Category Archives: Uncategorized

Note to Attorney General Barr: If you’re really just digging around, hoping to save the President from onrushing doom, and have no real evidence, you may want to pay attention to Maddowblog, it’s eponymous heroine, and Steve Benen, her author and scribe of message:

But Team Trump is going considerably further, firing prominent U.S. officials who did nothing wrong, taking steps to strip some officials of their security clearances, and now opening a criminal inquiry into the work of American law enforcement and intelligence professionals.

The Republican president has long hoped to turn the Justice Department into a political weapon, to be used against his perceived enemies. It’s the stuff of banana republics, and there’s reason to be concerned about it happening in the United States right now.

Postscript: For the sake of historical context, Rachel noted at the end of last night’s show that that Americans have lived through a scandal in which a U.S. attorney general was sent to prison for misusing the powers of the Justice Department, using federal law enforcement as part of a political scheme to benefit the president.

Something I’ve learned from fencing: trying really, really, REALLY hard to do something often results in over-reaching, loss of balance, and disaster.

If Barr thinks he has strong evidence of something wrong, fine. Investigate it. Find something, even better. It may not be fun to be corrected, but I adhere to the view that truth is better than lies.

But if he’s indulging in some misguided loyalty to a President who has set historical records, unlikely to ever be beat, for lying, boasting, and grasping, then he may find himself occupying a jail cell next to Trump himself.

Your allegiance is to the Constitution, not to the President, Mr. Attorney General Barr.

CNN has a report on a Trump/Federalist Society-nominated-and-confirmed Judge James Ho, and why he believes mass shootings occur:

One of President Donald Trump’s appointees to the federal bench issued a controversial opinion this week with a startling opening line that amounted to a ringing endorsement of law enforcement and a dire warning to its critics.

“If we want to stop mass shootings, we should stop punishing police officers who put their lives on the line to prevent them,” James Ho of the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals said in an opinion released Monday.

Ho, a former solicitor general of Texas, served in the Justice Department as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and then as an attorney-advisor to the Office of Legal Counsel. He is a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and was nominated in 2017 and confirmed 53-43 to the conservative-leaning appeals court.

Judge Ho has an impressive academic record, but his dissent, starting on Page 4 of the opinion, fails to bring a full and convincing argument to bear to support his contention.

First of all, it’s confined to the incident at hand. This may be a requirement of writing a legal opinion, but it opens with that very general statement, which is blaming courts for enforcing laws constraining police behavior when using their weapons, and then tries to connect the incident at hand to that statement.

It just doesn’t succeed as a work of general analysis. Why? Because it’s so easy to raise questions undermining his thesis. What are a few?

• Since the loosening of gun laws, have police officers displayed arrant cowardice when it comes to responding to emergency calls associated with gun violence? In Judge Ho’s defense, I can recall the behavior of the police officers at the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, where they hesitated to enter the school. However, that’s the only one I can recall. Worse for Judge Ho, the negative case – of prompt & brave response, possibly preventing a mass shooting – is difficult to successfully measure. This casts grave doubt on any attempts to numerically analyze this question.
• Are mass shootings even susceptible to police interference? This is more of a mixed bag, as some mass shootings take place at remote locations, such as farming locations, or that take place so quickly that the police, despite quick response, cannot stop the shootings. Shootings such as the recent Las Vegas incident, in which the shooter barricaded himself in a high-rise hotel, and the University of Texas tower shooting (1966), in which the shooter was located on a tower’s observation deck and thus isolated for more than an hour and a half, fall into another category that might be characterized as Rational planning is not alien to an irrational or murderous person. But the fact of the matter is that giving someone with a murderous temperament a high powered automatic weapon greatly raises the odds of a mass shooting being successful, no matter how well the police respond.
• Does Judge Ho’s assertion work on a historical basis? If we’re going to examine his hypothesis scientifically, we need to collect data. Generating data is clearly unethical, but collecting data – examining the historical record – is ethical and necessary. Does the historical data support his hypothesis, or are there hypotheses which better fit the data? Judge Ho neglects this important facet in attempting to support his assertion.

Unfortunately, given current Second Amendment interpretation, Judge Ho is slightly constrained in finding an interpretation for the mass shootings we’ve been experiencing, but he could have railed against the faulty interpretation in his analysis, and perhaps found a more reasonable explanation for mass shootings. But add in his ideological leanings, he’s desperately hemmed in by a set of quickly constricting walls. Here’s NPR on his ideology:

More recently, in a case involving the ban on interstate handgun sales, Ho complained, “the Second Amendment continues to be rated as a ‘second class’ right,” borrowing language from his mentor, Clarence Thomas, and new Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.

“Law-abiding Americans should not be conflated with dangerous criminals,” Ho added. “Constitutional rights must not give way to hoplophobia.”

The Urban Dictionary defines that term as an “irrational, morbid fear of guns.”

And so we find the distortion point: when an ideology (that is, a description of a wished-for reality) clashes with reality, and still takes precedence over reality, then the explanations begin to take on surrealistic qualities. I don’t care if a Federal Court judge is asserting them; they remain surrealistic, even clownish. Think of all the Sandy Hook massacre deniers.

When Judge Ho approvingly quotes his colleague, Judge Clement,

“No member of this court has stared down a fleeing felon on the interstate or confronted a mentally disturbed teenager who is brandishing a loaded gun near his school. . . . [We have] no basis for sneering at cops on the beat from the safety of our chambers.”

he has, perhaps unknowingly, begun walking down the path that he has consciously repudiated: gun control.

From the Willamette Week.
Secondary: Nearly one in four Portland police shootings involves a replica gun. But the city has no restrictions on such weapons.

Here’s the problem implicit in this case: the officers are being placed in an impossible situation. The wide availability of anything less than a machine gun to members of the public, who merely have to slap down anywhere from a few bucks to a couple of thousand bucks to acquire weaponry, and the persistent and acrid encouragement of more and more self-armament by groups such as the National Rifle Association (NRA), moves police officers from the realm of law enforcement, in which they are allies of the public in the pursuit of domestic tranquility, to quasi-military personnel. It’s not the armament that really concerns me, though, but the fact that now the public has become a potential enemy for the police to be concerned with, as the officers in many shootings have demonstrated. rather than the people they are sworn to protect. Add in the fact that toy makers have been manufacturing toys that resemble the real thing to a high degree, and the problem is only compounded for our police officers.

The dubious reasoning behind the recent Second Amendment decisions seems to ignore questions of basic neurobiology, such as when, if ever, does a brain achieve rationality, and is rationality a default mode for the brain? This should be taken into account as the implicit basis for these decisions is that, after the ascendancy of individualism over the common good and fear of the government, that people are naturally rational.

To wrap this up, I’d like to return to a quote from Judge Ho, which I will repeat:

“Law-abiding Americans should not be conflated with dangerous criminals,” Ho added. “Constitutional rights must not give way to hoplophobia.”

I must ask, then, upon what basis is the ban on individuals owning machine guns or anthrax rationalized? Without a doubt, most owners of these weapons – for that’s how anthrax is perceived – would be perfectly law-abiding.

And, yet, they are forbidden.

The answer lies in the ratio of destructiveness to individual. In the Revolutionary War days, a musket, while devastating compared to its predecessors, wasn’t much compared to today. Add in irrationality, and the argument behind Ho’s quote is completely invalidated, a smoking crater from which little can be salvaged.

A reader writes concerning membership in the mob:

Steve Scalise from Louisiana was there.

I ran across his name after I published. Rep Scalise (R-LA) has a TS of 98.4%. He must be quite worried.

Nicholas Weaver on Lawfare proposes a technological solution to a very human problem – child pornography:

… the ideal legislative solution would not try to weaken encryption. Instead, an effective proposal would go around encryption by mandating that everyone’s device examine every image—turning the current centralized mass surveillance system into a privacy-sensitive, distributed surveillance system. In this world, everyone’s phone and computer would check to see if the machine contained known child-abuse images; if present, those images would then be reported to the government or NCMEC. This would ensure that the status quo results of the current bulk surveillance system are maintained even if every communication were encrypted.

Such legislation would require that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), working with the private sector, develop and publish a public version of PhotoDNA. It needs to be public because introducing it onto phones and computers would naturally reveal the details of the algorithm, and NIST has the experience necessary to select public algorithms in the same manner it selects cryptographic algorithms.

A public version would be less resistant to someone permuting images—but this is acceptable, as once a permuted version is discovered through some other means, the image is once again detectable. Additionally, both phones and computers currently have protected computing environments, usually for digital rights management, that could also be used to protect the “public” PhotoDNA algorithm from tampering.

NCMEC would then provide a downloadable approximate hash database. Such a database wouldn’t list all hashes but would use a probabilistic data structure to save space. That is, if a hash matches in the database, the database will say with certainty “yes, there is a match,” but if a hash is not in the database, it will only indicate that there is probably not a match.

The legislation would finally require that all major operating system vendors, notably Apple (MacOS/iOS), Microsoft (Windows) and Google (Android), include code to automatically scan every image and video when it is downloaded or displayed, calculate the hash and check against a local copy of the database. If the image matches, the system must query NCMEC to see if there is an exact hash match and, if so, upload a copy to NCMEC with associated identifying information for the computer or phone.

This would offer several advantages over the existing system. Cryptographic protections would simply become a nonissue, as the scanning would take place when the image is displayed. It would also significantly reduce the number of companies that need to be involved, as only a few operating system vendors, rather than a plethora of image hosters and other service providers, need to deploy the resulting system.

Weaver does understand there might be some objections:

Of course, civil libertarians will object. After all, this is mandating that every device be a participant in government-mandated mass surveillance—so perhaps it might be called a “modest” proposal. It is privacy-sensitive mass surveillance, as devices only report images that probably match the known NCMEC database of child exploitation images, but it is still mass surveillance.

PhotoDNA is a program that generates a hash value for use in comparisons from various types of media files, and it appears that its virtue in this application is that, unlike some hash programs, a minor change in the content of the media file results in only a minor change in resultant hash file, thus permitting “approximate” searches. More here.

I have a sad feeling this scheme would prove ineffectual.

First, while I’m not familiar with PhotoDNA, I suspect Weaver’s hanging his hat on NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) expertise is a mistake. Not that I doubt NIST, but, at its basic, cryptography vs the basics of PhotoDNA would appear to be quite different from each other. Cryptography algorithms depend on one-way mathematical functions, which is to say running a calculation in reverse is extremely expensive without key parts of the data – that is, the key itself.

PhotoDNA doesn’t seem to require that type of processing, and while I recognize that it can detect some minor changes to a picture, this capability is notoriously touchy. If the algorithms do go public, all it takes is a pedophile with good programming skills to sniff out those weaknesses, and then write a program which either builds a randomly changed picture with those weaknesses in mind, or even worse changes the picture, queries the proposed database for a match, and doesn’t show the picture if it gets a match; it could also run PhotoDNA on the original and the changed picture and not show the picture if PhotoDNA’s emitted hash values are approximately the same, and instead introduce another random change, rinse and repeat. Another approach is in the communications channel, where the child porn software could randomly change the picture on each transmission, thus foiling Weaver’s remark concerning database updating each time an unacceptable picture is intercepted.

The problem is that the goals of those attempting to subvert cryptography programs and those attempting to evade detection by PhotoDNA are fundamentally different. Cryptography programs are responsible for transforming the intelligible into the unintelligible and back into the intelligible; subverters must either gain access to the mathematical keys, or subvert the mathematical functions themselves. Those involved in child porn, on the other hand, will be attempting to evade detection by PhotoDNA. They don’t need to break a complex mathematical formula, using skills on the level of a Nobel prize winner. All they need to do is manipulate the data so that it goes beyond detection by PhotoDNA. This is why NIST may not perform up to snuff, although I am not aware of all of their competencies. I simply note that if Weaver is depending on their cryptography expertise in algorithm selection, he may be disappointed.

And, finally, the mass surveillance is a real concern, and a probable show stopper. Not because it’s monitoring pictures, but because it sets up a government run communications system that can be used by anything, say any bit of government-sponsored piece of malware. Not that these government communication nets don’t already exist on our phones, I’m sure, but to do so officially is not an acceptable proposition to the civil libertarians.

There may be a technological solution to the problem of child porn, but I don’t think this one will work.

A couple of weeks ago my Arts Editor and I visited a friend and former colleague as he protested President Trump on a street corner in St. Paul. (My favorite of his signs: a picture of Trump with the word L I A R overlayed on it.)

My observation was that most drivers were giving thumbs-up or honking in approval, with the occasional thumbs-down, a frowny shake of the head, or, more memorably, a yelled FOUR MORE YEARS! We were not favored with thrown objects, as my friend has reported on previous occasions.

Anyways, watching the continual meltdown of one of the most powerful offices ever seen in the world made me think, as we raked leaves in the front yard this evening, that the perfect rejoinder might be this:

FOUR MORE YEARS? HE’LL BE LUCKY TO MAKE IT FOUR MORE MONTHS!

Or even four more weeks. It’s getting that bad, between the evidence and big bad Senator McConnell (R-KY), leader of the Senate Republican majority, beginning to put some space between himself and Trump.

All the little Trump-lite Congress critters had better start figuring out their exit strategies, because re-election will be hell for those who clasped the Father of Lies to their bosoms.

Well, this incident gives us a good list of those Republicans who have tied their boat to President Trump and are terrified that his impeachment – or resignation – will be the end of their political careers.

House Republicans stormed a closed-door impeachment hearing on Wednesday to protest the inquiry and refused to leave until Democrats held an open hearing.

About 30 House Republicans, headed by Rep. Matt Gaetz, forced their way into the hearing as Laura Cooper, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, was providing private testimony as part of the impeachment inquiry inside the House Intelligence Committee’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), according to Axios.

They said they were protesting the lack of transparency in the impeachment process, and refused to leave until the hearings were made public, despite longstanding rules that witnesses are interviewed in classified settings. [Business Insider]

I’ve not yet ascertained a list of Trump’s Little Boys, although I’ve noted notorious Trump adherent Rep Matt Gaetz (R-FL) (TrumpScore: 83.2%, which is surprisingly low) claims to be the leader. Rep Marshall (R-KS) (TS: 97.9%), Rep Mark Walker (R-NC) (TS: 93.2%), Rep Buddy Carter (R-GA) (TS: 95.7%), Rep Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) (TS: 96.0%), and Mo Brooks (R-AL) (TS: 88%, again a bit low) all appear to be part of this little theater stunt doomed to go wrong. They see disaster looming for their leader and therefore their ideology – and thus this panic reaction.

Their excuse that secret hearings are inappropriate is bullshit, as I said before.

And, to them, I will say good riddance. Their inability to see what’s been in front of their noses for just about four years now marks them as a bunch of morally inferior creatures, unworthy of the seats they occupy.

Moderate Republicans take note! This makes for a good list of primary challenges.

I see that Senator McConnell (R-KY) has taken the next step in the process of separating himself from President Trump, as Politico reports:

President Donald Trump claimed earlier this month that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told him that his phone call with the Ukrainian president was “the most innocent phone call that I’ve ever read.”

But McConnell said Tuesday he’s never discussed the phone call with the president.

In combination with yesterday’s testimony from diplomat Bill Taylor, including this opening statement, which is certainly worth a read as it gives the lie to the no quid pro quo chant, it appears the walls are beginning to collapse on President Trump. Given the evidence which continues to appear, this may all transition to the question of whether he resigns before he’s shown the door.

Although running for re-election after resigning would be something of a stretch.

I’m getting really tired of this idiotic talking point:

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) stuck to GOP talking points in his defense of the White House’s handling of the impeachment inquiry, asserting that Trump’s options are limited because the Democrats aren’t conducting a fair process.

“I don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing,” Rubio said. “They’re not allowed in the room, they’re not allowed to have attorneys there, they’re not allowed to have anybody there listening to the evidence that’s being presented against them. So I’m not sure what more they can do.” [WaPo]

Look, this is the inquiry, not the impeachment itself. To make a rough analogy, this is where the police are gathering up the evidence, and the police are not required to share evidence or make it public; indeed, they shouldn’t, and recent reveals of bodycam footage sometimes bothers me, as it can be prejudicial against either side in a case.

If & when the actual impeachment comes up, by necessity the evidence relevant to the findings and the final vote will be revealed, and if the motion is carried, then the trial in the Senate may reveal even more.

But the notion of fairness is better considered as how this could potentially protect President Trump. Irrelevant information that comes out during the inquiry is not public, which means it never need be public if it’s not deemed relevant to the inquiry. In this way, President Trump may be saved needless embarrassment, such as, say, the discovery there were even more paramours.

And if the House decides not to proceed with impeachment at the end of the inquiry, then Trump may be saved a shitload of embarrassment by this “secret” process.

Win, lose, or draw, though, Trump’s talking point, so faithfully repeated by his idiot followers in the House & Senate, has no ethical, moral, or rational basis. It’s more like a cult chant, evoking the mumbo-jumbo God to come and save them from the big bad Democrats.

Pah.

Steve Benen notes a new undercurrent in the Democratic Party and expresses a little unease at it:

And as a New York Times report noted today, “It’s that time of the election season for Democrats.”

“Since the last debate, just anecdotally, I’ve had five or six people ask me: ‘Is there anybody else?'” said Leah Daughtry, a longtime Democrat who has run two of the party’s recent conventions.

With doubts rising about former Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s ability to finance a multistate primary campaign, persistent questions about Senator Elizabeth Warren’s viability in the general election and skepticism that Mayor Pete Buttigieg, of South Bend, Ind., can broaden his appeal beyond white voters, Democratic leaders are engaging in a familiar rite: fretting about who is in the race and longing for a white knight to enter the contest at the last minute.

…

But even if we put these relevant angles aside, there’s a more obvious concern related to the 2020 cycle: Democrats don’t necessarily need a “white knight” because – and this is important – they’re already winning. General election polling currently shows each of the party’s top contenders ahead of Donald Trump in 2020 match-ups.

While the size of any field is misleading, as the big Republican field of 2016 demonstrated in that it had roughly 17 ambitious but ultimately unimpressive and unqualified, in my judgment, candidates (with the possible exception of Kasich), I think there’s enough qualified candidates in the Democratic field that Benen is right to think the unease of some Democrats is unwarranted.

However, in reviewing the Democratic field today, I think it’s worth noting that recent non-campaign events have stirred the pot quite a lot, specifically the heart attack of Senator Sanders (I-VT). It’s a reminder that an elderly leader, no matter how apparently robust, is at risk of sudden health conditions impairing their competency. For the concerned Democratic primary voter who is not tightly bound to any candidate, the top three candidates, who are former VP and Senator Biden (76), Senator Sanders (78), and Senator Warren (70), become a little more worrisome. The office of the President is stressful, and cleaning up after Trump will make it only moreso.

So who might be seen as moving up? Mayor Buttigieg (37) has the attributes of youth, military service, distinguished academic achievements, and charisma; his civil service is somewhat limited, although it is of the Executive sort. And he is a white guy, which in some Democratic communities might be seen as a necessity for defeating President Trump. But some Democratic voters are still uncomfortable with voting for a gay candidate, and in combination with his rather extreme youth and his limited experience with national and foreign affairs, he may not be the best pick.

Which leads to Senator Klobuchar (59) of Minnesota. True, she’s not charismatic, but she’s in the right age range, a good amount of civil service with some private sector work thrown in, apparently healthy, reportedly highly respected in the Senate, and brings a degree of diversity in her gender to the office desirable to most Democratic primary voters – apologies to the Mayor. She can argue her work as a prosecuting attorney gives her some executive experience, and her time in the Senate has undoubtedly exposed her to national and international issues. She can play mean, as we saw at the last debate (well, I read about it), or in reports of how she treats her campaign workers.

More importantly, Klobuchar is more of a centrist. She has not endorsed Buttigieg’s plan to reconfigure the Supreme Court. She doesn’t support Medicare for All, arguing that most voters are satisfied with their health care insurance and would prefer not to take the big leap into the unknown. While that may engender a thumbs-down from the progressive wing, the fact of the matter is that the Democrats need to win the Presidency, and the progressives may just have to hold their noses and vote for someone who hasn’t received their stamp of approval – just as non-progressives might have found themselves voting for Sanders if it wasn’t for his heart attack.

In terms of dirt, Klobuchar has remarkably little, although I believe a little bit has been dug up from her time as Hennepin County attorney. She may become the compromise candidate for the Democrats, which would certainly be worthy of a party built on compromise.

The key hurdle will be the Iowa caucuses. If she does well, the rest of the field had better look out.

Brad Parscale is the current campaign manager for the Trump campaign. It’s an interesting judgment call he’s exhibiting with this merchandise:

Time to stop the political theater and false accusations.

Time to get back to work for the people of this country.

Time to Get Over It!https://t.co/MEQNVxZEwU

— Brad Parscale (@parscale) October 18, 2019

Get Over It comes from Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, who claimed during a press conference that running foreign policy via quid pro quo is standard practice – right before he tried to deny he ever said any such thing. To Fox News, no less.

I suspect that it’s seen as a tough phrase around which the base can rally since the base runs more on emotion and resentment than actual analysis. I look forward to the Trump Campaign T-shirt that quotes the toughest of the tough, the Soviet Union, with their remarkably brazen assertion, What’s ours is our, what’s your’s is negotiable. Perhaps a little long for a T-shirt, and you’d better put it on the back or the ladies will find themselves stared at it in quite offensive ways, but its amorality would certainly fit into TrumpWorld.

But this T-shirt could be mocked in so many ways. For example, replace that ‘O’ with Trump’s hair on it with a bald head behind bars. Or in small print, Trump lost the popular vote. Or, post-election, the Electoral College results.

There’s lots of opportunity. All the brave entrepreneur has to do is laugh at Parscale when he sputters and threatens legal action.

But, still, the “conservatives” out there are repeating them anyways. Let’s have David Priess of Lawfare tell us about it:

Law professor and former deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo this week declared, “What the framers thought was that the American people would judge a president at the time of an election. They would never have wanted an impeachment within a year of an election.”

He couldn’t be more wrong. Nothing in the Constitution, the framers’ debates or historical practice suggests presidents get a free pass during the final year of their term that allows them to avoid facing the sole constitutional remedy for treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors. Presidential terms have a constitutional time limit; impeachment inquiries and impeachment votes do not.

Sounds a lot like that idiotic SCOTUS nominee argument over Garland, doesn’t it?

I’d add that Congress is the closest thing we have to a group of experts on the President concurrently in office. Congress is elected to take care of government, including oversight of the President, the Judiciary, and each other. In Revolutionary War times, the government may not have been particularly complex, but it was, for many citizens, far away; the Senators and Representatives were picked to make these hard decisions. These days, we’re still a representative democracy, and now it’s gotten quite complex, and the communications masters have become quite sophisticated at obscuring the truth.

People with names from McConnell to McCollum to Pelosi are, once again, responsible for making the decision of whether or not the President is fit to hold the office or not. And this should be done without the dishonorable partisan posturing we’re seeing from names such as Nunes, Graham, and, yes, McConnell.

Yoo is engaging in a partisan fantasy which, as Priess points out, has no basis in the Constitution or records of the debates.

Yoo is an idiot. His argument doesn’t even deserve to be taken seriously.

The Canadian Journal of Anesthesia has published a study on study retractions in the field of anesthesiology. From the abstract:

My correspondent responds concerning building strategies:

Yup, it’s definitely the scale in a lot of ways — which of course goes back to *ahem* population growth.

Yes, my hobby horse. Giddyup!

I disagree with your belief that my chances of getting hit by an F5 tornado are effectively zero. I probably should have said F4, nearly as violent. You do recall the F4 that was on the ground from about Comfrey to St. Peter [in Minnesota] in 1998, do you not? Or how about the F5 in 1992 near Chandler?

Not actually, no, but an event has to be horrific or in my face for me to vividly remember it.

But my point is that any particular residence in the state of Minnesota has a very small chance of being hit by a F4+ tornado in the next N years. I put together this chart, mostly for fun, although it’s not as useful as I anticipated:

(I wish I could find data in a usable form from earlier years. This gave it on a County basis – are you kidding? No more time for this search.)

I had some probably misguided notion to plot these vs the number of residences in the state, which would have been terrible given how residences are not nearly even distributed. Given the lack of F3+ tornadoes, I saw no point in doing so.

So in the last few years we’ve seen nothing worse than an EF2. Does that discredit my reader’s notion of building to withstand an EF5? The flip notion of studies of this sort is that the low-frequency is accompanied by an almost guaranteed high loss: potentially complete erasure of one’s home and the lives of you and your family.

This is why I think we should fund research into detection of and protection from Near Earth Objects (NEOs) – the frequency of impacts of civilization killers may be very low, but if we draw the short straw, we won’t even get to regret our penny-wise, pound-foolish ways. Here is a blog post on the European Space Agency’s work in this area.

My correspondent’s dilemma may be complicated by one more factor: if the construction required to substantially survive an EF5 also adds to the climate change problem, is s/he still justified to choose to go down that path? Indeed, what if those climate change gases are actually making tornadoes stronger and more numerous?

The answers are not easy.

Long, long ago, when people liked to complain about the size of government and asserted that the many intelligence agencies should be combined into one for financial and size reasons, I suggested that the variety of methods and internal competition that likely results from having multiple intelligence agencies was a positive, rather than a negative. Much like the problems to be seen with monoculture agriculture, wherein the appearance of a single pathogen or pest can put an entire crop at risk of failure, a single agency might miss opportunities to gather intel that multiple, independent agencies are more likely to find. The duplication and inherent waste is more than made up for by the improved likelihood of finding all the important intelligence gathering tools.

But while reading this piece by Professor Austin Carson in Lawfare concerning whether intelligence officials should testify to Congress, and how to handle variances with official Administration lines, since the Intelligence agencies are part of the Executive, and this piece by David Nakamura in WaPo concerning how former intelligence and defense officials have disputed official White House stories concerning, well, reality, it occurred to me there’s another reason to have multiple intelligence agencies.

It’s all about corruption.

It’s one thing to corrupt one official, such as, say, the Director of the CIA. Or the head of a hypothetical singular intelligence agency. But it’s a lot harder to corrupt five at the same time.

As multiple and semi-competitive agencies, they act as corroborators of each other, each bringing their peculiar skills and tools to the table, and if one is corrupt and attempting to disseminate false information in the service of a foreign power, the others can cast doubt through their independent investigations and testimony. This is known, by the way, as consilience.

In the age of Trump, where I wonder just how much damage we’re sustaining as Trump betrays allies, secrets, and who knows what else, and the Republicans stand by, letting it happen, I have to wonder if the Founding Fathers were all that wise in the selection of a single person to run the Executive. The Roman Empire equivalent, the office of Consul, was generally split between two men, and they could act as foils for each other.

Sure, implementing that in today’s world rather makes me sweat a bit, but it’s a concept worth considering, given how incompetent Trump has proven – and that he was elected, with no apparent corruption of the election machinery.

The ornamental grass gives up its secrets reluctantly, even as winter tries to move in.

The stripey can be a harsh taskmaster.

Following up on the Rep. Collins (R-NY) resignation post-pleading guilty to insider trading charges, this New York Post article implies they go directly to a special election, not yet scheduled:

There’s no shortage of candidates seeking to replace Rep. Chris Collins in a special election.

“Republicans shouldn’t have much trouble holding the district,” said Kyle Kondik, who helps run the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ congressional race tracking operation, Sabato’s Crystal Ball.

“While the party has been hurt by retirements and resignations in the Trump era, this is the rare instance where a congressman leaving relieves a GOP headache as opposed to creating one.”

In 2018, a then-indicted Collins scraped past Democratic challenger Nate McMurray by just 1,000 votes.

And thus there will be no Democratic appointed incumbent for the special election. The question then is the status of the Trump and Republican brands in the New York 27th district, and whether the nominee makes proper decisions in regards to how tightly s/he clasps themselves to those brands; the strength of the Democratic candidate, whoever that may be, will also come into play. If it’s McMurray, he’ll have some name recognition already in place, but, unless the Republicans nominate a cad or the Republican brand is severely damaged, some Republican but not-Collins-again voters will return to the Republican fold.

Which will be a pity. While the Republicans nearly lost this “safe Republican” seat in 2018 because of the perceived, and now acknowledged, guilt of Collins of insider trading, I suspect the Republican brand has not been sufficiently damaged to lose a safe seat for the general candidate, and thus the Republicans will keep on going, rather than taking another step towards entering the necessary Reformation phase.

And here’s a chart, just because I want to experiment with Datawrapper.

Teetotalism:

Teetotalism is the practice or promotion of complete personal abstinence from alcoholic beverages. A person who practices (and possibly advocates) teetotalism is called a teetotaler (plural teetotalers) or is simply said to be teetotal. The teetotalism movement was first started in Preston, England, in the early 19th century. The Preston Temperance Society was founded in 1833 by Joseph Livesey, who was to become a leader of the temperance movement and the author of The Pledge: “We agree to abstain from all liquors of an intoxicating quality whether ale, porter, wine or ardent spirits, except as medicine.” [Wikipedia]

I used it in an email to a publication to which I subscribe. I was surprised to see the spelling is tee-, not tea-. And, as I typically consume a glass of wine once a year to no known schedule, I do not, much like Groucho Marx, belong.

It may seem that Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is reprimanding President Trump for his decision to withdraw troops from Syria, but reading his opinion piece in WaPo reveals that this relatively easy decision to make is also about trying to splash mud on, you guessed it, the Democrats:

Withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria is a grave strategic mistake. It will leave the American people and homeland less safe, embolden our enemies, and weaken important alliances. Sadly, the recently announced pullout risks repeating the Obama administration’s reckless withdrawal from Iraq, which facilitated the rise of the Islamic State in the first place.

And

Long-time readers know that I’m neither a fan nor a respecter of the Evangelical community, although I do try to be polite in my disbelief and distaste. SemDem on The Daily Kos, however, is a lot more pointed than I am in the wake of President Trump’s disastrous Syrian decision:

This current slaughter is exactly what Turkey, Russia, and Syria wanted, and they got it because Trump is the weakest president in history. Trump always, always does what dictators tell him to do: rollover. He has no spine. By the way, those aren’t my words, those are the words from the National Security Council official on the phone call. 

For the record, Trump has retweeted and thanked Wayne Allen Root, who made the claim that Trump was loved like the “second coming of God.” In reality, he is a dangerous sociopath who cages toddlers and now, allows them to be killed for his own nefarious purposes. That isn’t God-like at all. Rather, it is the personification of evil.

I went to an ultra-religious school in my youth run by right-wing Christians. They kept warning us that one day, Satan would return. Even at a very young age, I imagined how they’d fight him when that day arrived.

Never in my wildest imagination did I think they’d worship him.

SemDem also repeats this tweet:

At the Values Voter Summit, conservative Christians I spoke with had little concern re: Syria pullout and the Kurds:

“I do have a lot faith in President Trump, that he knows things that we don’t know,” Mary Holloway from Texas told me. “People should trust their president.”

— Michelangelo Signorile (@MSignorile) October 12, 2019

Sadly, no. To the extent that he is truthful in public, he’s at least worthy of being given the benefit of the doubt. President Trump, given his volume of outright lies, boasts, attacks on non-white Americans, and his vast incompetency at, well, virtually every function assigned to the Presidency, he doesn’t get that benefit. The person quoted above, Mary Holloway, has abdicated her responsibility, and, if I had to guess, it’s because the alternative, taking responsibility for having supported such an utterly dismal Presidency, whose Administration has resulted in such a disaster for those least able to defend themselves, is too much for her wobbly little sense of morality to bear.

So bear SemDem’s critique in mind next time an Evangelical tries to persuade you of something. Their judgment may be suspect.

This one came out nicely.

But notice how, in this second picture, removing the context by moving in closer heightens the impact.

It almost becomes an abstract. Some of this I attribute to the brilliant blue.

From Gizmodo’s article on the presence of plague out in the Rocky Mountains:

The Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge was forced to undergo a temporary closure as a “precautionary measure” last month while it worked to address the issue affecting colonies of black-tailed prairie dogs and endangered black-footed ferrets dependent on them for shelter and food, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service said Saturday.

And all I can imagine are prairie dogs offering the ferrets crumpets and tea.

George Will wants to burnish his old-line conservative credentials by taking down a few liberal candidates for President, but I think he may have stumbled in his rush to nail Senator Warren:

Warren, a policy polymath, has a plan for everything, including for taxing speech that annoys her. The pesky First Amendment (in 2014, 54 Democratic senators voted to amend it to empower Congress to regulate spending that disseminates political speech about Congress) says “Congress shall make no law” abridging the right of the people “to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” One name for such petitioning is lobbying. Warren proposes steep taxes (up to 75 percent) on “excessive” lobbying expenditures, as though the amendment says Congress can forbid “excessive” petitioning. Lobbyists are unpopular, and her entire agenda depends on what the amendment was written to prevent: arousing majority passions against an unpopular minority (the wealthy).

I’m certainly not a legal scholar, so perhaps there’s a ruling already in place against me, but a little old-fashioned common-sense will tell us that this is a bit of sleight of hand. When we talk about the people petitioning the government, we need to keep in mind that this is supposed to be an equally distributed right.

Now, let’s be a little nuanced here. I don’t think I’ll disagree^[1] with the assertion that groups of people may come together to petition the government as a group. But characterizing these groups is important: they feel they have a grievance, they come together to address that grievance, and that’s the function of the group.

Most lobbyists, however, are corporate, and that, in fact, is the key differentiator. First, the members of a corporation did not come together to address a common grievance with the government, but to engage in private sector activities. Second, because of the first, those employees may not agree with their company’s lobbyists’ goals, particularly when those goals have to do with politics, and that is almost certainly part of every lobbyist effort. Objections to this statement are easily refuted through references to the fact that, no, information concerning corporate activities is not immediately, or even ever, available to the employees, and for most employees, quitting out of principle is not a practical option. Not when there are mouths to feed at home.

And, third, and most important, corporate lobbyists have, by definition, corporate money behind them, and that pushes the already-faux corporate citizens‘ voices well above those of their fellow … citizens. If common citizens cannot find the time or resources to make that trip to Washington, but are limited to their local constituents’ meetings – if those meetings are even being held, which some politicians haven’t been doing of late – will they be heard? Or will the lobbyists’ voices, more insistently brought to the fore by spokesmen replete with the resources to stay on the job all year long, have disproportionately more influence?

Not because of the quality of their argument, or the smoothness of their rhetoric, but simply because they have the staying power that money can buy, they have the megaphones upon megaphones that dollars can bring them.

And it makes for a very unfair “right.”

Now, whether Warren has the right solution to the disparity, I can’t say. The problem of unforeseen consequences could raise its ugly head, and it’s possible that this will exacerbate the problem of Very Rich Corporations dominating and even destroying the merely Rich Corporation, as the former will be able to get the rich government contracts simply by outstaying their smaller rivals.

And, perhaps, we should really point the finger at the members of Congress who have proven to be vulnerable to lobbying. Although how anyone would approach that problem, given the difficulty of the public detecting such undue vulnerabilities, is a tough question.

But I think Will, in partisan pursuit of points, makes light of a real problem, and accepts the ridiculous assertion that corporations are somehow citizens which should have their voices heard even more strongly than real people.

And I think that’s a damn shame.

¹ Although it’s the sort of subject that deserves a re-think from time to time.

A reader responds to Steve Webb’s rant concerning the construction industry:

Hmm. I wonder a bit about his numbers, e.g. a bookcase that weighs 500kg or 1102 pounds, more than half a ton. I’ve never seen a bookcase that heavy.

Seems to me that depends on how big and fancy a bookcase you want.

Another question I had was: how long do those wooden exteriors last compared to brick? Longevity and maintenance are worth something. My Chaska brick home was built in 1883; it’s still standing with the original bricks on the exterior. If it had had wooden siding instead, how many times would that siding have had to be replaced, and at what carbon cost?

Sure. It’s the old question about up-front costs vs continuing costs. I don’t know, but I suspect the siding on the original part of my 1938 home is original.

An interesting question: when it comes time to replace it, should the discarded siding be buried? Or is it not worth the effort?

My current house has concrete walls and a steel roof, both of which should last longer than the alternatives. But is it long enough to offset the higher initial carbon cost? Versus wooden framing, and wooden (cedar shake) shingles (asphalt shingles are probably horrible on the carbon scale, but I’m too lazy to research it right now).

How about how much my personal safety against things like all but direct hits by an F-5 tornado? How much carbon is that worth?

What’s the risk of being hit by a F-5 tornado at your location? Virtually zero. But that does bring up a related topic: when is it appropriate for each family to have their own refuge, and when is it appropriate to have a shared refuge, which should reduce costs, both financial and ecological? Given our current inclination to own our homes on big lots, rather than living in apartment buildings, it’s probably the former.

In general, I think I agree with what he’s getting at. The construction industry is in general a horrible polluter and waster of energy. But if they were not, almost nobody could afford a home. Even that nice wooden building picture above cost a rather large fortune. Nice wood is expensive. Large beams are expensive. Designing like that is expensive. It’s a tough problem to solve.

Very. It’s reminiscent of the palm oil debacle, it’s not the activity, it’s the scale.

Some fall colors to take your mind off the melt-down in our political system:

I should have gotten a close-up as well.