Yearly Archives: 2018

Jack Goldsmith talks about the vulnerabilities of the U.S. energy infrastructure on Lawfare:

Moreover, the U.S. government has for many years warned that foreign adversaries have penetrated U.S. networks in ways that could be preparation for devastating cyberattacks. As long ago as November 2014, NSA director Mike Rogers warned that China and “probably one or two other countries” were inside the networks that controlled U.S. critical infrastructure, including the power grid, and could thus attack or disrupt those networks. At least twice in 2017, the U.S. government warned that foreign hackers had penetrated the computer networks of companies that run energy facilities in the United States. In November 2017, Symantec reported that hackers, including ones linked to the Russian government, had gained access to the computer networks of electrical utility companies.

So there is little that is new or surprising in the revelation that Russia is probing and placing potentially offensive implants in the computers that operate the U.S. electrical grid. But of course the revelation comes in the context of deep anxiety about Russian interference in the 2016 election and is exacerbated by deteriorating relations between Russia and the West.

The news that Russia and other adversary nations are deeply embedded in U.S. critical infrastructure networks—and that we are embedded in theirs—raises at least the following questions:

While reading Jennifer Rubin’s column in WaPo on the McCabe firing, I came across this concluding paragraph:

In sum, once more, a Trump-inspired stunt is likely to backfire. The politics are irrelevant to Mueller, who now views each of Trump’s antics through a single lens: Does this reveal corrupt intent to disable an investigation into Trump’s conduct? In this case, Trump leaves little doubt as to his motives.

And it occurred to me: does it matter? That is, suppose Mueller’s investigation comes to an end. Then what? He delivers a report. And what if the House GOP shrugs its collective shoulders and doesn’t do anything about it regardless of its contents?

I know the headlines are screaming that Trump may fire Mueller at any moment (although that’s actually up to Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein), but for Mueller, there’s a big question: supposing he does have evidence worthy of indicting the President. Does he deliver it to this DoJ and Congress?

Or does he wait for the next, possibly more mature, Congress?

There’s been some puzzlement over President Trump’s anecdote about making up facts (“fake facts”) during trade discussions with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Here’s Steve Benen:

It was striking for several reasons. The president not only admitted that he makes stuff up, Trump also acted as if this is worth bragging about – even in the context of trying to mislead the prime minister of one of the United States’ closest allies. It also served as a reminder that the president doesn’t feel like doing his homework, even on one of his signature issues.

I haven’t seen this explanation, though: he’s connecting with his base. He’s showing that any person can keep up with the best in the world, and that expertise isn’t needed.

Let the dance begin!

Red Rock West (1993) is a tale in which the least admirable of motivations, avariciousness, dominates nearly every leading character, and this dark path leads to film noir. Michael, a former Marine, is wandering Wyoming searching for a job. He drifts into a bar in Red Rock and accepts an unspecified job from the bar owner when he’s mistaken for someone else. When the job turns out to be to kill the bar owner’s wife, well, he’s dead broke and what else is there to do?

Go to the bar owner’s wife and inform her of her danger. She offers him a job – to kill her husband.

Michael considers his options and ends up writing and mailing a note to the sheriff, explaining the situation. But as he leaves town that night, he hits someone with his car, and, being afflicted with an urge to do good, he picks the guy up and takes him to the hospital, where he waits to hear the condition of the man. What he doesn’t know is that the man is also suffering from gun shot wounds. The surgeon notifies law enforcement when they discover them, and so the local deputies arrive to detain him until the sheriff can talk to him.

And the sheriff is the bar owner.

Soon, Michael’s running across the landscape, sheriff in hot pursuit, until he’s picked up by an out of town man with whom he shares a link – they’re both former Marines. All is well and good until the man mentions that he’s looking for the Red Rock West bar owner in order to get the details on a “job.”

The plot is intricate and, if you’re not paying attention, this movie will turn into a puzzling drag. But otherwise you may find yourself drawn into a plot which is uncompromising in following the twists and turns, including the final crick which explains who shot the man Michael originally took to the hospital, as well as why.

A good story, well told, with good technical support, I found myself really enjoying this movie. It parcels out information in dribs and drabs, making it difficult to guess where the movie might be going next. In the end, I was perhaps a little disappointed at the lack of actual growth in any of the characters, but that’s not unusual. I’d say this is a minor classic of the genre, and worth your time.

In the runup to the event of the firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe on Friday, two days prior to his retirement (scheduled for tomorrow), I was troubled by both the notion that this would be an enormously petty action by an Administration (or, more accurately, a President) which imagined the FBI’s inquiry into Russian meddling in the Presidential Election was politically motivated merely because McCabe, then a deputy director, has a wife who is a registered Democrat. This seemed like the shoddy work of someone undeserving of an elevated position.

Then came the news that an internal Justice Department inquiry suggested McCabe was guilty of wrongdoing. An internal FBI inquiry would suggest that this would be less a politically motivated lynching, but more likely an actual actionable indiscretion by McCabe. After Attorney General Sessions fired McCabe after months of intense pressure from President Trump (to the extent that it appears Trump was the primary motivation), CNN reported:

The origin of his dramatic fall stems from an internal review conducted by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. That report — the details of which have not been publicly released — is said to conclude that McCabe misled investigators about his role in directing other officials at the FBI to speak to The Wall Street Journal about his involvement in a public corruption investigation into the Clinton Foundation, according to a source briefed on it.

Andrew McCabe has vigorously disagreed with the report.

So what to think? Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes cover what we know in detail, with the knowledge of experienced national security lawyers. While counseling patience in the absence of the release of the damning report, they do have some troubling questions:

There are, however, at least two features of the action against McCabe that warrant consternation, even if McCabe himself behaved badly enough to justify the sanction. The first is the timing, which is hard to understand. The only factor we can fathom that might justify it is the notion that if McCabe in fact had acted very badly, the window to punish him and thus make an important statement to the bureau workforce was closing.

But we are unaware of prior cases in which authorities rushed through the merits against a long-serving official in a naked and transparent effort to beat the clock of his retirement. Michael Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general who is representing McCabe, described the process as follows:

The investigation described in the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report was cleaved off from the larger investigation of which it was a part, its completion expedited, and the disciplinary process completed in a little over a week. Mr. McCabe and his counsel were given limited access to a draft of the OIG report late last month, did not see the final report and the evidence on which it is based until a week ago, and were receiving relevant exculpatory evidence as recently as two days ago. We were given only four days to review a voluminous amount of relevant evidence, prepare a response, and make presentations to the Office of the Deputy Attorney General. With so much at stake, this process has fallen far short of what Mr. McCabe deserved.

Even allowing for a certain degree of lawyerly hyperbole in this account, the process described here seems highly irregular. McCabe, in his statement Friday, suggested one possible reason for the acceleration:

The release of this report was accelerated only after my testimony to the House Intelligence Committee revealed that I would corroborate former Director Comey’s accounts of his discussions with the President. The OIG’s focus on me and this report became a part of an unprecedented effort by the Administration, driven by the President himself, to remove me from my position, destroy my reputation, and possibly strip me of a pension that I worked 21 years to earn. The accelerated release of the report, and the punitive actions taken in response, make sense only when viewed through this lens.

In an interview with the New York Times, McCabe said directly that his dismissal “is part of an effort to discredit me as a witness.”

Without commenting on the appropriateness of firing McCabe, they still discern the curves of another attempt at obstructing justice. If they see it, is there little doubt that it’ll catch Mueller’s attention as well?

Naturally, President Trump, long infuriated by various aspects of Deputy Director McCabe’s existence, as noted above, celebrated on Twitter in his usual faux-triumphant manner:

Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI – A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!

Why do I say faux? Because it’s actually a frantic spin to tarnish the FBI. Consider the statement “… great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI …” as if they suffered under former Director Comey. Subsequent interviews with numerous FBI employees revealed that Comey was actually widely respected and even admired. Keep this in mind when reading anything from Trump in regards to this matter – it really changes the tone and purpose of Trump’s releases. You begin to realize that he sounds desperate, not triumphant.

I checked National Review, but beyond a simple news report, no opinion has yet been rendered.

Former CIA Director John Brennan (2013 – 2017) has little patience with this circus, as he posted in response to President Trump on Twitter:

When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America…America will triumph over you.

A more honorable man than Trump would be humiliated by Brennan. Trump, though? I’m not sure he’ll take it in the proper vein.

Kevin Drum sees it as Trump’s insecurities writ large:

This whole affair has been contemptible from the start. Trump knows perfectly well that he won the election solely because of the FBI’s interference. This is something he finds intolerable, so he has invented a fantasy in which that never happened. In fact, he’s spent the entire past year spreading the preposterous lie that the FBI actually helped Hillary. Then he went about defaming and firing all the people whose very existence was a continuing rebuke to his election triumph. McCabe is one of them.

Which suggests the President is a man not in command of his faculties, but a victim of his emotional needs. Such men are easily manipulated.

Andrew McCabe’s statement is here, and is worth a read by every American.

And former FBI Director Comey has posted a most interesting statement on Twitter:

Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not.

In the context of Mr. Comey’s statement, what are we to think about the situation? Certainly, it’s reasonable to settle back and wait for more information to come forth. However, for the partisan, that is quite unsatisfactory, for the feel the pull of the tribal loyalty, while forgetting the importance of getting to the truth of the matter, regardless of who comes up guilty – and who innocent.

That’s what concerns me. For the moment, there’s really not enough information. However, for those who need a preliminary position, my approach is to look to the history of the principals of the matter. To my knowledge, Comey and former CIA Director Brennan were (or are) highly respected by all. The whispers of corruption only came after it became apparent that they (Comey in particular) might have information suggesting that President Trump is, shall we say, less than he would like to pretend to be.

And President Trump? There is documented proof in media and legal records that he will lie to advance himself, and will do so as often as necessary. This is not proof positive that his position in this incident is the defective one, of course, but that combined with the entire timing is certainly the sort of thing, for a preliminary position, which moves me to consider that, regardless of McCabe’s culpability in the Justice Department investigation in which it was suggested he may have abrogated FBI conduct standards in the Clinton investigation – and which would have perhaps damaged Clinton’s campaign even more than he would have otherwise, much to Trump’s benefit – I see this as a dirty move on Trump’s part.

But I stand ready to change my position as more information comes out.

Me? I’m a snake juggler. Here, throw me this one when I have the other two in the air.

It’s another damn infestation of snakes, and I do mean that literally – every word. Jaws of Satan (1981, aka King Cobra) is another in a long line of earnestly unconscious films about the ongoing hunger of Satan for the souls of humans. In this particular case, he’s taken the form of a king cobra and has invaded some unnamed town via a rail car load of dogs meant for a soon-to-open opening dog race track.

But on arrival, everyone on the train is dead or dying, and at least one displays a most gruesome wound to the face. The doctor in charge calls in a herpetologist, who spends most of his time lusting after the doc. Satan busies himself by influencing the local tribe of rattlesnakes, driving them to distraction with his mean-spirited orders. Meanwhile, the local Catholic priest spends time in the self-doubt lane, a part of the highway overly crowded in this particular genre, and dismisses his monsignor’s claim that the priest’s ancestors were cursed by Druids and therefore he has trouble a-brewin. It’s all superstition to him, a hilarious assertion for a fellow in his line of work.

Meanwhile, the story zigs and zags such that a snake ends up in the doctor’s bed – and then so does another and then so does her knight in shining armor, the herpetologist. Or so I infer from the morning after, which includes a visit from our priest, who seems quite unconscious of the entire hypothetical evening incident. But he’s a little distracted as a local witch, who warned him of trouble coming, is now dead with ghastly wounds as well.

Oh, yeah, a sheriff’s deputy dies, too, but beyond finding the body, nobody seems to notice. Maybe the actor’s vacation day was over and he had to go back to waiting tables.

In any case, in a rather dull climax, they find the king cobra in a cavern, where the herpetologist trips over his big feet and knocks himself out, the doc is offered up on a rocky altar, and they’re rescued by the priest, who sets the snake on fire with a reflection of, ah, holy light.

It’s all fairly shoddy. It’s not just that I’m not partial to supernatural stories of this sort, but the story lacks emotional punch. It relies on grisly death to draw the audience in – and it doesn’t work. The sheriff’s deputy I mentioned, for example, he must have friends, family, even his boss, but he’s not awarded a funeral, mourners, or anything to make his death poignant. He’s just another spear-carrier, and it’s dull, especially since they tried to build his exit scene up. Maybe he ended up on the TV channel’s cutting room floor.

The acting was so-so, or worse, as was the bones of the story. The snakes, at least, all seemed to be real, and the wounds were annoyingly grotesque. But the story didn’t really care about the people, it just wanted to portray Satan coming to getcha.

It’s another dull bit of propaganda, if you want to read it that way.

As I left dinner a couple of nights ago, I happened to look up. A smartphone camera’s really not up to the task, but that’s all I have.

Nathaniel Scharping on D-brief discusses a delicacy under development:

Henry Kaiser, National Science Foundation
Via Popular Science

News of the delicacy first appeared last summer, when Mie Pedersen, a gastrophysicist from the University of Southern Denmark announced that she and her team had found a new way to prepare jellyfish and turn them into snacks. Her method involves treating the animals, which can be more than 95 percent water, with ethanol and then dehydrating them. The result is a shell of collagen that makes for a satisfying treat.

It’s no new delicacy, either. Jellyfish have been a source of food in Asia for hundreds, and perhaps even thousands, of years. There, a month-long process involving salt and alum is used to dry out the jellyfish. The result is something that’s been described as “pickle-like” in texture, or perhaps a wet noodle, without too much flavor.

Which sounds innovative and all that, but this paragraph drove me slightly buggy:

And jellyfish, unlike many other marine animals, are actually doing quite well. This could make them an attractive option for consumption. In depleted fisheries around the world, jellyfish have filled the void. They feed on plankton, tiny crustaceans and fish larvae, and the competition is making it more difficult for fish populations to recover. As ocean temperatures continue to rise over the next century, jellyfish will likely continue their dominance of the sea.

Sure – as if those populations are going to recover without significant progress on climate change? To me, we’ve used up all the other species, so let’s move on to the jellyfish.

Yeah, I know. It’s just human ingenuity doing it’s thing. Taking something that seems useless and making it useful is an admirable thing, you’ll hear that from many. I can even agree.

But there’s an alternative view, and it’s this:

We’ve used up the ocean’s inhabitants, and then ruined it, but we’ll skim off the only thing still prospering and maybe use that up, too.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Jabe Wilson addresses the challenges facing researchers these days, and how publishers are trying to help them find and develop new knowledge on R&D Magazine:

As scholarly publishing has become a digital enterprise, the move to create semantic data that captures knowledge has increased significantly. Another way to describe this trend is as a shift in focus from reading articles as a whole, towards finding individual, semantic ‘facts’ reported in publications. This has been driven by the maturing of automated approaches to identifying and extracting these facts; as well as the steps to bring AI into fruition in the form of machine learning. In essence, recent years have seen a step-change from human curation in isolation to rules-based automated indexing approaches, and then to the applications of statistical approaches such as deep learning and machine reasoning. These approaches are helping researchers to access insights in a far shorter time period, greatly improving productivity.

Semantic data is important to R&D, because it means we can link facts that are related across papers, and over different domains of knowledge – enabling us to deliver insights that might not be obvious from reading one paper alone. To do so requires normalizing the terminology with taxonomies, to allow a network to be created. The increasing reliance on linked facts mean the demands of the modern researcher are changing; researchers need bespoke analytics products for their specific needs, built on robust semantic databases. In today’s world, this more often than not means solutions that combine semantic technology methods, augmented with machine learning and machine reasoning approaches.

The support tools are growing ever more sophisticated. Does this mean they’re also more and more expensive to design, build, and maintain? How hard is it to bring a new engineer on board and have her up to speed within, say, 6 months? But in our current world of science, this is necessary because …

These techniques offer the ability to aim AIs at problems we are interested in solving, and having the means to understand and interpret the answers the AIs provide. Together, these two factors of growing interest in AI and greater collaboration will become increasingly important if we are to overcome the productivity crises that many disciplines of science and research are experiencing. Research at Stanford University has indicated that since the 1930s, the effective number of researchers at work has increased by a factor of 23, but annual growth in productivity has declined. As a result, new ideas are becoming more expensive to find; using AI to augment researchers will be a key weapon in the fight to overcome these issues.

Because, of course, a decline in growth indicates a moral failing in the researchers, or at least the money-driven managers would have us believe. I’d say it’s a matter of a paucity of low-hanging fruit, myself, and now we have to start climbing the trees to get the delicious fruit that beckons us.

And AI will be the guy who boosts our valiant researchers up the tree, I think. I wonder if they’re teaching courses at university on how to work with AI augmentation tools….

Adaptive introgression:

[The researchers] went looking for instances of adaptive introgression — a phenomenon in which a newly introduced piece of genetic material is so beneficial that it quickly radiates out into the entire population. [“Your Neanderthal DNA might actually be doing you some good,” Sarah Kaplan, WaPo]

Reading that last phrase, I was struck by the notion that “population” must implicitly have the modifier “future” on it, since genes, for creatures such as us, is not a directly transferring piece of genetic material.

But it is for bacteria.

“Quickly,” for us, would imply at least a few generations, which would be inversely related to the level of promiscuity practiced by the population.

 

“Of course the wolf flies.” – Duane Johnson, Rampage ad

Paul Rosenzweig, a national security lawyer of long standing, finds he can’t finish a book he’s contracted to write. Why? Because he’s lost the faith. He writes about this on Lawfare:

The last straw for me was this week’s announcement by the Republicans in the House that they have found no evidence of collusion – directly contradicting what the Special Counsel has uncovered and revealing that the function of oversight is now dead in Congress.  Thus two thirds of my thesis (the premise of legality by the Executive and oversight by the Legislative) is now untenable.  And I have 90,000 words that are no longer ones I am willing to publish.

I can hear my liberal friends now, mocking this somewhat.  They have had this skepticism of government for a long time and will, I am sure, both welcome my “conversion” to their view and deride me for how late in my career it was.  I think however (and with respect) that this sort of response undervalues and mis-states the deviance of Trumpism.  The Trump approach has truly stolen the soul of conservatism.  It is different in kind and not degree from past administrations.

And so, for now, I put aside the book.  I hope I can return to it someday with a chapter on the “Trump Detour.”  At this point, however, we can no longer say that Executive and Legislative probity is a given.  The guardrails of American democracy (to paraphrase Jack Goldsmith in describing institutional restraints on authoritarianism) are buckling.  To which one can only respond: Trumpism Delenda Est.

It’s disturbing to me to hear a hardened lawyer looking at the future in such a dismal way. I’m not sure I’m as depressed as all that. The structure of any democracy cannot safeguard against dictators and incompetents if the people are unwilling to participate in that democracy. Trump was elected because a sufficient number of citizens either did not participate, or participated with little attention, in the election. They have since learned that elections have consequences. We’re seeing the reaction to that in the number of new candidates for seats that have become available through special elections, or will be available at the midterms.

I think that’s encouraging, and may portend a change at the midterms of a magnitude such that the Republicans may be forced to begin reforming themselves – finding ways to man the gates, removing certain rules of the Party, as I’ve discussed before, and otherwise guiding their Party away from extremist-right.

Or the Party may simply recede into history, as the old “moderate Republicans” form a new Party which can hopefully grow into a responsible governing entity.

The hidden trick will be for the Democrats not to follow the Republicans into their own form of extremism, or they may also fade into the own forms of depravity and obscurity. In a nation such as ours, we best function through compromise at the center, feeling our way towards correct positions by feel, rather than by ideology. Right now we’re off the rails, but continued pressure on the currently incompetent President and his supporters in Congress may force them from power as their own supporters begin to realize how badly their selections have performed.

The hair may say 70, but the face says 30.

The biographical drama Leadbelly (1976) chronicles the life of Huddie William Ledbetter from his late teenage years through his second prison term for murder. He was a blues musician who worked from 1903 until his death 45 years later. This is truly a chronicle, for there is little attempt to do more than connect his upbringing, the strictures of the American South in which he grew up, and his own lust for life with his prison terms and his music.

Indeed, in some ways this movie is all about the music he composed and performed, the subjects both well-worn, such as women and love, and more unusual, such as the song he sang hoping that the Governor of Texas might grant him a pardon. We’re given performances of his many songs as they fit the time and scene.

But as such, the movie comes off just a little flat. In some ways, I found it hard to connect with Ledbetter, and perhaps that’s just a societal difference of 100+ years and a completely different social circumstance. Some of it may have been questions in my head about whether Ledbetter ever really learned from his experiences, or if the pain he endured was more a function of the racist society in which he lived. Indeed, it has elements of film noir to it, although I wouldn’t classify it as such, as an epilogue suggests there was, in fact, a happy ending to his life, as it claims he later played Carnegie Hall.

It is an interesting movie, but not necessarily a movie you’ll remember a month from now.

Speaking of the original Bolo by Laumer, I just got around to seeing last night’s Colbert where he interviews Paul Giamatti – and gifts him with a copy of one of the classic collections of Bolo stories by Laumer. They didn’t really discuss it, but it was cool to see an obscure ex-diplomat get a call-out on Colbert. (Yes, it was also cool to see Kuttner and Moore mentioned.)

When you’re on God’s team, you don’t lose. Keeping this in mind, we can better understand how the GOP, the party of the Evangelicals, even if they’re led by a lying, boasting, adulterer, can embrace lies such as we’ve been hearing of late concerning the special election in PA-18. From the conservative Washington Times:

“The president’s engagement in the race turned what was a deficit for the Republican candidate to what is essentially a tie,” said White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah. “Also the Democrat in the race really embraced the president’s policies and his vision whereas he didn’t really embrace [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader.”

But as Jon Favreau points out:

Conor Lamb campaigned:

1. For universal health car
2. Against Trump’s tax cut
3. For expanded background checks
4. For stronger unions
5. Against cuts to Social Security
6. For a woman’s right to choose
7. For medical marijuana

Why the ridiculous claim? A mature secular voter knows that this isn’t a horserace – that there’s no financial cost or gain depending on whom you vote for. But the GOP base isn’t made up of mature secular voters (no offense), but rather, to a substantial degree, they’re Evangelicals on God’s team.

Or at least this is where they’d like to see themselves.

But Trump went into PA-18 and campaigned in a district which went for him in 2016 by 20 points, and his most excellent candidate, who was going to win easily (or so Trump pronounced on the eve of the election), lost by a feather – less than 700 votes.

Left to consider it, an Evangelical voter should be appalled that God couldn’t push just a few more votes into the Republican column, let alone give losing candidate Saccone a twenty point victory. Since there must be a God, well, either Saccone (who called his opponent and those supporting him God-haters) isn’t favored by God, despite the blessings of Party leader (and thus favored by God) Trump.

Or God isn’t with the Republicans.

The Republican leaders, despite a lot of foolishness, know their base. What’s the most efficient way to convince their base that God is still with them? By co-opting the victorious Lamb (fortunate name for the Republicans, BTW). I suppose God recognized his innate Republican-ness, and helped him to a wonderful victory.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays with the base, although it may be hard to discern. The next Presidential Approval poll might yield something, but then again it might not. Since there are so many other incidents that can affect that poll, it’s hard to know how to interpret it in this context.

But this loss may chip away a few more Evangelical voters from the Republicans. When you’re in a team sport and your team gets blasted, it has to make you wonder if you’re doing things the right way.

Ever wonder what Great Britain can really do when they suspect a foreign power of aggression on their own soil, such as the recent poisoning incident? Lawfare‘s Ashley Deeks gets the details:

The press has reported on (non-forcible) reactions that the U.K. may be considering. This reporting tends to focus on imposing economic sanctions; expelling Russian spies or diplomats from the U.K.; restricting visas to Russian businesspeople; or revoking the broadcast license for RT, Russia’s national media network. These measures would be “retorsions,” or unfriendly acts that do not violate international law.

The U.K. still has another category of options: countermeasures. The Draft Articles on State Responsibility, adopted by the International Law Commission and generally accepted as an accurate restatement of customary international law, define countermeasures as acts by the injured state that would otherwise be international law violations but that are not wrongful because they are responses to an initial violation of international law by the wrongdoing state. Countermeasures should be proportional to the original violation, and their goal must be to induce the wrongdoing state to comply with its international obligations and cease the violative behavior. The victim state must cease its countermeasures once the violation ceases. Only states that are injured may impose countermeasures: This means that a victim state’s allies may not impose “collective countermeasures” on the wrongdoing state if only the victim state was actually injured. And, according to the Draft Articles, before imposing countermeasures the injured state must call on the wrongdoing state to fulfill its obligations, notify the wrongdoing state that it intends to take countermeasures, and offer to negotiate with that state.

Not the sorts of things that’ll make Putin’s hair stand on end, but then he has little enough as it is.

I wonder if the fangs were of the glow in the dark variety I had as a kid.

High Anxiety (1977) is a comic farce and a parody of, among other things, Alfred Hitchcock movies. Unfortunately, it has not aged as well as the Hitchcock movies, despite a number of individually funny bits.

I think it has to do with the lack of a serious undertone to the movie. Subjects include psychotherapy (at “The Institute for the Very, Very Nervous”), Hitchcock’s The Birds, ineffectual personal servants, dominatrices and submissives, and others, but none are really subjects of vital interest. Charlie Chaplin also used comic farce, but his subjects included the submission of workers to their corporate masters, the blindness of love, etc., subjects that are either timeless, or seem nearly so.

All that said, there are parts which still made me laugh out loud. If you happen to stumble into this flick, you will find it entertaining. But I fear it doesn’t work as well as it used to.

The zero-risk society is a bit of an aphorism these days, emblematic of the fear of any risk for children – which has left many to wonder, how are they supposed to learn about dealing with risk?

Well, in Britain it looks like they’re starting to figure that out, as Lenore Skenazy at Let Grow reports. Her conclusion?

Something Steve Benen said reminded me that there may be a fix for the national conundrum – who to vote for in a winner-take-all contest. First, the conundrum:

… we’re occasionally reminded that while the Republican Party rejects everything the Green Party stands for, the GOP nevertheless sees the Green Party as incredibly useful in moving the country to the right. Indeed, we know just as a matter of arithmetic that if Green Party voters had backed the Democratic ticket in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2016, Donald Trump would not be president today.

This is an oft-noted wail of voters – they would prefer a 3^rd party candidate, but aren’t they wasting their vote by voting for that candidate?

Minneapolis, just a few miles to my west, uses instant-runoff voting. In this method, voters may list their preferred candidates in preferred order. During counting, losing candidates have their votes redistributed to surviving candidates based on the order specified by the voters. In the end, these ballots may indicate the most accurate measurement of preferences for 3rd party candidates, while permitting such voters to also specify someone else who is “acceptable”. How about we implement this for the Presidency? Heck, we could probably do this on a state-by-state basis. (Maybe the only way, legally speaking.)

I’m sure this has been suggested many times before, but it’s worth reiterating.

Incidentally, Steve’s report is about someone on the GOP payroll in Montana who registered for the Green Party primary for the Senate seat that’s in contention, perhaps hoping to split the vote that would otherwise go to the Democratic candidate through hard line leftist appeals if he were to win the primary. It seems to me that electoral shenanigans such as this, legal or illegal, might be abandoned if we had instant-runoff, as they would become ineffective.

Akiva Eldar describes Netanyahu’s campaign tactics and their consequent fallout on AL Monitor:

In Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s school of morality and politics, accepting a bribe is no reason to unseat an elected premier, nor is a hostile takeover of the country’s media. He insists that a prime minister should not be replaced because of criminal indictments or guilty verdicts. According to Netanyahu, a prime minister can only be “replaced at the ballot box,” although what he means is that a prime minister can only be “replaced by Jews at the ballot box.”

March 17 marks two years since his horrible election-day video warning — “Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls” — and calling on Jews to turn out en masse. It’s hard to know how many votes he picked up for the Likud with this alarmist message, but the damage he caused to relations between Jews and Arabs is discernible.

The annual index compiled for more than 40 years by professor Sammy Smooha of Haifa University points to a decline in the Jewish majority’s perceived legitimacy of the country’s 20% Arab minority. The proportion of Jews accepting the Arabs’ status as a minority with full civil rights in a Jewish and democratic state fell from 75% to 68%. Three out of 10 Jews think the Arabs should leave the country and receive appropriate compensation. The percentage of Jews who refuse to have Arabs as neighbors grew from 41% to 48%.

At the same time, the Arabs’ perception of the state’s legitimacy has also changed. Whereas 66% of Arabs recognized Israel’s right to exist in the 2015 survey, the rate declined to 59% in the 2017 survey. Only a minority, 47%, of Israeli Arabs are reconciled to Israel as a state with a Jewish majority compared to a majority of 60% two years earlier. In addition, the study discerned a significant increase in the threat perception of Israeli Arabs, with 73% fearing a severe undermining of their basic rights compared with 68% in the previous poll.

There is a certain resemblance to GOP tactics for riling up their base, isn’t there? Get the emotions going, call the other side “God haters”, get the fight or flight mechanism firing – and then harvest the votes.

It’s really quite despicable, isn’t it? And it has consequences, as the cohesiveness of the Israeli state falls apart, which in turn exacerbates the tensions in the Middle East.

There’s been quite the hubbub since the House Intel Committee abruptly terminated its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and concluded there wasn’t any interference.

Excuse me, the GOP members of the House Intel Committee, being in the majority, did so “…over the fierce objection of Democrats.”

Wait, wait, I’ve still got it wrong. SOME of the GOP members of the House Intel Committee blah-blah-blah.

Who’s the goat here? Retiring, and that’s probably the key word here, Representative Trey Gowdy (R-SC). From Politico:

Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina said that the evidence gathered by the committee clearly showed Russia’s disdain for Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton, and was “motivated in whole or in part by a desire to harm her candidacy or undermine her Presidency had she prevailed.”

Rep. Gowdy is a member of the Tea Party, so we know he’s not a moderate. He led one of the fruitless investigations of the Benghazi tragedy.

But apparently he’s remembering some conservative positions, such as country comes before party.

I wonder how long it’ll take before someone tries to RINO him out of the party. Although, given that he’s retiring, it might not be worth the time, except as an object lesson.

Let the purification rituals begin. Someday, there’ll be three members of the GOP left – and two will be on probation.

After Saccone’s small-minded vitriol in the closing of the PA-18 special election, compare to his opponent, Conor Lamb (D), and his commentary the morning after the election:

“Look, I was at a lot of polling places yesterday with cars parked outside of them that had president Trump’s bumper sticker on them. So he’s a popular person here,” Lamb told CNN’s “New Day” on Wednesday. “But I think that what happens when you campaign in real life as much as possible is that those divisions go away. Everyone gave me a fair shake and I know that there are people that voted for the president who also voted for me. And, you know, I thank them for hearing me out.” [Politico]

I think Mr. Lamb has a bright political future ahead of him, if that’s what he wants. He speaks the language of inclusiveness, and, assuming he has follow-through, that will take him a ways.

Antediluvian:

Of or belonging to the time before the biblical Flood.
‘gigantic bones of antediluvian animals’

humorous Ridiculously old-fashioned.
‘they maintain antediluvian sex-role stereotypes’ [Oxford English Dictionaries]

Noted in this episode of 9 Chickweed Lane.

When clearing the gutters of ice, this is what you get …

That one piece sort of looks like amber with an embedded insect.

Nyah.