Category Archives: Uncategorized

Sharon Bradford Franklin on Lawfare discusses the impact of Carpenter v. United States (2017):

Writing for the majority in Carpenter v. United States, Chief Justice John Roberts called the court’s momentous Fourth Amendment decision “a narrow one.” The specific holding—that a warrant is required for law enforcement to access historical cell site location information (CSLI)—may indeed be narrow, and the decision rightfully cautions that “the Court must tread carefully” when considering new technologies. Yet, despite its limited scope, the opinion provides a framework for recognizing that the digital trails Americans create through their daily lives are protected by the Fourth Amendment. The decades-old “third-party doctrine,” under which Fourth Amendment rights are extinguished whenever individuals share their information with third parties such as banks and telephone companies, has appropriately been confined to the pre-digital age scenarios in which it arose.

As others have already argued, the Carpenter decision does not provide a clear legal standard for when the Fourth Amendment applies to data shared with a third party, and it raises many questions about the future of Fourth Amendment doctrine. But the decision does offer a resounding declaration that Fourth Amendment analysis must take account of the “seismic shifts in digital technology” and the power of modern surveillance tools. In particular, the Carpenter decision should foreclose, once and for all, any claim that bulk surveillance of Americans—or bulk collection of their digital records—would be constitutional. Through the USA Freedom Act of 2015, Congress ended the government’s bulk telephone records program, known as the Section 215 program, and provided new authority for collection of call detail records using a “specific selection term.” With reauthorization of this act to be considered next year, Carpenter’s analysis should preclude any attempt to retreat from the narrowing of surveillance authorities achieved under the 2015 law.

And so the judiciary is not insensitive to the implications of digital media and how they differ from other collectors of your information. I think this is as important as does Franklin, although it’s taken the courts 30-40 years to figure it out. I recall, back in the early to mid 1980s, a course in college concerning computers and society, and one of the hypotheticals of the day was using computers to track your purchases, and making deductions from that – and the computer’s recommendation that cash be extinguished so that the tracking would be more comprehensive. Not so different from this, is it? Of course, you can’t rule on hypotheticals … can you?

Why do we find the appearances of survival mechanism so amusing sometimes? Here’s our Amaranth:

Apothegm:

a short cryptic remark containing some general or generally accepted truth; maxim [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing,” Quote Investigator:

First, “The Quote Verifier” volume has my highest recommendation. The impressive research of Keyes is presented in a fascinating, entertaining, and fun manner. Second, yes, QI will try to trace this expression. Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill both produced apothegms that are loosely similar to the quotation under investigation but are unmistakably distinct.

WaPo points out that things are going according to prediction, not to plan:

In the town of Sodankyla, Finland, the thermometer on July 17 registered a record-breaking 90 degrees, a remarkable figure given that Sodankyla is 59 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in a region known for winter snowmobiling and an abundance of reindeer.

This is a hot, strange and dangerous summer across the planet.

Greece is in mourning after scorching heat and high winds fueled wildfiresthat have killed more than 80 people. Japan recorded its highest temperature in history, 106 degrees, in a heat wave that killed 65 people in a week and hospitalized 22,000, shortly after catastrophic flooding killed 200.

Ouargla, Algeria, hit 124 degrees on July 5, a likely record for the continent of Africa. And the 109-degree reading in Quriyat, Oman, on June 28 amazed meteorologists because that wasn’t the day’s high temperature. That was the low . It was the hottest low temperature ever recorded on Earth. …

The brutal weather has been supercharged by human-induced climate change, scientists say. Climate models for three decades have predicted exactly what the world is seeing this summer.

It’s been a bit warm for us here in Minnesota this summer, but not too much out of the ordinary. We’ve been lucky. The hot, hot temperatures, wild storms, and wildfires world over are reported and bring home how we’re changing the weather.

But not in a planned way.

In the meanwhile, is President Trump trying to do anything to repair years of governmental neglect brought on by GOP disbelief? Or does he still think it’s all a Chinese-inspired hoax? Then again, I have no idea how to interpret any answer he’d care to give. He’s literally become that awful of a leader, of a man.

I do fear that an awful lot of us will have to die before this planet’s ecosphere regains its footing.

My reader continues the conversation concerning the 14th Amendment:

My reaction was only to what you wrote and quoted; I haven’t researched the issue closely. I do think the meaning of legal words does drift with time; how could it not? See arguments about the second amendment as a for-instance, although there’s a difference between legalese, the language of the amendments and the language of legislation, if one really wants to split hairs. I only know enough linguistics to be dangerous. :-)

Yes, words do drift in meaning; but I continue to believe it’s dangerous if legal jargon drifts in meaning.

Back to the main point of this thread, which was an article by Michael Anton claiming the purpose of the 14th Amendment was not to provide birthright citizenship, later rebutted by Elizabeth Wydra (same link as above), I have noted one or two more rebuttal articles in WaPo since, at least one of which suggested Anton actually misquoted Senator part of the debate to bolster Anton’s position. While I have no expertise in the area, it does appear Anton’s intellectual reputation is in tatters.

For readers unfamiliar with serial killer history, Ted Bundy was basically the archetypal serial killer, charming, raping and killing an unknown number of young women in the 1970s. My most recent dive into the ol’ mailbag reminded me of him in the slimy way this missive is written. It’s not a long one, so I’ll interweave my thoughts with the text.

What a marvelous, superlative, ingenious way to simply ruin a perfectly good weekend.  Read on, fellow travelers, read on!!  Remember, evil triumphs when good people do nothing!!

So we start with a reference to the famous quote^[1] concerning the need of men to take positive action when confronted with evil, and by so doing the author is attempting to wrap his devious message in the cloak of goodness. It’s a common rhetorical approach that attempts to manipulate the reader into accepting the hidden message of the following text. Indeed, the attentive reader will have noticed I used the exact same technique to start this post by referencing a loathsome & deceptive personality (Wikipedia’s description: “Many of Bundy’s young female victims regarded him as handsome and charismatic…“) to place the reader in a state of mind receptive to the idea that this mail, which many may have seen before, is actually a deceptive and destructive missive.

Not incidentally, the fonts used in the mail change in certain places, which I was unable to capture in this post. The point? To build up momentum for accepting the hidden message by suggesting that others have already accepted it. We live in a busy, busy world and it’s common practice to use secondary clues as to how we should react to a given message; it’s much harder to strip away clues which may be extraneous, or even malicious, and evaluate a message on its own merits.

Letter to My Boss,

I have enjoyed working here these past several years.  You have paid me very well, given me benefits beyond belief.  I have 3-4 months off per year and a pension plan that will pay my salary till the day I die and a health plan that most people can only dream about.

Withholding important information is a common and important story-telling technique. It builds suspense and lets the author channel the thoughts of the reader in such a way as to build a successful story. Note I don’t fault the author  for using it; after all, he or she is trying to be effective. But I do want to draw the reader’s attention to how it affects them intellectually and emotionally.

Despite this I plan to take the next 12-18 months to find a new position.

During this time I will show up for work when it is convenient. In addition I fully expect to draw my full salary and all the other perks associated with my current job.

Peeking ahead, I’ll let the Jack out of the Box: we’re talking about sitting members of Congress. This author would have the reader believe that members of Congress are lazy, underworked, overpaid, and feckless. This is the meat of the letter.

So let’s think about the assertion. Upstanding members of Congress must be knowledgeable about a large range of topics from the perspectives of policy and regulation. Think of it: agricultural policy, energy policy, death penalties, should we declare war, how do we monitor the Executive and Judicial branches, the list goes on and on. Sure, we can all point at members all both parties who slack the job, or even worse use their position in a self-interested way. If you want names, Menendez of the Democrats and Price of the Republicans come right to mind as members who’ve been accused, but not convicted, of corruption.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking a couple of examples of malfeasance characterizes all 538 members of Congress, along with all their predecessors. If this were true, the United States would have become the Disunited States way back in the 1800s simply through incompetence.

I think my reader knows where this is going, but let’s digest the next paragraph first.

Oh yes, if my search for this new job proves fruitless, I will be back with no loss in pay or status. Before you say anything, remember that you have no choice in the matter.  I can and will do this.

This lovely bit completes the exercise of making the execrable Congresscritter completely contemptible by giving him a high ‘n mighty air comparable to your favorite arrogant monarch. By instilling this bias in the reader against one of the three important legs of the governmental stool, this is, in reality, an attack on the American way of life. The form of government we use was not selected at random or to benefit those who can attain positions in it; it was selected by the Founding Fathers in reaction to the abuses of the English monarchy. As it’s been improved in the years since its formation, it has proved relatively effective compared to other forms of government.

And, for that reason, it comes under attack in letters such as these, letters designed to foment discontent and distrust of a government which, we are often encouraged to forget, is our government. Not the property of a monarchy, never to be transgressed upon. No, at its best, when we’re talking to each other, trusting we have everyone’s best interests at heart, and using our best intellectual efforts to understand the world around us, from science to politics, it’s highly effective.

We wouldn’t be the most influential country in the world, otherwise.

So that’s the real purpose of this letter, to discourage the reader from trusting that our government can work to our benefit. This mail came from a conservative source, but given the behavior of the GOP these days, a Democrat might take similar delight in it. Readers on the entire American political spectrum would be mistaken in accepting this message at face value.

Sincerely,
Every Senator or Congressman
running for re-election

I just find it funny that in one part of this mail the mythical author of the letter says he or she is looking for a new position, yet here they reference their re-election efforts. Apparently the real author is having trouble with their cognitive processes.

The 2018 Elections are just around the corner.

——
Are we stupid or what?

Our work is not over, it has just begun, good and faithful patriots!!

If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do, you are misinformed.  (Mark Twain)

This is simple reinforcement of the false trope that this mail was written for the reader’s welfare. Twain is a favorite of such authors, given his radiant reputation.

REMEMBER:  If you forward this, PLEASE REMOVE all email addresses before you send it on.

REMEMBER:  Please help stop email address harvesting and subsequent spamming your family, friends and yourself.  Use BCC when sending to multiple email addresses and also delete old email addresses BEFORE forwarding on emails.

One of those harmless reminders about removing mail addresses, isn’t it? But think about it: the author of this bit of destructive trash has just asked that anything that can be traced back to his or her mail account, and perhaps on to them personally, be removed. One more bit of deceit.

“Peace is that brief glorious moment
in history, when everybody stands
around reloading”
— Thomas Jefferson

An unexpected allegiance to the Chaos Theory of History in which nations eternally grind away at each other, rather than cooperate peacefully. The author is getting off message at this point, again perhaps indicative of a poorly disciplined intellect.

I saw a movie where only the military
and the police had guns:
Schindler’s List.

Here we wander off message some more. Which reminds me, I saw a movie where everyone with a gun shot law enforcement and innocent citizens dead: The Untouchables. See, we can find all sorts of examples supporting ideological positions from popular stories. I find it much more useful to ask what science discovers. But you know what? For years, government funded basic science, which constitutes most of the basic scientific research performed in this country, was forbidden by law to study gun violence and gun control. So there’s not much science out there with respect to guns and society.

In conclusion: read warily, my readers, bits of mail that impute terrible personal traits to our elected officials. Most of them labor at a thankless job for praiseworthy reasons. And without them?

We’d be fucked.

¹Quote Investigator reports the source of this quote may be famous British politician Edmund Burke, or perhaps the much less well-known Rev. Charles F. Aked.

Cousins and neighbors to our orange lilies, I like the color combo.

I think my Arts Editor enhanced the colors a slight bit. Gorgeous comes to mind. But not Gorgeous George.

… but this still struck me as cool. Finding correlations is an important part of just about any research being done, but this can be difficult with anything beyond single variable to single variable relations. Let’s let Donald Richards explain further in this interview from Quanta Magazine:

If you want to study the correlation between one batch of variables and another batch, then there is no single Pearson correlation to measure the strength of an association. A second problem, which people often overlook in everyday applications, is that the Pearson correlation coefficient should be used only when there is a reasonably linear relationship between the two variables. If the relationship is highly nonlinear then this method is inapplicable.

So what do you do then? Apparently, it’s a real mess to figure out the correlation coefficient, but Richards came up with a handy solution:

How does distance correlation work?

This is where the concept of a Fourier transform comes in. A Fourier transform is a way of breaking up a mathematical function into its component frequencies, similar to how a music chord can be decomposed into its constituent notes. All functions can be uniquely characterized by Fourier transforms, so people started to try to define the concept of a measure of correlation by using Fourier transforms. If you give me two probability distributions — the statistical spread of values that a variable takes on — and if I want to test whether the two distributions are the same, all I have to do is calculate their Fourier transforms. If these are equal then I know that the two probability distributions had to be equal to begin with. The distance correlation coefficient, in layman’s terms, is a measure of how far apart these Fourier transforms are.

I’m clueless on Fourier Transforms, but I think this sounds very cool – not only for what it is, but for this:

You wrote a paper last year giving examples where distance correlation improves on Pearson’s method. Talk about the case of homicide rates and state guns laws.

This was prompted by an opinion piece in The Washington Post in 2015, by Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at UCLA. The title of the article is “Zero Correlation Between State Homicide Rate and State Gun Laws.” What he did was — you know, my eyes bugged out; I couldn’t believe it — he found some data on the states’ Brady scores, which are ratings based on the toughness of their gun laws, and he plotted the Brady scores on an x-y plot against the homicide rates in each of these states. And if you look at the plot, it looks like there’s no pattern. He used Excel or something to fit a straight line to this data set, and he calculated the Pearson correlation coefficient for this data set, and it came out to be nearly zero. And he said, “Aha, zero correlation between state homicide rate and state gun laws.”

That’s not kosher?

I was horrified. There are so many things wrong with this analysis.

And I’ll leave off at that, but to note that not every blogger, even a highly educated one such as Volokh, is always right.

Back when the ACA was still under debate,  I remember the brouhaha over the medical device tax, mostly because of its impact on Medtronic and Senator Klobuchar fighting that tax. WaPo is now reporting that tax, not yet in force, may be repealed:

The House voted Tuesday to repeal the excise tax on medical devices, with nearly five-dozen Democrats joining all but one Republican in backing the bill.

The measure was approved on a 283-132 vote that comes before lawmakers leave Washington for their summer recess at the end of the week.

The 2.3 percent tax on some devices sold by medical manufacturers was created under the Affordable Care Act. It is not set to take effect until 2020, following a move by lawmakers to include its postponement as part of the deal that ended a government shutdown in January. But lawmakers of both parties have long sought to repeal the tax, arguing that its enactment could lead to higher prices for consumers as well as the loss of tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs.

Image credit: “Totally Subcutaneous Implantable Cardioverter-defibrillator in a Child With Complex Congenital Heart Disease and Infection in a Previous Transvenous System,” Revista Española de Cardiologia

It seems to me that medical device demand should be fairly inelastic, meaning that people don’t generally consider a medical device to be an optional part of their life. From crutches to defibs, you get the device in order to keep on living and being productive.

It’s hardly ever for entertainment.

So when the lawmakers proclaim the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, I have to wonder. Is it because the more expensive devices will be avoided due to cost, with less expensive devices substituted in their stead? Or are lawmakers just pulling this out of their asses? In fact, doesn’t this imply we’re indulging in frivolous medical procedures?

Maybe I just don’t understand medicine.

David Post on The Volokh Conspiracy summarizes the finding of Maryland federal district court’s Judge Messitte that the suit by the Attorneys General of Maryland and D.C. concerning foreign emoluments paid to the President can continue:

So when a foreign government makes payments to the Trump Organization for the use of the facilities at the Trump Hotel in Washington – as several have done – this is an “emolument … from [a] foreign State” and therefore violates the Foreign Emoluments Clause. Similarly, the benefits received under the lease issued to the Trump Organization by the federal government for the operation of the Trump Hotel constitutes an “Emolument from the United States,” in violation of the Domestic E.C. …

The court adopted the broader reading pressed by the Plaintiffs, and I have to say that, at least on first reading, I find its analysis to be awfully persuasive. Judge Messitte looks pretty carefully both at internal, textual consistency and the “original public meaning” of the term at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, and all evidence – including pretty overwhelming evidence from Founding-era dictionaries and legal texts – does seem to point to the broader interpretation. …

But however this knotty little problem of constitutional interpretation is ultimately resolved, the ruling means that the suit will proceed for the time being. The political fallout from this ruling could be quite substantial, to put it mildly. Not because it will reveal any “emoluments” that haven’t already been reported on, but because the court could now allow the parties to proceed to discovery, and that could be the first time that the public gets a close look inside the Trump financial empire – at Trump’s tax returns, for example, which would almost certainly be relevant evidence in regard to the nature and scope of the payments that Trump has received to date. I think it is fair to say that that prospect makes Trump very unhappy; I can’t imagine many things he wants less than to have the Attorneys General of DC and Maryland poking around in his financial records. Those of us who harbor serious doubts about our President’s integrity and law-abiding nature have believed for a while that he’s hiding something in there, and we may be about to find out whether we’re right or not.

It’s a Gordian knot of a problem for Trump – to let go the profits he’s supposedly making on his businesses, or to let the process of discovery reveal the inner workings of his empire. The possibilities in the latter are endless – gross incompetency as a business manager, near bankruptcy destroying his mythical reputation, dubious loans from foreign sources … the Trump base will take a lot, but if the wrong thing popped up in those financial records, he could suddenly become dust on the breeze.

But will the judge permit discovery while the inevitable appeals drags on? I hope so, because the potential real damages to the nation are immediate and need to be stopped, if in fact they exist.

And, sure, I have a morbid interest as well.

Biotremology:

But Italian scientists have found a way to control leafhoppers without using chemicals or traps—in fact, their method isn’t even lethal. Using a laser device that picks up on tiny vibrations, researchers recorded the signals that males use to sweet-talk females. Then they attached small devices to plant stems to play back the pulsing noises they captured. It’s effectively shouting over the insects, preventing males from finding mates — though the sound isn’t audible to human ears. This experiment was also successfully tested on American grapevine leafhoppers.

This trick allowed the researchers to significantly silence males looking to hook up, which could help to deter their spread. It’s a clever method that could have broad implications for the agricultural industry, as more than 195,000 species of insect use vibrational signaling. The technology has emerged from a fairly new field known as biotremology, the study of vibrational communication in animals.

“There are a lot of pests that are not treated with environmentally-friendly strategies just because we don’t know their communication system,” says Rachele Nieri, an entomologist who worked on the project, along with two researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Valerio Mazzoni, an agricultural entomologist at the Edmund Mach Foundation. “If we want to manipulate the behavior of a pest that doesn’t use chemicals, but vibration, we need to know their communication, their language, to be able to disrupt it.”

From “Wine And Whines: Listening To Insect Booty Calls To Preserve Vineyards,” Tony Farah, D-brief.

Michael Dorf suggests on the Take Care blog that if the pro-choice decision Roe v. Wade is rescinded, and then Congress acts to restrict abortions nation-wide, overriding State laws, Congress may be rebuffed by SCOTUS thanks to the acts of one renegade … Clarence Thomas:

Jennifer Rubin of Right Turn remarks on President Trump’s contradictions:

Given these results and the dismal GOP numbers heading into the midterm elections, it is no wonder Trump is now crazily suggesting the Russians will interfere on behalf of Democrats. That raises the question as to why he’s been so lax in defending our election system, but more to the point it should serve as a warning signal that Trump might claim the 2018 midterm results are illegitimate.

If, as any sensible American hopes, the GOP takes a kick right to the family jewels, and Trump claims the mid-terms are illegitimate, then the proper response is this:

President Trump, you denied funding for election year security, you dismantled the cyberczar position, and therefore if any illegal shenanigans took place, domestic or foreign, it’s on you. You left this country wide open to it. Shut the hell up and be President. Or step down and face the legal music.

Don’t let him have his cake and eat it as well.

Chris Cillizza of CNN has a well-reasoned conniption fit over Trump’s latest attempt to build a bubble of iron around his followers:

If you blinked, you might have missed it.

At a speech in Kansas City to the VFW annual convention on Tuesday, President Donald Trump — amid one of his trademark anti-media rants — said this (emphasis mine):

“Stick with us. Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. … What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

I know I keep saying this, BUT: That is an absolutely remarkable thing for any elected leader to say — especially when that leader is the most powerful person in the country. And I know I keep saying this too, BUT: That the President not only thinks like that but feels emboldened enough to utter it to a crowd of people — with cameras broadcasting it around the country — is downright scary.

Go back and read that full quote above. What Trump is saying is this: I (and those who support me) are the only ones telling you the truth. Anything you hear from anyone who is not me is not to be believed.

I more or less agree with Cillizza, so I shan’t repeat what he said. Rather, I’ll just note that Trump’s appeal is decidedly un-American as well as being American.

Why? Because Americans have a long history of believing themselves to be tough-minded, skeptical mongrels, all the while going to church (or other) where most of them believe in a supernatural creature for which there is no evidence – just the scary thoughts of societal chaos and black death.

If you run across a Trumpist who’s trumpeting that Trump is the only Truth, ask them who cut off their All-American balls. No, I’m serious, if not diplomatic. Ask them where they lost their American attitude of skepticism and tough-mindedness, of getting all the information, not just what this self-interested politician (it’s worth emphasizing, eh?) who replaced the swamp with a much, much worse swamp. It’s the big question: have they been sucked in by the King of Con-men, and make them prove that they haven’t.

They may not be convinced, but it’s at least a start.

Balloon flowers in the garden, holding it above the invisible sinkhole….

From NewScientist (14 July 2018):

Wearing a tie compresses veins in the neck, pushing blood into the skull, creating a pressure build-up that most likely crushes vessels and cuts blood flow, says Lüddecke.

In healthy people, a 7.5 per cent drop in blood flow in the brain is unlikely to lead to noticeable symptoms, says Steve Kassem at Neuroscience Research Australia in Sydney. However, it might create problems for smokers, older people or those with high blood pressure, he says. These could include headaches, dizziness and nausea.

One solution is to wear a looser tie, although this tends to look sloppy, says Kassem. “I think there’s probably enough room for us now to say, ‘Alright, maybe we should stop wearing ties altogether’.”

Yes! I’ve been saying ties are bad for us for nigh on forty years!

Barack Obama’s first Attorney General, Eric Holder, appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night, and, watching it this morning, I was impressed by Mr. Holder’s ability to communicate. My Arts Editor commented that he seems to be sincere and not holding anything back, and I thought he seemed to have a good grasp on the fundamental nature of American governmental structures, although of course his remarks were constricted by the format. His remark about telling the President ‘no’ was the correct answer, and of course the current occupant of the White House won’t understand that.

He admitted to considering a Presidential run but pronounced the mid-terms to be on the top of his priority list, as well he might. It’ll be interesting to see if he runs, and if the “Fast and Furious” scandal is a taint or not on him.

Yes, it’s quite metaphorical.

Tongue firmly in cheek, The Addams Family (1991) makes a concerted effort to convince the viewers that a family with values diametrically opposed to conventional values could succeed, and by so doing they illustrate how many may be mere fluff – and the one that remains common, familial love, keeps the family together and chugging along when they are unexpectedly deprived of their family inheritance.

Along the way there’s enough word play and reversed situations to keep the eyebrows raised, although, as my Arts Editor commented, Thing is overly used, as if the special effects folks were given too free a hand.

But in the end, fine acting, a good story, and fun special effects make this movie a pleasant way to spend an evening. Even if the stage combat was more than a trifle iffy.

Deimatic:

This dramatic behavior “meets the predictions of what we call a deimatic display, which are anti-predator displays that there are not many examples of, and which are quite poorly understood — the theory behind these displays has only been properly developed in the last couple of years,” Whiting said.

“A deimatic display is designed to basically overload the sensory system of a predator,” Whiting said. “For example, if I walked up behind you and clapped my hands really loudly behind your head, you might be momentarily stunned and possibly a little disoriented, potentially giving an animal enough time to make its getaway. You find deimatic displays in animals such as mountain katydids, which lift their wings and display spectacular colors on their abdomens when predators approach.”

Noted in “To Scare Off Predators, These Lizards Stick Their Tongues Out,” Charles Choi, D-brief.

It Thistles. From Michigan:

Remember the Nunes memo concerning the FISA warrant for Carter Page? On Lawfare David Kris opines on the release of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act(FISA) warrant under an FOIA:

First, a huge amount of information is redacted in these FISA applications, but they still represent a monumental disclosure to the public. The government considers FISA applications to be very sensitive—and their disclosure, even heavily redacted, may have long-term, programmatic consequences long after we’re finished with President Trump. The government seems to have accepted that FOIA applies to FISA.

The balancing act when it comes to these sorts of things is very difficult, indeed. Did ham-handed President Trump just make it worse? Does he even get involved in this sort of thing? I don’t know.

But the real story here is the vindication of the Democrats’ position in the Nunes Memo imbroglio, at least according to Kris:

Now we have some additional information in the form of the redacted FISA applications themselves, and the Nunes memo looks even worse. In my earlier post, I observed that the FBI’s disclosures about Steele were contained in a footnote, but argued that this did not detract from their sufficiency: “As someone who has read and approved many FISA applications and dealt extensively with the FISA Court, I will anticipate and reject a claim that the disclosure was somehow insufficient because it appeared in a footnote; in my experience, the court reads the footnotes.” Now we can see that the footnote disclosing Steele’s possible bias takes up more than a full page in the applications, so there is literally no way the FISA Court could have missed it. The FBI gave the court enough information to evaluate Steele’s credibility.

There’s also more detail on the previous disclosure from the House intelligence committee Democrats’ memo on how Steele went to the press with the “dossier” when FBI Director James Comey sent his October 2016 letter to Congress disclosing the possible newfound importance of the Weiner laptop in the Clinton investigation. According to the FISA applications, Steele complained that Comey’s action could influence the election. But when Steele went to the press, it caused FBI to close him out as an informant—facts which are disclosed and cross-referenced in the footnote in bold text.

Nunes’ mid-term opponent, Andrew Janz, has been handed a tool for his attempt to unseat Representative Nunes, and it should go something like this:

Nunes was given the opportunity to take on an extremely responsible position, and he treated it disrespectively and completely missed its point, which would be to monitor the President, not to defend him against all charges. This has endangered the Country, and so Nunes must be replaced.

And were the FISA judges biased against Republicans? Kris again:

But it is worth noting that—and as the Democrats previously pointed out—the judges who signed off on these four FISA applications were all appointed by Republican presidents, including one George H.W. Bush appointee (Anne Conway), two George W. Bush appointees (Rosemary Collyer and Michael Mosman) and one Reagan appointee (Raymond Dearie). I know some of those judges, and they certainly are not the types to let partisan politics affect their legal judgments.

Retraction Watch notes that someone sincerely studied the long-debunked Shroud of Turin:

A year ago, PLOS ONE published a study claiming that there was strong evidence that a person wrapped in the Shroud of Turin — according to lore, the burial shroud of Jesus Christ — had suffered “strong polytrauma.”

Today, they retracted it.

According to the retraction notice for “Atomic resolution studies detect new biologic evidences on the Turin Shroud,”

Concerns have been raised that the data presented in this article [1] are not sufficient to support the conclusions drawn; the provenance, integrity and availability of the material used for the study have also been questioned.

Yes, they’re taking this old hoax seriously. Interested in an article or two on the subject? Skeptical Inquirer’s Joe Nickell has an article that gives a quick sketch of the Shroud’s background:

When the cloth first appeared in Lirey, France, in the middle of the fourteenth century, its owner could not, or would not, explain how he had acquired the most holy relic in Christendom. In 1389 a bishop reported to Pope Clement VII that it had been used in a faith-healing scam in which persons were hired to feign illness, then, when the cloth was revealed to them, to pretend to have been healed, “so that money might cunningly be wrung” from unsuspecting pilgrims. “Eventually,” he said, after “diligent inquiry and examination,” the “fraud” was uncovered. The cloth had been “cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who painted it” (D’Arcis 1389).

This sordid origin of the supposedly sacred relic is corroborated by much other evidence. According to Jewish burial practices, Jesus’ body would have been washed and covered with burial spices, and the body wound in multiple cloths of plain linen. In contrast, the Shroud of Turin depicts an unwashed “body” without any myrrh and aloes, is a single cloth woven in herringbone pattern (a medieval but not first-century weave), and shows an anachronistic under-and-over draping style.

Moreover, there is no history of this cloth (there have been some forty True Shrouds) prior to its appearance in Lirey, and the image’s elongated forms are those of French gothic art of that period. Iconographic elements also date the image to the middle ages. The radiocarbon date, obtained by three laboratories, was 1260–1390 ce, consistent with the ca. 1355 hoax and forger’s confession. This is what is called corroborative evidence, and there is more.

Regardless, the authors of the retracted article are not pleased.

Peloton:

THE Tour de France is under way again. As they wind their way through the countryside, the 170 or so competitors will group tightly together in a pack – known as the peloton – to reduce air resistance and save their legs.

Noted in From “A swarm of 3D printed cyclists reveals the best position in the pack,” Steve Cassidy, NewScientist (14 July 2018, paywall).

This long dormant thread gets resuscitated in the light of an analysis of the Brit population who voted in the historic referendum on leaving the European Union. The Online Privacy Foundation funded and published the analysis, and here’s the meat of the summary of “The Role of Personality, Authoritarianism and Cognition in the United Kingdom’s 2016 Referendum on European Union Membership“:

The UK electorate’s views of EU membership appear to be strongly influenced according to people’s personality traits, dispositions and thinking styles. Participants expressing an intent to vote to leave the EU reported significantly higher levels of authoritarianism and conscientiousness, and lower levels of openness and neuroticism than voters expressing an intent to vote to remain in the EU. When compared with Remain voters, Leave voters displayed significantly lower levels of numeracy and appeared more reliant on impulsive System 1 thinking. In the experimental studies, voters on both sides were found to be susceptible to the cognitive biases tested, but often, unexpectedly, to different degrees.

Gaining a deeper understanding of the differences and similarities between Leave and Remain voters is an important area of study, not only to better understand UK society, but also to contribute to research exploring the effectiveness of psychographic targeting. In light of allegations of psychographic targeting during the referendum, it is important to understand whether, and to what extent, knowledge of voters’ core psychological characteristics and biases could be exploited, particularly through social media, to influence the way they form early opinions and subsequently process information.

The findings from this research raise important questions regarding the use and framing of numerical and non-numerical data during UK political campaigns. In a situation where “In general, political campaign material in the UK is not regulated, and it is a matter for voters to decide on the basis of such material whether they consider it accurate or not” (The Electoral Commission, 2018) the research also raises the question of whether existing regulatory controls need to be amended. Not only do many voters lack the skills to critically evaluate the information which is being presented, their inherent beliefs and biases clearly influence the way in which they process this information. Considering these factors, a fundamental question is raised as to whether direct democracy in the form of binary, winner-takes-all, referendums is an appropriate mechanism for deciding major and complicated political issues, such as constitutional changes. More broadly, constitutions may need to be adapted to take into account fundamental shifts in societies’ use of technology and consumption of information.

Which all ignores the fact that we, and everyone else who uses representative democracy, elect representatives not only to represent us, but to become experts in the subject matter of government so that us plebes, who often haven’t the time to master the ugly details, don’t have to – and so we’re not subject to the uninformed opinions of our unwashed brethren.

I do wonder how numeracy correlates with general analytical skills, though. Here’s the paper’s comment:

When compared to Leave voters, Remain voters had higher levels of numerical risk literacy, were more likely to engage in analytical System 2 thinking, and tended to perform better in deductive reasoning tasks. In all three areas, older voters tended to perform significantly worse than young voters intending to vote the same way.

Numeracy

Figure 6. Differences in Berlin Numeracy Test results for Leave and Remain voters by age group and sex. Error bars represent 95% confidence interval of the mean.

Cognitive Reflection

Figure 7. Differences in Cognitive Reflection Test results for Leave and Remain voters by age group and sex. Error bars represent 95% confidence interval of the mean. Points below the dashed red line denote a greater tendency for impulsive System 1 thinking, while points above the red line denote a greater tendency for reflective System 2 thinking.

Reasoning

Figure 8. Differences in Wason card selection task scores (abstract reasoning cards) for Leave and Remain voters by age and sex. Error bars represent 95% confidence interval of the mean.

Some may argue that direct democracy is important because it expresses the will of the people, but I don’t buy it. Go form a party and get elected, says I. It’ll subject those candidates to close examination, whether they like it or not, and so long as the major media players remain honest and vigilant, the populace stands a chance of evaluating those candidates on their policy views and their general competency.

Deborah MacKenzie of NewScientist (14 July 2018, paywall) remarks:

Around a third of people in Western societies have an authoritarian personality. This personality type is partly determined by genes, and features a strong desire for order, obedience, conformity and cohesion within the “in-group” with which the person identifies.

While personality traits are generally thought to stay roughly stable over a person’s life, some of them can be made to shift. “Threatening circumstances can make less authoritarian people significantly more authoritarian,” says Jost.

The real message of the analysis by Sumner and his colleagues is that politicians of all stripes need to find messages to attract voters across a range of personality types, says Tillman. “The Leave campaign and the Republicans have done a better job of appealing to authoritarian voters. The challenge for rival parties is to understand why and respond to it.”

Which I rather sadly notes completely ignores the possibility of improving the population from being knee-jerk, emotion-driven people to being more analytical and thoughtful.