If any of you happen to find yourself or anyone you know infected by the propaganda at the Peterson Deficit Summit today, Campaign For America’s Future’s Virtual Summit is the antidote. There is a ton of useful information about deficits and rebuttals to the nonsense that’s spewing forth from nearly every villager in the land.
Yesterday, they held a conference call, which is summed up here. (You can hear the audio at the link.):
[Yesterday] morning, the White House debt commission convened and largely presented a skewed picture of America’s finances, with much scapegoating of Social Security and Medicare. [Yesterday] afternoon, Campaign for America’s Future convened top economic experts to offer journalists facts and views that the commission has yet to pursue.
Campaign for America’s Future Roger Hickey expressed deep concern that Pete Peterson deficit hysteria propaganda is taking hold on the commission, noting that a new key staff member was hired from a Peterson-funded organization, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Hickey also pointed out while Social Security and Medicare were repeatedly flogged, there was little mention of the Bush-era tax cuts that actually vaporized the surplus.
The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner offered an entirely different approach to deficit reduction, one based on strong economic growth with “more social investment in the short-run.” He mentioned you certainly can cut the deficit with an “austerity approach” but “if you put the cart before the horse, it’s the more painful way to get to budget balance.”
Institute for Women’s Policy Research President Heidi Hartmann emphasizes the pain that will be inflicted on elderly women if Social Security is needlessly slashed, and the attacks on “greedy geeezers” have nothing to do “the typical retiree in America today.” She raised an eyebrow at Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s comment that we should go after Social Security because “that’s where the money is.” As Dr. Hartmann recalled, the quote was originally about “bank robberies.”
And Center for Economic and Policy Research Co-Director hammered the commission for pushing the false assertion that “everyone agrees” on the basic issue, saying that’s “not an honest way to proceed.” Baker rejected the commission’s arbitrary goal of major budget cuts by 2015, which is before anyone expects unemployment to come down to a reasonable level.
There are many motives for flogging the deficit right now, not the least of which is political. Republicans use this as a weapon whenever Democrats get into office Case in point:
Clinton’s experience shows what such pressure can do to a president’s agenda. Promises of spending on education, public works and a middle-class tax cut fell by the wayside as advisers led by Robert Rubin, who later became Treasury secretary, convinced the new president the best thing he could do for the economy was to show investors his resolve on fiscal discipline “You mean to tell me that the success of the economic program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” Clinton raged at aides, according to journalist Bob Woodward’s book, “The Agenda.”
Obama got health care, which is hardly an “entitlement” so I’m guessing the Grand Bargain is in full effect: agree to be deficit hawks going forward. Those are the terms set forth by the Big Money Boyz. (You didn’t think they were going to allow the peons in congress to insult them to their faces and get nothing in return, do you?)
Here’s a handy primer which explodes the myths about the Social Security. Everyone needs to bone up on this subject — it’s going to be with us for a while. Pete Peterson has a billion dollars devoted to this cause and he’s going to use it.
And sadly, our president seems to have a burning desire to be the Democrat who “fixed” Social Security. I suppose he thinks it will make all those important people respect him in the end. But it won’t. Bill Clinton left a surplus and Pete Peterson and instead of devoting it to social security, all his buddies took that money for themselves and ran. There is no margin in pandering to the millionaires. They think these presidents are chumps either way.
When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided that he would bump climate-and-energy legislation behind immigration reform as his next priority, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was apoplectic. Graham, along with Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), had spent months drafting a climate/energy bill, and was prepared to introduce it Monday, when, enraged by Reid’s plan, he backed out.
Earlier today, Reid appeared to reverse course, saying climate/energy would be the next logical issue to address, followed only afterward by immigration reform. So everything’s groovy, right?
Far from it. Tonight, Graham told me that he will filibuster his own climate change bill, unless Reid drops all plans to turn to immigration this Congress
There you have it. Or, to paraphrase James Baker, “fuck the Latinos. They don’t vote for us anyway.”
And I will bet you that he’ll vote against the climate change bill in the end.
Senate Republicans offered counter-proposals on financial regulation reform on Tuesday that seek to water down portions of a massive Democratic bill that has been under development for months.
The Democrats should stand tough and walk away from this one if they have to. I’ll be very interested to see if they have the nerve.
There is precedent for letting the Republicans roll around in their own manure while the Democrats come out smelling like roses. They ought to give it a try.
Update: I’m hearing that smart people think forcing the Republicans to continuously vote no on financial reform and refusing to accept their “shitty deal” makes the Democrats look weak.
If this is true then the Democrats should just abdicate their 59 seat majority and let the Republicans write all the legislation from the beginning. This is all just a supreme waste of time.
The good news is that both parties would be able to say they voted for a Republican financial reform bill, so that’s good. We wouldn’t want the Democrats to have any advantage in what may be shaping up to be a mid-term slaughter. That wouldn’t be fair.
Women are just slightly dumb animals who need to be drawn a picture and lectured to like a four year old before they can understand what they are doing. That goes without saying. But giving doctors immunity from liability for failing to tell their patients about fetal birth defects? That seems just a tad much to me. Sure the dumb bitches can’t be allowed to make their own decisions about taking on a lifetime of care or consider implications for their own health and well being. What the silly little twits don’t know won’t hurt them, right? But you’d think that the important members of society like insurance companies and employers would have a stake in something like this.
The Oklahoma Legislature voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to override vetoes of two highly restrictive abortion measures, one making it a law that women undergo an ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the fetus before having an abortion. Though other states have passed similar measures forcing women to have ultrasounds, Oklahoma’s law goes further, requiring a doctor or technician to set up the monitor where the woman can see it and describe the heart, limbs and organs of the fetus. No exceptions are made for rape and incest victims. The second measure passed into law Tuesday protects doctors from malpractice suits if they decide not to inform the parents of a unborn baby that the fetus has birth defects. The intent of the bill is to prevent parents from later suing doctors who withhold information to try to influence them against having an abortion. Gov. Brad Henry, a Democrat, vetoed both bills last week. The ultrasound law, he said, was flawed because it did not exempt rape and incest victims and was an unconstitutional intrusion into a woman’s privacy. He painted the other measure as immoral. “It is unconscionable to grant a physician legal protection to mislead or misinform pregnant women in an effort to impose his or her personal beliefs on a patient,” Mr. Henry said. The Republican majorities in both houses, however, saw things differently. On Monday, the House voted overwhelmingly to override the vetoes, and the Senate followed suit at 10:42 a.m. Tuesday, making the two measures law. […]
Two other antiabortion bills are still working their way through the legislature. One would force women to fill out a lengthy questionnaire about their reasons for seeking an abortion and then post statistics online based on the answers. The other restricts insurance coverage for the procedure.
I’m sure there’s lots more “abortion reduction” common ground like this we can find if we look hard enough.
Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t think there’s been much attention paid to these survey results from the University of Washington about the tea partiers’ attitudes toward race, equality and liberty. It’s not surprising in the least, but it is interesting to see it spelled out this clearly:
Led by Prof. Christopher Parker, the 2010 Multi-state Survey of Race & Politics examines what Americans think about the issues of race, public policy, national politics, and President Obama, one year after the inauguration of the first African American president. The survey is drawn from a probability sample of 1006 cases, stratified by state. The Multi-State Survey of Race and Politics included seven states, six of which were battleground states in 2008. It includes Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio as the battleground states. For its diversity and its status as an uncontested state, California was also included for comparative purposes. The study, conducted by the Center for Survey Research at the University of Washington, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent and was in the field February 8 – March 15, 2010. Tea Party views on Equality, Liberty and Obama [ New Results posted here ] Is America Now A Post-Racial Society? [ Full Table of Results here ] Many believed that the election of Barack Obama brought to a close the long, painful, and ugly history of race and racism in the United States. But as the incident with Henry Louis Gates last summer, and the more recent outbursts of the Tea Party activists suggest, racial divisions remain. Which is closer to the truth? A recent survey directed by University of Washington political scientist Christopher Parker, finds that America is definitely not beyond race. For instance, the Tea Party, the grassroots movement committed to reining in what they perceive as big government, and fiscal irresponsibility, also appear predisposed to intolerance. Approximately 45% of Whites either strongly or somewhat approve of the movement. Of those, only 35% believe Blacks to be hardworking, only 45 % believe Blacks are intelligent, and only 41% think that Blacks are trustworthy. Perceptions of Latinos aren’t much different. While 54% of White Tea Party supporters believe Latinos to be hardworking, only 44% think them intelligent, and even fewer, 42% of Tea Party supporters believe Latinos to be trustworthy. When it comes to gays and lesbians, White Tea Party supporters also hold negative attitudes. Only 36% think gay and lesbian couples should be allowed to adopt children, and just 17% are in favor of same-sex marriage. Analysis of the data In what follows, we explore the ways in which support for the tea party movement affects Americans’ attitudes toward groups and views on important issues. Towards that end, we begin with how support for the tea party informs their view of marginalized groups in American society. Next, we assess how support for the tea party movement informs citizens’ views on liberty, equality, and perceptions of the president. To facilitate comparisons across a range of support for the tea party movement, we divide support for the tea party into four discrete groups. Respondents were required to answer a question that asked whether or not they “strongly approved” or “somewhat approved” of the tea party, or whether or not one “somewhat approved” or “strongly disapproved” the tea party. True believers, for us, were those who strongly approved the movement (N = 117). True skeptics are those who strongly disapprove the party (N = 66). Middle of the roaders are those that either somewhat disapprove or somewhat approve (N = 171). We also include the group who claim to have never heard of the tea party movement, and so had no opinion the movement (N = 157). The last two columns include the overall average for whites, and the difference between strong supporters of the tea party who we call “true believers” and those who are in the middle, those whose answer included a “somewhat” of some kind. We believe this a reasonable benchmark group. We begin with an assessment of how support for the tea party affects views of marginalized groups in America. As the results indicate, supporting the tea party (or refusal to do so) appears to color how people see blacks, immigrants, and gay rights (table of results: click here). In each case, across the range of support for the tea party movement, including those who had never heard of it, the true believers register relatively intolerant views. Of the nine (9) questions examined, there were only two instances in which the distance separating true believers from middle-of-the-roaders fell below 10 percentage points. On whether or not “…blacks have gotten les than they deserve,” the difference was 9 points, where true believers were more likely to disagree, and on whether “…you favor…laws to protect homosexuals against job discrimination,” where 4 points separated true believers from middle-of-the-roaders. The greatest differences emerge with questions tapping blacks, like other racial minorities, should work their way up “without any special favors,” and whether or not “gay or lesbian couples should be allowed to legally adopt.” In the first instance, true believers outpace those in the middle by 21 percentage points. In the second instance, support for gay rights, the gap separating the middle from true believers is 20 points, where the middle was more sympathetic. Overall, the average distance separating respective levels of tea party support, across various marginalized groups, after rounding, is 17% for blacks, 12% for immigrants, and 13% for gay rights, respectively. Rather large differences also emerge upon consideration of liberty, equality, and perceptions of president Obama’s character traits. On questions that tap issues of liberty, the gap between true believers and those in the middle is greatest on the question of whether or not the “government can detain people as long as they wish without trial,” where true believers support the proposition by 25 points over those in the middle. The difference narrows to 8 points when people were asked to consider whether or not people with political beliefs at variance with the much of the country are entitled to the same rights as everyone else. Overall, for this set of questions, the mean difference is 19 points, where “true believers’” preferences appear to run counter to liberty, at least relative to those in the middle (table of results: click here) Similar results obtain for egalitarianism, where strong supporters of the movement appear less inclined toward equality. Consider the proposition where the distance between groups is greatest. When asked to opine on whether or not “we’d have many fewer problems in this country” if people more treated more equally, only 31% of true believers agreed, versus 55% of those in the middle, reflecting a 24 percentage-point difference. The smallest difference, a 17 points, emerges when respondents were asked whether or not “our society should do whatever is necessary to ensure equal opportunity in this country,” where 81% of those in the middle agree, versus 64% of true believers. Overall, the mean difference is approximately 22 points. Finally, at least for this round of analysis, we turn to the way in which support for the tea party informs how people perceive the president. At its most narrow, 21 points separate true believers from those who dwell in the middle, where 65% of the latter see the president as a strong leader versus 44% of the former group. The gap reaches its widest point on the issue of whether or not the president is moral: 64% of those in the middle agree that he is moral versus only 32% of true believers. Overall, the mean difference between the groups, in the way in which both perceive the president, is approximately 26 points
My beliefs about the tea party’s intolerance has come in part from intuition, so it’s good to see some data supporting my personal observations. I spent a good part of my life around racists and I know it when I see it. They have changed over all those years, of course. When I was a kid it was completely normal for people to use the “N”-word in casual conversation. It was also completely normal to smoke cigarettes around babies. Things have changed. But that doesn’t mean there is no racism and nobody smokes anymore. One of the main things that’s changed is that we don’t stand by silently if someone blows smoke in a baby’s face — and neither do we stand by silently when racism rears its ugly head in our politics.
I think it was delusional to believe that the election of the first black president wasn’t going to result in a primal scream from the racist rump of the American polity. We can pretend that this is about something less noxious and be compassionate because they are poor deluded people who don’t know any better. But the fact is that these are all well-fed, decently educated, privileged white Americans who have no respectable reason to redirect their resentments about a changing world onto racial minorities, immigrants, gays and women who behave in ways they don’t approve of. I actually have enough respect for them to take them seriously and treat them as adults not small children or innocent animals. They have agency. There’s no good reason not to hold them responsible for their words and actions. For instance, here’s a news story about the North South Carolina Republican primary debates:
[I]t was when the candidates were asked about a recently approved Arizona law to crack down on illegal immigration that they plowed new ground.There was agreement that greater enforcement of state and federal laws would help solve the problem, but Bauer also blamed welfare. Workers, he suggested, are content to sit at home rather than fill jobs taken by illegal immigrants, typically in agriculture, construction or service.”The real problem is the work force,” Bauer said, speaking of a state with 12.2 percent unemployment, the sixth-highest jobless rate in the country. “The problem is we have a give-away system that is so strong that people would rather sit home and do nothing than do these jobs. Laziness is not a disability. There are a lot of people that are flat-out lazy and they are using up the goods and services in this state.
Compare that with those tea party survey results and see if you can figure out what he’s talking about.
To any progressives who are flirting with the idea of backing libertarian candidates as a protest vote against the Democrats, here’s an interesting editorial from the Louisville Courier-Journal about the Republican Senate primary between Rand Paul and Trey Grayson.
Here’s the passage about Paul:
Dr. Paul’s father, Ron Paul, is a well-known congressman from Texas who has run for president twice — in 1988 as a Libertarian and in 2008 as a Republican. But with Rand Paul, it’s not merely a matter of “like father, like son.” Dr. Paul, 48, is an independent thinker, whose articulate, good-humored approach to politics has caught many in the Grand Old Party by surprise.
Dr. Paul’s maverick streak is a challenge of sorts to the pooh-bah of Kentucky Republicans, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who at least behind the scenes is backing Mr. Grayson. The secretary of state is positioning himself to be a loyal foot soldier in Mr. McConnell’s destructive, dishonest effort to undermine virtually every initiative from the Obama administration.
The trouble with Dr. Paul is that despite his independent thinking, much of what he stands for is repulsive to people in the mainstream. For instance, he holds an unacceptable view of civil rights, saying that while the federal government can enforce integration of government jobs and facilities, private business people should be able to decide whether they want to serve black people, or gays, or any other minority group.
He quickly emphasizes that he personally would not agree with any form of discrimination, but he just doesn’t think it should be legislated.
His perspectives — like Mr. Grayson’s — are repellent to those who believe in a woman’s right to choose whether to have an abortion. Indeed, Dr. Paul wouldn’t even permit exceptions in the case of rape or incest. He says the mother and the unborn zygote have equal rights.
It’s an unusual kind of “liberty” and “property” that says a woman doesn’t own her own body, but that’s where libertarians Ron and Rand Paul stand on the issue. If that, or the fact that they believe that (men’s) property rights trump human rights is something with which you agree, well then I’m sure they say some things that sound pretty good.
These are certainly people you’d think Democrats could work with in congress on certain issues. In the same way that a far right Republican will discover that he wants the government to fund research for Parkinson’s when his mother comes down with it, libertarians will sometimes make common cause with Democrats on discrete civil liberties issues and foreign wars. But other than that, there’s a very good reason why they almost always align themselves with the Republican party — after all, they agree with them on the most important issue to both of them. Taxes, of course.
Legislative strange bedfellows are common in DC. Indeed, alliances made up of people who find each other useful even if they have completely different aims is a natural part of negotiating political deals — and politicians often suffer from lack of trust because of it. But I honestly don’t think movement politics can be coherent or successful if it adopts such a utilitarian philosophy. People identify with political movements (as opposed to single issue advocacy) out of broad shared values and world view. They aren’t all that well suited to legislative sausage making or convoluted political gamesmanship. It’s dissonant and ends up confusing people. Sometimes strange political bedfellows are just too strange.
Both the White House and billionaire conservative Peter G. Peterson are holding “fiscal responsibility” summits dominated by calls to cut our most vital safety-net programs. We are countering this with our Virtual Summit on progressive approaches to reducing the federal deficit while protecting our social contract with our elderly, poor, disabled and unemployed.
But read this depressing article at Huffington Post first. I think this says it all:
“The frame of the debate is between those who think the witches have taken over the entire community and the whole lot of them should be burned and those who think there are only a few witches and burning just a few of them would be enough to appease the demons,” said James Galbraith, the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government at the University of Texas. “There are a few of us operating safely removed from the bonfires who maintain there is no such thing as witchcraft.”
Sadly, somebody said the other day that David Axelrod was madly waving polling results around the White House that said people really want to kill some witches.
Elizabeth Bumiller, Royal Stenographer and Messenger
by tristero
This is another post where I try to look rather closely at the way something is being said. Here, the topic is pretty serious – the communication of important data within the Pentagon – but that topic, while addressed, is not my main focus. Rather, it is the way that topic is reported that concerns me, and concerns me a lot. Obviously, my reasoning and conclusions are speculative, but I don’t think they’re entirely unfounded.
Those of us who have been enduring Elizabeth Bumiller’s reporting for the New York Times over the course of far too many years have marveled at how someone so lazy, so incurious, and so biased could hold onto her job. I think I can offer a partial explanation. She’s a messenger, not a reporter.
Still, rarely has her sloth been on such prominent display as it is here, an article about the Pentagon’s dangerous obsession with elaborate PowerPoint presentations in lieu of serious analysis and genuine comprehension. But, appearances aside, this article wasn’t written for you or me, instead… well… Go ahead. Read it. I’ll wait.
Don’t see what I’m talking about? Of course you don’t. After all, you’re not a reporter who’s supposed to be doing an article on the problems with Powerpoint presentations, or who accidentally happens to know something very important about the subject. You’re simply someone who relies upon the media to, you know, inform you. So it’s quite understandable that you wouldn’t realize that the problem with Bumiller’s article is what is glaringly not mentioned. That omission would make this an appallingly bad piece of reporting… if Bumiller’s intention was actually to inform the ordinary reader about the nature of the problem.
In fact, if you were a reporter, rather than a royal stenographer and self-appointed Messenger to the Mighty, and you were doing an article on problems with PowerPoint presentations in the military, you would be obligated to mention Edward Tufte’s famous essay, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint which brilliantly described how thoroughly misleading and counterproductive these cheesy slideshows can be.
Who is Edward Tufte? Again, it’s not your job, Ms/Mr Ordinary Reader, to know who he is. It should be a reporter’s job to find out, however, but apparently Bumiller never did. Tufte is, barely arguably, the foremost authority on the visual presentation of complex data in the United States. Data like the stuff displayed in a military PowerPoint slideshow. Since the publication of his first masterpiece, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Tufte has become well known as THE expert on how to create effective visual presentations, either in print form or live. Here’s a link to an excerpt from his work, where he discusses the problems that were hidden in plain sight in a PowerPoint presentation during a space shuttle disaster, a presentation which gave NASA the misleading impression that the problem wasn’t that serious.
In short, if you are actually writing an article about the problems with PowerPoint presentations, it absolutely behooves you to contact Edward Tufte (who incidentally recently received a presidential appointment). But Bumiller didn’t bother, and for good reason, I think: her article is not really about the problems with PowerPoint. It is an expression of the whims of the miltary’s leaders .
Let’s analyze what Bumiller actually did do to write her article. It wasn’t much. She looked at, maybe read, a couple of articles in military journals and looked at a website. She also read a short section of Fiasco. And she interviewed the following people:
Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster Capt. Crispin Burke Thomas X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel
That is, apparently, all she did (and got a nice clipping – front page, above the fold, for her efforts). While there is a blizzard of apparent facts, there is virtually no attribution for many of them. For example, Bumiller writes,
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates reviews printed-out PowerPoint slides at his morning staff meeting, although he insists on getting them the night before so he can read ahead and cut back the briefing time.
How does she know? She doesn’t say. I read this as implying she spoke to Gates, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say she probably didn’t, that she got this tidbit from one of the fellows above. Why? Because I don’t think a reporter wastes a Defense Secretary’s time by making a special effort to interview him about when he reviews his PowerPoint slides. Or rather, she calls him up specially and asks about something that minor exactly once.
There are also problems with the following excerpt. As I read it, Bumilller makes the quote appear as if it came from a formal interview, but again, it is all but certain that someone told her about it, or that it was a casually dropped aside while she was taking dictation – I’m sorry – reporting on some other story she was discussing with Petraeus:
Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is “just agony,” nonetheless likes the program for the display of maps and statistics showing trends. He has also conducted more than a few PowerPoint presentations himself.
Another curious feature of the article is that the attribution of a considerable amount of information is hidden from public view. Instead, we get euphemisms like “Senior officers say…”
So what are we to make of what Bumiller wrote? First of all it’s “he said/she said” with absolutely no focus or interest in trying to grapple with what the actual problems with PowerPoint presentations in the military might be, or what should be done to fix them. (A few apparently bewildering slides does not a case make.)* In short, it is stenography: Bumiller simply wrote down what she was told, looked up a couple things and thereby got herself a prominently placed clipping.
But if it is stenography – and it surely is – it’s stenography with a particular message. Somebody powerful – Gates? Petraeus Both? Others? – is really fed up with sitting through all the stupid fucking PowerPoint presentations and wants it reined in. Rather than exercise direct authority issuing memos (at least not yet, it’s too trivial, unless your initials are DR, and he’s history) he called in Elizabeth and – not directly, of course – told her what to write and who to contact. And so she did.
And that’s all she did. She didn’t do a single thing to verify beyond an article or two, which she didn’t do more than mention, that there really was a problem. She simply told us what the Big Guys think, and that’s all.
What’s the problem with that? Well, here’s one. Since Bumiller is not reporting, but merely doing the bidding of the powerful leaders in the military (if not the Defense Secretary) we are not provided enough facts to be fully informed as to whether there really are serious problems with PowerPoint. All we are told is that powerful people think there are. We’re not even given any access to sources that would enable us to make up our own minds.
As it happens, there are very good reasons to cut back on the incredible amount of time wasted preparing slides, and to be alarmed at the misleading, insipid presentations. But what would happen if the Powers That Be were wrong, or deliberately trying to mislead or promote misinformation? You’d never know that was going on from Bumiller’s style of reporting. She clearly doesn’t think that is her job. (I wonder: why did the name “Judith Miller” just pop into my head? Weird…)
I’m sure that, ever since the first newspapers, powerful people have been using them in order to send messages of this sort to others. But there was a time when newspapers, including the Times and the Post, would not only pass on those messages but sometimes provide context, sometimes dissent. Not always, surely, but enough so that, for instance, a criminal president – Nixon – was forced to resign.
I suppose to some extent it still happens, a little. But whenever it does, suddenly there are more Millers and Bumillers running around, taking dictation, writing articles where the Royals talk to other Royals in code, and the rest of us are left looking at entrails for signs about what is really going on.
And that is doubleplus ungood.
— *Yes, that Afghanistan slide looks awful, but if it were in a long paper, and if it were properly annotated, it might actually make sense (although probably Tufte would have a lot of objections, even then). Clearly, the biggest mistake was to project something that deeply complex and think you’ve explained anything.
