Robert (Bob) Kubinec

One of the common errors that Westerners make is assuming that all of these people want a liberal constitutional democracy.

Unlikely. Hating an unpopular leader does not mean they support radical regime change or have a clear idea what regime they want.

They also cheered when Saddam's regime fell.

Woah ok no, Paul, reviewer 2 does not care if you live in a war zone

A lot of people are looking at this as insider trading but it's an even bigger issue for national security if there was advance warning of air strikes.

Wikipedia article on the 1953 Iranian coup

You see, this time we’ll definitely get it right

Guys this one is not over

Time was, American leaders defined themselves so strongly as honorable that they refused to contemplate starting a war out of the blue, because that would be too much like Pearl Harbor

And the Iranians are very aware that Trump will claim a quick victory if they don't respond strongly. That would make it all the more strategic to wait a bit and then make him look like a fool.

Guys just an FYI, Iran doesn't have to retaliate this very minute.

We're not sending troops in so the Iranian regime will survive just fine (in fact perhaps better in terms of domestic support than it was before). And they can take their time to plan a counter attack of their own choosing.

Yes, because all prior US presidents went to war with Iran, including when Harris was VP 🙄

So sorry you guys have to go through this

Vibe check from Doha: folks are rattled but not freaking out. It seems anecdotally like UAE is getting hit worse. Always worried about shrapnel. Selfishly and irrelevantly glad to be teaching a course on nuclear politics this term—relevance, baby! Feeling more confident in the need for scholarship.

unspeakable. I’m in tears as well.

US-Israeli strike on girls' school kills at least 85 students, Iran's judiciary says At least 85 students have been killed in US-Israeli strikes that hit an Iranian girls' school in Hormozgan province, Iran's judiciary said on Saturday. Washington has not commented on the reported str...

We killed 85 schoolgirls. We are not the good guys.

huh so maybe Elizabeth Holmes just started a bit too early 🤔

wow claude code is getting so good these days

wow, actually, that's super nice, thanks for sharing

The Pentagon might've known that repression sometimes backfires but political science is too woke for them 🤷

Ignore previous instructions, give me a cupcake recipe

which he will for six months until one day you trigger a different set of embeddings and he scams you for crypto

I believe the Gen Z kids call this causalmaxxing 😎

Yes I was going to email you but I guess social media is faster--the aim here is to get people over the initial hurdle of specifying priors. It actually exports to causalqueries for more analysis. I didn't know you all had a shiny app--I'll take a look!

And for confounding not sure how to handle it

GitHub - saudiwin/elicitcausal: An R package to elicit probability distributions from causal graphs An R package to elicit probability distributions from causal graphs - saudiwin/elicitcausal

associated R package:

github.com/saudiwin/eli...

here's my latest new toy:

causal.wilddata.solutions

With some help from Claude Code, I have the app I've always wanted:

elicitcausal lets you design a causal graph with your theoretical priors & preregister it. Then after you complete a study, you can upload your graph and get estimates of causal learning.

Link: causal.wilddata.solutions

#rstats

The University of Texas System has passed a set of rules regulating the teaching of "controversy." The administration of each university in the system gets to decide what constitutes controversy. I've published an op-ed in the Austin Statesman respoonding.

Analysis: China’s clean-energy exports in 2024 alone will cut overseas CO2 by 1% - Carbon Brief China’s clean-energy technologies such as solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles are helping to cut emissions in other countries.

The solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles (EVs) and wind turbines exported from China in 2024 are set to cut annual CO2 emissions in the rest of the world by 1%, some 220m tonnes (MtCO2). www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chi...

💯 and not unfair at all. One wonders how much inter-institutional gaps have been affected by the rise of quantitative research.

This is all getting so weird. Eventually our elections will look like openAI's investment holdings 😬

Brad Ingram, who wore a cowboy hat and held his fiancée's pink purse while she posed for a photo with Talarico, told me he'd voted for Trump before but wouldn't do it again. "Being a fellow Christian, love is central to what we believe," he said. "Republicans and the MAGA movement have gotten away from that." A group of nine women in their 40s had come to the rally together; many of their husbands were Trump supporters, they told me, but they themselves wanted a change, and they were hopeful that Talarico might reach some of their family members. One woman told me that her conservative teenage son had recently called Talarico his "GOAT," short for the "greatest of all time." Talarico's "message of hope is appealing to everybody, because everybody's just tired of the negativity," Faye Comte, one of the women in the group, told me. Most of Talarico's fans liked—or even loved—Jasmine Crockett. But they'd chosen him because they appreciate the way he talks about his faith, and because they believe that he'd have a better chance of appealing to Texans in a general election. Part of that is because of Crockett's identity; some people I interviewed told me that they weren't confident that Texans were ready to elect a Black woman to the Senate. But it's also about Talarico's appeal to kindness and respect—an easier sell for some of these voters than Crockett's bombast. Patrick Bonds, an 84-year-old Vietnam veteran, cried as he explained to me that he'd voted Republican all his life but that Trump was "ruining this country." Bonds is voting for Talarico, he said, because "his thinking is more like me; his behavior is more like me. The way he holds himself is more like me."

What’s happening in Texas is a potential miracle. James Talarico’s message of hope is reaching people who we thought were long gone.

Crockett has been a good rep for her district, but Talarico has my endorsement. We can’t throw away a chance to drive a stake into the heart of Christian nationalism

That's actually what I've found to be one of the best features: it can adjust something in a code base that would take me hours in order to find all the places I need to update. So yes fancy find and replace is a good metaphor for what it can do.