Yearly Archives: 2018

My reader thinks I’m seeing more than he is regarding Ana Stankovic:

I agree that “designing new government systems requires thinking about the ruthless” is an important point. But perhaps shame on me, I didn’t exert (or have) the brain power to derive that important point from Stankovic’s writing.

Nyah. I just made that part up.

The markets took a tumble again today, and I’m just going to guess that President Trump’s replacement of H.R. McMaster as National Security Advisor with former U.N. Ambassador, advocate of the Iraq War ,and for bombing Iran John Bolton may be a factor in this retreat (I see CNN is also blaming worries about a trade war).

While in the past (real) war has not necessarily been a bad thing for business, this time around there’s a couple of flies in the ointment.

First, the weapons are becoming so potent that the damage can destroy consumers, markets, and the businesses themselves.

Second, the general recognition in the investment and commercial worlds of the mendacity and amateurism of this President must concern, even frighten, most  leaders of big international businesses, which must consider themselves vulnerable to the results of war, and investors must realize this as well. High tech firms may also find themselves targeted and vulnerable to cyber-attacks, and in this case the attacks may not even come from putative enemies, but merely adversaries which we are not currently targeting. This would be due to the attribution problem.

Bolton, of course, is trying to shed any responsibility for his ridiculously aggressive statements of years past. From CNN:

John Bolton said on Thursday that his past policy statements are “behind me” and that, after taking over next month as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, “The important thing is what the President says and the advice I give him.”

But Bolton’s history of provocative, often bellicose pronouncements, typically in the form of calls to bomb countries like Iran and North Korea — along with his unwavering support, before and after, for the 2003 invasion of Iraq — are impossible to pass off, especially as Trump considers tearing up the Iran nuclear deal and prepares for talks with Pyongyang.

It’s all in that second paragraph, isn’t it? President Trump presumably judges him on what Bolton’s said and done, and so must we. If Bolton still thinks the Iraq War was a good thing, even in the teeth of the disaster it became, not to mention the false pretenses under which it was motivated, then what kind of advice is he going to give to President Trump when he’s negotiating with, say, Putin, or Kim?

And just to stir the pot a bit more, former Republican diplomat Richard Haass wrote a tweet about the situation:

@realDonaldTrump is now set for war on 3 fronts: political vs Bob Mueller, economic vs China/others on trade, and actual vs. Iran and/or North Korea. This is the most perilous moment in modern American history-and it has been largely brought about by ourselves, not by events.

This from a seasoned world observer – not a tin-pot real estate developer and his discredited National Security Advisor.

It’ll be interesting to see how long Bolton, and for that matter the tariffs, last. Trump hasn’t shown a great deal of backbone in the past, but you never know when he’ll find think it’s time to toughen up. No doubt just when you wish he wouldn’t.

Misfeance:

A term used in Tort Law to describe an act that is legal but performed improperly.

Generally, a civil defendant will be liable for misfeasance if the defendant owed a duty of care toward the plaintiff, the defendant breached that duty of care by improperly performing a legal act, and the improper performance resulted in harm to the plaintiff.

For example, assume that a janitor is cleaning a restroom in a restaurant. If he leaves the floor wet, he or his employer could be liable for any injuries resulting from the wet floor. This is because the janitor owed a duty of care toward users of the restroom, and he breached that duty by leaving the floor wet.

In theory, misfeasance is distinct from Nonfeasance. Nonfeasance is a term that describes a failure to act that results in harm to another party. Misfeasance, by contrast, describes some affirmative act that, though legal, causes harm. In practice, the distinction is confusing and uninstructive. Courts often have difficulty determining whether harm resulted from a failure to act or from an act that was improperly performed. [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “Will We Ever Learn What Bob Mueller Knows?” Quinta Jurecic andBenjamin Wittes, Lawfare:

Reports issued by special grand juries don’t have to be confined to criminal wrongdoing: § 3331(a)(1) allows for reports on “noncriminal misconduct, malfeasance, or misfeasance in office involving organized criminal activity by an appointed public officer or employee.” But while the provision’s focus on wrongdoing by public officials would encompass a hypothetical Mueller report on, say, obstruction of justice by President Trump, it could make for an awkward fit with public disclosures on any activity that took place before the election, such as coordination with the Russian government during the campaign season.

A reader reacts on Ana Stankovic’s comments on Marxism:

I think Ana doth protesteth too much. It’s hard to tell exactly what she’s trying to say, other than to slam Marx, apparently for criticizing the Slavs (of which she is one, so it’s personal). Her writing is clever and colorful, but her organization and continuity suck the sense out of her essay.

I’m not sure if it was the criticism, or the occupation by Soviet forces (if in spirit only), which motivates her criticisms. But I do agree that it wasn’t entirely easy to follow her argument, although I tend to agree with her initial statements. Apologists for Marx do not appear to understand that designing new government systems requires thinking about the ruthless, ethics-free power-seekers, and how to keep them out – or at least under control. The purges and assassinations that tended to mark the march up the ladder of numerous Soviet personalities are symptoms of a maladroit system.

The saddest thing is that it might still have been better than the preceding monarchy.

A reader comments on the general trend exemplified at UW-Stevens Point:

It seems like many or most major universities and colleges have turned into profit-seeking vocational schools these days. I, like you, hated the humanities I was required to take in college, being in the Engineering school. But like you, it was simply my ignorance.

I think it’s a highly visible mark of how applying the goals of the private sector to the educational sector perverts the goals of the educational sector. The end result? The general, if slow, degradation of the citizenry; and, in a sense, a rip-off of the student (or “consumer”), who is paying for a full and general education to prepare them for the rigors of life – and getting substandard, or even no, education in subjects which my reader and I may not have understood in our youth, but is vital for an engaged citizenry in a republic such as ours.

That perversion in the name of more students prepared to immediately jump into jobs may end up ruining our country. A worker trained to a job is simply a worker who will eventually occupy a spot in the unemployed line. But if they are properly educated, they should be able to move on to other jobs as that first one evaporates, whether it’s due to evaporation or the continual advance of science and technology.

But I like the blue.

And right at the moment, the Trump Administration is in the corner of Corporate Profits. The New York Times has the low-down as the bell sounds:

The contentious negotiations over the fate of the North American Free Trade Agreement have veered into one of the world’s most pressing health issues: fighting obesity.

Urged on by big American food and soft-drink companies, the Trump administration is using the trade talks with Mexico and Canada to try to limit the ability of the pact’s three members — including the United States — to warn consumers about the dangers of junk food, according to confidential documents outlining the American position.

The American stance reflects an intensifying battle among trade officials, the food industry and governments across the hemisphere. The administration’s position could help insulate American manufacturers from pressure to include more explicit labels on their products, both abroad and in the United States. But health officials worry that it would also impede international efforts to contain a growing health crisis.

And how important is this issue? I mean, do special package warnings work? Katherine Martinko of Treehugger remarks:

Food manufacturers are feeling highly threatened — which, in a way, is a good thing — because clear warnings on food labels are known to work. When packages show confusing charts that require time and math skill to decipher, few shoppers are inclined to do so, or are misled by numbers that are presented as overly complicated. One study at Mexico’s National Institute for Public Health found that only 17 percent of shoppers bother to look at the front-of-pack labels now mandated by law.

This particular NAFTA-related fight is important because it would influence future trade policies. When countries back down and agree to something like what the U.S. is demanding, it creates “regulatory chill,” deterring other countries from pursuing aggressive warnings on food packages. Chile is unusual in that it has stuck to its decision to fight obesity in this highly visual and effective manner.

And the impact would not only be on the Mexicans and Canadians, but potentially Americans as well. From the Times article:

Heading off pressure for more explicit warnings through the Nafta negotiation is especially appealing to the food and beverage industry because it could help limit domestic regulation in the United States as well as avert a broad global move to adopt mandatory health-labeling standards.

“It kind of kills a law before it can be written,” said Lora Verheecke, a researcher at the Corporate Europe Observatory, a group that tracks lobbying efforts. “And once you put it in one trade agreement, it can become the precedent for all future deals with future countries.”

For my money, this public health issue should trump the corporate profits angle because it’s a national security issue. I don’t see the profit margin of Coca-Cola being of relevance to our national security, but a healthy, active citizenry is of critical concern to the nation. Since none of us are omniscient, easy to understand warning signs on the food we eat seems like an important step forward. Yes, they could become a political football in and of themselves, and, sure, the presence or absence of them may prove to be wrong as science advances – yep, eggs, butter, and margarine are examples of the fluctuating opinion of science – but, in all honesty, we make the best decisions we can with our best knowledge and judgment, because that’s all we can do, and acknowledge and correct mistakes as they occur. That’s what adults do.

If President Trump is really serious about national security, as he claims here, then he should be on the other side of this issue. The fortunes of Oreos are not the fortunes of the United States, no matter how much I loved them in my youth.

Lawfare’s Nicholas Weaver reports on the CHIMERA computer vulnerability:

But CHIMERA, unlike the others, is a series of vulnerabilities not in the processor but instead in the “chipset”—the separate component in a computer that acts to interface all the peripherals (USB devices, network, speakers, etc.) to the computer’s central processing unit (CPU). AMD did not design their own chipset. Instead they contracted ASMedia, a Taiwanese company, to design and build it for them.

The chipset itself has privileged permissions, meaning that it’s able to read and write all of the computer’s memory—including the memory that is supposed to be otherwise off limits. Attackers can access the chipset by taking control of the computer’s operating system. And if they can then take over the chipset, they can bypass the last-line protections shielding the computer’s memory from interference. Because this includes the secure regions of the computer, which are supposed to be protected from even the operating system, a chipset compromised by an attacker can evade even those last defenses. Evading these defenses allows the attacker to read cryptographic keys or other secure secrets which are supposed to be protected against even an operating-system compromise.

Only a few high-security users actually take advantage of these features, and these defenses only come into play once the operating system is already compromised, so the overall impact for most is minor. But for those few high-security users, it’s a concern. Attackers with access to those cryptographic keys could access whatever secrets were protected by that last measure of security. This may include allowing them to read encrypted messages, impersonate the computer’s server to others, access authentication tokens in order to login to other computers, and more.

As a software engineer, let me just say Gah! Who let these guys have unrestrained access to memory? That’s a broken hand offense, as in we find the guy who let this happen and break his hand a few times.

And who’s the designer and implementer of the chip set? Not AMD, who sells the entire package of CPU and chipset. Their chipset designer and supplier is ASMedia of Taiwan. Back to Nicholas:

This report on UW-Stevens Point from WaPo is definitely disturbing:

The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point has proposed dropping 13 majors in the humanities and social sciences — including English, philosophy, history, sociology and Spanish — while adding programs with “clear career pathways” as a way to address declining enrollment and a multimillion-dollar deficit.

Students and faculty members have reacted with surprise and concern to the news, which is being portrayed by the school’s administration as a path to regain enrollment and provide new opportunities to students. Critics see something else: a waning commitment to liberal arts education and a chance to lay off faculty under new rules that weakened tenure.

Students are planning a sit-in at the campus administration building on Wednesday in a demonstration called Save Our Majors. The Stevens Point Journal said students will then deliver a list of demands and requests to school officials. The school is one of 11 comprehensive campuses in the University of Wisconsin system.

Perhaps the “University” should just admit it wants to be a lowly vocational school and be done with it. Of course, they think they can whitewash their subversion of this branch of UW with this remarkably capitulatory remark:

To fund this future investment, resources would be shifted from programs with lower enrollment, primarily in the traditional humanities and social sciences. Although some majors are proposed to be eliminated, courses would continue to be taught in these fields, and minors or certificates will be offered.

Remove the major, then remove the professors, and the quality of the education goes right into the crapper. But the real problem is the remark about lower enrollment. Are these guys coming out of the private sector and trying to optimize for cash flow by blowing off the “underperformers”? At an educational institution?

Look, when I went to school, I had little interest in a liberal education – although I thought the philosophy courses were sort of fun and even had an offer from a history prof to write a letter of recommendation – but that was my naivete coming through. And let’s be honest, you can paste the label “adult” on someone, but it doesn’t give them the wisdom of knowing what they need to learn.

It’s the responsibility of our society to educate as well as we can. That means maintaining departments which may not attract hordes of students, but enough to continue teaching those courses vital to the well-rounded education of our young adults. Trying to run a University like a business is simply lunatic and will end in slow failure. Better to rename it Stevens Point Vocational and be done with it.

If they really want to search for the truth (a mission of UW which Governor Walker tried to remove from the UW mission statement secretly, according to WaPo), perhaps they should open a class on how the use of the processes of one sector of society are highly suspect when applied to another.

I’d support that!

Ana Stankovic is having a toxic reaction to a wave of references to Karl Marx. She writes about it in LARB:

CALL ME A KILLJOY but I am sick to death of hearing about Karl Marx. I am sick of his name, his -isms, his undoubted genius, and his “philosophy.” I am sick of him “having reason,” as the French say, or “being right.” But most of all I am sick of his “relevance.”

As someone whose parents were born and grew up in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and who missed the same fate by the skin of her teeth, I know perfectly well what Marx’s relevance amounts to. Marx gave it a name, even if for him it meant something else than it did for the people of Yugoslavia. I am talking about the oft-quoted and seldom understood “religion of everyday life.”

In post–World War II Yugoslavia, Marx’s “relevance” was to be a member of the ruling communist party. Outside of that supra-religious institution no substantial share in the social wealth was possible. “[T]he life-process of society,” as Marx observes in what turned out to be a weird prediction, “which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.”

Always interested in a foreign viewpoint, this one concerning a supra-religious institution is fascinating and baffling. I suspect I need a better grounding in the history of the region once called Yugoslavia, as well as that of Marx.

And Ana has a lovely analogy with the satirical movie The Producers, worth taking a look at.

Philip Reitinger thinks we’re going about security on the large scale all wrong, and he talks about it on Lawfare:

As Rosenzweig says, a decade of government efforts to raise awareness has been insufficient. Awareness alone does not work at scale; awareness fails often. While increased awareness may raise costs for attackers, it can be overcome by automated attacks that will turn a small success rate into a series of significant and successful intrusions. The solution is not that “we need to think of ways in which government intervention can ‘nudge’ the general population in the right direction.” Instead, industry should stop asking consumers to make security decisions for which they are ill-equipped, especially when implementation of those decisions is burdensome. As Microsoft discovered decades ago, asking a consumer if she wants to run a process does not add value. If the consumer doesn’t understand what the process is, she will click “yes” almost always. Industry also needs to position bad security decisions so that they are, to use technical jargon, really hard to make. Save liability for inexplicably bad decisions that actors are equipped to make—decisions that don’t happen by default—such as corporations failing to meet basic and clear security standards.

This technology requires a paradigm shift: Don’t teach people to farm. Sell them food.

The flip side of that coin, though, is trust. Trust that industry will be giving you truly secure channel software. Do you trust them to do that?

Philip is quite right, most computer users don’t understand computer security. Heck, I didn’t specialize in it and so I just get the gist of it. But does that mean we should be trusting corporations to deliver security as a matter of course?

Should we be trusting the open source movement? Beats me.

I’ll tell you what, folks – I keep my online transactions to a bare minimum, and when I’m at the store, more often than not I’m paying cash. Some people think I’m old-fashioned, but the real reason is that I’m an informed, cautious consumer. I know that I don’t know how secure any online transaction will be – including credit cards at store, which are also running over a network, and are therefore somewhat vulnerable to determined hackers (such as those using skimmers).

Cash has its own security concerns, but frankly I’m a little more comfortable with them.

Like today. President Trump does a bunch of idiotic things, the usual news sources report he feels he’s unleashed and is doing well, his advisors and staff are in the midst of hysteria and paranoia, and all I can think is same old, same old. He’s such a terrible failure he doesn’t even understand he’s in the biggest Presidential hole ever^[1] and digging deeper.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Ryan’s too busy dismantling social safety nets to attend to the immediate security needs of the nation. His Party colleagues mumble and drool about guns, and then abandon their responsibility to investigate the problem, much less do something about it. After all, they might lose their campaign funding if they do.

And some days you feel way too callous about it all to write about it.

Like today.

¹Which I do not write as a salve to his tender ego, but as an honest, true, and non-partisan observation of his utter incompetency.

Cabal:

1 : the contrived schemes of a group of persons secretly united in a plot (as to overturn a government); also : a group engaged in such schemes

2 : club, group
a cabal of artists

[Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “Trump’s new defense attorney burdened by a controversial past,” Steve Benen, Maddowblog:

Recently, diGenova has been appearing on television quite a bit – remember, Trump’s TV remote dictates a little too much of his presidency – pushing a conspiracy theory about a cabal of FBI agents who manufactured the Russia scandal as part of an anti-Trump plot. This cabal, diGenova has said on Fox News, set out to “frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime.”

Junie and her new flame.

A slightly surreal view of prison life, Kittens in a Cage! (2015), which may actually be a TV series, is presented here as a movie about innocently bad girl Junie, a young woman with a cock-eyed view of life and morality. She’s coming from somewhere else, and if she’s apparently innocent of the sexual innuendo from her fellow prisoners, once she finds the right lady for herself she’ll dance the innuendo with enthusiasm and style.

But, for me, it’s her power ukelele playing which is really charming. It serves as a conduit into her inner life, letting us see the raging fever which she otherwise hides behind her big, innocent eyes and sham prudishness. I found the Family Guy-like flashbacks a little off-putting, adding a bit of a hitch to a plot which might have benefited from a smoother flow.

But there’s lots to laugh about here, and some strong performances to boot. If you do stumble across this or the TV series, and you have off-beat tastes, this may be worth your time.

Abeyance:

1. temporary inactivity, cessation, or suspension:
   Let’s hold that problem in abeyance for a while.
2. Law. a state or condition of real property in which title is not as yet vested in a known titleholder:
   an estate in abeyance.

[Dictionary.com]

Noted in “Judge: Trump Must Face Summer Zervos Defamation Lawsuit,” Daily Beast:

Justice Schecter subsequently denied Trump’s “motion to dismiss this case or hold it in abeyance.” This comes as Zervos, who accused Trump last year of sexually harassing her in 2007, sued the president for defamation after he suggested she made up the allegations for “ten minutes of fame.”

Politico is reporting on the latest rock star climbing up the rope in the GOP primaries:

National Republicans — on the heels of the Roy Moore and Rick Saccone debacles — worry they’re staring down their latest potential midterm election fiasco: coal baron and recent federal prisoner Don Blankenship.

With Blankenship skyrocketing in the West Virginia Republican Senate primary and blanketing the airwaves with ads assailing his fractured field of rivals as career politicians, senior party officials are wrestling with how, or even whether, to intervene. Many of them are convinced that Blankenship, who served a one-year sentence after the deadly 2010 explosion at his Upper Big Branch Mine, would be a surefire loser against Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin — and potentially become a national stain for the party.

The discussions have intensified over the past few weeks. During separate meetings with the National Republican Senatorial Committee, aides to Blankenship’s two primary opponents, Rep. Evan Jenkins and state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, pointed to Blankenship’s traction and questioned what could be done to stop him. The Senate GOP campaign arm, which heard out the appeals, recently commissioned a survey to gauge the coal king’s electoral strength and determine his staying power in the race.

It’s fascinating how discredited figures such as Blankenship – convicted of coal mine safety violations which impact the working man more than anyone – can achieve such popularity. Is it because they are emblematic of the hungry grasping for wealth and prestige, no matter the cost for his employees, which appeals to the darkest primitive urges from our primeval past? Is it his willingness to break the rules that appeals to many who feel over-regulated (see this post on our personal insensitivity to matters of scale)?

But this is within the West Virginia GOP. Does Blankenship have a similar popularity throughout West Virginia? I suspect there are enough sensible people there that will prefer current Senator Manchin (D), who is considered the most conservative of the Democratic Senators, that Blankenship’s bid for the seat will fall short, particularly if he has more extremist views to share.

But his increasing popularity is a measure of the extremism of the GOP these days – and another reason why the party really needs to be destroyed and reconstituted with reasonable adults.

If you look closely, you’ll see Pia Zadora.

The clash of the forces for preserving the status quo, or conservatism, vs improvement of society, or what is generally considered liberalism, are the focus of Santa Claus Conquers The Martians (1964). This particular example is illustrative of the error of shrinking from change to society over the welfare of children.

The children of Mars have become despondent, perhaps finding the eating of their food in pill form and engaging in accelerated learning techniques to be enervating, and a meeting is called by the leaders of Mars to discover the problem. Consulting an ancient oracle, the leaders discover that it’s nearing Christmas Day on Earth, and while the Earth children anticipate the receipt of gifts, the Martian children do not.

The leaders discuss the problem under the leadership of Kimar, and, against the protests of Bomar Voldar, decide to proceed to Earth and kidnap Santa Claus. Against the background of continued grumbling of Bomar Voldar, who believes the disturbance of the children of Mars will soon pass, the Martians proceed to kidnap a couple of children to help them find the proper Santa Claus, as every street corner seems to have a Santa Claus, and then, at the North Pole, to actually abduct him, after knocking out some mouthy elves. During this operation, the fell power of Santa Claus is hinted at, as their supposedly impregnable robot, Torg, becomes immobile and useless. Claus himself, however, puts up little resistance and accompanies the Martians and the children, who had temporarily escaped, back to their ship.

The return to Mars is not without excitement, for the evil designs of Bomar nearly come to fruition when he traps Santa and the children in an airlock and attempts to asphyxiate them by opening the outer door to the airless void outside the ship, but Claus and the kids find a way to stop him. Bomar Voldar finds himself imprisoned for this attempted crime.

Upon landing on Mars, Bomar Voldar escapes and, with some cohorts who seem to have watched too many Three Stooges escapades, plots to undue the damage being done to Martian society by Claus. And what might that be? A might toy machine has been built, and all Santa must do is press buttons in response to the requests from the children of Mars to fulfill their wishes. But Santa is not without discontent, for his fingers are not accustomed to this sort of work, and he yearns for the days when toys were hand-built by his elves.

So when sabotage damages the machine, Santa sees an opportunity for excitement. He organizes the Earth kids and a couple of Martian kids to set a trap for Bomar Voldar and his minions, all the while cultivating another comic failure Martian named Dropo as his own replacement. Upon the capture and restraint of Bomar Voldar, Santa points out that the machine and Dropo can take his place, and he is returned to Earth by his grateful Martian friends.

And it’s awful.

It’s so awful it’s almost charming. The dialog is dull, and the delivery is stilted. Worse yet, the Martians appear to be wearing plumbing on their heads. Kimar, the glorious leader, appears to be bereft of a sense of humor, much like his antagonist, Bomar Voldar. The cinematography is dull, special effects almost non-existent. And why oh why would the United States dispense heavy bombers to investigate that blip in the sky?

And yet … the charm comes from the eccentricities. Who can resist mouthy elves? And there’s this polar bear that menaces the kids at the North Pole that I found I just wanted to hug.

And Torg, the robot, for all that its role was severely limited, made me laugh for its unfalteringly naive appearance.

And in the end, I couldn’t help but speculate that Santa Claus should have snapped his fingers and returned to Earth. We’re already a little puzzled at the escape from the airlock trap, not to mention the immobilization of the fearsome Torg. The suggestion that Santa has magical powers might set the ears of the Martians back a little. A little humble pie, as it were.

But don’t waste your time on this unless you’re involved in a tour of odd Christmas movies. Then this should be the first one on the list.

And here’s a link to the YouTube of it, in color. The version I saw was black and white, and not well done, either. Consider yourself lucky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dhvdnzHBr0

CNN is reporting yet another school shooting, and that the shooter is dead – shot by the school resource officer:

One person is dead after an armed student shot two other students at Great Mills High School in Maryland on Tuesday morning, according to St. Mary’s County Sheriff Tim Cameron.

Cameron said the school resource officer engaged the shooter and ended the threat, and the shooter was pronounced dead. A male student is in stable condition and a female student is in critical condition, he said.

The school resource officer fired a round at the shooter, and the shooter fired a round as well, but the officer was not injured.

I wonder how many 2nd Amendment absolutists will celebrate the death of the shooter as proof that having more guns works. To my mind, the fact that a single shot was fired is proof positive of the failure of having guns out there, readily available. Shots were fired, students endangered and terrorized – this is not the behavior of a good society. And what if the school resource officer had been the first down?

If you’ve heard of the proposed “Mueller protection laws” and are wondering how they’re structured, Steve Vladeck on Lawfare has a summary and opinion:

There are actually two different legislative proposals on the table to deal with this problem. Although they differ slightly in their particulars, they have the same basic structure: Both bills would allow a Special Counsel terminated under §600.7(d) to challenge his termination before a “three-judge” D.C. district court (which would include two federal district judges for the District of Columbia and one judge from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit). That three-judge court, in turn, would be able to decide if the substantive standard set out in §600.7(d) had been satisfied. Like all other decisions by three-judge district courts, whoever loses would have a right of mandatory (not discretionary) appeal directly to the Supreme Court. And that’s it. As I wrote in January, “[t]he bills don’t change the procedural or substantive rules governing the special counsel’s authority, or the grounds on which he can be fired; they simply ensure a role for the courts in reviewing any dismissal to make sure it’s done for the right reasons and not the wrong ones.”

It adds a review step to firing process, with the review by the judiciary. This is appealing as it falls right into the American tradition of legal review. Additionally, it spreads the power over all three branches. The Executive may fire, but the Legislative provides a review process, and the Judiciary actually implements it. In this way, the demagogic instincts of the dictator are muffled. But what does Vladeck think?

I’m generally in favor of more judicial review, not less—and of broader federal remedies over narrower ones. So wholly apart from the (insane) politics of the moment, this proposal seems like a no-brainer. But even for those who are more circumspect, the arguments against such review presumably turn to some degree on confidence that the Justice Department will abide by its own regulation, and that allowing for judicial review of a removal decision is just unnecessary. Of course, there are plenty of reasons to doubt the efficacy of the internal checks and balances in this case—all the more so given the increasingly overt political pressure from the White House. So as between potentially inefficient judicial review and the possibility of firing a special counsel for illegitimate reasons, it seems to me that the scale tips rather overwhelmingly in favor of these proposals, rather than against them.

The other prudential objection is that the judicial review provided by the legislation could cause chaos; what would be the status of the investigation while Mueller litigated the validity of his termination before the courts? And would that litigation in turn become a referendum on Morrison, rather than the desired inquiry into the propriety of Mueller’s sacking? To me, this is a far more well-taken objection, but I think it ultimately misses the mark. It’s far less likely that whoever would otherwise be swinging the axe toward Mueller would do so for blatantly inappropriate reasons if they knew there was even the specter of judicial review. And if somehow the dismissal were undisputedly for good cause, presumably Mueller wouldn’t turn around and bring suit. So conceived, the particular genius of the Mueller protection bills is that, if they’re enacted, the judicial procedure they would create would almost certainly never have to be utilized.

Vladeck definitely feels that it’s time to pass this legislation.

Returning to the thread of the unannounced war with Russia, it appears Putin’s strategy also addresses America’s ally Great Britain, as noted by Jackson Diehl of WaPo. First he addresses the out of power Labor Party:

When confronted with his government’s conclusion that Russia was responsible for what amounted to a military attack on his country, the opposition Labour Party leader [Jeremy Corbyn] and his spokesman (a) refused to accept that the Kremlin was responsible, (b) cast doubt on British intelligence, (c) complained that Moscow had not been accorded due process and (d) said the right response was “robust dialogue.” In other words, Corbyn echoed almost exactly the line advanced by Putin’s own propagandists.

But the Conservatives are hard as nails, right?

[Prime Minister Theresa] May’s government is indeed handicapped by its impending departure from the European Union, which has isolated it. But there is much more her government could do, if it chose. There are billions of dollars of Russian money laundered into London real estate — a good part of it connected to Putin’s circle. Senior Russian officials send their children to English private schools. Russian companies and banks raise money in London markets.

May was vague about targeting that money in her speech to Parliament. It was hard not to be reminded of what might have been Corbyn’s only legitimate point: Russian oligarchs, he claimed, have contributed more than $1.1 million to the ruling Conservative Party.

While I’m not particularly impressed at a mere $1.1 million, who’s to know if that’s an accurate accounting – or a number on the low side? The suggestion that Conservative politicians have been soaking up foreign money suggests they’re just as avid for power as is the GOP.

But Corbyn, along with his bizarre retro-ideas of how to run Great Britain, also appears to share the soft-on-Russia ‘tudes of some of his predecessors, but without the excuse that it’s Marxism! Ah, forgive me, as an independent I’ve always been a little confused by those who found the Soviet Union so charming in the face of its brutality and, worse, built-in instability. A political structure built on nothing more than who can be the most brutal and unethical is a frightening thing, and not only did we see the final results, but the ongoing progress reports were, at best, vaguely encouraging, before the mask was taken off. The best one could say is that it was better than the monarchy which preceded it, but not by much.

When I heard that President Trump had his White House advisors and staff sign Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), I thought nothing of it. So much for my assumptions, eh? The ACLU has an admirably brief remark on these NDAs:

“Public employees can’t be gagged by private agreements. These so-called NDAs are unconstitutional and unenforceable.”

Which is admirably sensible in a public institution in which we all have an explicit stake, isn’t it? If a White House staffer witnesses some breach of the Constitution, s/he should not have to weigh their future economic fortunes against their duty to report the violation. Nor should they be restrained from writing a memoir, for that matter, about public matters.

If President Trump should like to complain that his private matters should not be a matter of public airing, then he should not bring them into the White House. That is one of the virtues of divestment in the first place.

In Pennsylvania, where the PA Supreme Court found the state has been gerrymandered in favor of the GOP, and then issued its own map, the GOP has lost its latest appeal to SCOTUS. From CNN today:

The Supreme Court has denied a request from Pennsylvania Republicans to block new congressional maps that could tilt several key races in Democrats’ favor from being used in the midterm elections.

The court issued one sentence to reject the request. There were no noted dissents.

Dissents may be noted if a minority of the justices wished to take on the case – here’s an example of Thomas and Gorsuch registering a dissent. The fact that SCOTUS, with a 4-4 ideological cast, with 1 swing vote, turned down a plaint from the GOP without dissent suggests they think the PA Supreme Court did not break any rules, despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth – or that it’s up to the people of Pennsylvania to put it right. Which is within the possibilities, since PA Supreme Court justices are elected.

Since it appears the Pennsylvania GOP is more or less without shame, I suspect there’ll be more maneuvering.

XKCD:

I can’t help but think that the other group of people referenced above are the unwilling progenitors of a new species – or, if you prefer, would-be slave owners.

Put this in the Nature is Cruel book. From NewScientist (3 March 2018, paywall):

Zombie ant fungi are parasites that are mostly found in tropical forests. Once inside its host, such a fungus alters the ant’s behaviour in ways that favour its own reproduction, for example by compelling the ant to seek a place other ants are likely to pass. The fungus then sprouts a long stalk, sometimes right through the back of the ant’s head. Infectious spores bloom at the end, making it easier for the fungus to brush onto another ant.

“Besides their beauty, it’s striking how these fungi evolved and are so well adapted morphologically and ecologically to infect their hosts,” says João Araãjo at Pennsylvania State University.

Nature may be endlessly inventive, but the byproduct seems to be a particularly vibrant form of the macabre.