All true. But, (1) treaties can be negotiated (ECJ calling); (2) the court could be issuing opinions rather than binding judgements; (3) I believe many countries allow foreign laws and judgements to be entered in arguments, without recognizing them as binding.
"Setting up a right-wing strongman in Venezuela is the risk I am concerned about. And all the associated death squads and misery."
That would be awful. You might end up with people being arbitrarily arrested and tortured in the Helicoide prison. It's even possible that there could be widespread poverty, lack of essential medicines, and famine.
Agreed. Elliott fucking Abrams is not promising. I wonder whose idea that was? Not Trump. Bolton?
According to Twitter, Hugh Hewitt is on the TV right now saying that a war in Venezuela might be what is needed to bring America together.
Like, it would bring us together to oppose a war in Venezuela?
I wonder if it would bring Venezuela together.
Sounds like a win-win scenario to me.
We are all Venezuelans fearing a civil war now.
So, Bolton wanders into a press conference with a notebook reading "5,000 troops to Columbia" on it, holding the notebook up where it will be clearly visible to cameras. I wonder if they're going to pay them if they are there when the next shutdown hits?