Monthly Archives: July 2018

The continuing saga of Brexit, the British exit from the European Union, may be taking a left turn following the resignation of Boris Johnson from Prime Minister Theresa May’s government, who is a Brexit “hard exit” advocates, as well as chief negotiator David Davis – but possibly not disaster. Former Brit Andrew Sullivan explains in New York:

So what happens when all this keeps coming closer and closer? Who knows? But with parliament deadlocked and the E.U. implacable, a simple solution could present itself as the only way out for a Tory Party desperate to keep Labour out of power: The transition period could be extended, and a second referendum called. On the ballot this time would be the two actual, non-fantasy options: a brutal exit, or remaining in the E.U.

This wouldn’t be a referendum to undo the first one; it would be to clarify it, after the actual, tangible, non-fantasy options are available. People voted for Brexit with no one actually knowing what kind of Brexit, or any clear idea of what it would entail, and many voters were confused about the intricacies. Two years later, and the confusion is even deeper, and the divide greater.

I don’t know what the result of such a second referendum would be, but I know that it is the only way not to permanently divide and embitter the country, and to end the debate for good. I suspect that a doomsday Brexit would concentrate the mind; and that sticking with the status quo, after the last two chaotic years, might seem a little more enticing that it once did. In that scenario, Brexit may — just may — be reversed by the people. That’s my hope anyway. Some small part of me wonders whether it isn’t Theresa May’s hope as well.

And Andrew believes this may have been a setup by Prime Minister May. Add in President Trump’s criticism of Prime Minister May (swiftly denied to be criticism, or to exist, or maybe he claims the tapes are fake, who knows what we should make of President Irrelevancy), which will inflame British opinion, no matter how hard Rupert Murdoch works to calm the waters, and we may see the abortion of Brexit, and, if my and other speculations on the matter are correct, the dilution and spoilage of the Russian strategy to alienate the various national actors allied in opposition to Putin’s empire-minded ways.

Or at least one prong of the plan. President Trump remains resolute in denying the activities of the Russians in the 2016 Presidential elections, unless, of course, he plans to accuse the Russians of interfering to aid President Clinton. Excuse me, candidate Clinton. To be honest, my implications are mere speculation; the evidence that he has been compromised is circumstancial and not dispositive.

But for us pattern-seeking monkey-types, the arrows definitely point in that direction, and it’s worth using it as a scientific hypothesis. What is the real point of a hypothesis? To predict. If we stipulate for the moment the President being compromised, then we can predict their will continue to be attempts by the President to dismantle important alliances which have blocked and frustrated Russia since before it’s rebirth following the peaceful defeat and dismantlement of its predecessor, the USSR.

And Prime Minister May may be cementing a place in history for herself if she finds a way to avoid the entire Brexit debacle.

In case you want to see an analysis by experienced lawyers, rather than a software engineer (that would be me), of the indictment of Russian military intelligence personnel, Lawfare presents just such an analysis here. Their summary?

The Internet Research Agency indictment, in February, offered a potential legal solution to that puzzle.

This indictment, by contrast, offers a potential factual breakthrough. It tells us that the prior factual premise was wrong: the alleged conduct violating the CFAA continued to occur throughout the summer of 2016. That affects the earlier analysis in two ways. First, it makes clear that the Russians did intend to release the information at the time the hacking occured. Second, and perhaps more important, the indictment alleges that the criminal hacking conspiracy was ongoing at the time individuals in the Trump campaign were in contact with charged and uncharged Russian conspirators, raising the possibility of more straightforward aiding and abetting liability.

In other words, stay tuned. This indictment represents a tightening of the ring in the story of criminal prosecution for the 2016 election hacking. The government has now alleged that the social media manipulations by Russian actors constituted a criminal conspiracy. It has alleged as well that the hacking of Democratic Party and Clinton campaign emails were crimes conducted by officers of the Russian state. The question remains: Who, if anyone, helped?

And will the judiciary – or a jury – accept the contention that social media manipulation by foreign actors is a crime? I happen to believe so, but how about the folks with power.

Yesterday, Representative McCollum (D-MN) responded to my letter regarding the illegal immigrant family debacle. She affirms her position opposing such policies, and cites her support for Reunite Children With Their Parents Act (H.R. 6172). She also discusses her opposition to “hyper-partisan” bills from the Republicans.

I think I’m going to send my Senators and Representative mail regarding Puerto Rico becoming a State someday soon. It seems unjust to deny those American citizens full representation in Congress.

Basic logic tends to be overlooked even as it underlies the most basic technologies of today’s civilization. But has the last word been uttered on the matter, between modus ponens and syllogisms? Not according to Douglas Heaven in NewScientist (30 June 2018, paywall):

One major work-in-progress is an assumption Aristotle called “the most certain of principles”: that things are either true or not true. Inconveniently, this makes conventional logic blow up on occasion. Take the sentence “this sentence is false”: is that true or false?

Neither true nor false

Many-valued logics get round this by allowing statements to be true, false, possible – and more. Paraconsistent logics provide ways to deal with statements that are both true and false, contradictions that would yield nonsense in more traditional logic.

As logic evolves, it is becoming closer and closer to what’s really in our heads – and, paradoxically, harder to understand. Logic has also suffered as the internet and other media have sped up the spread of emotional arguments, says Gabbay. “Illogical arguments are more effective now than logical ones.”

His own pet project is to bring logic out of our heads and closer to our hearts, by developing a formal system of logic, plus rules for reasoning with it, that can capture emotional aspects of argumentation, including personal attacks, appeals to “common sense”, straw-man arguments and so on. “All of the things that were considered to be logical fallacies up to now urgently need to be modelled,” he says – the next stage in the evolution of logic as our guide to truth.

I wish he’d hurry. Having a formal approach to writing arguments which are not only formally correct but are also convincing to people who don’t care about being formally correct would certainly be nice.

Ever hear of vegetable orthotics? Here they are again this year, as they worked fairly well last year.

Incidentally, our neighbor took down their fence and replaced it with arbor vitae. Should be nice.

It’s good of Special Counsel Mueller and to take pity on me for griping about the lack of news out of the investigation. As you’ve no doubt heard, 12 new indictments were filed in court today. Here’s the indictment. What caught my eye^[1]?

Object of the Conspiracy

20. The object of the conspiracy ws to hack into the computers of U.S. persona and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, steal documents from those computers, and stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Seems to be quite clear. Other sections detail attacks on Democratic and affiliated entities.

58. Although the Conspirators caused transactions to be conducted in a variety of currencies, including U.S. dollars, they principally used bitcoin when purchasing servers, registering domains, and otherwise making payments in furtherance of hacking activity. Many of these payments were processed by companies in the United States that provided processing services to hosting companies, domain registrars, and other vendors both international and domestic. The use of bitcoin allowed the Conspirators to avoid direct relationships with traditional financial institutions, allowing them to evade greater scrutiny of their identities and sources of funds.

If you’re inclined to see silver linings in dark clouds – and I’m not particularly – then this is an exemplar of one of the problems bitcoin brings to the world – the privacy and occultation of the activities of the users is great if the user is engaged in legal activities and is worried about illicit monitoring by the government, but it’s not desirable when the user is engaged in anti-social activities.

It’ll be interesting to see if this indictment becomes part of the cannon fodder for banning cryptocurrencies. My bet is that it will become that. But will it be the discussion be reasonable or ideological? Of late, and as stoked by our international adversaries, important discussions such as these become shouting matches in which the winners do what they want, and the losers, rather than consider the possibility that they were wrong, nurse their complaints, suckle at their own wounds, and vow vengeance upon their enemies.

Everyone thinks they know everything. Toss in a bit of religious mania and it becomes toxic septicemia for the arteries of society.

72. In or around July 2016, KOVALEV [one of the defendants] and his co-conspirators hacked the website of a state board of elections (“SBOE 1”) and stole information related to approximately 500,000 voters, including names, addresses, partial social security numbers, dates of birth, and driver’s license numbers.

Which suggests there was more going on than just social media influence. While there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of direct interference with vote counting, the known weaknesses of voting machines makes them a vulnerability in our system which should be immediately patched – or dispensed with.

[43]a. On or about August 15, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, received a request for stolen documents from a candidate for the U.S. Congress. The Conspirators responded using the Guccifer 2.0 persona and sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate’s opponent.

Fascinating. Some candidate – and perhaps current member of Congress – has a serious ethics deficit. If his or her name comes out and they are a member of Congress, they may not have a chance to resign – they may be ridden out on a rail.

[43]b. On or about August 22, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, transferred approximately 2.5 gigabytes of data stolen from the DCCC to a then-registered state lobbyist and online source of political news. The stolen data included donor records and personal identifying information for more than 2,000 Democratic donors.

Notice it doesn’t say the lobbyist asked for the information – an anonymous contribution of stolen information? But the fact that it was stolen should have been manifest. One wonders if the recipient rejected it or not.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff, and it should give Trump something to talk about with Putin at their upcoming summit. Of course, after the last indictment of Russian intelligence material was handed down, I had a suggestion as to how Trump should handle it:

1. The President sends a diplomatic note to the Russians requesting immediate extradition.
2. The Russians reply with a suitably snarky No.
3. The sunny reply to that is, We’re pleased you have agreed to our request, and the entire United States 5th Fleet will be coming to the port of Vladivostok in order to place them under arrest. Your cooperation will be appreciated. We’ll send in an LST for the actual pickup.

With very little modification, I quite sincerely and strongly urge the President to use this simple script to win back respect of and admiration for America both within and without the United States. He and his team have made many mistakes during his time in office; this approach would clear up a lot of the mistrust and despair for which he’s responsible.

¹All quotes hand typed. The PDF is made up of jpg files, I think. Apologies for typos.

Steve Benen has forgotten Trump’s primary motivation as he notes the President continues to mislead on the North Korean issue:

As Donald Trump’s policy toward North Korea unravels, the American leader decided yesterday to offer some evidence of progress: the Republican president released an image of a recent letter he received from Kim Jong-un.

“I deeply appreciate the energetic and extraordinary efforts made by Your Excellency Mr. President for the improvement of relations between the two countries and the faithful implementation of the joint statement,” Kim said in a translated letter tweeted by the president.

Trump added in his tweet: “A very nice note from Chairman Kim of North Korea. Great progress being made!”

No, there is no great progress being made. Trump is making that up, hoping we’ll all just play along with the fantasy.

President Trump, being what he is, only does that which will benefit Donald J. Trump. He sees the Presidency as a great money-maker, and therefore wishes to retain it. Given political realities, it’s incumbent on the incumbent to consciously construct the mythos of the stable genius, the great deal maker, the demi-god, Trump.

And thus he can’t be seen as having been taken in by the North Koreans. It would shake his cult right down to their roots to see their leader failing at, well, just about anything. But when it comes to an existential threat, he can’t permit himself to be seen by his followers as a clumsy amateur who endangers the country.

That’s worse than letting immigrants in, in their minds.

So I think Steve’s analysis is just so far out in left field it’s not even wrong. In Trump’s mind, the danger is not to the United States, but to himself. And that’s all that matters. He has to keep his base enthralled; admitting failure is just not an option.

Blazar:

The high-energy neutrino reported Thursday was created in the fast-moving swirl of matter around a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. When this black hole generates a brilliant jet of radiation, and that jet is aimed directly at Earth, scientists call the galaxy a “blazar.”[“In a cosmic first, scientists detect ‘ghost particles’ from a distant galaxy,” Sarah Kaplan, WaPo]

It appears to be orange, orange, orange.

The primary blogger at emptywheel, Marcy Wheeler, is (or claims to be, I’ve made no effort to verify it, but I ran across a mention of these qualifications in WaPo) a journalist with long experience in national security and civil liberties issues. Enough so that, she claims, the FBI chatted with her about some information she came up with, which incidentally caused a bit of an uproar as it was a reveal of a source, unusual in journalistic circles.

But this gave her an insight into today’s House interrogation of FBI Agent Peter Strzok, infamous for writing anti-Trump texts while on the job investigating Hillary Clinton during the Presidential campaign. Specifically:

So tomorrow, as House Judiciary Republicans spend half the day or longer publicly flogging Peter Strzok, know that all that flogging cannot change the fact that key evidence in Mueller’s possession, evidence which I suspect implicates the President directly, has absolutely no tie to Peter Strzok at all. None. Tomorrow will be just one big giant show that in no way can alter the provenance of key, damning evidence in Mueller’s possession.

Someday in the future we may discover if Marcy is correct or not. If she is, this may just be another circus put on by the second- and third- rate GOP House members who believe Party victories are more important than getting things right.

And if she’s not? I’ve been getting antsy about the Mueller investigation because there hasn’t been any public activity in the last couple of months. Is he wrapping things up? Avoiding negative publicity during the run-up to the mid-terms?

Preparing to lower the boom on someone who’s pivotal in this mess?

Or were the criminal indictments and pleadings all we’re going to get?

If you believe Marcy, there’s more to come. And that’s what my gut tells me as well.

Equerry:

an officer who works for a particular member of a royal family to help in their official duties:
an equerry to the Queen [Cambridge Dictionary]

Heard on Dr. Who last night: Trial of a Time Lord.

I know I grew up drinking fruit juice by the gallon, and I suppose in view of this report, it’s miraculous that I was skinny as a rail as a kid – and still have my original teeth. From Katherine Martinko on Treehugger:

Juice, on the other hand, has somehow escaped the unhealthy label. Despite having a sugar content equivalent to that of soda (10 teaspoons per 12-ounce serving), it still enjoys a healthy halo, and thus continues to feature prominently on breakfast tables, in kids’ lunches, and on daycare menus. Particularly for kids, juice is seen as an easy way of getting important vitamins and minerals into their bodies, which may be why the average kid in the U.S. drinks 10 ounces of juice per day — double the amount recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

A trio of paediatricians wants this to change. In an article for the New York Times titled “Seriously, Juice Is Not Healthy“, the three doctors argue that it’s time we stopped pretending that juice is different from other sugary beverages.

One of the biggest concerns is the sugar content, which nobody needs these days, in light of the obesity crisis currently afflicting the United States. Studies have shown that drinking juice prior to a meal actually makes a person hungrier, leading them to overeat.

Juice is not the same as whole fruit because it lacks the fibre that fills a person up. That is why “children who drink juice instead of eating fruit may similarly feel less full and may be more likely to snack throughout the day.” The doctors also expressed concern over juice being a “gateway drink” to other sugary beverages.

I don’t drink much juice these days, fortunately. But I can’t count the number of kids I see running around with juice boxes.

And that’s the indicator of the next fight on the way: the war to be waged by the juice manufacturers on information like the above. Get out the marshmallows as corporate profits become more important than the health of the kids. Sort of like the recent contretemps at the World Health Organization and baby “formula”. The United States came out of that looking like idiots, didn’t they?

Lawfare‘s Benjamin Wittes tries to correct the misapprehensions of many, including myself, and possibly even President Trump, concerning Judge Kavanaugh’s attitudes towards the Office of the President and the law by delving into the musty old articles of 1998. Here’s one of the three points he claims Kavanaugh is making in an article Kavanaugh published shortly after the impeachment of President Clinton:

Second, the article also makes a strong prudential case for independent investigations of the President and other high officials, given the inherent conflicts facing the attorney general in situations in which senior administration officials are investigative subjects. Kavanaugh made this argument at a time when, as noted above, the whole political culture was moving the other way. “Even the most severe critics of the current independent counsel statute concede that a prosecutor appointed from outside the Justice Department is necessary in some cases,” Kavanaugh writes. “Outside federal prosecutors are here to stay.” Critically, Kavanaugh’s proposed structural reforms to the independent counsel law were aimed not at weakening it but at shoring up the credibility and independence of the investigators against political attacks. Does this sound like someone who’s gunning for Mueller?

Wittes transitions, then, to this:

Kavanaugh and I talked at some length about these ideas at the time he gave that speech and wrote that article. I had written a book about the Starr investigation, a number of years earlier, in which Kavanaugh is quoted. So we had a shared interest in the subject of how investigations of the president should and should not take place. His point was in no sense to create an imperial presidency that was above the law. His concern, rather, was that his experience with Bush had taught him that Starr’s disabling of the Clinton administration was not worth it. This was about humility. “Looking back to the late 1990s,” he writes, “the nation certainly would have been better off if President Clinton could have focused on Osama bin Laden without being distracted by the Paula Jones sexual harassment case and its criminal-investigation offshoots.” He gave the speech when it looked like Barack Obama would win the presidency. He published the article with Obama in office. This was a policy proposal, in other words, to protect the institution of the presidency at time when his party didn’t control it. And nowhere in those pages does he indicate that his view of the law had changed.

I am not convinced that Kavanaugh would not get in the way of any SCOTUS case involving the President on the grounds that the President is too busy or too important to be imposed upon. Wittes and Kavanaugh notes the country might have been better off if Clinton hadn’t been bothered by those suits of long ago. The problem with this statement is that impeaching President Clinton over a blowjob wasn’t an act of responsible governance, it was the act of a political party that was entering into its first phase of insanity.

Also, arguments on posteriori grounds based on one or a few cases, without a theoretical framework with which to justify those arguments, are really little more than ad hoc emotional arguments. In my previous post on this subject, I laid out the theoretical, plausible outcomes of adhering to just such reasoning, which comes down to leaving the Nation vulnerable to a malignant or incompetent President, and that Justice delayed is quite frequently Justice denied.

Suggesting the President shouldn’t be subject to such cases just because Clinton may have been unfairly victimized isn’t good reasoning. If the result is to protect a truly malignant President from investigation and removal, it’s better to put the blame for that sordid incident on the responsible entity – the Republican Party for pursuing a triviality which could have been better handled through some misdemeanor in court, or even a traditional whisper campaign – rather than subjecting the nation to a truly sanctimonious, yet completely hypocritical trial.

The impeachment of Clinton may have been one of the early signs that our political system was beginning to suffer from a cancerous growth called hypocrisy.

And I don’t think Wittes’ judgment on this matter is accurate, so much as I should like to.

This report from Katherine Martinko at Treehugger caught me off-guard:

Did you know that one-third of all fish caught never makes it to a dinner plate? According to the latest report on the state of the world’s fisheries, released yesterday by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a shocking 35 percent of global catches gets thrown overboard or rots before eating. This is a sobering number, considering the detrimental environmental impact of much of the world’s fisheries, as well as the many people suffering from lack of food. The Guardian reports:

“About a quarter of these losses are bycatch or discards, mostly from trawlers, where unwanted fish are thrown back dead because they are too small or an unwanted species. But most of the losses are due to a lack of knowledge or equipment, such as refrigeration or ice-makers, needed to keep fish fresh.”

An example of the tragedy of the commons, as they say, and the importance of responsible regulation by governmental entities, at least so long as the world remains overpopulated by humans. When it’s just a few small fishing villages, that kind of waste would be unimportant to the prey species, but in today’s world of trawlers and too many mouths, this kind of waste does terrible damage to those species.

Research at the University of California-Riverside has yielded a surprise:

A diet high in soybean oil causes more obesity and diabetes than a diet high in fructose, a sugar commonly found in soda and processed foods, according to a just published paper by scientists at the University of California, Riverside.

The scientists fed male mice a series of four diets that contained 40 percent fat, similar to what Americans currently consume. In one diet the researchers used coconut oil, which consists primarily of saturated fat. In the second diet about half of the coconut oil was replaced with soybean oil, which contains primarily polyunsaturated fats and is a main ingredient in vegetable oil. That diet corresponded with roughly the amount of soybean oil Americans currently consume.

The other two diets had added fructose, comparable to the amount consumed by many Americans. All four diets contained the same number of calories and there was no significant difference in the amount of food eaten by the mice on the diets. Thus, the researchers were able to study the effects of the different oils and fructose in the context of a constant caloric intake.

Compared to mice on the high coconut oil diet, mice on the high soybean oil diet showed increased weight gain, larger fat deposits, a fatty liver with signs of injury, diabetes and insulin resistance, all of which are part of the Metabolic Syndrome. Fructose in the diet had less severe metabolic effects than soybean oil although it did cause more negative effects in the kidney and a marked increase in prolapsed rectums, a symptom of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which like obesity is on the rise.

So, if you’re a mouse, don’t ingest soybean oil. Mouse models are not necessarily good proxies for humans, but it’s something worth worrying about. Where does soybean oil show up in food products?

… is found in processed foods, margarines, salad dressings and snack foods. Soybean oil now accounts for 60 percent of edible oil consumed in the United States. That increase in soybean oil consumption mirrors the rise in obesity rates in the United States in recent decades.

And …

The researchers cautioned that they didn’t study the impacts of the diets on cardiovascular diseases and note in the paper that the consumption of vegetable oils could be beneficial for cardiac health, even if it also induces obesity and diabetes.

I’m still considering avoiding soybean oil, and it’s definitely an issue to keep on the radar for the future.

President Trump begins the NATO summit:

President Donald Trump on Wednesday accused fellow NATO ally Germany of being beholden to Russia because it buys energy from Moscow, in pointed remarks ahead of a summit of the military alliance in Brussels.

“Germany is a captive of Russia,” Trump said at a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, his first since arriving in the Belgian capital. “It’s very inappropriate.”

Trump went on to complain that the United States is expected to “defend them against Russia,” despite Germany making “billions of dollars” in energy payments to Moscow.

“I think it’s something that NATO has to look at,” Trump said. “Germany is totally controlled by Russia.” [CNN]

We’ve seen this time after time, haven’t we? Trump is suspected of A, and then he accuses his opponent du jour of A. From sexual misconduct (“grab a pussy” vs PizzaGate), it’s been a distinctive pattern. A long running concern has been Trump being compromised by Russia, and so now he’s managed to use that particular trope against German Prime Minister Merkel, who had the wherewithal to criticize him.

While it may work as a distracting tactic, I wonder if it really betrays a complete lack of imagination on the part of the man. I shouldn’t be surprised.

David French of National Review expresses his disappointment in Trump’s nomination of Judge Kavanaugh to SCOTUS rather than Judge Barrett in WaPo:

Trump had — right in front of him — the judge who could be populist and principled; the person who could galvanize the base and be an originalist judicial bedrock for the next 30 years.

The president blinked. In the coming days and weeks, you’ll see conservatives rally around Kavanaugh. The judicial nomination wars will settle into their post-filibuster norm. It will be easy for Democrats to largely vote in lockstep. Kavanaugh’s credentials will make it easy for Republicans to do the same. In the coming years, he will make the court more originalist. He’ll certainly write at least some opinions that make conservatives stand up and cheer, but at roughly 9 p.m. on July 9, for a critical part of Trump’s base, the cheers for Kavanaugh were a tad forced.

There was, for the first time in Trump’s judicial wars, a palpable sense of an opportunity lost.

French seems to think that Trump is operating on a basis of conservative Christian principles. French should know better; Trump operates to benefit Trump. Kavanaugh has expressed respect for a broad power view of the Presidency, that the President shouldn’t be bothered with lawsuits, etc. This benefits Trump more than the empty glory that comes with nominating a conservative woman to the bench who, frankly, hasn’t Kavanaugh’s experience, whether or not my reader likes that record.

Needless to say, the cultural warriors have leapt to their artillery now that Judge Kavanaugh has been nominated to SCOTUS by President Trump. My previous thoughts and knowledge on the judge, slim as they may be, were written up here. Steve Benen didn’t much care for his acceptance speech:

There’s simply no way Kavanaugh can speak to this with any authority. For him to state such a claim as fact is hard to take seriously.

I imagine the White House’s allies will say the judge was simply being polite, saying nice things about the president who, moments earlier, announced plans to reward him with one of the nine most important jobs in American jurisprudence, and there’s no need to take it too seriously.

Perhaps. Alternatively, when a Supreme Court nominee uses pro-Trump hyperbole better left to the president’s press secretary, he’s signaling a deference that should give us pause.

Rather than agree – or disagree – with Steve, I’d rather speak to Judge Kavanaugh’s potential future on the Court. Given his previous comments that a sitting President should not be bothered by such minutiae as lawsuits, it’s reasonable to assume, as many commentators have been quick to point out, that he was selected for his inclination to protect Trump’s backside in case Special Counsel Mueller comes out with legal action against the President – or, for that matter, if Congress impeaches the President.

So my thought is this – will Judge (perhaps soon to be Justice) Kavanaugh have the balls to recuse himself if such a lawsuit ends up before SCOTUS? Having substantively discussed how he’d decide such a lawsuit, he’s effectively compromised himself.

Yesterday I mentioned California’s Republican embarrassment, but now it’s back to the other coast, specifically New Jersey, as WaPo’s Dave Weigel reports:

The National Republican Congressional Committee has withdrawn its endorsement of a congressional candidate in New Jersey after reporters dug up offensive comments he’d made about black and Hispanic people.

“Bigotry has no place in society — let alone the U.S. House of Representatives,” NRCC Chairman Steve Stivers said in a statement Monday night. “The NRCC withdraws our support of Seth Grossman and calls on him to reconsider his candidacy.”

Grossman, a former elected official in Atlantic County, was not the party’s first choice to run in New Jersey’s 2nd District. Rep. Frank A. LoBiondo (R-N.J.) announced his retirement late last year, and the local party scrambled to find a contender in a district that backed President Trump in 2016 but was high on Democrats’ target list.

No strong candidate emerged, and Grossman won the four-way June 5 primary with 39 percent of the vote. Almost immediately, Democratic and liberal groups began digging through his social media and through videos from candidate forums.

And what did he say?

In one video, Grossman answered a question about how Republicans could reach more diverse groups of voters by saying “the whole idea of diversity is a bunch of crap, and un-American,” having “become an excuse by Democrats, communists, and socialists, to say that we’re not all created equal.” In a Facebook post, first uncovered by the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, Grossman linked approvingly to an article at a white nationalist website that argued African Americans “are a threat to all who cross their paths, black and non-black alike.”

“Oy vay!” wrote Grossman. “What so many people, black, white and Hispanic, whisper to me privately but never dare say out loud publicly.”

And he managed to win a plurality in the primary. This speaks either to the relative ignorance of the current Republican voter, their tolerance for extremism, or their mental state, which appears to find anything outside of their social circle to be frightening.

In any case, it’s not conducive to a productive American society.

I have yet to see similar cases for the Democrats, although they’ve tried to chase away a few candidates on various tactical grounds.

Our newest phlox. I’m hoping it’s not as predacious as the current phlox:

A look down Herb Lane:

And our new Guardians of the Garden. They’re a bit shy, but I’m assured quite rambunctious:

I suppose we could liken them to a bad case of acne. The owner doesn’t want them, but there they are, ugly little red explosions in Illinois, Virginia, and now California, according to The New York Times:

A Republican congressional candidate in a reliably blue California district managed to capture nearly a quarter of votes cast in the state’s open primary last month — just after the state Republican Party caught wind of his anti-Semitic comments and rescinded its automatic endorsement.

The candidate, John Fitzgerald, urged people on his campaign website to pay attention to “Jewish supremacism,” among other anti-Semitic views, which led party leaders to rescind their support in May, about two months after the official endorsement.

The Republicans have removed the endorsement, but it’s still egg on the face – and another clue that the extremists are riding on the skirts of a Party that is already in the shallows of the Extremist Sea. How soon before they climb the rope ladders and take control of the ship from the slightly less extreme extremists?

On Lawfare Kimberley Marten outlines how Russia is asserting influence throughout the world:

Russian aggression is a central concern of the foreign and security policy community, with debate focusing on what Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions are and how best to deter him. But missing from much of the discussion is the fact that a variety of semi-state security groups, with a hazy relationship to Moscow’s central authorities, are playing an increasing role in Russian actions both at home and abroad. The United States and other Western states must develop a better understanding of the complex motives and economic interests held by these opaque and informally commanded security forces to ensure the best possible attribution of and response to any hostile acts they commit. This will require recognizing that they are likely not always following Putin’s direct orders.

While many scholars and analysts now have a sophisticated understanding of the roles played by private military and security firms around the world, the array of semi-state security actors mobilized by Russia is unique—and noteworthy. Putin’s Russia is replacing the traditional notion, held by most Western countries as well as the Soviet Union, that states should have ultimate command and control over how armed force is used on their territories or in their name abroad. Instead, the new Russian model is centered on ambiguity, and the Kremlin even seems comfortable with the fact that these semi-state actors often have distinct commercial interests, separate from the Russian state. When a well-armed state with a growing international presence chooses to redefine the relationship between sovereignty and force, the magnitude and variety of threats that it might produce is being redefined as well.

The semi-official methods they’re moving to also impacts the Russians who make up these private military forces, as the loss of central regulation may also mean less chance of rescue or exchange of prisoners.

It also increases the chances of rogue actors.

Poker night was always a problem with this crew.

Destroy All Monsters (1968) is a rare outlier in the Japanese Godzilla / kaiju genre of movies. Most of these stories feature a monster or two laying waste to the countryside, often acting as the deus ex machina that brings punishment down upon the evil-doers of the moment, while the citizenry cowers in its shelters. But in this one, despite the destruction of a number of cities world-wide, the monsters are actually the mechanism of a more comprehensive and comprehensible plot. Earth has been invaded by the Kilaak, a race of creatures which can take over humans through technological means. They’re Their goal? The usurpation of Earth for their own, unclear purposes.

As a means to that end, they surreptitiously take control of the several monsters penned up on an island named Monsterland, and send them out to destroy various foreign cities. Eventually, several meet at Tokyo, leaving it a wasteland. But the real action is taking place behind the scenes, as a various government agencies frantically try to discover what has happened to those who were in charge of Monsterland, and how to respond. In the climactic scene, humanity’s monsters are freed from alien control, stomp a space monster into the ground, and win the day.

To say this is a step up is true. To say the cheap special effects, obvious models, bad acting, and dubious story makes it worthwhile is a claim I shan’t be making. This is positively awful.

Only watch while drunk. Or working on it.

I’ve often thought that charitable motivations were one, or more, of the following:

1. Religious motivations. We give because God (or, more precisely, some guy who claims to have a special relationship with God) tells us to give.
2. Indirect gain motivations. We perceive a shortcoming in society, and by donating we believe we’ll help shore up the hole in the dike.
3. Reputational motivations. We give because it makes us look good to society at large, and then we reap the direct gains of looking charitable.

This article in Nautilus then attempts to explain the phenomenon of anonymous giving in the context of the third motivation, the reputational motivations category. Here’s a small bit from it, in the context of an episode from a TV series with which I’m not familiar, so I apologize for not expanding the context:

What’s intriguing about anonymous giving, and other behaviors apparently designed to obscure good traits and acts, like modesty, is that it’s “hard to reconcile with standard evolutionary accounts of pro-social behavior,” the researchers write. Donations fall under a form of cooperation called “indirect reciprocity.” “Direct reciprocity is like a barter economy based on the immediate exchange of goods, while indirect reciprocity resembles the invention of money,” Nowak wrote in his highly cited 2006 paper “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation.” “The money that fuels the engines of indirect reciprocity is reputation.” Donation evolved, in other words, because it granted a good reputation, which helped humans in securing mates and cementing alliances. But if that’s true, how did the practice of anonymous giving arise? The title of the new paper suggests a solution: “The signal-burying game can explain why we obscure positive traits and good deeds.”

The signal-burying game is one of the latest examples of scientists gaining insight into human behavior from game theoretic models and signalling theory. These games, the authors write, make sense of “seemingly counterintuitive behaviors by carefully analyzing which information these behaviors convey in a given context.” Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, said recently on Sam Harris’ podcast, “Waking Up,” “Signalling theory is probably the part of game theory I use most often. The idea there is: How do you credibly demonstrate what kind of organism you are through the signals you give out? And what makes those signals honest, and hard to fake, rather than easily faked, like cheap talk?”

The article is, of course, pop-science, which means they aren’t being properly general in their discussion. The impression I gain from the article is that the authors have accepted that everything is done for selfish reasons (libertarians would love that), and they’re attempting to rationalize anonymous giving, one of the potholes in their road to the compleat explanation of human behavior, by saying it doesn’t exist.

But of course it exists. While some might argue this is a self-negating statement, when I give I would give just as much anonymously as I do with my name attached – the latter is what happens because I mainly give by credit card, and since the government currently lets me take them against my taxes, I do that, too.

But while the latter is a well-known example of social-engineering, it doesn’t qualify to negate anonymous giving.

While I don’t doubt that some folks do engage in the behavior of interest in the article, which is “anonymous giving which is then leaked,” this is unsurprising in a culture where we also find rare, but documented, cases of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. The intellectual error in this article may be to fail to recognize there are non-biological as well as biological evolutionary reasons for behaviors. Rather than attempt to deny that anonymous giving occurs, it makes more sense to ask how it fits into the various categorizations of motivations for giving; we can use the categories I gave, above, or come up with your own.

In the first category, religious motivations, we have the most arbitrary and capricious reasons for immediate motivations, but they all boil down to God said be anonymous. This is the introduction of social evolutionary pressure which I mentioned, because it measures conformance, or lack thereto, of social strictures. The signaling mechanism indicating conformance might be the swelling of the coffers of the charity, singular or plural, in question, or the lack of apparently wealth of the donors. Just a trifle ironically, the various forms and reasons of anonymous giving are subject to the forces of social evolution; that is, those forms which lead to negative consequences for the members of the religion in question will become dead ends, while those leading to positive results will be propagated. This is an elementary observation. It’s simple to realize that there must be a congruency between positive for members of the religion and for the greater society in which it is partially or totally embedded, otherwise society will extinguish the particular phenomenon – or be extinguished.

In the second category, indirect gain motivations, anonymity may or may not serve the ultimate goal the betterment of society. However, I will point out that there are reasons for not advertising that one has the resources to contribute large amounts of wealth to a particular cause, such as importuning from other causes, worthy or, more often, not worthy. Then there’s outright criminal behaviors with negative impacts on the giver. This may be the strongest case for anonymous giving that I can think of – improving society, with it consequent positive results for the giver and their family relations, without signaling that one has wealth which may be gained by malefactors through negative acts. It makes anonymous giving seems like a more rational course of behavior than reputational giving, at least in relation to the perception of potential criminality in the society at large.

This, too, is a matter of social evolutionary pressure, especially if those who do not anonymous give are then eliminated from the idea pool. The idea pool is analogous to the gene pool, and consists of those ideas which are used to improve society. If we admit that those with more wealth are often those who most control the direction in which society will travel, then those victimized by criminals will lose that influence – and society will lose those ideas, for better or for worse.

And then there’s folks, like myself, who have no taste for gaudy & pretentious gestures. Not usually. I’m not as shy as when I was young, but I’m still not much for the limelight.

In any case, I’d take this article with more than a grain of salt.