Yearly Archives: 2018

On Lawfare, in a longish post Matt Tait of the University of Texas-Austin laments the damage done by the CIA’s torture program, and his final point is telling:

Finally, the RDI [rendition, detention and interrogation] program was reckless in ways that the officials who designed it may never really have understood, and for which they have never been held accountable. It is perhaps hard to fully convey how much of a threat the legacy of torture still poses to the United State’s ability to interact with its allies overseas and to its ongoing counterterrorism efforts.

The risks and subsequent fallout from this recklessness is vast. When the U.K.’s domestic security service, MI5, found out that the U.K. foreign intelligence service, MI6, had been involved in the rendition—but not torture—of suspects who had later endured torture, MI5 threw all MI6 officers out of its headquarters. This caused a prolonged rift between two of the main intelligence agencies of one of the United States’ closest allies—agencies that are themselves responsible for no small amount of intelligence that reaches the president in his daily brief.

Similarly, some extremely bad people are walking free with large payouts because the evidence against them was contaminated by torture. The program has directly led to considerable litigation in the U.K., Canada, U.S. and elsewhere. It has put top-secret documents at risk of discovery through litigation. It has caused a sustained foreign policy firestorm for the United States and its allies with enormous costs.

Defenses of this program ignore or undervalue these costs, or pretend they are not directly attributable to it. And even putting values aside, advocates of starting a new torture program as a matter of “toughness” ignore that the price of doing so will not be measured in a few hurt feelings.

Torture is a deeply flawed instrument when it comes to intelligence collection, easily fooled and  unverifiable. It’s real purpose is vengeance and fear; its results is loathing and disdain. It’s the tool of fools who have no faith in their own value systems. Matt’s story, which includes new CIA Director Gina Haspel, is a story of failure, law-breaking, and ego. She should not have been confirmed, and wouldn’t have been by adults.

Fecund:

• able to produce a lot of crops, fruit, babies, young animals, etc.:
  fecund soil
• producing or creating a lot of new things, ideas, etc.:
  a fecund imagination

[Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “Saturday Waterfowl Extravaganza,” Kevin Drum:

This has been a very fecund year for the ducks and geese here in our little suburban watering hole. Last year we had no ducklings and only two broods of goslings. This year we’ve had three broods of ducklings and either four or five broods of Canada goose babies—so far.

Refik Anadol’s http Infinity Room.

A reader sends a link to an article on Ars Technica further documenting the energy costs of Bitcoin:

The bitcoin network is run by miners, computers that maintain the shared transaction ledger called the blockchain. A new study estimates that this process consumes at least 2.6GW of power—almost as much electric power as Ireland consumes. This figure could rise to 7.7GW before the end of 2018—accounting for almost half a percent of the world’s electricity consumption.

The study is an updated version of calculations performed late last year by analyst Alex de Vries. In this new version, de Vries has gathered more detailed information about the economics of the mining business. But his new numbers are broadly consistent with the old ones. Last December, he estimated that the bitcoin network was consuming roughly 32TWh annually, or 3.65GW. His website, which is updated daily, now shows the network consuming 67TWh annually, just under that upper bound of 7.7GW shown in his new study.

But even more interesting:

A crucial point here is that the difficulty of the mining task automatically adjusts to maintain a 10 minute average block creation rate. So if more computing power joins the network, the result isn’t that more bitcoins get created. Instead, it takes more computing power to produce each bitcoin, making existing mining hardware less profitable than before—and driving up the energy consumed per bitcoin.

I was not aware of this, and is a rare sighting of an anti-scalable algorithm, if I don’t miss my guess.

He’s working on frogs this week.

Those frogs you dissected in biology class? Fake. Real frogs are full of beans!

On 38 North, Joseph DeThomas agrees with my own suspicions concerning Kim Jong Un and his adversaries:

Kim Jong Un has to be given a great deal of credit for tactical diplomatic acumen. He began 2018 totally isolated and under severe economic and military pressure. He had no reason to believe any of the main participants would relent in sanctions pressure and he had reason to fear that they would lament but do nothing to halt any ill-conceived US military action. In five short months, he has totally reversed the diplomatic momentum of the situation. While he is still under sanctions pressure, he has eliminated any hope the US could resort to military action and maintain its alliance with the ROK. He has likely shifted China’s position back to its more traditional semi-supportive approach to the DPRK, especially as long as Kim refrains from further provocations, and he has isolated President Trump should the President wish to return to a policy of maximum pressure.

Kim did this through very slick public diplomacy in which he shifted his image from that of a comic book villain to that of a normal and quite approachable statesman. At the same time, he made himself the center of the diplomatic geometry of the Korean Peninsula. He began the year as the target of diplomacy. He has emerged this spring as its prime mover by dealing with each of his opponents bilaterally—offering them what they wanted in isolation from the others and by leaving Donald Trump until last, with Japanese Prime Minister Abe still on the sidelines, ignored by all actors.

The Japanese will carry the blight of World War II for another couple of generations, I suspect – because their Asian neighbors find it too profitable to let it drop. And it’s sensible to be wary of any entity that displayed such barbaric violence towards them.

But the real star of the show is Kim, I think. He remains the scion of a vicious family monarchy, no matter how many skills he displays in the diplomatic arena or how much good press he may garner, and that’s another key element of the drama playing out on the southern border of China. Is he building a mask? You bet. He may end up denuclearizing the peninsula, but it’ll be on his terms, not ours, or no dice. His biggest task may be decoding Trump’s utterances, which tends to descend into gibberish when he talks about anything beyond the American borders.

So I don’t expect any instant successes. The North Koreans have never been known for quick movement at the diplomatic table. And if Trump comes back from the summit claiming victory, well, don’t be naive.

Scofflaw:

Scofflaw is a noun coined during the Prohibition era to mean a person who drinks illegally. It is a compound of the words scoff and law. Its original meaning was someone who mocks or ridicules anti-drinking laws, but has extended to mean one who flouts any law, especially those difficult to enforce, and particularly traffic laws. [Wikipedia]

Used by my Arts Editor last night. Couldn’t remember last time I’d heard it, that must mean something significant.

The carousel of House On The Rock is reputed to be the largest in the world, yet lacks any of the traditional horses at all, instead populated with creatures out of legend and cockeyed mind. These pics may be a little out of focus, unfortunately, but a smartphone camera is hardly a match for a whirling dervish of paper maché and gearing!

Not that HOTR lacks for carousel horses. They are mounted on the opposite wall, of which I apparently didn’t take pics. Or haven’t found them, yet.

I was a little surprised on Wednesday night when Colbert of The Late Show said that previous independent and special counsel investigations have lasted longer than the Mueller investigation so far, during which I feel like I’ve aged a decade. (Sorry, I’m feeling a little manic tonight.) But here’s WaPo confirming Colbert:

“When you’re talking about an investigation that involves international activity, with a foreign government and foreign actors who have no incentive to be cooperative, such an investigation takes a lot of time,” said Jacob Frenkel, who worked in the independent counsel’s office in the late 1990s and is now at the firm Dickinson Wright.

By comparison, it took nearly a year and a half for the independent counsel to bring charges in what is now known as the Whitewater scandal — which began by exploring Bill and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in a suspicious real estate venture — against Arkansas’ governor and two others. That case stretched on for nearly eight years, drawing in multiple independent counsels and exploring a wide range of allegations about the Clintons. They were never charged, and Bill Clinton was impeached, but not convicted and removed, for obstructing justice.

“Judged by historical standards, I think that the special counsel has amassed a remarkable record of achievement in the first year of his tenure,” said David Kris, a former assistant attorney general for national security who now runs the Culper Partners consulting firm. “It’s fast and it’s productive, and there’s obviously more to come.”

This is how I feel about the purpose of the investigation:

Legal analysts, say, though that Mueller is probably unconcerned with accomplishing a particular result — such as charging the president, or forcing his impeachment. Ron Hosko, a former FBI assistant director who worked under Mueller at the FBI, said Mueller’s main aim was always to be thorough, and “if at the end of that investigation he’s able to say, we found no evidence of collusion, kind of the core mission, I think Mueller would see it as, ‘we’ve accomplished our mission.’ “

Horse firmly in front of the cart. Let the evidence lead the way, and if there’s no conclusive evidence, then that’s that. I’ve seen the disasters that can happen by assuming a conclusion and then trying to prove it – reality comes sailing in through the window and steps in your freshly baked cake after mucking out the barn. Yech. And that’s just in programming.

Of course, those of us of a mendacious nature might ask if that’s how a member of either base (that is, the restless extremists in the Republican and the Democratic parties) would feel as well. But I shan’t. Nyah.

There’s no real point here except to note that investigations of this sort are lengthy processes and shouldn’t be hurried. Watching the various Trump lawyers and associated minions complain about the length of the investigation is, in its own way, a telling remark on how many of them feel about the matter – let’s close this up before they find something! Or, at least, that’s a congruent explanation. No firm facts, just a bunch of arrests, guilty pleas, and indictments.

Pass the popcorn. We’re not even to the fifth inning!

A reader corrects me concerning the possibilities of crowd-computing cryptocurrencies:

Serious miners often run multiple “rigs” (machines) and each may have as many as 8 to 32 GPU cards in it. It would take a huge amount of “idle” cycles ala SETI at Home to cover the resources of even a few miners.

Ah, truly dedicated systems. I wonder if they use bespoke computing solutions….

WaPo reports on the sudden weakening of the American capability to respond to global pandemics:

The top White House official responsible for leading the U.S. response in the event of a deadly pandemic has left the administration, and the global health security team he oversaw has been disbanded under a reorganization by national security adviser John Bolton.

The abrupt departure of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council means no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security. Ziemer’s departure, along with the breakup of his team, comes at a time when many experts say the country is already underprepared for the increasing risks of a pandemic or bioterrorism attack.

Ziemer’s last day was Tuesday, the same day a new Ebola outbreak was declared in Congo. He is not being replaced.

Pandemic preparedness and global health security are issues that require government-wide responses, experts say, as well as the leadership of a high-ranking official within the White House who is assigned only this role.

It’s simple to suggest that the Trump Administration is using a false libertarian view of the matter: that other countries should take care of their own problems. It’s false because political and even geographical boundaries are permeable: disease does not respect the former and can surmount the latter. As WaPo points out:

The day before news of Ziemer’s exit became public, one of the officials on his team, Luciana Borio, director of medical and biodefense preparedness at the NSC, spoke at a symposium at Emory University to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1918 influenza pandemic. That event killed an estimated 50 million to 100 million people worldwide.

Worldwide. That means the virus traveled from wherever it originated to just about everywhere, and this in a time when travel was not as cheap and easy as it is today. So, just as pathogens do not respect national borders, nor can our public health system.

All that said, reasonable people can disagree on the precise structure of how we prepare for eventualities such as this one. Perhaps we don’t need a high ranking official who concentrates on this one issue and sits on the National Security Council. Perhaps that’s a waste of money. I’m no expert on matters like this.

But when experts comment that the Trump Administration is screwing up by not having a high official working on this one problem, and given how terribly we all suffered last time, I’m more than a little nervous. Once again, this feels like third-rate amateurism at its worst. All the walls at the southern American border won’t stop another potential pandemic – it won’t even slow it down.

A reader reacts to the news that SCOTUS has ruled that states have the right to legalize, or more accurately regulate, sports gambling as they desire:

The sociopaths have gotten near complete control of society, and they are bent on extracting as much wealth and power as possible, never mind the misery and suffering inflicted on the majority. This is just another small step in that pogrom to enrich the 1%, and anyone who fancies him or herself to have a chance at it. “Screw you, I’ve got mine” is the guiding principle today.

While it’s easy to point out that no one is forced to gamble, the reality of the situation is that people, at least in American culture, have an inclination to risk small amounts of wealth in hopes of recouping greater wealth. The gambling business is constructed to take advantage of that inclination.

I suppose we could call this a learning opportunity for the American people, but I fear it’ll never be effective for the vast majority.

Do you wonder how Trump lawyer Michael Cohen might be persuaded to flip? Harry Litman on Lawfare has some details based on his experience with Sammy “the Bull” Gravano:

For this sort of defendant, the adroit prosecutor must deploy a gradual and nuanced psychological campaign to wean them from a total identification with the family and its values, and a disgust at the mere thought of talking with the government. As John Gleeson, the prosecutor who led the prosecution of Gotti and flipped Sammy the Bull, told me, “It’s not something that happens instantly. The heart of it is convincing the would-be cooperator that there is no such thing as honor among thieves. If the tables were turned, the guy he’s reluctant to give up would throw him under the bus in a heartbeat.”

To be sure, the prospect of a long time in jail is a strong start. In fact, few people realize that it was the passage of long mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes—justly controversial in other settings—that, in combination with the mobs’ ill-fated decision to go into the drug business in the first place, broke the back of organized crime. The refrain of the Sammy the Bulls of the world had been, “I can do a nickel standing on my head,” meaning they were more than willing to serve a five-year sentence and keep quiet. That calculus changed with ten- and 20-year sentences.

If Cohen faces a sentence, it will be driven by the amount of money at issue in his putative financial crimes. Given their possible number and magnitude, his exposure could potentially be very long—certainly long enough to deprive Cohen, by all accounts a family man, of seeing his children grow up.

But for Cohen to agree to flip, he’d likely need to undergo a gradual transition that permits him to feel justified in breaking the Trump camp version of the omerta, or code of silence. As Cohen has pledged, “I will always protect Mr. Trump.”And with the intense focus on the case, it is likely that prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York would want to apply a soft touch and avoid possible charges from the president’s supporters of overbearing treatment.

Step one in that transition is the isolation of the lieutenant from the family and the daily social life, which usually consists largely of a lot of hanging out and killing time and not all that much actual criminal activity. That much seems already to have happened, notwithstanding that Cohen has yet to be arrested. The Times reported recently that Cohen has told associates that he feels isolated since the FBI search.

With the spell of daily connection to the family broken, the feds will seek to persuade the made man that the Don doesn’t esteem him—or worse—doesn’t even respect him.

Since Trump doesn’t appear to treat his subordinates with much respect, this might be easier than one might think.

On our way to Chicago, we stopped at the House On the Rock (HOTR) in Wisconsin. I find it impossible to give insight into this echo of a guy who seems to have gone completely around the bend, so I’ll just post pics of this part of the trip with very little comment. There’s a lot of pics, I’ll do them over the next few days.

One of our favorite collection items, for that’s one of the themes of HOTR, was the gigantic iron pots decorated with whimsical reptiles.

Our recent vacation trip to Chicago included stops at the Field Museum, where we saw the Mummy exhibit and we holstered the cameras, and the Art Institute of Chicago, which was awash in camera wielding art warriors. We had a great time at both (and Geno’s East as well, where we ate lunch after the Art Institute visit), and snapped a few pictures of our own.

Here’s our Arts Editor gawping at the subject of a recent film:

Here’s a couple of pics, just to prove we were really in the building. Honestly, I didn’t want to live behind the camera during the visit, but I liked these paintings a lot.

I enjoyed these abstract representations of a firebreathing dragon.

And then we finished up with a visit to Geno’s East, Chicago’s finest deep-dish pizza. Excellent!

One of the unexpected consequences of the bitcoin trend has been its impact on specialized graphics processing units (GPUs), which the miners find very useful for the sort of calculations necessary to verify the transactions and thus earn cryptocurrency for themselves. From The Motley Fool:

The conundrum has been that soaring cryptocurrency prices have angered both NVIDIA’s and AMD’s core gaming customers. Rising graphics card prices have made it difficult for these core customers to upgrade, or even replace their graphics cards, should they need to. NVIDIA and AMD were left with a choice: Either risk their long-term success by alienating their core customer, or increase GPU supply and risk cratering near-term GPU prices (and thusly their own margins). As we now know following their respective quarterly reports, these companies have chosen the latter.

Understandably, meeting GPU demand won’t happen overnight. In late March, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang admitted that his company still has a long way to go in an interview with TechCrunch. Said Huang, “We’re sold out of many of our high-end SKUs, and so it’s a real challenge keeping [graphics cards] in the marketplace for games … we have to build a whole lot more.” AMD has echoed this challenge, suggesting that its ramp-up of GPU production may be limited by the ability of its memory partners to meet demand.

While there’s always a certain amount of demand for high end computing resources, this unexpected competition for resources is certainly an interesting aspect of the entire scenario.

I wonder if the computations are amenable to public computing, a la the SETI@Home effort. If so, and if you could find some way to convince your everyday user to dedicate part of their machine to the calculations, that might be a way to alleviate the problem, and even decentralize the generation of the currency, which is a problem noted here.

Paul Rosenzweig’s comment on the elimination of the White House Cyber Coordinator Role:

This is not just nonsense: It is nonsense on stilts.

Ever get the feeling that National Security Advisor Bolton, responsible for this move, has fallen behind the times?

philology:

Philology is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is a combination of literary criticism, history, and linguistics.^[1] Philology is more commonly defined as the study of literary texts as well as oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “The Eternal Exile,” which is a review of two biographies of Gershom Scholem by Nathan Goldman, The Hedgehog Review:

The resemblance of the Kabbalah as portrayed in Scholem’s work to its actual historical content is a complex subject beyond the purview of both Prochnik and Engel, neither of whom are scholars of Jewish mysticism. But both writers subscribe to the increasingly popular reading of Scholem’s scholarship as a creative project. Engel writes that he sees Scholem “not as an explorer but as a poet.” This is not to say that Scholem was fundamentally a fabricator—though Prochnik notes instances in which he clearly was—but that he shaped what he found; his philology was guided by a philosophy. His scholarly interest in recovering the history of Jewish mysticism was inseparable from his political desire to rejuvenate the Jewish people in the present. Scholem wrote about the Kabbalah as a distinctively Jewish resource for cultural renewal. His spiritual yearning brought him to Palestine, where he became a librarian in the Hebrew department of the National Library and, through his writing and political activity, worked to realize his vision of Zionism.

On The Resurgent, Peter Heck complains that Senator and former GOP Presidential nominee John McCain (R-AZ) is mistaken in seeing his junior partner on that ticket, former half-term Alaskan governor Sarah Palin, as a ball & chain his campaign:

To say that Palin wasn’t ready for the national stage is fair. To say that, in hindsight, she turned out to lack the policy chops that would have made her an effective player in D.C. is fair. But to say that McCain’s margin of loss without her wouldn’t have been staggering is engaging the worst kind of historical revisionism.

I can’t agree. The selection of Governor Palin, especially when she went on display and became the iconic incoherent right wing extremist, was the moment when I believe most independents realized that McCain’s campaign was profoundly flawed. I know that, until then, I was willing to give McCain a fair hearing, but once he had selected Palin, my requirement that competent people, regardless of gender, had to occupy the seats of President and VP had not been met, and cast serious doubt on McCain’s future staff selections.

I agree with the sentiment that Obama was inexperienced at the national level upon his election to the Presidency, although I think Heck overstates the case, but Obama convinced me to vote for him based, in part, on his personnel selections. Let’s face it: no President can do this job without excellent help in the form of his selections to Cabinet posts and subsidiary positions, and that’s why the Senate has confirmation power -to help the President make good selections. To an overwhelming extent, the effectiveness of a President depends on those picks, and, for the non-partisan observer, I think history will prove that Obama made excellent selections. At the time of the campaign, Biden was somewhat suspect based on his previous plagiarism scandals, but he proved to be an articulate and convincing spokesman for the election, and has subsequently proven to be an excellent vice president.

But, more importantly, Heck betrays the limited vision of the extremist which loses elections and causes the party of any persuasion to become more hermetic and estranged. Why the latter? Palin was emblematic of the extremist right wing, and when the McCain campaign lost, and lost to a relatively inexperienced community organizer and only recent Senator, it became a full-scale rejection of the extremist offering of their best. For the citizen of flexible and inquiring intellect, this is an opportunity to learn and grow, but for the dogged zealot, convinced of the rightness of their cause, this is an embittering experience. Their best, stomped by someone they are already convinced is inferior, whether due to race or inexperience – keeping in mind McCain’s years of service in the military and in government, too – had to feel like sand in the teeth.

Palin may have attracted and appeased the extremist wing of the GOP, but she repelled just about everyone else.

And I think Heck overstates the case against Leiberman. Leiberman would have occupied the vice-president slot, not the president slot, and that’s not necessarily a policy making position. The only real consideration against Leiberman from a GOP perspective is if McCain were to die or become incapacitated during his Presidency. In another time, a conservative Democrat wouldn’t have been a problem – and his appeal to the independents would have been undeniable and even huge. But in 2008? The extremists were solidifying their hold on the heart of the GOP, and Leiberman was considered anathema. I think McCain, realizing he had little chance, decided to roll the dice on an unknown who had charisma and unknown other potentialities.

And he rolled snake-eyes.

The latest from Boston Dynamics:

In the hubbub of the SCOTUS ruling that the individual states may legalize gambling, I’ve not run across a certain bit of information: what’s the real worth of gambling. Not this:

While it’s probably impossible to accurately estimate, experts suggest that illegal betting in the United States is a $50 billion to $150 billion business — perhaps significantly more.

According to research by UNLV’s Center for Gaming Research, legal sports betting in Nevada totaled nearly $5 billion last year, led by football — both college and professional — which accounted for $1.76 billion.

A 2017 report from Eilers & Krejcik Gaming estimated that legal sports gambling could be a $6 billion industry — perhaps as much $16 billion if more states eventually get onboard. [WaPo]

The oxygen produced by my little fern garden may be more valuable than the entire gambling industry.

Because that’s merely the churn of the industry, isn’t it? I mean, outside of the minor expense of paying the employees, paying taxes, and skimming profits, we’re not producing anything, are we? It’s not as if we’re buying paper towels, or food, or a handyman’s service – all transitions that have something of value.

So I’m uncomfortable with this terminology that obscures the question of whether this is really an industry like others – or just a lot of financial masturbation. Even entertainment has its value in the stories it produces and how that enhances the lives of those who can learn from those stories.

But gamblers? Some are vaguely entertained, obviously, but others are addicts.

Where’s the value?

As had been speculated, President Trump has decided to kick over the sandcastle called the JCPOA, which happened while I was on vacation. His reasons, according to this WaPo article, appear to be specious (or he’s desperately confused, take your pick), and in some cases, I’d judge them not to be relevant. But how do others see things? Former Senator Jim Talent (R-MO) on National Review:

I’m not saying the regime is about to fall, but it is overextended, and that makes it peculiarly vulnerable now to the re-imposition of American sanctions. One of the few good national-security developments in the last 15 years is that the United States has figured out how to make sanctions particularly effective. You target the banks. The world trades in dollars, which means that every transaction — including the sale of oil — has to surface eventually in a bank which cannot operate if it must disconnect from the American financial system.

Yes, the rogues can and do launder cash and pursue other illicit activities, such as the drug trade, to get some resources. But you can’t run a country on that, not for long anyway, and especially not when you want your country to be the hegemon of the Middle East. That was why the Iranians were so desperate for a deal three years ago; the tough sanctions which Congress passed over the opposition of the Obama administration had brought them to their knees.

Let’s see what happens now as the sanctions go back into force. The Europeans will complain, but Trump can mollify them by cutting them a little more slack in his tariff policy. The Iranians may promote a conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, but that was coming anyway, and the Israelis wouldn’t still be around if they weren’t a very tough nut to crack. Besides, Hezbollah has a lot on its hands already in Syria.

He thinks Trump should get the Nobel Peace Prize if this works. Someone who breaks a deal should be a prize winner? Talent also likes to dance around the fine points, such as Iran’s agreement not to ever build nuclear weapons.

Kevin Drum in the adroitly title post “Trump Frees Iran to Pursue Nuclear Weapons“:

Anyway, I guess we’re now back to the North Korea strategy: keep ratcheting up sanctions in hopes that their economy will collapse before they successfully build a nuclear bomb. That worked great! I’m sure it will work great with Iran too.

The North Korean population appears to be completely cowed, while the Iranians have had their tastes of freedom – the situations are not really analogous.

Dan Drezner on PostEverything:

Reinstating sanctions undercuts the U.N. Security Council, as well as our European allies that are signatories to the JCPOA. But the only way Iran feels any uptick in economic pressure is through secondary sanctions pressuring European countries to scale back their trade and investment in Iran. So, in essence, the Trump administration is deciding that the way they will improve the Iran deal is by threatening to sanction our NATO allies.

Nicholas Miller on Monkey Cage:

President Trump has argued for a better deal — one in which, for instance, Iran accepts permanent limits on its enrichment program or its missile development. But is that realistic?

A look at past nonproliferation diplomacy with Iran suggests that any U.S. effort to win still more concessions would fail. Three factors made the 2015 concessions possible: an uptick in Iranian nuclear provocations, a powerful multilateral coalition to stop those and domestic receptivity in Iran. None of those conditions exists now.

In particular, Nicholas notes that Russia is no longer willing to play along, and they were a key part of the JCPOA. Miller’s conclusion?

It took 30 years of diplomacy and an unlikely confluence of factors to get Iran to agree to the JCPOA’s limits on its nuclear program. Attempting to achieve a better deal without any of these favorable conditions would be quixotic at best.

But characteristic of Trump’s approach to damn near anything.

The Iranian government is unhappy, of course, as they’ve been certified as being in compliance. From the Tehran Times is the transcript of the Iranian letter to the United Nations:

As you are aware, on 8 May 2018, the President of the United States announced his unilateral and unlawful decision to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in material breach of Security Council Resolution 2231 (2015) to which the JCPOA is annexed. Simultaneously, he signed a Presidential Memorandum instructing relevant U.S. authorities “to cease the participation of the United States in the JCPOA” and “to re-impose all United States sanctions lifted or waived in connection with the JCPOA”, thus committing multiple cases of “significant non-performance” with the JCPOA, and in clear non-compliance with Security Council Resolution 2231.  These acts constitute a complete disregard for international law and the United Nations Charter, undermine the principle of peaceful settlement of disputes, endanger multilateralism and its institutions, indicate a regress to the failed and disastrous era of unilateralism, and encourage intransigence and illegality.

There’s more – more than I cared to read – at the link, so make of it what you will. I think that, handled properly, the Iranian government can make this into a propaganda victory. However, it’s not clear how much of a problem the Iranian hard-liners, destitute of the Presidency for a second Presidential term (4 years) and deeply resentful of the JCPOA, will pose for the Rouhani Administration – and keep in mind that President Rouhani is subject to the will of Supreme Leader Khamenei, who is more conservative than the reform-speaking Rouhani. It’s no slam-dunk for the Iranian government, but it’s certainly an opportunity to weaken American influence globally.

On Lawfare Jack Goldsmith explains the legal basis of the original agreement:

The particular manner in which President Obama crafted the Iran deal paved the way for President Trump to withdraw from it.  Obama made the deal on his own presidential authority, in the face of significant domestic opposition, without seeking or receiving approval from the Senate or the Congress.  He was able to do this, and to skirt constitutional requirements for senatorial or congressional consent, because he made the deal as a political commitment rather than a binding legal obligation. As Curt Bradley and I recently explained, a political commitment “imposes no obligation under international law,” a nation “incurs no state responsibility for its violation,” and thus “a successor President is not bound by a previous President’s political commitment under either domestic or international law and can thus legally disregard it at will.”

Which is to say, the GOP’s control of the Senate, and their desperate series of NO! to anything President Obama tried to do made this approach necessary – and necessarily fragile.

J. Dana Stuster on Lawfare:

Trump suggested in his statement on Tuesday that the goal of withdrawing from the JCPOA is to eventually secure a new agreement that goes further than the current deal. “The fact is they [the Iranian government] are going to want to make a new and lasting deal, one that benefits all of Iran and the Iranian people,” Trump said on Tuesday. “When they do, I am ready, willing, and able.” What that might entail exactly is unclear, but administration officials have often expressed frustration that Iran retained any enrichment capacity and that the deal did not include constraints on Iran’s ballistic missile development. The Obama administration, when the JCPOA was negotiated, argued that eliminating Iran’s civil nuclear research and its missile program were unrealistic concessions that the Iranian regime would not accept—and that was when the United States had the cooperation of its negotiating partners and an international sanctions campaign on its side. The Trump administration seems to think it can get more concessions with less leverage. How? There is no plan. The United States is now lurching toward a direct confrontation with Iran with an ad hoc strategy.

Don’t take my word for it. That comes straight from the State Department. In a background briefing on Tuesday, a befuddled reporter pressed two State officials for how the United States would work with its partners to constrain Iran’s nuclear program now that the White House had shot down the supplementary agreement being worked on by France, Germany, and Britain. The State Department’s response: “We did not talk about a Plan B in our discussions because we were focused on negotiating a supplemental agreement, so we did not—we did not talk about Plan B.” The administration does not have a plan for how to make the sanctions, which they valued more than the agreement and their relations with Europe, work. It also does not have a plan for how else to pressure Iran. The Washington Free Beacon reports that officials are now mulling a proposal from the Security Studies Group—a small think tank founded by veterans of Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, a hotbed of paranoid and misinformed policy—that advocates the Trump administration adopt a clear policy of regime change in Iran, including support for groups trying to destabilize the government. “U.S. policy toward Iran currently does not publicly articulate two components vital to success: That a new birth of liberty based in self-determination for the Iranian people should be official policy; and that military action should be anticipated if other measures fail,” the paper states.

This entire Administration appears to have no concept of how to plan – but they’re mostly amateurs who’ve learned contempt for government at the teat of the conservative media and haven’t the wit to think for themselves. They’re hip-deep in serious business with one of the most deluded men in the country at the helm. We can only hope he scares everyone so much that they keep out of the way of our madly careening ship of state.

Stewart Baker discussing a podcast on The Volokh Conspiracy:

Speaking of cyberattacks, you’d better buckle up, because Iranian retribution for US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is probably being prepared as you read this. And according to a highly educational Recorded Future/Insikt report, Iran’s semi-privatized hacking ecosystem is likely to err on the side of escalation.

And given the vulnerabilities built into the Internet, it could get messy. But that might be intemperate of them, since it’d be necessary to leave a fingerprint behind in order for the message to be loud and clear.

And China? From WaPo:

New freight train connections usually have limited potential to make global headlines, but a new service launched from China on Thursday could be different. Its cargo — 1,150 tons of sunflower seeds — may appear unremarkable, but its destination is far more interesting: Tehran, the capital of Iran.

The launch of a new rail connection between Bayannur, in China’s Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, and Iran was announced by the official news agency Xinhua on Thursday. Its exact path was not described in the dispatch, but travel times will apparently be shortened by at least 20 days in comparison to cargo ship. The sunflower seeds are now expected to arrive in Tehran in about two weeks.

A clear signal that China may ignore U.S. sanctions – a move that may have influenced Trump’s decision to succor China’s ZTE Communications firm today, a move which otherwise appears to be madness. Trump may twist himself into a pretzel trying to make his withdrawal from the JCPOA pay off.

And our nightmares?

And they want me to wear this creepy wig, too!

It can be a bit unsettling when a movie combines traditional horror schlock with some actual quality elements, and Gargoyles (1972) does that. It postulates that the gargoyles found on buildings from the Medieval period are actually a reference to a race of creatures competing with humanity for mastery of the planet. Set in the late 20th century, the story revolves around the suggestion that the lifecycle of the gargoyle race is that they are an egg-laying race in which the eggs can lay unattended for long periods of time, and then hatch. In our story’s case, the setting is the Southwest desert of the United States, in and around the small town of, well, I forget.

A local man, Uncle Willie, who specializes in oddities of nature, has discovered an unusual winged skeleton in the desert and contacted a naturalist, Dr. Boley, offering to sell it to him. The naturalist shows up with his adult daughter, Diana, in tow, but as they discuss the skeleton, the house is assaulted by unknown forces and caves in, killing Willie, and then catches fire. The skull of the skeleton is saved, and Dr. Boley and Diana escape the inferno. However, their car is damaged by the unknown forces, and they can only make it back to town, where they put their car in for repairs and take a room at the little hotel.

The next day they report the incident and return to the scene with the police. There they discover some trouble making dirt-bikers, who the police blame for the trouble. That evening, though, their hotel room is broken into, they are assaulted, and the skull is stolen by men in rubber suits leathery creatures. Making their escape, one of the two creatures is hit a semi and killed. Dr. Boley deems swapping the skull for the body of his attacker to be a fair deal and begins examining it. Harassed by the proprietor of the hotel, Dr. Boley and Diana decide to leave with their prize in their repaired car, but, delayed by Diana’s failed attempt to free the dirt bikers, they are intercepted by more of the, uh, leathery guys, who rip the doors off their car, tip it over, pull out the body of their fallen comrade, and finally kidnap Diana, the latter effected by a winged creature.

Dr. Boley discovers the lair of the monsters is a nearby cave system, and is briefly captured but breaks away, and now it’s time for your good old-fashioned monster hunt, complete with yelping dogs and guys with guns; the dirt-bikers also volunteer to help. One on one, the critters’ claws outclass mankind, mostly, but guns even the odds, and in the end all but two of the creatures are dead in a heap – the last two flying off to breed and keep up the clandestine battle for the world.

For all that this fits into the hokey sub-genre of monster movies, of the “there’s more to history than you might guess” variety, there are some competent elements here. The chemistry between Dr. Boley and his daughter Diana is warm and relaxed. Dr. Boley himself is written as a believable character, doggedly logical in his approach to the skeleton and the creatures which appear; he only gives in to manly hysterics when his daughter disappears. Unfortunately, the cops and the dirt-bikers add little to the story; Uncle Willie, as well as the proprietor of the hotel, give us a little more gristle to chew on, although they’re clearly not central characters.

And the gargoyles themselves, for all that their costumes are sometimes too obviously rubber suits, are given some thought by the storytellers. They display concern for each other, they shower affection on their young, and their actions towards humans, given the history of genocide between the two races, makes sense. It wasn’t just a bunch of guys in costume running around caves killing each other.

Still, the miasma of bad horror movies tends to cling to this movie in the persons of some of the supporting characters and elements of the plot itself, not to mention the occasional plot hole. I certainly don’t recommend it, but simply note that there are some thoughtful elements present.