Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Hill’s headline says it all:

Trump says Republicans should release their own transcripts in impeachment probe

President Trump suggested Sunday that Republicans should release their own versions of transcripts of interviews in the House’s ongoing impeachment inquiry.

In a tweet, Trump claimed House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) “will change the words that were said to suit the Dems purposes.” His tweet came as Schiff said Democrats were planning to release transcripts of the interviews held in the probe so far.

I think Steve Benen misses an important point in his analysis, as true as it may be:

It’s unlikely that anyone in the West Wing has reviewed the deposition transcripts, but dozens of House Republicans have participated in the behind-closed-doors process – claims to the contrary notwithstanding – and they’ve had an opportunity to let the president know how the developments have unfolded.

And given the weekend’s presidential tweets, Trump has apparently been told to expect some discouraging news.

There’s also a degree of irony hanging overhead: for weeks, the White House and its GOP allies have condemned the private nature of the impeachment inquiry and demanded more transparency. But now that transcripts are poised to be released, Trump appears to be scrambling to undermine public confidence in the materials – which Republicans used to be eager for us to see.

During the assorted depositions, some House Democrats told reporters that Republicans were actually lucky that that the discussions were unfolding in private. In light of Trump’s stress-tweeting, the president is starting to realize those Dems were right.

But in order for public perceptions of President Trump to change to be in accordance with the transcripts and their interpretations, there must be trust in the transcripts.

But this goes deeper than casting doubt on the transcripts. Over the years, I’ve occasionally taken mass emails from the conservative side of the political spectrum and turned them inside out to show an anti-government thread that runs through them. Whether or not they’re reflective of American authors writing them, or the result of a studied assault on American society by a foreign power, they function as a divisive wedge separating Americans from the government by blinding us to the fact that it’s not THE government, but OUR government, and we can and should participate in it.

By casting doubt on the transcripts, which are supposed to be faithful reproductions of the statements of witnesses, we see the sowing of doubt concerning the trustworthiness of the Republic’s elected lawmakers. Whether this is purely the result of Trump’s morality-free way of life, or if he’s doing so at the direction of foreign masters, I have no idea; all I know is that either hypothesis is consistent with what little we know.

But I do know that if the Republicans endorse this defense mechanism, then they’re directly contributing to the potential dissolution of the United States.

Trevor Paglen is a geographer and artist who works with what is still called artificial intelligence in his latter capacity, and so I found his viewpoint on AI, recently expressed in a review of his recent work in NewScientist (12 October 2019, paywall), to be interesting:

Paglen fears the way the word intelligence implies some kind of superhuman agency and infallibility to what are in essence giant statistical engines. “This is terribly dangerous,” he says, “and also very convenient for people trying to raise money to build all sorts of shoddy, ill-advised applications with it.”

“You’re STAFF,” she used to say.

Long time readers know that I’ve often expressed strong skepticism about the use of the term artificial intelligence in connection with what passes under that rubric. Intelligence is not an easy thing to define, and it’s become more and more clear that there is a wide spectrum of behaviors which may be defined as intelligence, such as recognition of self in a mirror, a capability which extends beyond humans to certain cetaceans and others. Anyone with a dog or cat, or an alpaca, knows there’s some intelligence in the critter.

But it seems to me that the use of the phrase artificial intelligence is, in itself, somewhat specious. Is there really a point to distinguishing the substrate of the intelligence? Does this accomplish anything beyond noting that it’s not biological, and thus possibly inferior? That would certainly be congruent with my sneaking hunch that people and corporations would still prefer to work with enslaved creatures that can hardly fight back, and that AI fills the bill.

I once touched in passing on an observation concerning when something is or is not the advanced form of programming in the context of ranked choice voting in Maine, and I’ll reiterate it:

When a programmer is given a task to solve, typically the steps that we’re encoding for the computer to follow are either well-known at the time of the assignment, or they can be deduced through simple inspection, or they can be collected out in the real world. An example of the last choice comes from the world of medicine, where early attempts at creating a diagnosis AI began with collecting information from doctors on how to map symptomology to disease diagnosis.

These steps may be laborious or tricky to code, either due to their nature or the limitations of the computers they will be run on, but at their heart they’re well-known and describable.

My observations of ML, on the other hand, is that ML installations are coded in such a way as to not assume that the recipe is known. At its heart, ML must discover the recipe that leads to the solution through observation and feedback from an authority entity. To take this back to the deferment I requested a moment ago, the encoding of the discovered recipe is often opaque and difficult to understand, as the algorithms are often statistical in nature.

I think that digital historians (and this dude claims he’s working on digital archaeology, so don’t laugh) will eventually classify algorithms based on whether the rules directing the program were concocted and encoded by the programmers or users, or if the program itself must deduce the rules based on behaviors and feedback from humans or entities that can validate the deduced rules. Note that the colloquial definitions of artificial intelligence, which require an approach to self-agency, even if it’s not achieved, are not really even relevant to this definition.

And this is important, as Paglen notes, because true self-agency isn’t just a game-changer, if it ever occurs, it’ll be a positive feedback loop. Engineers know that such loops amplify initially small effects in ways that are often out of control and destructive, while negative feedback loops damp down undesirable behaviors through detection and suppression.

An angry self-aware computer isn’t something we want to face, I suspect. Not only are there strong ethical conundrums to worry about, but, if it has access to weaponry, the concerns become existential.

Back to Paglen for another choice observation:

Asked what concerns him more, intelligent machines or the people who use them, Paglen answers: “I worry about the people who make money from them. Artificial intelligence is not about making computers smart. It’s about extracting value from data, from images, from patterns of life. The point is not seeing. The point is to make money or to amplify power.”

And they’re not concerned about ethics, I suspect, although occasionally a bit of noise about ethics leaks through. There’s gold up in those hills to be collected, and the slow poke gets nothing. Ethics, shmethics.

Just getting back to an old love – stuff in space. Here’s a pic of Mercury:

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Arid and lonely, and so so close to our primary. A certain ennui associates with it.

I was a little startled to read this bit from coverage of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s recent speech to coal mining interests:

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison railed against environmental protesters in a lunchtime speech on Friday, warning of a “new breed of radical activism” that was “apocalyptic in tone” and pledging to outlaw boycott campaigns that he argued could hurt the country’s mining industry.

The remarks were made to an audience at the Queensland Resources Council, an organization that represents peak mining interests in the northeastern Australian state. …

And appalls my Arts Editor, who comes from a publishing family.

More at Hellvetica.com.

In reference to a Trump anti-Witch Hunt party,

Supporters who showed up to the witch hunt hunt were gifted with orange caps featuring jack-o’-lanterns on the front, and “Keep America Great!” on the back. The crowd listed toward retirement age; instead of candy, there were tables of fruit and crudities, and a cash bar. There were plenty of MAGA hats and Trump T-shirts, but few actual Halloween costumes. [WaPo]

I can’t quite decide if they really meant crudities, or just typoed crudites. They both really work.

I present to you the chance to work on a desktop version of the Cray-1, by Craig Fenton:

As part two (see previous attempt) of my ongoing series in ‘computational necromancy,’ I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. This project falls purely into the “because I can!” category – I was poking around the internet one day looking for a Cray emulator and came up dry, so I decided to do something about it. Luckily, the Cray-1 hardware reference manual turned out to be useful enough that implementing most of this was pretty straightforward. The Cray-1 is one of those iconic machines that just makes you say “Now that‘s a super computer!” Sure, your iPhone is 10X faster, and it’s completely useless to own one, but admit it . . you really want one, don’t you?

Not really, but Wow. There’s software emulation, but this guy’s doing it in hardware using a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). They permit customized computer platform to be built in the field. I briefly looked at FPGAs for implementing some work project, of which I’ve mostly forgotten, but that work environment was too unstable to accomplish anything. A pity about that.

This was from the era when computers had presence. Here’s the old Cray-1A from Computing History:

They note:

In 1975 the 80 MHz Cray-1 was announced. Excitement was so high that a bidding war for the first machine broke out between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, the latter eventually winning and receiving serial number 001 in 1976 for a six-month trial. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) was Cray Research’s first official customer in July 1977, paying US$8.86 million ($7.9 million plus $1 million for the disks) [or roughly $38 million in 2018 dollars]. The NCAR machine was decommissioned in January 1979.

And here’s Fenton’s Civil War re-enactment piece:

Geek on!

[H/T Kevin M]

Twitter has decided to ban political ads, rather than wade into the quagmire of evaluating the truthfulness of such ads, as noted by NBC News:

Twitter announced Wednesday that it will no longer take political ads, a major step as tech companies work to deal with misinformation ahead of the 2020 election.

The ban will go into place in November.

In a series of tweets, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey laid out the company’s reasoning, focusing on the downside of political advertising when combined with digital advertising.

“While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions,” Dorsey tweeted.

“Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale,” Dorsey added.

I suppose I should be embarrassed that I didn’t even know that Twitter had advertising at all, but I’ll skip the pretense. I do not see much utility to Twitter as a societal entity, and so I don’t care. Rival Facebook’s policy?

Facebook is currently embroiled in a debate over its decision to allow political campaigns to push ads containing misinformation. The company has said it does not think it should be the arbiter of political speech, though it does stop companies and political committees from using false information in ads.

This all reminds me that I treated a topic I’d consider a close cousin of this one back in early 2018 as part of a conversation with a conservative friend of mine. The last post of that thread is here, but I’ll summarize because the posts are long. He argued that there really is no such thing as a free press dedicated to facts, but rather always-biased actors; to suggest that some news sources were worse than others, even those sponsored by national adversaries, was an error, and to suggest an audience cannot discern truth vs manipulation was an insult to the audience. I disagreed. If you want more, follow the above link and find your way to the beginning.

My point here, though, is that Dorsey has acknowledged two things:

1. The difficulties of policing paid political ads. Issues of facts vs partial facts vs lies, presentations, and even timing (think of Comey’s announcement concerning Clinton near the end of the last Presidential campaign) makes the task of policing such ads Herculean.
2. The influence of social media on the national discourse. Some folks may dismiss it, but it’s become apparent that social media can be used to polarize American society.

Social media hosted on the Internet is, unless special preparations are taken, naturally an international phenomenon. This means that, politically, both domestic and foreign powers can access them and use them for their own ends.

A domestic political power, although sometimes malignant, is usually acting in what it sees as the best interests of the nation.

As I noted in my conversation with my friend, no such assumptions can be made about a foreign power. Given that no one can be required to reveal their associations in the arena of social media, and the difficulty both technical and non-technical individuals to track down this obscured yet critical information, all the messages one receives on social media from people you don’t know are suspect. (Contrast this to the services offered, present and past tense, by traditional news media, the best of which considered it a requirement that they track down and report such associations to reader. The loss of such traditional new sources will continue to prove to be one of the most under-reported, yet important losses to American culture as the years pass.)

Now, as I understand it, Twitter’s ban is on paid advertising; non-commercial accounts can still spew as they wish. Non-commercial accounts only communicate with those that have signed up for such communications, and they lack, for the most part, impressive names to attract the unwary; an important exception is someone like President Trump. However, this should still put quite a dent in the reach of malevolent entities. And there’s tentative proof of this, as a certain Matthew Dowd has observed (I know nothing about Mr. Dowd, so I’m merely tentative so far as proof goes, but I assume it’s not hard to track down confirmations for the Twitter pro):

The two main entities attacking Twitter for its banning of political ads are: Brad Parscale/Trump campaign and Russian state television. Hmmm…..

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) October 31, 2019

So Putin’s pissed, eh? Given Special Counsel Mueller’s report on the Internet Research Agency (here’s a nice link sympatico with this post), this comes as no surprise.

It’s all about the butts:

Apparently that’s authentic, and it’s not uncommon to have a cat licking its butt in medieval art. More here at Sad And Useless, and thanks to my Arts Editor.

And it appears the GOP has walked right into the Speaker’s trap: as the resolution affirming the impeachment inquiry passes 232 (232 Democrats, 0 Republicans) to 196 (194 Republicans, 2 Democrats), with 4 not voting (3 Republicans, 1 Democrat).

You’ll hear a lot about polarization from third party analysts and about the allegedly illicit nature of the inquiry from the Republicans.

But here’s what it really comes down to:

The Republicans lack the natural patriotism required to protect the Republic.

Real patriots and leaders would have voted for the inquiry resolution, because that’s all it is. It’s not an impeachment vote. Much like the Merrick Garland debacle, the Republicans don’t even want to deal with the issue, despite the multiple offenses, alleged by the Democrats and the Special Counsel and the White House officials now giving depositions. They don’t want to even have the opportunity to affirm the innocence of their leader, despite all the evidence, just as they didn’t want to have to vote against Judge Garland, who came with recommendations from Republicans.

This absurd, absolutist loyalty to such a damaged and abusive President is the end result of the toxic team politics. This post becomes more applicable than ever to the terrible error of absolute and unending loyalty to the party and all of its apparatchiks.

And, in that sense, I suppose the Republicans never really had a chance with Pelosi holding the whip. She knew what they would do, and set the pitfall accordingly. Now she need only persuade the independent segment of the electorate that this does, indeed, constitute pure anti-patriotism.

In an update on the coal industry in Trump’s America, the number of coal companies to file for bankruptcy YTD is now up to five:

Murray Energy Corp., the private coal giant whose founder pushed the Trump administration for an overhaul of what it called “anti-coal” environmental policy, filed for Chapter 11 protection on Tuesday.

It’s the fifth coal company to land in bankruptcy court this year, in a rapidly shrinking industry that’s being squeezed out of the U.S. power market by cheaper options such as natural gas, solar and wind power.

As noted earlier, the coal industry is reaching the end of its rope, and it’s incumbent on the government to take note and … not save it. I don’t say that because it’s the free market thing to do, because we’re not talking about a free market when various energy sources have notoriously been getting government support for years, but because of the environmental concerns of powering a civilization overpopulating itself. Tomorrow’s generations do not deserve more damage inflicted on the environment upon which they will depend just because that would mean corporate survival for coal mining companies.

But the government should step in:

The legal maneuver also could imperil the solvency of a major pension fund that covers tens of thousands of coal miners and has renewed calls for the federal government to step in and help support the retirement payments.

“We’re talking about 82,000 miners who are going to lose their pensions, and we’re fighting this,” Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), whose state is home to large Murray Energy operations, said in a radio interview on West Virginia MetroNews on Tuesday.

And this is what the country is about – taking care of each other. I’d like to see the government step forward and keep those pensions funded.

On Monday of this week, the House Democrats, led by Speaker Pelosi, announced that there would be a vote for concerning the next phase of the impeachment inquiry. From the letter sent to the members of the House:

This week, we will bring a resolution to the Floor that affirms the ongoing, existing investigation that is currently being conducted by our committees as part of this impeachment inquiry, including all requests for documents, subpoenas for records and testimony, and any other investigative steps previously taken or to be taken as part of this investigation.

This resolution establishes the procedure for hearings that are open to the American people, authorizes the disclosure of deposition transcripts, outlines procedures to transfer evidence to the Judiciary Committee as it considers potential articles of impeachment, and sets forth due process rights for the President and his Counsel.

We are taking this step to eliminate any doubt as to whether the Trump Administration may withhold documents, prevent witness testimony, disregard duly authorized subpoenas, or continue obstructing the House of Representatives.

Nobody is above the law.

Naturally, the Republicans, who’ve been railing about the inquiry’s use of private depositions (as is normal in police investigations and previous impeachments), called for a vote on it (none are necessary, as they well know), and, in some cases, Administration officials who refused to obey the lawful orders and subpoenas issued by the House, are now celebrating a faux-victory, Representatives (there’s so many to pick from), Senators (such as Mark Meadows) and the President alike.

They should all be shaking in their shoes, instead.

Speaker Pelosi, she who, with Senator Schumer, bested Trump easily during the national shutdown, is hunting Republican scalps. She’s already demonstrated her command of tactics, as we saw. Now she and her colleagues in the Democratic House leadership have gathered enough information. Not necessarily to convict the President in the Senate, though, but to put the Republican’s nuts in a nutcracker.

Because now they will be faced with the opportunity to vote on the inquiry, and anyone’s who is interested in, or concerned about, American politics will be paying attention.

If the Republicans vote for the inquiry, the Republican base, still infatuated with President Trump, will take note and try to evict them from their seats.

If they vote against, the independents, the deciding force in many districts, will take note and vote against them.

The only Republicans who won’t be too worried are those that have already announced their retirement. There’s more than a couple of them, especially from Texas.

And then, for the Republican Senators, comes a trial in which they will face a similar, devastating question.

I believe Speaker Pelosi thinks that the conviction trial will fail, but in the 2020 elections the true fruits of the impeachment inquiry will be reaped as more House Republican seats turn Democratic, the Senate Republicans are reduced, possibly to minority status, and quite possibly the Presidency will be in Democratic hands as well, as the trial in the Senate terribly humiliates the President, exposing his chronic corruption and incompetency.

And if she scores a victory in the Senate trial, so much the better.

Erick Erickson of The Resurgent suggests we’re seeing the weaponizing of information:

I am sure people are behind these decisions, but I am also sure they know that stuff like this gets clicks. Clicks generate traffic. Traffic generates revenue. Hate clicks generate the most traffic and so the most revenue. News sites are now specializing in outrageous content that gets the most clicks and that most often is caused by hate clicks.

Those hate clicks then get shared online, fed into algorithms, and recirculated to increase the hate and increase the traffic. Clickbait headlines compound the issue and for good measure outrageous videos and cute puppies pile on too.

I have been thinking a lot about all of this after seeing two separate and unrelated, but very connected, pieces this past Friday. The first is this katherine Miller essay at BuzzFeed on how the 2010s broke our sense of time. The second is the Georgetown University Battleground survey where in a majority of voters think we are headed towards a civil war. In fact, the average voter thinks we are two-thirds of the way to the “edge” of a civil war.

Now I have no idea what the edge of a civil war is, but I do think we are at a moment of serious discontent in the country and I think it is directly related to Katherine Miller’s point about the algorithm. We no longer live chronologically online. We live algorithmically. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the rest of the internet now shows us content in a timeline designed to increase our interaction and increase our clicks. It has taken us out of chronology.

NewScientist’s Carl Miller (19 October 2019, paywall) is all over it and more. A couple of small excerpts:

A powerful illustration of that fragility came on 7 March 2019, when Facebook made an announcement. Among the billions of accounts, groups and pages that inhabit its site and its subsidiary, Instagram, it had identified a network of 137 engaged in what it termed “inauthentic” activity targeting the UK. Yet to the 180,000 people who followed all or part of this network, it would have seemed utterly unremarkable. Tedious even.

On the one hand, nationalists were sharing slogans. “Being a leftist is easy!” one meme said. “If anyone disagrees with you, call them a racist!” But others in the network pushed a different angle. One account called for the leader of the pro-Brexit party UKIP to be charged with hate crimes. Others drew attention to stories that LGBT Christians were being bullied because of their faith. The vitriol and polarisation would be familiar to anyone who has spent time on social media. The one key difference was that none of it was real. Neither the nationalists nor the anti-racism campaigners existed. Both were online masks worn by a single coordinated and hidden group.

This ecosystem of fake identities, false voices and deceptive groups was attempting to provoke broad social change. Its members pumped polarised messages to both ends of the political spectrum not to change anyone’s mind, but to confirm the beliefs their viewers already held. The aim was outrage: to make people angrier and angrier about the injustices they were already convinced were happening. To alter the way that people behaved and thought, they had lured them into a fake society that only existed online.

Having started using telecommunications and social media^[1] near its birth in the early 1980s, I found it was already a tired trope that telecommunications lacked several of the attributes we humans use to communicate, such as body language and sarcasm. Those days were simply text on a computer monitor; today’s Web is far more expressive, but it’s an expressiveness under the direct and total control of the entity pushing the message.

It’s really no surprise that right wing commentators such as Erickson as well as scientific researchers are discovering that the Web, used by so many as a free news source to the extent that it’s superseding and destroying the old news media which had spent decades building operations, reputations, and community trust^[2]. Whether you’re conservative or liberal, if you are a communicator and consider yourself to be, to use an old-fashioned word, earnest, then to discover you’re keeping unintended company with national adversaries for whom concepts such as truth and facts are no more important than lies is a trifle galling. For the earnest, the goal is not to win at all costs, but, in the best cases, to discover truth and uncover the best solution to whatever the problem du jour might be. Not all commentators adhere to such a credo. For some, ideology comes before reality; and, of course, perceiving reality is can be a very tricky business. But, for the best of commentators, pundits, and etc, the ideal is truth, not merely winning an argument.

This frustrating discovery leads to this observation from Miller:

Since the end of the cold war, the militaries of liberal democracies have been bigger, better funded and more powerful than the military of any country that wishes to do them harm. The dangers, however, are no longer physical. Now, coordinated groups can step right into the middle of the politics of any country with an online presence. And this poses a problem that no state can answer alone.

That is, if the liberal societies tear themselves apart at the instigation of authoritarian adversaries such as Russia, then who needs a big military? The authoritarian nation need merely do what it does best – repress its own citizens and sow dissension against its enemy. Simply keeping the enemy in a state of back-biting may be adequate to the needs of the authoritarian, depending on national or religious mythology.

While Facebook and other New Age publishing entities work on solutions – which seems fruitless to me – people like you and me need to take responsibility for how we treat information from the Web, especially free information. Miller presents a good starter list of rules, which I will shamelessly borrow in its entirety:

Blancmange:

Blancmange is a cold dessert that is made from milk, sugar, cornflour or corn starch, and flavouring, and looks rather like jelly. [Collins Dictionary]

Noted in “senate might do the right thing maybe,” Greg Fallis:

An interesting thing happened in the Senate recently. Senator Lindsay Graham, who has the moral courage of a blancmange, said he would ask the Senate for a resolution condemning the House impeachment inquiry. That wasn’t the interesting thing, of course. Since the death of his friend John McCain, Graham has morphed into Comrade Trump’s attack poodle — alternately snarling at Trump’s critics and wagging his tail in the hope that Trump will give him a treat.

Gabion:

A gabion (from Italian gabbione meaning “big cage”; from Italian gabbia and Latin cavea meaning “cage”) is a cage, cylinder, or box filled with rocks, concrete, or sometimes sand and soil for use in civil engineering, road building, military applications and landscaping. [Wikipedia]

Noted in a reply to a letter to Archaeology (November / December 2019, not available online, extracted here):

One [head]stone was rescued from a pile of rocks being used to build the gabions protecting the base of the minaret, another was photographed in a side valley – the locals who showed it to us did not want it moved – and two others were in the ministry storeroom for safekeeping – David Thomas

My feelings on impeachment are, I trust, apparent – I’m for it. Simply on the volume of lies, if nothing else. How about others?

Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare:

President Trump’s substantive defense against the ongoing impeachment inquiry has crumbled entirely—not just eroded or weakened, but been flattened like a sandcastle hit with a large wave.

It was never a strong defense. After all, Trump himself released the smoking gun early in L’Affaire Ukrainienne when the White House published its memo of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That document erased any question as to whether Trump had asked a foreign head of state to “investigate”—a euphemism for digging up dirt on—his political opponents. There was no longer any doubt that he had asked a foreign country to violate the civil liberties of American citizens by way of interfering in the coming presidential campaign. That much we have known for certain for weeks.

The clarity of the evidence did not stop the president’s allies from trying to fashion some semblance of defense. But the past few days of damaging testimony have stripped away the remaining fig leaves. There was no quid pro quo, we were told—except that it’s now clear that there was one. If there was a quid pro quo, we were told, it was the good kind of quid pro quo that happens all the time in foreign relations—except that, we now learn, it wasn’t that kind at all but the very corrupt kind instead. The Ukrainians didn’t even know that the president was holding up their military aid, we were told—except that, it turns out, they did know. And, the president said, it was all about anti-corruption. This was the most Orwellian inversion; describing such a corrupt demand as a request for an investigation of corruption is a bit like describing a speakeasy as an alcoholism treatment facility.

Steve Berman of The Resurgent thinks Trump is psychotic:

The impeachment of President Donald Trump is now near inevitable, as the Act 3 finale to his teleplay we call a presidency. We don’t know whether he will be removed. He might be. He doesn’t even know.

This is no different than Trump’s campaign. He never gave two turds over what he said, or who he maligned, or who he offended (other than his troll base, who cheered him for simply being a maligning, crass offender). He spoke what many were thinking, but never thought out to its logical conclusion. Trump didn’t know if he’d win, and was surprised as anyone when it happened. That’s an indictment of the left, the Democrats, and the horrible, horrible Hillary Clinton, who, with her husband, and her daughter, is Trump’s personal friend.

The impeachment offends the actual office of the President. It offends Congress, both Democrats and Republicans. It elevates blowhard hacks like Rep. Adam Schiff, who gets to conduct a Star Chamber and cause Republicans to behave like college brats occupying the dean’s office.

It’s a s**t show. But it’s Trump’s show, because he brought all this upon himself.

He would have it no other way. Trump’s presidency is art. He needs the big comeback. He wants to paint himself into a terrible cliffhanger, and have a deus ex-machina bail him out. On the issues themselves, Trump has more ears and cheers than the Democrats, who have flown the coop into the wild blue yonder of nuttiness. But the price of admission to his sane ideas is living through his opus.

His analysis has its attractions, although his antipathy towards a Democratic Party which is more or less middle of the road rather ruins it. However, I still incline towards the Russian asset theory, as it seems to be congruent with the facts we know.

Liberal Kevin Drum of Mother Jones:

Andrew McCarthy of National Review:

The “no quid pro quo” claim is misguided because it is largely irrelevant to an impeachment inquiry. As explained in part one, we are not here talking about a criminal court prosecution in which a prosecutor must prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. If a majority of the Democratic-controlled House was satisfied (or at least said they were satisfied) that an egregious abuse of power occurred, they could vote an article of impeachment even if a corrupt quid pro quo could not be proved to criminal-law specifications.

More important, the president’s camp should stick with and relentlessly argue his best point: The president’s actions in conducting Ukrainian relations do not establish an impeachable offense under the circumstances. Let’s consider the relevant issues.

McCarthy has the following points: “No harm, no foul” (laughably unethical), the Democrats didn’t give Ukraine any aid (so utterly irrelevant), “Assistance to U.S. investigations”, which frantically dances around the credible allegation that this is all about asking a foreign power to take actions damaging a political rival, “Investigating Vice President Biden’s influence over Ukraine,” for which there is no evidence of corruption, but may be the best of the bunch, “Investigating Hunter Biden and Burisma corruption,” which McCarthy admits is a problematic defense, and “The Shadow State Department,” in which he attempts to justify Rudy Guiliani’s interference with United States’ relations with Ukraine.

McCarthy has certainly mastered the art of writing authoritatively, but it seems every time I read him, he’s writing on a narrow subject beyond my expertise, or it’s impossible to take him seriously due to spinning. And I’m troubled that he doesn’t see the cumulative misdeeds of Trump as a more than adequate reason to throw Trump under the bus.

Andrew Sullivan:

… close to 50 percent or so of the country supports impeachment and/or removal — far higher than previous polling for Nixon (until the summer of 1974, when he quit) or Clinton (ever). And the particular nature of the Trump offense — a secret attempt to pressure a foreign government to influence U.S. elections on the president’s behalf — is smack-dab in the center of the high-crime category the Founders were obsessed with. I’ve not been an impeachment fan, even as I have regarded the president as mentally ill and characteristically tyrannical from the get-go. I was long unconvinced by the Russia “collusion/conspiracy” claims, saw impeachment as inapplicable in most cases of executive wrongdoing, and only switched sides this year when evidence of obstruction of justice in the Mueller report became undeniable. But the Ukraine matter? If you were to look up an impeachable offense in a metaphorical dictionary, you’d see Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas as illustrations.

I think Sullivan sees the situation clearly, but then he’s never been a Trump or GOP fan.

Greg Fallis’ post title is all you need to know:

buy me some peanuts & impeach the motherfucker already

But Fallis almost feels sorry for Trump:

Last night he attended game five of the World Series. He’d spent most of the day being celebrated and celebrating himself for having given the order for a Delta Force team to kill or capture Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS. Clearly, he expected that celebration to continue at the ballpark.

It didn’t.

Some fans displayed a large banner reading “Impeach Trump”. A group of veterans behind home plate held up signs stating “Veterans for Impeachment.” When the park introduced some members of the military, the crowd began to cheer — but when the introduction included Comrade Trump, the cheering immediately turned to boos. Loud boos, measured at around 100 decibels. That’s just slightly less loud than a chainsaw. And if that wasn’t enough, a large segment of the crowd began chanting “Lock him up! Lock him up!”

Why would Trump, knowing, if disbelieving, polls showing his low approval ratings, think he would be universally applauded? Because he’s transactional. His latest act was a great achievement, and so now everyone should love him, that’s the transactional way.

Well, sorry. We all have memories. One good act – almost befouled by the pullout from Syria, reportedly – doesn’t make up for everything else.

Enough for now.

A reader doesn’t mind the government getting its fingers into consumer computing devices:

I think this is a novel idea with real potential. Most pedophiles are not going to be hackers, or even very computer literate. They instead will be like most of the populace, barely able to operate their devices. 😉 It’s far better than nothing, and also better than having my cryptography intentionally hamstrung and backdoors.

Unfortunately, it’s not the average or even median technical competency of a pedophilic community that matters – it only takes one smart, methodical operator who puts together a solution and gets the word out for most of the rest to find and use that solution.

There are smart criminals. Think of Jeffery Epstein, who committed suicide in police custody after repeated accusations of what amounted to pedophilia. He was reportedly quite bright, although undisciplined and not inclined to respect almost any rules.

The spread of a capability to evade detection of their anti-social activities is the result of computers, which automate many things that previously afflicted humanity – for good or ill.

The Administration announced the assassination, if you will, of Islamic State top leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Given the barbarity and authoritarianism of the Islamic State, it seems well-deserved, although to those given to favor such a way to organize a nation, his tactics may have seemed justified, and his death a blow.

But, and I say this with a degree of sadness, what came first to mind was this:

In the coming days, how will the information from non-Administration sources deviate from the information delivered by President Trump and his minions?

The video in the above link seems to be only part of the announcement – this CNN post has a link to a longer announcement. But that was my immediate reaction, and I think it’s sad that we have an Administration that is so untrustworthy that I look forward more to behind-the-scenes information than the official announcements.

Here’s looking at you, kid.
Image source: WWF, supposedly.

Asian elephants in Sri Lanka like to eat crops, which, despite local respect for elephants, leads to conflict. The obvious question gets an elegant answer, as detailed in NewScientist (19 October 2019, paywall):

[Zoologist Lucy King of the University of Oxford] has since designed elephant-deterring beehive fences. With 15 beehives and 15 dummy hives strung along a 300-metre wire, the fences are elevated so that people and cattle can pass safely beneath. But if an elephant tries to push through, the wire swings, triggering a flurry of buzzing wings and stings. King’s studies suggest the bees are an effective deterrent. The fences reduce crop raids by 80 per cent, on average, which explains why they have now been installed at 62 sites in 20 countries.

King is currently experimenting with introducing the concept in Sri Lanka, where human-elephant conflict is particularly intense. She found that Indian bees are more placid than African ones, reducing the effectiveness of the fences. But beehive fencing could still be a worthy investment for Sri Lankan farmers, who would enjoy a reduction in elephant raids, ensure their crops are well pollinated and get honey to sell. As King says: “This is the only fence that, once you build it, makes money for you.”

It’s a delightful idea, and sounds like it works. No unintended consequences, beyond perhaps the honey, are mentioned, and getting the hives near the crops might be a plus for the bees as well.

Now I’m wondering if putting the hives up fifteen feet makes them more vulnerable to their predators …

The cleome and nasturtium gave it up in the last few days, and anomalous hollyhocks are beginning to fade.

A venting, nothing to see here:

For evidence of the ongoing failure of GOP predictions and the Laffer Curve, it’s harder to get more graphic than Steve Benen’s graph of budget deficits:

Yep, the 2019 Federal Budget Deficit grew again, by 26%, in grievous defiance of GOP orders predictions that it shrink because they cut taxes.

It’s also worth savoring those Golden Clinton Years when the budget was in the black and the economy was roaring, before the spendthrift Republicans^[1] took over in 2001 and forced it back into the red, followed by the Great Recession, caused by Republican deregulation.

Now, as we near a chronic and, so far, unforced^[2] annual deficit of $1 trillion, we’ll be either exploring the new territory of how monstrous deficits and possible looming government defaults on the loans financing the deficit play out.

But what about inflation? Here’s a chart which should remove the influence of inflation, I think:

As we can see, the deficit as a percentage of GDP jumps under the Trump Administration. Interestingly, though, is this:

The drop in percentage would appear, to this non-economist, to be a combination of the growth in GDP and a some change in the Federal budget. Trading Economics has a handy chart on GDP growth, which is no where near it needs to be for the Laffer Curve to work:

It would probably need to be closer to 6% or even better for the deficits to shrink, rather than rapidly expanding. The Federal Budget isn’t shrinking either, as the St. Louis Fed makes clear:

The above lacks the 2019 data; Wikipedia suggests it will come in at $4.407 trillion, while the 2018 data show at $4.1 trillion.

So why the deficits? The failed 2017 tax reform. From Trading Economics comes this rather brutal chart:

Once we let go of the fairy tale that the Laffer Curve will always kick in and save your ass, the twin events of the 2017 tax bill becoming law and the elevation of the annual Federal deficit comes as no surprise. Anyone who has struggled with a budget will understsand it. And with the Republicans in control during the critical period, all responsibility is dumped on them.

Party of financial responsibility, indeed.

¹ I should start a petition on change.org advocating the Republican Party change its name to the Spendthrift Republican Party.

2 Certainly, Bush and Obama ran larger deficits for a couple of years, but it’s worth noting they were fighting the Great Recession using the time honored tool of pumping money into the economy. Trump was handed a great economy and pumped up the deficit for no good reason. To ignore these facts is to mark yourself an idiot. Yeah, I’m crabby today.

Arrant:

1. downright; thorough; unmitigated; notorious:
   an arrant fool.
2. wandering; errant. …

Few people know that large numbers of the splendid seamen who man our North Sea fishing fleets are arrant Cockneys.

THE CHEQUERS|JAMES RUNCIMAN [Dictionary.com]

I used it in this post.

Deb’s favorites:

Brilliant in the morning sun.

The Wichita Eagle had a chance to interview home-state boy made, uh, pick your adjective Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and threw a little salt in a wound:

Eagle: And what good really is the word of the U.S. in light of the president’s treatment of the Kurds? Has that undercut U.S. credibility?

Pompeo: The whole predicate of your question is insane. The word the United States– I’ll give you a good example– the word of the United States is much more respected today than it was just two and a half years ago. The previous administration in Syria, where you asked the question earlier, the previous administration said, ‘Boy, if you use chemical weapons that’s going to be bad,’ and the president drew a red line, President Obama drew a red line. He then duly ignored it. This president said, ‘If you use chemical weapons, I’m going to take action.’ And we fired Tomahawk missiles in to take down that threat to let them know that the cost of violating this, this massive violation of human dignity, these massive human rights violations by using chemical weapons, that there would be a cost imposed for that. And when the President said he would do it. He did. I see that all across the world, we make clear the things that we will do. We also make clear the things that we’re not prepared to do. I think it’s important for people to understand that other countries have to step up too. Other countries must share the burden for not just the security of the world, but security for their own countries. So this president’s been very clear that we have high expectations for how other countries, not just our European partners, but countries in Africa, countries in the Middle East, countries throughout Asia, who depend on the Strait of Hormuz to be up, they need to, they need to do that for themselves as well. And when they do, America will continue to be an enormous partner. I get a chance to travel the world. And when I show up, people want to meet the American secretary of state. They don’t want to meet Mike. They want to meet the American secretary of state who they know can work alongside them to deliver security for their people in an important way.

And now follow-up! Egad, that much should Whoever the interviewer was, they should have gone with:

Eagle: And what third-party information, such as polls and interviews, do you have to verify your claim that the Trump Administration has more respect from around the world than the Obama Administration?

Because, of course, he offered mere eyewitness accounts, which is both a poor way to collect data and, not to insult the Secretary or anything like that, but could be falsified.

An opportunity lost.