Monthly Archives: August 2017

This letter from Protect Democracy and Free Speech For People, via Steve Benen, caught me completely off-guard. It urges the prosecutors in the Arpaio case not to abandon the conviction of Joe Arpaio just because of his Presidential pardon. Why?

While the Constitution’s pardon power is broad, it is not unlimited. Like all provisions of the original Constitution of 1787, it is limited by later-enacted amendments, starting with the Bill of Rights. For example, were a president to announce that he planned to pardon all white defendants convicted of a certain crime but not all black defendants, that would conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

Similarly, issuance of a pardon that violates the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause is also suspect. Under the Due Process Clause, no one in the United States (citizen or otherwise) may “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” But for due process and judicial review to function, courts must be able to restrain government officials. Due process requires that, when a government official is found by a court to be violating individuals’ constitutional rights, the court can issue effective relief (such as an injunction) ordering the official to cease this unconstitutional conduct. And for an injunction to be effective, there must be a penalty for violation of the injunction – principally, contempt of court.

Put another way, one of the most important safeguards for the Due Process Clause is the courts’ power to hold wayward law enforcement officials in criminal contempt.

The president’s unprecedented pardon of Arpaio undermines the rule of law by immunizing unscrupulous law enforcement officials from judicial review. The foundation of the role of courts as protectors of individual rights will be nullified if they cannot execute and protect their own orders. The pardon itself conveys the unmistakable message that similarly-situated local, state, and federal law enforcement officials need not fear the judiciary, because if they run afoul of a court order, the president will pardon them. …

Importantly in this case, President Trump has not issued a pardon after an acknowledgement by Arpaio (or Trump) of his guilt in the matter, as is the case with most pardons.  Rather, President Trump has made clear that he believes Arpaio should never have followed the court’s order to begin with, and was right to ignore it. That factual context raises grave questions about this pardon’s potential to lead to other due process violations.

This issue is not just about Arpaio. Other local, state, and federal government officials will take cues from what happens next, and, if left unchallenged, the pardon will embolden unlawful official action. That is why the pardon power, properly construed with the Due Process Clause, does not allow a president to pardon a government official for contempt of court based on the official’s violation of an injunction ordering him to stop violating individuals’ constitutional rights.

That last paragraph is the fascinating kicker to this letter. While the naked language of pardoning a convict seems unrestricted, past Presidents haven’t used it in quite this manner, and have often been careful to justify their actions, with some exceptions, such as Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich. President Trump’s pardon of Arpaio has been notable on several fronts, but I believe Protect Democracy has really hit the nail on the head (or the President in the nuts, if you’re feeling a trifle vulgar today). They suggest that using the Pardon power to protect corrupt government officials from prosecution and punishment by the court systems is un-Constitutional.

And the prevention of that corruption is really at the very heart of our system of government, if you think about it. When the monarchists of Britain controlled us, there was little to stop wholesale corruption – indeed, it wasn’t so much corruption as a way of life; the careful checks and balances of the Founders was intentionally designed to minimize such corruption.

I dearly hope this argument makes it to SCOTUS, because there are only three rigidly conservative ideological Justices on the Court: Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch. Kennedy is the well-known swing vote, but remember this is the Roberts Court. Chief Justice Roberts has shown a sensitivity to the idea of a legacy. (This also assumes the left leaning side of court found this convincing. If they were to vote together, then charges of ideologically motivated judging would descend.)

I have no idea if the arguments presented by PD and FSFP really have merit. But it seems to me this is an opportunity for SCOTUS to declare itself. Is it ideologically motivated? Or does it consider itself a guardian of the Constitution, in all its complexity, and willing to say that it protects the people first, and the powers of the Presidency second?

Being in my mature years, I’ve more or less lost touch with current musical trends, so I had to check out something called bubblegum trap when I heard about it this morning:

A style of rap where a retro beat is added to trap drums to produce a less hardcore version of trap music

I just love the name. Here’s a sample:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaLPo_4CKdE

I probably won’t be listening to it obsessively, but it’s interesting how the reuse of the structure of music continues.

Spaceweather.com reports an ongoing mystery:

Source: EarthSky.org

AURORAS LIKELY THIS WEEK: For reasons researchers do not fully understand, the weeks around equinoxes have more geomagnetic disturbances than any other time of year. Data prove it: Auroras love equinoxes. We are now just weeks away from the northern autumnal equinox and, right on cue, the auroras have appeared:

And I’ll omit the pic (the one to the left is merely explanatory of equinoxes), as it may be proprietary to Spaceweather – you can follow the link if you wish to be smitten with solemn envy.

And if & when scientists figure out why there’s a statistically greater chance of auroras around the days of the equinox, I’ll look forward to understanding it.

Never go to this guy for a straight-edge shave.

Tower of Evil (1972) features plastic sets, an embarrassed Scottish sailor, some aimlessly vicious chatter about husbands, a bunch of interchangeable characters, a madman, and the God Baal and his acolyte, Teratoma. If you can find the theatrical release, you’ll apparently get some gratuitous nudity, but our TV version had a little blurring and some cuts. Not that it matters.

Mix liberally with bourbon (representing the American detective who wanders about aimlessly brandishing his pistol), and then set aside for a good walk around the lake.

Forget where you’ve put it until it starts stinking, and then you’ll have achieved an aesthetic plateau worthy of that neighbor who never did anything with their life. Don’t bother to watch, unless your bucket list includes something about seeing Baal giving everyone the finger.

Homologation:

Homologation (Greek homologeo, ὁμολογέω, “to agree”) is the granting of approval by an official authority. [Wikipedia]

Noted in a work email I cannot discuss further.

I noticed that David French on National Review has mastered the sepulchral tone of imminent doom to a fine degree as he laments the possibility that his particular sect of Christianity – which he conveniently simply labels Christianity – finds one of its tenets, that concerning the homosexual marriage, along with LGBTQ rights, under attack:

Again, this is basic Christianity. Moreover, it’s a moral statement. It declares no position on matters of constitutional law, civil rights, or civil liberties. It does not in any way urge any individual or the government to mistreat any LGBTQ person. To the contrary, it repeatedly declares God’s love and God’s saving grace.

The backlash was of course immediate, with multiple liberal Evangelicals deriding the statement as cruel or mean. In their theology, God’s word is subject to an overriding cultural and political test. One can reject even His clearest commands if those commands are “mean” or “intolerant.” And what’s “mean” or “intolerant” is — oddly enough — defined almost entirely by secular social revolutionaries. …

Yes, sin does create shame and broken hearts. Its cure isn’t endorsement but rather repentance. But then there was this, from Nashville’s mayor, Megan Barry:

The @CBMWorg‘s so-called “Nashville Statement” is poorly named and does not represent the inclusive values of the city & people of Nashville

This statement is in many ways far more ominous than anything that comes from the liberal Evangelical world. The liberal Evangelical argument is one reason that the Nashville Statement was necessary. The authors and signatories expected pushback. Barry’s statement, however, is different. It’s not separation of church and state, it’s a declaration of state against church.

I must say that part way through, I began wondering how the generation following those who implemented the Salem Witch Trials felt about the abandonment and condemnation of the killing of witches^[1]. Would there have been as an atmosphere of dejection and disappointment because Christianity was changing, that one of the central tenets of the Christian experience had been rejected by a large part of the populace, and thus the country was doomed?

I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer is yes. After all, you always need someone or some group to blame for the ills that are otherwise difficult to explain.

So far as I can make out, David is not concerned about accuracy or having an honest argument. If he was, he wouldn’t confuse civil marriage with religious marriage. He wouldn’t confuse the opinions of a politician as a person with an official policy – particularly in a country in which government is not permitted to make laws with respect to religion. He would admit that change comes to all human institutions.

He wouldn’t try to portray the dominant religion of the United States as being under attack.

No, David is trying to rile up the Evangelical base by playing the victimhood card. You may remember Adrian Chen mentioning it being played in the 1960s, when a memo from the labor unions to the Kennedy Administration suggested using the Fairness Doctrine to suppress right wing viewpoints was leaked to the press. Well, this is how it’s played today – ignore the facts on the ground, the context, and stir up the fears of the readers. See, fear is one of the finest bonding agents known today – far better than Gorilla Glue or Superglue, because it deactivates the reasoning facility in favor of the fight or flight reaction^[2], and people in the throes of that reaction are a lot easier to mold.

And this is where my disappointment in Mr. French really comes popping to the fore – because in this missive, dedicated to coaxing his reader into the abandonment of reason, he displays it in himself. He speaks of signing the Nashville Statement:

WE AFFIRM that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness.

WE DENY that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.

This is the standard Evangelical fundamentalist cant, as I understand it – and it tells the story. It tells us that rather than consider the issues at hand, applying his mental faculties, and coming up with a reasoned judgment, he’s simply gone off and read the Bible. He’s taking a famously contradictory book, extracted some assertions, and decided to sign up for them.

This may take some gumption. It may take even a little leadership.

But, really, it doesn’t take intellect. Oh, maybe he agonized over signing the pledge, or was hesitant to become an evangelical Christian, but in the end we’re talking about giving up a reasoned approach to life in favor of just trying to interpret what a sometimes obtuse book, written a long time ago, has to say. And then taking it for God’s word. That’s where the real cessation of reasoning comes in.

In a sense, there’s an aesthetic principle at work here, and David plies it well, whether or not he’s conscious of it. By demonstrating that he’s willing to give up his reasoning capacity, he implicitly encourages his audience to do the same. It creates a bond between him and his audience. And then the manipulation can begin. In this case, Be fearful of non-conservative politicians – they’re out to getcha! The writer demonstrates not-thinking, and so the audience should not-think. This may explain why I’m so impressed by the sepulchral tone.

But do you know what I see as the saddest thing of all? The Bible has a fabulous rule that he could have instead cited^[3]. It’s called the Golden Rule. Simply treat people how you’d want to be treated. It covers so much ground and doesn’t get you involved in other people’s love life, while inviting you to love them so long as they love you. What’s not to like about that?

Even an agnostic like myself can like that.

¹My apologies to any historian who is shaking their head at my shaky grasp of Christian history as to when killing witches was abandoned.

²“Fight or flight” seems to be popping up everywhere for me lately. I wonder how my cortisol levels are doing…

³If the Bible didn’t have some redeeming qualities, it wouldn’t have survived this long. Simply evolutionary theory.

I should have read a little further before posting this, because Rep Spencer has apologized. Politically Georgia reports:

A Georgia Republican lawmaker who warned that his Democratic former colleague could “go missing in the Okefenokee” over supporting the removal of Civil War monuments said he regrets that his comments on Facebook were “misinterpreted as a threat against her.”

State Rep. Jason Spencer added that the nation’s “terrible” racial division would only get worse if he cannot continue to have the type of conversation he had on social media with former Democratic state Rep. LaDawn Jones.

Here’s part of his apology:

“I regret that my choice of words in warning LaDawn about the possibility of violence has been misinterpreted as a threat against her, or anyone else who would like to see historic monuments to the Confederacy removed. I was trying to warn her that there really are people who would harm others over the issue. In light of the recent tragic murder of a woman in Charlottesville, I believe that a certain degree of caution is necessary. I still do.

“I condemn racism, ‘white supremacy’ and any group from the yesterday’s Klan to today’s neo-Nazis, who espouses such vile beliefs. They should not be tolerated. Provoking such hateful people is to deliberately invite violence with them, and that should not happen in America in the 21st century.

Reminds me of the old BBS days, when it was easy to offend someone because body language, inflection, etc, simply didn’t come through the telecommunications channel.

But I suspect the haptics folks are working on that.

Georgia PoliticsPolitically Georgia reports on a social media remark which must have had a touch of bourbon behind it:

A Georgia Republican lawmaker warned a Democratic former colleague who criticized his support for Civil War monuments on Facebook that she won’t be “met with torches but something a lot more definitive” if she continues to call for the removal of statues in south Georgia.

State Rep. Jason Spencer, a Woodbine Republican, also wrote former state Rep. LaDawn Jones that “people in South Georgia are people of action, not drama” and suggested some who don’t understand that “will go missing in the Okefenokee.”

For former Rep. Jones’ part, she’s not too concerned:

Jones said in an interview that Spencer sat next to her for four years in the Georgia House and that they developed a friendly, if sometimes testy, relationship.

“If it were anybody other than Jason Spencer, then I would be alarmed. But we had a unique relationship in the Georgia Legislature,” said Jones, who served from 2012 to 2016. “If that had come from anybody else, I’d take it as a serious threat.”

Still, she added, she was “concerned” by his reaction.

Maybe Rep. Spencer thinks this is just friendly trash talk, but it seems to be in poor taste.

It looks like the second coming of Flash Gordon – the GyroCar. Here’s the official request for funding:

Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com treats it with some sarcasm:

It’s all very cleverly engineered; it’s round because there is a giant flywheel underneath, giving it stability. It has two generators and a backup generator to keep it spinning.

This is such a wonderful idea. It excites me so, to see yet another solution to the single biggest urban problem of our times: How to keep the roads dedicated to the moving and storing of private cars.

Me? I’m keeping an eye on my leg.

Of Dr. Seuss, that is.

If I have to say something nice, I’ll say Marsha Hunt, there on the left, seemed to be enjoying herself in her role as a flirtatious, hungry werewolf.

Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985) is an amateur effort that just happens to inexplicably include Christopher Lee in its cast. While the main plot might have been interesting in the hands of real writers, those who masqueraded as writers for this flick (or perhaps the director) have dispensed with believable characters, and that is a fatal flaw that cannot be overcome by the exhibition of Sybil Danning’s breasts. Add a staccato editing style which interleaves snarling werewolf heads with other scenes for no apparent reason, a werewolf community that doesn’t really seem to care if it loses members, wretched special effects, a horrid rock ‘n roll sound track which didn’t enhance the movie in the least, a lead actress with no acting chops and a voice only a gauntlet on a chalkboard could love, a leading man who smirks his way through the report on how his sister died, and an excruciatingly awful title, and this is really a movie which should be on the bucket list of Christopher Lee or Sybil Danning fans ONLY.

And then done with your alcoholic drink of choice in hand. Otherwise you may claw your eyes out.

Leon Sigal on 38 North has some more complaints about journalists trying to cover the history of North Korea and its nuclear weapons program. It’s thorough, but just as I was about to skip on by as repetitive, this popped up:

In October 2002, having balked at talks for nearly two years, President Bush sent James Kelly, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, to Pyongyang—not to negotiate but to confront it over its clandestine uranium enrichment program. The North Koreans offered to forego uranium enrichment, as well as plutonium production, in return for diplomatic recognition, legal assurances of nonaggression, including nonuse of nuclear weapons, and not impeding its economic development, as Kelly himself acknowledged three weeks later: “They did suggest after this harsh and—personally, to me—surprising admission that there were measures that might be taken that were generally along those lines.” Under strict instructions, Kelly ignored the offer. In her memoir, Condoleezza Rice is more forthcoming. Kelly, she recalls, was bound in a diplomatic straitjacket:

Usually there is enough trust in an experienced negotiator that the guidance is used more as points of reference than as a script. But in this case, given the fissures, the points were to be read verbatim. There were literally stage directions for Kelly. He was not to engage the North Koreans in any side conversation in any way. That left him actually moving to the corner of the table to avoid Pyongyang’s representatives.

Rice’s conclusion is worth underscoring: “Because his instructions were so constraining, Jim couldn’t fully explore what might have been an opening to put the program on the table.”

Instead, administration officials claimed that the North Koreans had “admitted” they had an enrichment “program” and said they should be punished. They overcame resistance from South Korea and Japan to suspend shipments of heavy fuel oil, thereby tearing up what little was left of the Agreed Framework. While US forces were tied down preparing to invade Iraq, North Korea retaliated by reprocessing the five or six bombs’ worth of plutonium, which, when weaponized, would allow it to conduct nuclear tests for the first time. It also moved to restart its plutonium reactor, ramped up imports of enrichment equipment, and aided Syria in constructing a reactor of its own. The North’s nuclear effort, largely held in check for a decade through negotiations, was now unleashed.

Look, I have no idea if Sigal is offering a fair view of how the history of negotiations over the North Korean nuclear weapons program proceeded and went awry. And, certainly, when confronted with a regime in which a portion, any portion, of the populace is consigned to hard labor camps that are tantamount to death, there must be a moral element to a country’s relations with that regime, especially given the superior firepower that the United States brings to the game, although that power is considerably attenuated when one takes into account the decay of that moral position at the thought of civilian casualties in either North or South Korea. This is true so long as the United States has the gall to consider itself the epitome of moral leadership. But these are all assertions which can be fact-checked by competent historians.

But when I see “administration officials”, and know that means “Bush administration officials,” I’m afraid the red flags start waving. Given the willingness of Bush, Cheney, & Co. to see what they wanted to see, whether it was WMDs in Iraq or the success of American torture, rather than realities on the ground, I’m more than willing to believe the Bush Administration officials saw what ideology dictated they saw.

Or, not to mince words so much, they lied through their teeth.

I was brought up to believe lies have consequences. It degrades your reputation, and, worse yet, it may lead you down paths which have negative consequences. In the above sequence, the Clinton Administration negotiated with the North Koreans to the point where they were signed up to an agreement in which the North Koreans abandoned nuclear weapons development. Clinton handed it off to Bush, and Bush basically said, We think they’re probably cheating, so we’re abandoning it to. And it’s not at all clear Bush’s minions had anything concrete to justify their position – it was simply ideological. It’s even possible that, as something Clinton started, they felt it had to be destroyed. Remember the affect the word Clinton seems to have on conservatives, after all.

Fifteen years later, what do we have? A nuclear armed North Korea.

But I’d like to take this a step further. The Bush electoral victories were essentially powered by the Evangelical right wing in the belief that the evident religiosity of Bush and his cohorts made him the preferred pick for the White House; indeed, some really felt he was the selection of God.

There’s little need to go into the many scandals and failures of the Bush Administration, as they’ve been documented so far and wide that the GOP is unwilling to really acknowledge him as a Republican President. They were that bad. But it is worth asking, was there a common failing which explained how we ended up in two wars, only one of which was even arguably justified, as well as indulging in the horrific practice of torture, not to mention the rampant mismanagement of Congressional duties, particularly financial, once the Republicans held both Congress and the Executive?

For my money, yeah.

They were fucking overconfident that they knew how things worked.

And, you know, while some people are just overconfident because they don’t understand the depth of the pool they’ve jumped in, there’s also the shared overconfidence that comes from folks who think God has blessed them. They get things backwards, believing they can indulge in any sort of shenanigans because God has touched them. Somehow, they don’t understand that, if God even exists and has chosen them, that bloody well means the bar is a helluva lot higher for them than for anyone else.

Being chosen by God means you have a lot higher to jump, froggy boys, than everyone else.

And if God doesn’t exist, you’d better learn a bit of humility because this job is bigger than anyone. Maybe look back at others’ successful work on these problems, eh?

So, one of Trump’s constituencies was reportedly the Evangelical right, although I seriously doubt Trump would recognize a Bible if Melania whacked him in the back of the head with it. But some of his nominations happen to be highly religious, such as Carson and DeVos. The behavior of both since their confirmations has not inspired confidence, and so I have to wonder if they’re wandering about, destroying the good works of their predecessors while believing that God might, oh, I don’t know, be guiding their feet on the path?

Rather than using good judgment and even Science?

I suspect I’m just not going to sleep well over the next few nights. I certainly didn’t last night.

Aplomb:

imperturbable self-possession, poise, or assurance. [Dictionary.com]

I just thought about it today and realized I hadn’t seen it used in years.

I see former UN Ambassador John Bolton, committed neocon and someone who has failed to impress me over the years, has decided that it’s better to destroy the United States’ reputation, and therefore its future, than to continue the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran, as CNN/Politics reports:

John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the UN who at one point was a candidate to lead the State Department, claimed in a National Review op-ed published Monday that his plan for the US to exit the Iran nuclear deal had to be presented publicly, because staff changes at the White House have made “presenting it to President Trump impossible.” …

In a memo drawn up after a July directive from Steve Bannon, the recently ousted White House chief strategist, Bolton pushes for selling the idea of leaving the Iran deal to the public in a “white paper” and lays out a strategy for the “campaign” and its “execution.”

Bolton has been frustrated at the rise of more traditional foreign policy thinkers within the White House, such as Mattis and Tillerson, who have favored remaining in the deal. The agreement curbs Iran’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Iran remains under multiple sanctions for terrorism-related activities.

“Trump can and should free America from this execrable deal at the earliest opportunity,” Bolton writes.

Where proponents of the deal, including lawmakers and former Obama administration officials, see the pact as a way to get visibility on Iran’s nuclear activities, and, at least for the time being, stop it’s nuclear program, Bolton sees only danger.

“The JCPOA is a threat to US national-security interests, growing more serious by the day,” Bolton writes, though he doesn’t offer evidence. “If the President decides to abrogate the JCPOA, a comprehensive plan must be developed and executed to build domestic and international support for the new policy.”

Abrogate is just a fancy word for failing to keep your word – i.e., dishonor. Some folks may think there’s no reason to consider there to be honor among nations, but this is a false assumption. The simple fact of the matter is that nations assess other nations for their reliability, for their predictability. If they negotiate a good faith treaty with some other nation, what are the chances that the other nation will keep its word, will honor the treaty, and will follow through on all the consequences of that treaty?

Well, those chances can be assessed in two ways – first, by looking backward at the past performance of the other nation. Has it kept its word before, or does it try to weasel out? What is its general inclination towards honorable behaviors?

But past performance is no guarantee of future performance, so they also must assess current leadership.

And I’ll tell you what, when someone like Bolton irresponsibly starts yacking about some plan to dishonor the United States, and our chief foreign relations guy is this amateur hour, incurious man Trump, that’s really frustrating. Because treaties and other agreements between nations is how we encourage trade, and it’s how we discourage war. Without them, tariffs go up, and we end up fighting multiple, draining wars.

And we’re no longer Reagan’s famous “shining city upon a hill.” We’re no longer the principled nation to which other nations can look for leadership. We’re just the heavily armed bully, running around looking for victims.

And bullies get taken down, eventually.

All that said, if they can catch Iran cheating, fine, great. If they’re cheating according to the standards in the JCPOA, then Iran has abrogated it and we’re no longer bound. Then it’s all legit, and I will sigh and wonder what Iran thinks it’s going to get out of this. But if Bolton and his allies use cheating to get what they want, that just blackens the soul of the United States. And the article indicates no cheating by Iran has been discovered yet, and that Bolton’s assertions about dangers to the United States are without evidence or argument. So far, Bolton’s case appears empty to me.

On a side note, I quoted the CNN article because it provides some basic fact-checking, rather than Bolton’s remarks directly. Context is important. Maybe I’ll get around to reading Bolton’s unvarnished remarks tomorrow. Or maybe a reader will be kind enough to provide a summary for me?

Gotta like this idea for replacing Confederate statues!

There’s a marked difference in maturity levels between President Trump and, well, just about any foreign leader, wouldn’t you say? Mexico’s Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray, for example:

The Mexican government expressed its solidarity Sunday with the United States following the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey and offered assistance to Texas.

Mexico offered to help Texas deal with the disaster, “as good neighbors should always do in trying times.”
On Sunday evening, Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott spoke by telephone.

Carlos Gonzalez Gutierrez, the Mexican consul general in Austin, said he has been in constant communication with the governor’s office to determine how Mexico can best help.

“As we have done in the past, Mexico stands with Texas in this difficult moment,” Gonzalez said.

Mexico is prepared for a Katrina-like assistance package, officials said. [Dallas News]

Meanwhile, what does President Trump do? Also via the same Dallas News article, he Tweets:

The latest offer from Mexico to help Texas comes after President Donald Trump took to Twitter Sunday, insisting it will pay for a border wall.

“With Mexico being one of the highest crime Nations in the world, we must have THE WALL,” Trump tweeted. “Mexico will pay for it through reimbursement/other.”

Along with the vast – and embarrassing – disparity in evident maturity levels, we also see the prioritization Trump is evidencing here. Top priority is his base, he’s assuring his base that he’s going to get that damn wall built, and that Mexico – not his base – will be paying for it. Somehow, Somewhen. To be charitable, he’s making promises to his base that, in all likelihood, he won’t be able to keep.

But foreign relations? That’s one of his top responsibilities as President – but he doesn’t seem to be paying attention to the simple common courtesy which keeps relations, personal and international, going without too much grinding.

He may be thinking he’s working to assure his political future and re-election, but for those who understand that it’s competency and not ideology which assures a future, this is one part of the big anchor which will clatter around behind him on the racetrack, dragging him to an ignominious failure.

Adrian Chen writes an interesting article for The New Yorker which touches on a couple of concerns of mine WRT the Web that long time readers will recognize: issues of accuracy and honesty, along with questions of gatekeeping. He brings in a comparison with the early days of radio, which has its problems since being an author on radio requires access to some fairly expensive technology, even on a pro rata basis, while Web authoring access costs have come down to almost nothing; but the comparison is interesting regardless. This really caught my eye:

The various efforts to fact-check and label and blacklist and sort all the world’s information bring to mind a quote, which appears in David Goodman’s book, from John Grierson, a documentary filmmaker: “Men don’t live by bread alone, nor by fact alone.” In the nineteen-forties, Grierson was on an F.C.C. panel that had been convened to determine how best to encourage a democratic radio, and he was frustrated by a draft report that reflected his fellow-panelists’ obsession with filling the airwaves with rationality and fact. Grierson said, “Much of this entertainment is the folk stuff . . . of our technological time; the patterns of observation, of humor, of fancy, which make a technological society a human society.”

Facts alone are only compelling to those who understand the context; for those who don’t, story is the necessary provision of context in an understandable manner.

False stories serve the desires of malicious, selfish folks, and in an ideal world, gatekeepers keep them out. When television and radio were dominant, the gatekeepers were small in number and effective. However, were they neutral with regards to true narratives with which they disagreed? Chen notes:

In 1961, a watershed moment occurred with the leak of a memo from labor leaders to the Kennedy Administration which suggested using the Fairness Doctrine to suppress right-wing viewpoints. To many conservatives, the memo proved the existence of the vast conspiracy they had long suspected. A fund-raising letter for a prominent conservative radio show railed against the doctrine, calling it “the most dastardly collateral attack on freedom of speech in the history of the country.” Thus was born the character of the persecuted truthteller standing up to a tyrannical government—a trope on which a billion-dollar conservative-media juggernaut has been built.

Thus the sense of grievance on which the conservative movement has been built. Now we have Trump lying like it’s drinking water.

It’s a good article to read.

Winsome:

attractive in a sweet, engaging way; charming [Collins]

Popped into my head last night as a word I knew little about, after I had called my wife a winsome lass.

From a book review by Lucas Kello of Ben Buchanan’s The Cybersecurity Dilemma: Hacking, Trust and Fear Between Nations on Lawfare:

Students of international relations are trained to read history—even ancient history—as a prelude to the future. Among the eternal notions that theorists commonly invoke, one enjoys special appeal: the security dilemma. It originates in Thucydides’s famous claim that “increasing Athenian greatness and the resulting fear among the Spartans made [their] going to war inevitable.”  A similar fear had fueled Athens’s grab at empire. Therein lies the dilemma: in the anarchic international system, the growing security of one state ensures the growing insecurity of others. This perverse logic produces occasional outbreaks of war, even when the contenders wish to avoid it, as in 431 B.C.

In The Cybersecurity Dilemma: Hacking, Trust and Fear Between Nations, Ben Buchanan argues that this ancient logic explains much of the incessant hostility that mars interstate dealings in cyberspace. The argument has three “pillars.” They can be summed up as follows: the development of offensive weapons requires advance intrusion into other states’ networks; maximizing defense also necessitates intrusion; therefore, states penetrate foreign networks whenever they can—even while interpreting intrusions against them as threatening. The cycle repeats incessantly.

Sounds like a negative feedback loop, and it’s fascinating, but retroactively obvious. Moving to the nuclear arms scenario of last century, the remark about 431 B.C. is fairly frightening; one wonders if any of the operational issues of surviving that period have applicability to the issues of controlling and suppressing cyberwarfare. I only bring this up because all options should be examined; I suspect the answer is No, given the disparate nature of the weapons classes involved.

A couple of more opinions come in concerning the Arpaio pardon. Steve Benen on MaddowBlog:

In case this isn’t obvious, a president isn’t supposed to intervene with the Justice Department about an ongoing criminal prosecution of someone the president likes. What’s more, note that Trump didn’t even bother to consult with his own Justice Department – or pay any attention to the department’s pardon protocols – before rescuing his right-wing pal who acted as if he were above the law.

There’s also the near future to consider. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is moving forward with his investigation into the Trump-Russia affair, and as of Friday night, everyone received a stark reminder that this president is comfortable abusing the powers of his office to keep his allies out of prison.

Indeed, it’s easy to imagine Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn waking up on Saturday morning with a spring in their step. After all, in Donald Trump’s America, loyalty to the law is nice, but loyalty to the president is almost literally a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Trump has told a staggering number of lies since entering politics, but his vow to restore “law and order” may be the most painfully ridiculous of them all. It’s difficult to guess where this story goes next, but let’s not forget that as recently as last month, the president reportedly sought information on his power to issue pardons to White House aides, members of his family, and even himself.

Making “law and order” into a ridiculous proposition in order to pardon a law and order sheriff does have a certain irony to it, but I suspect that’s lost on most Trump supporters. Not that they lack a sense of humor, but they don’t have the knowledge base to realize just what’s going on.

The Editors of National Review also disapprove, but cannot resist irrelevant digs at their favorite voodoo dolls:

We are mindful of the hypocrisy of the Left regarding abuse of the president’s constitutional pardon power. President Clinton put it on sale for the benefit of donors and cronies. President Obama used it to effectively rewrite Congress’s narcotics statutes, for the benefit of drug felons and in circumvention of his duty to execute the laws faithfully. Both commuted the sentences of anti-American terrorists from the FALN and the Weathermen. These were disgraceful acts.

But that past doesn’t make Trump’s pardon any less objectionable. Trump acted for the benefit of a political crony, just like Clinton. He did it — just like Clinton — outside the Justice Department’s pardon process. While presidents have the authority to go around DOJ, the regular process is in place to ensure that presidents make fully informed pardon decisions. To short-circuit the standard procedure is to consciously avoid facts that might show that clemency is unwarranted.

These superfluous shots at opponents tends to dilute their outrage and makes it seem as if all the politicians are equally bad – a deft sleight of hand of which they should be ashamed. I think most serious commentators would agree that Trump is way beyond most elected politicians, and is unique among those with him amount of power, in his failure to responsibly manage his position. To imply otherwise, simply to maintain one’s menacing posture against ideological opponents, is dishonest and actually fairly dangerous.

Who knew that Rip Torn and Sebastian Gorka were one and the same!

In order for a comedy about criminals with few restraints on their behavior to work, the characters really need to be parodies of who you might actually expect to find in these situations, and those in Nadine (1987) simply don’t make the grade. It works best if they exaggerate some character trait which, in reasonable quantities, might predispose them to bend their moral systems for financial gain, but we don’t really see that to any great extent here.

It’s 1954 in Texas, young Nadine is newly pregnant, her marriage to her bar-owning husband, Vernon, is on the ropes as his dreams of running a premium bar keep foundering, and in a moment of weakness, she agreed to a photo shoot with Raymond Escobar when he hints that Hugh Hefner may be interested. Recovering her good sense, she returns to the studio to demand those photos back, but when Escobar is knifed by an unknown assailant virtually in front of her, she grabs her folder of photos and scoots out the back door.

Once at home, though, she discovers the folder contains plans for changes to the local highway. Her husband shows up, looking for her signature on the divorce papers, and she promises to sign if he’ll help her with an ill-defined task. Back at Escobar’s, he helps her break-in, then realizes something’s wrong. While she’s searching for her photos, the local cops, assigned to keep an eye on the place, come in to get a brew and stumble on Vernon, who distracts him until Nadine whacks him in the back of the head.

After a whirlwind cop chase, they end up at her place. While she busies herself for one last fling, Vernon discovers the highway plans and flies out the door, intent on making his most immediate fortune, using his lawyer-cousin for financial leverage.

Meantime, the criminal who paid for the plans is looking for them, and the cousin turns to him for financial help. This helps the criminal get a hold of the plans, leading to a climactic battle in a junkyard.

But where are the plans? Well, you’ll have to watch, and even then you won’t know.

It’s not a half bad plot, but it comes off flat. Perhaps it’s the lack of chemistry between the leads, but I tend to think the real problem is they’re too believable. Sure, they’re financially grasping – but we’ve seen that in The Godfather insofar as the criminal goes, and Nadine and Vernon, well, both are from the wrong side of the tracks – it’s not unexpected that a certain lust for money, ill-gotten or no, will possess them. Playing by the rules, after all, doesn’t seem to be doing them much good.

And so the story glides fairly flatly from one mildly intriguing plot twist to another. We know where it’s going, though, and while we may not know exactly which fork in the path it may take here and there, we know the ending spot. And that makes it a bit boring.

Benjamin Wittes and Jane Chong on Lawfare call for impeachment of President Trump and discuss the three areas of concern to national security professionals – and, of course, the rest of us. Then, I fear they start calling for a near miracle as they lay down the guidelines they believe should be followed:

In sum, Trump has embarrassed the presidential office in innumerable ways, and members of the House and Senate are obliged to organize these incidents in their heads and get a handle on their constitutional significance. There is a wrong way and a right way to go about this task. The wrong way is to treat the launch of an impeachment inquiry as a matter of political popularity or opportunism. On this view, the relevant vectors might include polls on Trump’s approval ratings, the results of next year’s midterm elections, and worldwide Google searches for “impeachment” (which soared when Trump fired Director Comey in May and has otherwise ebbed and flowed with the news tide). The right approach is to commit to a clear-eyed and ongoing assessment of Trump’s words and actions against the obligations of the office and to trace out the effects of his misconduct on the security and welfare of the United States.

In 1833, Justice Joseph Story explained that impeachment is not limited to “crimes of a strictly legal character” but also “has a more enlarged operation, and reaches, what are aptly termed political offenses, growing out of personal misconduct or gross neglect, or usurpation, or habitual disregard of the public interests, various in their character, and so indefinable in their actual involutions, that it is almost impossible to provide systematically for them by positive law.” This is a near-perfect description of Trump’s wide-ranging abuses and the challenge that now lies with Congress: the order that the positive law is unable to provide is now its to impose.

The pack of second and third rate power-mongers making up the GOP contingent in Congress are not nearly statesmen or stateswomen; they are political creatures who seem incapable of the view that the security of the United States comes first, and the satisfaction of their craven egos is a far distant second. I say that as an independent who has watched them deny anything – ANYTHING – that might constitute a reality they should not breach, be it climate change, banking regulations proven through 70 years of efficacy, or the belief that guns belong in the hands of the mentally ill.

But if they wish to honestly serve their country and accomplish the miracle I mentioned above, then if impeachment results in the loss of their seats due to the extremism of the current GOP base, so be it – this is the result of the abuse of the conservative element of our populace for the last twenty or thirty years by Fox News and other news sources that have failed to serve them with the full breadth of the news, that coddled them, that responded positively to their prejudices, often in the pursuit of self-enrichment.

So I appreciate their detailed, convincing case – but I doubt Speaker Ryan and his cohorts will be doing anything about it soon.

NewScientist’s David Hambling (19 August 2017) notes the first occurrence of GPS spoofing:

REPORTS of satellite navigation problems in the Black Sea suggest that Russia may be testing a new system for knocking GPS off course. This could be the first hint of an electronic weapon that could be used by anyone, from nation states to petty criminals.

On 22 June, the US Maritime Administration filed a seemingly bland incident report. The master of a ship off the Russian port of Novorossiysk had discovered his GPS put him in the wrong spot – 32 kilometres along the coast, at Gelendzhik airport.

After checking the navigation equipment was working properly, the shipmaster contacted other nearby ships. At least 20 were affected.

While the incident hasn’t been confirmed, navigation experts think this is the first documented use of GPS misdirection – a spoofing attack that has long been warned of but never been seen in the wild.

The remark that petty criminals, whose aims are selfish and provincial, might be able to accomplish this sort of thing is particularly frightening. At least nations can be predictable, and if identified in a particular incident, punished. So what’s to be done?

The spectre of electronic warfare has led to calls for more research into countermeasures. Research on receivers that could authenticate a GPS signal has been under way for over a decade. “Guarding against spoofing is not easy,” says Last.

There is one other option: ditch GPS and return to Loran, the second world war era system of radio navigation beacons. It requires a large, complex antenna and spoofing can be detected and located relatively easily. It was switched off in 2011, but advocates have long rallied around a modern update, eLoran – a low-cost fallback for GPS that might now turn out to be priceless.

Standing willing and ready to re-enter service.

And if it really comes down to it, we can re-staff the lighthouses! No, not really, but certainly low-tech approaches, while perhaps not as effective as high-tech, are also not as vulnerable to malicious actors, either. Using low-tech for the primary requirements and high-tech for detection and retaliation may prove interesting.

And the ornamental grass should like to lodge a complaint with management.