Monthly Archives: March 2018

Tactics in this class are probably not atypical, but it’s still disappointing to see them. WaPo reports on an attempt to subvert the attorney of one of the accusers of Alabama Congressional Senate candidate Roy Moore:

Days after a woman accused U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexual impropriety, two Moore supporters approached her attorney with an unusual request.

They asked lawyer Eddie Sexton to drop the woman as a client and say publicly that he did not believe her. The damaging statement would be given to Breitbart News, then run by former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon.

In exchange, Sexton said in recent interviews, the men offered to pay him $10,000 and promised to introduce him to Bannon and others in the nation’s capital. Parts of Sexton’s account are supported by recorded phone conversations, text messages and people in whom he confided at the time.

According to the article, this information eventually reached a federal prosecutor, who declined to pursue the matter. The article is quite long and in-depth, and it’s worth a read for a non-fictional account of how politics is sometimes conducted. By its existence, it characterizes the far-right extremists; I wonder how often the left indulges in these morally dubious practices. Go read it.

And if WaPo says your free articles are exhausted, stop supporting bad journalism and buy a subscription. Remember, free news sources are controlled by their advertisers. If you’re paying for a subscription, then at least that media source has some freedom from parties possibly hostile to the truth, which are the advertisers. That doesn’t guarantee that media source is a high quality, neutral source of news – but it removes one source of perversion of that ideal, doesn’t it?

A reader remarks on John Bolton’s appointment as National Security Advisor:

It’s become abundantly clear that 45 abhors dissent or any resistance to his political or economic ideas. He is surrounding himself with “yes men” who blindly subscribe to his agenda. That’s his MO. It’s why his businesses have failed and so eventually will his presidency.

Yes, to some extent it makes dependence on the intelligence of the person on the top of the pyramid overly critical. And yet, if & when the failure comes, Trump’ll blame someone else.

That said, I was reading somewhere, I can’t remember where, that while Trump has clearly signaled his protectionist instincts, Bolton is supposedly an avid free-trader. How much this matters in the context of the post of National Security Advisor is unclear to me, but it does suggest Trump has some tolerance for dissidence, at least when it’s not front and center.

That said, we’ve seen how much Trump is influenced by what he sees on TV. Perhaps Bolton just comes across real well on the airwaves, what with pronounced views and a big mustache.

I forgot to post the latest market performance. Yesterday, the Dow was down 1.77%, while the S&P and NASDAQ were down more than 2%. Here’s the chart from the NYSE:

This suggests there is little confidence among investors in President Trump’s recent economic policies. However, the investment community hardly qualifies as all knowing, so I think we’ll just have to wait and find out if this is going to turn out poorly – or well. Keep an eye on the agricultural sector, especially the family farmers, as they’re exhibiting a lot of anxiety about a trade war, from what I hear.

Conservative Hugh Hewitt uses WaPo to talk about his high hopes for new National Security Advisor John Bolton:

What to expect from Bolton? The bottom line is that Vladimir Putin’s worst nightmare just walked into the West Wing. Bolton can outlast and outthink anyone Putin, Kim Jong Un or Xi Jinping sends to negotiate quiet deals before the public big ones. A housecleaning at the National Security Council is coming too. Bolton knows everyone in the foreign policy set in Washington. Look for his old friends at the U.N., State, Defense and Justice to show up soon in the Old Executive Office Building and to work towards the implementation of the comprehensive National Security Strategy put together by his predecessor, H.R. McMaster, and company. It’s a great day for Reagan-era realism of which McMaster was a superb steward during his tenure.

And war on the Korean peninsula?

Critics charge that Bolton likes war — a ridiculous assertion. As he told me in one especially memorable two-hour interview back in 2007: “Nobody should want a war on the Korean Peninsula.” Chew on that, critics. What he is, however, is a Reagan realist. About Kim Jong Un’s father, Kim Jong Il, Bolton said that “He’s very good at negotiating about giving up his [nuclear] program. . . . He’s done it four or five times in the last 15 years.” That pointed to Bolton’s conclusion: “He’s not going to relinquish those nuclear weapons voluntary. No way.”

Yeah. It was Reagan who lost 200+ Marines in a few minutes in Lebanon. I don’t get all that jacked up about “Reagan realism.” Still, it’d be lovely if Hewitt is correct about Bolton not being as aggressive as his talk has implied over the years. But Hewitt is a long term apologist for the conservatives, so I’m not holding out a lot of hope here.

Our neighbor to the east, Wisconsin, is home to a certain Governor Walker, the once-to-be-celebrated Presidential contender, who more or less fell on his sword during his short campaign. Scampering back down-eared to Wisconsin, he hired a couple of State legislators for his Administration, and then refused to hold special elections to replace them.

But his dubious strategy for avoiding electoral embarrassment, based on results from, well, all over the country, has come to a stop, as a judge he himself appointed just told him to do his job. From the Journal-Sentinel:

Dealing a setback to Gov. Scott Walker and other Republicans, a judge ruled Thursday the governor must call special elections to fill two vacant seats in the Legislature.

Walker declined to call those elections after two GOP lawmakers stepped down to join his administration in December.

His plan would have left the seats vacant for more than a year. Voters in those areas took him to court with the help of a group headed by Eric Holder, the first attorney general under Democratic President Barack Obama.

Dane County Circuit Judge Josann Reynolds — whom Walker appointed to the bench in 2014 — determined Walker had a duty under state law to hold special elections so voters could have representation in the Legislature. She said failing to hold special elections infringed on the voting rights of people who lived in the two districts.

It’s the sort of ruling a child could get right, and yet the Republicans seem to think they’re above the rules:

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) ripped the judge as an “activist Dane County judge” who had injected her “own personal opinion into how we conduct elections.”

He said he wasn’t aware Walker had appointed the judge but said her approach was endemic to judges in liberal Madison.

“It’s something about the water in Dane County,” Vos said. “That’s why I try to stay here as little as I can.”

An absurd remark, yet not surprising for the Republicans, who would happily find any loophole to repress the non-Republicans – the Republicans currently have a majority in both houses of the Wisconsin Legislature, as well as holding the governorship. It appears anything to keep power goes.

The sad thing is, I could see the Democrats playing the same damn game.

A reader remarks on the NAFTA negotiations:

American big corporations are out of control. They’re effectively evil spawn of satan spreading their tendrils and damage across the nation, and then across the world.

Oddly enough, at this juncture I don’t really agree. It’s become apparent that asking corporate entities to have the best interests of the country at heart is really quite beyond most of them. After all, they’re in the business of providing goods and services to the customer, and letting the customer make the decision to use them (an idealization, it’s true – some are quite deceptive and even manipulative of the customer) – they’re not in the business of asking whether or not the product is good for the country. And, heck, in this case the country isn’t even their” country^[1].

It’s properly the government’s responsibility, and that’s where we’re falling down. Or at least Trump’s falling down.

Of course, historically we’ve been a country of merchants, of commerce, and quite often the government has fallen into line with the commercial interests. Getting struggling companies off the ground in the early part of the existence of the United States probably was required if they ran up against competition from foreign entities.

But at this point in our history, we should be beyond that.

¹A somewhat problematic description in the age of international corporations.

From NASA‘s Juno mission to Jupiter, just to remind myself there’s more than what I blog about out there, and some of it is just ….

This composite image, derived from data collected by the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument aboard NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter, shows the central cyclone at the planet’s north pole and the eight cyclones that encircle it.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM

Wow.

Or so I’m told.

Notice the faintly threatening cast one this view.

A forgotten missive finally grabs my eyes concerning the dud of a Nunes memo:

I can’t say enough bad things about Nunes.

However, the T45-Tribe fully believes the memo is the perfect proof of a smoking gun showing how the FBI and CIA are actually Democratic operatives trying to overthrow the Best Government Ever.

And they really do believe that, I think. Their opinions are reflected in the guy in the White House, so, getting the cart before the horse, they think all is wonderful.

I don’t know how many are going to be hurt by the tariffs and trade wars. I know the news is rife with farmers terrified of a trade war with China.

The Democrats are not above gerrymandering, as it turns out. SCOTUS will be hearing a gerrymandering case out of Maryland in which Republicans are suing, not Democrats. From Reuters:

When Maryland Democrats drew new U.S. House of Representatives district maps in 2011, long-time Republican voter Bill Eyler found himself removed from a conservative rural district and inserted into a liberal one encompassing Washington suburbs.

Eyler, a retired business owner in the small town of Thurmont roughly 55 miles north of the U.S. capital, said he thinks he and others like him were being targeted by the Democrats because of their party affiliation. He was inserted into a Democratic-leaning congressional district in an electoral map that diminished the statewide clout of Republican voters.

“There’s nothing we can do or say or vote that will make any difference,” Eyler said in an interview.

Eyler is one of nine Republican voters who pursued a legal challenge against a portion of Maryland’s electoral map. Their closely watched case will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday.

It’s self-serving crap like this which alienates voters, and alienated voters tend to permit extremists to win elective seats. It signals voters that fairness for everyone is superseded by advantage for the political Parties.

And it can discourage participation from the common, moderate citizen, while encourage the extremists, regardless of whether they are favored or disfavored by the changes, to come out of their holes.

How bad is it in Maryland?

Despite [Republican] Hogan’s 2014 victory that illustrated Republican strength statewide, Republicans currently hold just one of Maryland’s eight congressional seats because of the way the electoral boundaries are drawn.

Obviously, this isn’t dispositive – possibly the Republicans ran very weak opponents for those seats – but it’s indicative of a problem.

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.”