Monthly Archives: November 2018

A while back I ran across some advocacy for better secure communications for consumers, which reminded me that this makes some law enforcement professionals uncomfortable, since that closes off a source of information. In particular, the suggestion that encrypted communications be the default, rather than an option. So I couldn’t help but laugh when I read this Lawfare article by Susan Landau:

Trump’s lax approach to security presents an unusually stark problem. But unsecured communications have long been a problem for U.S. national security. In 1972, for example, the Soviet Union’s eavesdropping led to the “The Great Grain Robbery”: the eavesdropping of communications on calls between American wheat farmers and the Department of Agriculture that enabled the Russians to covertly buy record wheat at low prices, thus causing a U.S. grain shortage eighteen months later. …

Imagine if instead of the U.S. government fighting the spread of strong cryptography, the NSA and FBI had pushed for cell phones that would always encrypt communications end-to-end. This would make it far harder to intercept communications. It would also mean that every legislator and legislative aide, every chief executive, every financial officer—indeed any person who had information that would be useful to an eavesdropper, whether it be China, Russia, an industrial competitor or a criminal organization—would necessarily use phones that routinely secured their conversations. And importantly, it would protect the president’s phone calls even if he refused to listen to the officials begging him to use a secure method of communication.

While end-to-end encryption would make it much harder for United States to listen in to what the bad guys were saying, such use of end-to-end encryption wouldn’t mean the end of wiretapping. High-value targets would still be the subject of targeted, sophisticated hacks. For high-value targets like the president, this is still a concern.

That weakening our weaponry against criminals and national adversaries would have paradoxically made us more secure in this particular nightmare situation just makes me laugh.

It helps that I’m mildly exhausted today.

These are some of the same leaves as those starring in the Happenstance Leaves post, but arranged by my Arts Editor. Think of her as the Director, storming at her players for not doing their part.

I’ve been meaning to post something on this, but with a computer replacement coming up and what may be a fan burning out on the old computer, it’s been a bit chaotic. But Trump’s inadequate response to recent incidents, such as the pipe bombs and shootings, indicate voters have once again been reminded of his inadequacies:

That’s quite a jump in disapproval, and drop in approval. This is also from 6 days ago. Tomorrow is the release of the next poll, which should be interesting.

But will it tell us anything about the Senate and House races? How important is he, and will his drop in approval also reflect in voting for those races? Trump, being unique as a Presidential demagogue who inspires love and loathing, is a bit of a cipher.

But we’ll see in a couple of days.

Long time readers know that, from time to time, for my own amusement I dissect propaganda email that comes to me (and isn’t diverted to Spam), but this one is actually easier than most.

A quick look at Snopes.com indicates they could find no indication that Thomas ever said that, and WikiQuote notes it as a possible misattribution.

If that’s where it ends, I’d not bother. The “scare” stuff at the end is childish. But in my minute of research, I did notice whoever sent this mail around in an attempt to scare the conservative base into line chose to strip out one interesting fact.

Thomas was a Presbyterian minister.

The religious angle on socialism has always been a troublesome aspect of the entire “free enterprise Christianity” embraced by many conservatives, extremist or not. As an agnostic, my impression is that Jesus Christ was against any economic or governmental system which resulted in injustice, and it’s not hard to make the case that free enterprise, pursued with single-minded zest and the misunderstanding that it’s all about the money, would be given unfavorable consideration by JC.

Your mileage may vary.

But the fact that Thomas’ status as a minister has been stripped out of this mail certainly is part of the entire “conservative” (aka right-wing extremists currently in charge of the GOP) narrative control which seeks to manipulate the thought processes, and thus opinions, of the conservative base, rather than serving up all the facts and letting them come to their own conclusions.

It’s dishonest, and it doesn’t matter if liberals or conservatives or right-wing extremists do it.

I just happened to stumble across this little composition of leaves while raking:

The beauty of detritus.

Gotta love this from run26two on The Daily Kos.

So inevitable, so awful you shouldn’t watch. But you do. I was weak this morning.

That’s Marc Thiessen.

But his latest WaPo column, in which he makes the mistake of trying to boost President Trump by comparing him with his own Party’s arguably biggest mistake, President Nixon, is useful in that it’s diagnostic of the many problems of the current iteration of the Republican Party. He even provides a lovely summary of some of its Holy Tenets:

So, in many ways the Trump presidency is like deja vu all over again. Except that Trump is, at least for conservatives, arguably a much better president than was Nixon. While Nixon had a mixed record in Supreme Court appointments, Trump has, so far, given us two of the strongest conservative justices in modern history. While the chairman of Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers, Herb Stein, bragged that, under Nixon, “probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy than in any other presidency since the New Deal,” Trump has given us a historic regulatory rollback. While Nixon boasted over dramatic cuts in defense spending, Trump has enacted historic increases. While Nixon’s 1969 tax reform increased taxes, Trump’s reforms have cut them. While Nixon withdrew U.S. troops from Vietnam, Trump has unleashed our forces against the Islamic State and has halted the withdrawal from Afghanistan begun during the Obama administration.

Nixon also showed us that our constitutional system of checks and balances works, and that if the president crosses a constitutional line, the rule of law will prevail. And while Nixon resigned over Watergate, we still don’t know how the Russia inquiry will turn out. It may well be that there was no criminal conspiracy with Russia. Even knowing what we know about Watergate, the United States would not have been better off with George McGovern as president, just as we would not be better off today with Hillary Clinton in the White House.

Shall we extract the Holy Tenets?

1. A conservative XYZ is a good XYZ. A corollary to the entire cancerous team politics tenet which I’ve discussed at nauseating length, it’s wrong on so many levels in the SCOTUS scenario, as well as just about any other. I’ll list just a few for brevity’s sake: It suggests the judiciary should be politicized; that political orientation is far more important than judicial competency; and that, if you don’t like the judicial results, just replace the bleeding judges. That last is itself the result of the Holy Tenet that the Party Can Never Be Wrong Because God Is Behind It. So sorry, sometimes you’re just in the wrong. Fact is, liberals and conservatives can both screw things up, or get them right. A sober commentator wouldn’t actually be mentioning Gorsuch (IJ) or Kavanaugh for at least 5 years. Gorsuch has barely had a term, and Kavanaugh? Two weeks.
2. Regulation is always bad. It’s become the most dangerous refrain in American Republican politics, with apologies to Hillary. Regulation impairs corporate profit. Well, yes, sometimes it does. It’s helpful to return to the basics of society and remember that profit is a goal of the private sector, not the public (or government) sector. Government exists as a protective mechanism for society, from outside invaders, and, just as importantly, from internal mistakes. The are typically human behaviors which negatively impact other members of society. In the intentional category we can dump most crime, and in the unintentional category we can put a few crimes, pollution, and other behaviors such as reckless driving. In the broadest sense of the word, regulation is how government goes about its business in the internal mistakes category.

   Regulation, like any tool, is neither good nor bad in and of itself. Is a hammer good or bad? Depends on its use. Same with regulation. If Thiessen thinks regulation is always bad, let’s get rid of all murder statutes and see how well society works out in the long run. Yeah, nod along with me.

   But, as noted, Republicans use the word regulation to mean regulation of the private sector, and then claim that’s bad because it impairs corporate profit. The trick here is to refuse to accept the implicit metric of profit as the appropriate measure of regulation. It’s not. If you have the time and attention span – most of us don’t – go read my link concerning sectors of society. While I don’t think I ever addressed metrics explicitly in one place, it’s implicit. We often, mistakenly, judge the success of a company by its profitability. But here’s a good party (the one with horse ovaries) question for the businessman loudly opining what government needs him to run it right: What’s an appropriate profit margin for government? Yeah, he’ll sputter, because his metric – his favorite, all-important metric – has no application in the context of the government.

   I spoke of brevity earlier, so I’ll cut this short: discovering the metrics of government is one of the most important jobs of the citizen, because only then will they know if their elected officials and their functionaries are doing a good job. Strong military? Sure. An effective, uncorrupt police? Yeah. No regulation so all the companies are more profitable? Gotcha. Monitor and protect the lakes, the rivers, and, while you’re at it, CO₂ content of the air. That’s the duty of government.

3. The military needs more money. We’re used to the old trope, a Republican Holy Tenet, that Democrats are weak on defense and the Republicans are strong, but that’s just propaganda – and damaging propaganda at that. It’s a rare politician, wannabe or paid, that isn’t for more money for Defense.

   Defense serves an existential purpose, yes. But the military does not produce things of general consumer use, and the research required to develop new military war machines only develops useful things for the consumer by accident, and, at least as of 40 years ago when I did the research, not at the same rate, per $, as does the space program. My point? I recall in my libertarian reading that economists generally see Defense as a drag on the economy, not a general boost. Sure, start a new munitions plant and it’s good for the town its in – until it shuts down and its toxic waste must be found and dealt with. But that doesn’t translate as good for the country. Those people could have been making, say, smartphones, rather than bullets. Bullets that sit around and do little (but see fleet in being).

   So the trick is to determine the proper level of funding for the military, along with the composition of the military (Dreadnaughts? No. Best bombers? Yes.) For me, the fact that we outspend the next 7 countries suggests we’re overspending. China, three times larger than us, is #2, and has about a third of our budget.
   We’ve been at war for nearly 20 years now, and if you want to talk about drains on the economy, the military is a big one. Both Democrats and Republicans generally favor perpetually bigger military budgets, but Nixon understood that the military was a drag – and that’s why he celebrated being able to cut the Defense budget. Perhaps we should follow that example, rather than follow the Holy Tenet.

4. Taxes are evil. No, simply no. There’s the Kansas debacle. There’s the thought experiment – if taxes are evil, let’s drive them to zero and bask in the paradise of … ooops, you’re dead because a murderer got you. No cops or prison guards.

   Government services must be paid for, period end of sentence. At its heart, that’s a conservative (but not Republican) tenet. This has economic ramifications (see: Kansas debacle, above), for, if the services are inadequate, then corporations have trouble operating, and those that can will withdraw.

   Borrowing, to a point, works, but many economists are worried that the current level of Federal borrowing is distorting the economy, which makes it harder to predict and manage. I’m not an economist, but I know enough not to be captive to the “government budget” is the same as a “family budget” false analogy.

   I’ll stop here on this topic because the link above also discusses very briefly the application of bell curves to taxation levels, so go read that if interested.

5. We could have won Vietnam. Only if we wanted to be barbarians. ISIS, on the other hand, is relatively weaker, with a weaker ideology. Beware simplistic false comparisons. The military, under Obama’s direction, had them on the run, and fortunately Trump didn’t meddle overmuch. The real trick is to keep them extinguished.
6. Nixon was better than McGovern. An unanswerable question. Maybe McGovern would have been wonderful. But it betrays the Party’s own insecurity when it’s forced to claim its criminal President was better than a hypothetical President.
7. Hillary’s evil! Sad, sad, sad. She’s evil, and yet every investigation of her has turned up … nothing. Investigations led by hostile Republican leaders with prosecutorial chops … nothing. Nothing nothing nothing. She’s been investigated something like ten times. Nothing, wash, lather, repeat, nothing.

   Her real offense? Her husband, President Bill Clinton, was a better politician than all of them put together. I never liked Bill, though I voted for him twice as a political independent, but he was undeniably better than his opponents, be they named Dole or Gingrich or Bush.

   So when Thiessen claims we’re better off with Trump than Hillary, it pays to remember that virtually every professional group associated with the government, including national security groups, endorsed Hillary in the 2016 campaign, not Trump, and Trump has turned out to be a national security disaster.

   It pays to remember that Hillary has been a success at just about everything she’s worked at, with the notable exception of the Clinton health plan.

   It pays to remember that Trump has been a failure at just about everything he’s worked at, with the notable exception of his TV show, The Apprentice.

   So, if you’re an intellectually honest person, do you go with the guy with failure to his name and lies as his background, or the woman with success to her name and no scandals attached, despite determined efforts by the Republicans to attach them?

   Thiessen’s shallow intellectual roots are showing when he states this Holy Tenet.

A Party built, in part, on the above tenets isn’t viable over the long term. Ossified, paranoid, and using deceit to keep its members in line, the Republican Party will need to be burned down before it can be rebuilt into a respectable governance candidate.

And that’s bad for America. The leaders of the Republican Party have really let the Country down.

Let’s hope the rebuilding starts on Tuesday.

Mervert:

Man who makes unwanted sexual advances on a mermaid or actor-portrayed mermaid. [Paraphrased from The Latest Show With Stephen Colbert tonight]

Looking at the two sides in the imminent midterms reveals how each side is trying to portray the election to the best advantage. Representing the left is the unsurprising Kevin Drum:

The RNC created—and Donald Trump pinned to the top of his Twitter feed—an appallingly racist ad today that accuses Democrats of “letting in” Luis Bracamontes, a man who killed two Northern California deputies four years ago while in the country illegally. It’s widely viewed as Willie Horton 2.0, except maybe worse. So have any elected Republican officials denounced it? So far, I can find three:

• Sen. Jeff Flake
• Rep. Mike Coffman
• Gov. John Kasich

Don’t @ me if I got this wrong. Maybe there are four! Or even five!

The level of desperation this shows is palpable. Trump and the Republican Party keep pulling the race lever harder and harder, but it’s not working. Trump went from 800 troops at the border to 5,000 troops to 15,000 troops. He called the migrant caravan a thousand miles away an “invasion.” He claims he’s going to end birthright citizenship even though he knows perfectly well it’s part of the Constitution and he can’t do it.  …

Sadly, [the Republicans are] still going to get a lot of votes. But common decency, which took a vacation in 2016, is finally going to win on Tuesday. Trump is making sure of it.

On the conservative side, Kyle Smith on National Review has decided to play counterpoint to President Trump’s frantic attempts to stir up stark fear with a Fat, Dumb, & Happy routine:

Today is nothing like as fraught a moment, or it shouldn’t be. The U.S. is facing the usual, perennial problems such as dealing with the cost and availability of health care and massive entitlements-fueled debt, but problems specific to our moment are few. The main source of angst and anger appears to be the personality of the president. That’s hardly comparable to the importance of the Iraq War or the 2008 financial crisis or even an ordinary recession.

It’s an unpopular message, but 2018 isn’t a particularly eventful year. At the moment, things are more or less okay. Beneath the surface, there is bipartisan agreement on this. The Republicans don’t have a legislative agenda. The Democrats revealed in a breathless New York Times interview that their big plan after retaking the House is a package of political-process ideas aimed almost exclusively at bolstering the fortunes of the Democratic party, such as Voting Rights Act adjustments and more campaign-finance disclosure requirements. It can’t be the case that 2018 is both an apocalyptic moment for America and that these are the central issues.

He thinks – or would have his readers think, which can be a very different thing – that in a decade, historians will scratch their heads over this election’s uproar in puzzlement. He’s basically pouring oil on the water^[1].

There’s a couple of problems with his essay, though.

First of all, he’s fixated on the present. There’s no acknowledgment that the Presidential and Republican activities of today might damage the United States.

There’s not even a mention of it.

It’s difficult to understand this omission if you’re a thinking person of an innocent nature. I’ve had the latter surgically removed, so I attribute this to attempting to take the minds of the Republican base off the more disturbing aspects of the entire conservative movement.

But it is incumbent on the thinking person to be looking to the future, to be heading off disasters before they occur. Whether it’s anthropocentric climate change, environmental damage incurred while in pursuit of yet more corporate profits, or the next war, to simply make an assessment of how we’re doing now and claiming there’s nothing going on just doesn’t cut it.

If Smith were presenting a serious essay, he would have talked about at least some of the following: the suddenly mountainous national debt; the fact that our annual deficit went to zero during the Clinton years, and then roller-coastered back up during the years the Republicans dominated the Legislature, and what that may imply about the quality of the legislators involved; the future of our judiciary, with a collection of sub-par butts in judicial seats; the future of a democracy in which any media outlet reporting news in such a way as to infuriate President Irrelevancy (yes, I’m in a crabby mood) is demonized and labeled illicit; and documented Presidential mendacity, self-interest, and possible autocratic intents.

To name but a few relevant topics.

Smith also indulges in some convenient falsehoods. For example, “The Republicans don’t have a legislative agenda,” is fairly blatant, as Senator McConnell has stated, without obfuscation, that, should the Republicans control the Legislature again, the social-net programs will be on the chopping block.

“massive entitlements-fueled debt“: Blaming the debt on entitlements is long-time conservative kant which, unfortunately for Smith, doesn’t work when one considers, again, the Clinton achievement of a zero annual deficit. If entitlements, a serious subject, were the problem then that achievement would remain a Slick-Willy Wet Dream, but instead it exists, and is the elephant in the Republican Parlor.

And we all know this. It’s not hard to come up with this reasoning, really it’s not. Start with the Afghanistan war which, unavoidable or not, was irresponsibly financially managed by the Bush Administration, the completely unnecessary Iraq War, again irresponsibly financially managed by the Bush Administration, a notoriously spend-happy Congress of 2001, 2003, and 2005, “tariff wars”, and now the tax reform bill which is verifiably failing to perform as advertised, and we have a far more plausible scenario for skyrocketing deficits and debt: a failure to raise taxes responsibly. As has been noted time after time for at least the last 20 years, the GOP-dominated Congress has simply shrugged and “kicked the can down the road” when it came to deficits. Blaming a military-happy Congress on both sides of the aisle is far more accurate than faith-based blather about entitlements.

That’s why that’s a lie.

There you go, Drum and Smith. One believes this is a very important mid-term, if only the leftists can get the disinterested youth to vote, while the other thinks everything’s hunky-dory.

Curmudgeonly and Angry at all the lying, or Fat, Dumb, and Happy. Which works better for you?

¹ For those readers unfamiliar with nautical history, occasionally big ships with lots of oil reserves will dump that oil into the sea when the seas are too choppy for some activity. I doubt they do it very often these days, but I’ve read of it being done during World War II.

Megan McArdle says what I suspect a lot of people have been thinking:

When Rolling Stone magazine in 2014 published an account of a gang rape at the University of Virginia, some reporters, including me, nursed private doubts about its too-cinematic details — but, like me, they were exceedingly wary of publicly casting doubt.

Even after Richard Bradley, the editor of Worth magazine, finally raised questions about Rolling Stone’s account on his personal blog, even the writers who declined to attack him for “blaming the victim” treated them gingerly. A lot more reporting was required before we were willing to state outright what we’d suspected privately — that “Jackie,” the alleged victim, had made the whole thing up. …

But we know that’s not possible. High-profile false rape accusations such as the ones in the Rolling Stone article reflect the reality that between 2 and 10 percent of rape allegations are provably false; the FBI says 8 percent of forcible-rape allegations are “unfounded.” The number of false accusations that can’t be proved false necessarily pushes that number even higher. To act as if this weren’t the case borders on wishful thinking, and it comes at a cost.

NBC wasn’t the only media outlet that seems to have relaxed its normal standards during the Kavanaugh hearings. The New Yorker, with exceptionally weak evidence, ran allegations of his sexual misbehavior in college. The reporters no doubt believed they were making it easier for victims to be heard. But airing insufficiently vetted allegations encourages the public to distrust the media. Actual victims won’t be heard if no one’s listening.

If it’s true that certain media organizations charged into the Kavanaugh mess without having all their ducks in a row, then it’s a lot of sinus-infection snot on their heads. But, as President Trump himself observed at the beginning of his term, I don’t think we have to make this into some “liberal media organizations” out to get Kavanaugh. No, Trump had it right at the beginning.

It’s all about the money.

Rather than insert my usual rant about the problems of importing other societal sector operationality into the free press, I’ll just point you at my dead horse.

But if this is true, someone should be fired with a big, high fastball.