Did you hear there is a political convention next week?

Chaos reins at Chez NCTim. I was an absentee diarist last week, stuff happens. I will try to be more attentive this week. I still love you guys, but I have to finish my chores before I can use the Internet.

Chaos theory is the field of study in mathematics that studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions—a response popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for such dynamical systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos.

Chaos Theory in Politics

It is relatively uncommon that advances made in sciences – and in particular in mathematics – attract any attention in a basically open-minded public audience. Exceptions to this rule can be seen in the popularity of catastrophe theory in the 1980s and (to some minor extend) of the mysteries of relativity theory in the post-war era. The last two decades saw an interest in complexity issues because the term often has been used as a synonym for non-simplicity with the consequence that addressed problems have appeared as being interesting per se; “chaos” as a particular form of complex phenomena has attracted most attention. It did not come as a big surprise that “chaos” was supposed to be of interest in fields like economics, management science, sociology and other so-called “soft sciences” as well.
Actually, the term “chaos” describes a rather unambiguous phenomenon although several formal definitions exist in the literature (depending, among others, on the basic type of dynamical system). For more practical scientific purposes it might be fair to restrict the chaos property of deterministic (i.e., completely non-stochastic, full-specified) dynamical systems (i.e., sets of equations that are designed as unambiguously describing the motion of an assumed reality) to the following properties: i) time series generated by a chaotic system look random although they are generated by a completely deterministic system, ii) the development of two time series starting at very neighboring starting points might differ completely (the “butterfly effect”), and iii) different initial points can belong to different “basins of attraction” with different sets of points which are eventually reached.

It is now well-established that chaos can prevail in weather-forecasting systems (not necessarily in the actually observed weather!) and other natural-science fields dealing with fluids in general. Whether chaos is present in economic time series is still a somewhat open question, probably because external stochastic disturbances play a major role in the realization of economic variables. However, attempts have been undertaken during the, say, last twenty years to establish “chaos” even in fields for which the mathematical concept was not developed. The present book contains a collection of papers dealing with “chaos” (in a very broad sense) in political environments with topics ranging from general peace/war considerations, the Arab Spring, and counter-intelligence problems to the butterfly effect in politics, to gender problems in politics or to economic decision making processes.

A Handy List of All the Things the Republican Party Is Against in 2016

The Republican Party has always been against things. In Lincoln's day, it was slavery; for the last seven years, it's been a functioning federal government. But the Republican Party Platform, rewritten every four years before the party convention, is where things really run wild. That's especially true this year, as presumptive nominee Donald J. Trump has stepped back to let the Ted Cruz-esque purists have their fun with the party's official statement of principles. What follows is a list, likely non-comprehensive, of the things the GOP has declared itself against so far.

REPUBLICAN PLATFORM

Renewing American Values

• Preserving and Protecting Traditional Marriage
• Creating a Culture of Hope: Raising Families Beyond Poverty
• Adoption and Foster Care
• Making the Internet Family-Friendly
• Advancing Americans with Disabilities
• Repealing Obamacare
• Our Prescription for American Healthcare: Improve Quality and Lower Costs
• Ensuring Consumer Choice in Healthcare
• Supporting Federal Healthcare Research and Development
• Protecting Individual Conscience in Healthcare
• Reforming the FDA
• Reducing Costs through Tort Reform
• Education: A Chance for Every Child
• Attaining Academic Excellence for All
• Consumer Choice in Education
• Improving Our Nation’s Classrooms
• Addressing Rising College Costs
• Justice for All: Safe Neighborhoods and Prison Reform

It is hard to fathom the people that are fooled by this linguistic bullshit.

Forget Trump! The GOP's Convention Platform Makes It The Party Of Kris Kobach

For years, Kris Kobach has led an effort to pull the Republican Party to the conservative extreme. But in this election cycle -- as evidenced by the platform pulled together by him and his fellow convention delegates in Cleveland this week -- he doesn’t have a presidential candidate who is going to stand in the way.

The Kansas secretary of state was on the convention committee responsible for finalizing the proposed planks of the Republican party platform, which the full convention delegation will vote on next week. Normally, the process doesn’t get wide public attention because the platform is seen as little more than aspirational, something for party activists to rally around as they ramp up for the general election.

Enter Kobach, a Trump supporter with some experience pushing the Republican Party to the far right. With a nominee who has isn't steeped in movement conservatism and doesn't much seem to care, Kobach and conservatives on the committee appear to have had a long leash.

This was not Kobach’s first time serving on the platform committee. He was a member in 2012 -- where he harshened the platform's immigration language that the Mitt Romney campaign had tried to soften -- as well as in 2008.

But Trump-mentum and Kobach’s brand of hard-right, anti-immigrant conservatism were a match made in heaven. The legal wunderkind-turned-state bureaucrat has long advocated for anti-immigrant legislation -- including Arizona’s infamous “show us your papers” law -- as well as for restrictive voting laws.

Are Police Targeting Black Lives Matter Activists Ahead of the GOP Convention?

With the Republican National Convention fast approaching in Cleveland, tensions over security are mounting. Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump is expected to draw thousands of protesters and the scene outside the convention could turn volatile. At least two outside police departments have pulled out of the security effort, citing concerns that the city is ill-prepared. And the American Civil Liberties Union sued Cleveland over protest rules it views as draconian. (A settlement was reached last week.) Now, local and federal authorities have begun aggressively tracking activists—including members of the Black Lives Matter movement who have helped spotlight Cleveland's brutal policing problems.

Last week, law enforcement agents began visiting the homes of known activists in Cleveland. Jocelyn Rosnick, an attorney with the Ohio chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, which is providing legal advice and holding civil rights trainings for activists ahead of the RNC, said her group had received about two dozen reports from activists who said they'd been visited by agents from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Secret Service, or by Cleveland PD officers and Cuyahoga County sheriff's deputies. Law enforcement agents, some of them said, also made phone calls to relatives, neighbors, and places of employment asking about the activists' whereabouts. According to Rosnick, most of these reports have come from people involved with the local chapter of Black Lives Matter or the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Chaos Theory and Jungian Psychology as Applied to Economics

In March 1988 Murray Rothbard wrote a fascinating piece titled "Chaos Theory: Destroying Mathematical Economics from Within?" He observed that chaos theory had very “radical” implications. For those unfamiliar with chaos theory, it is a mathematical discovery which has implications for meteorology, physics, biology and economics. According to chaos theory, volatile dynamic systems are highly sensitive to small differences in initial conditions. Rothbard explained it as follows: “Two decades ago, Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist at MIT stumbled onto chaos theory by making the discovery that ever so tiny changes in climate could bring about enormous and volatile changes in weather. Calling it the Butterfly Effect, he pointed out that if a butterfly flapped its wings in Brazil, it could produce a tornado in Texas.”

Imagine the implications for international finance. A small perturbation might produce a completely unexpected turning of the entire global economy. The result would not only be unexpected, it would be virtually unpredictable (due to the complexity of the interactions of all the related small-fry phenomena). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on “Chaos” tells us that chaos theory postulates sensitive dependence (on initial conditions) within a system that is deterministic and nonlinear. The Stanford article points out that Aristotle “was already aware of something like what we now call sensitive dependence.” But Aristotle’s understanding of this was epistemological rather than metaphysical. On this matter the ancient philosopher wrote, “the least initial deviation from truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.” In other words, a small lie at the beginning may lead to a complete break with reality somewhere down the line – an epistemological corollary of chaos theory. (We will return to this idea later.)

Getting to the heart of the matter Rothbard wrote, “The upshot of chaos theory is not that the real world is chaotic or in principle unpredictable or undetermined, but that in practice much of it is unpredictable.” For if we find within a dynamic system (both mathematically precise and deterministic) that prediction is effectively impossible, our math suddenly ceases to serve any purpose. According to Rothbard, chaos theory has “subversive implications … for orthodox mathematical economics. For if rational expectations theory violates the real world, then so too does general equilibrium … and all the rest of the neoclassical apparatus.”

A campaign that makes the political turmoil of 1968 look good

There is rare agreement, on the left and the right, that the 2016 presidential election season is looking to be a repeat of Democratic Party’s 1968 race.

There was a bitterly fought primary campaign that year, with fierce public debates over the Vietnam War, race relations and law and order. The campaign led to a divisive and volatile Democratic National Convention in Chicago, with clashes between antiwar protesters and club-swinging cops in the streets outside the arena, and protests inside the hall over both the war and the mayhem outside.

The resulting split in Democratic ranks, plus the widespread public belief that the country was coming apart at the seams, led to Republican Richard M. Nixon’s win in November. The GOP went on to win the White House in all but one of the next half-dozen elections.

This time around, however, it is Republicans who seem most vulnerable to splintering after a fevered primary season. The Donald Trump insurgency is defying the best efforts of the GOP establishment to steer primary voters to other candidates. This seems a dire threat to Trump’s adopted party’s prospects — not only in the November election, but also potentially for decades to come.

It's about funking time! Wake up sheeple!

Have a great funkin' weekend!