He just can’t suffer the thought of being wrong, can he?
Whether it’s due to a psychological problem of quite the magnitude, or a cold-blooded political calculation that his base expects him to follow through on whatever his mouth decides to say, yesterday President Trump announced that he is taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventive against Covid-19:
President Donald Trump claimed Monday he is taking daily doses of hydroxychloroquine, a drug he’s long touted as a potential coronavirus cure even as medical experts and the US Food and Drug Administration question its efficacy and warn of potentially harmful side effects.
Speaking at a meeting of restaurant executives, Trump said he began taking the antimalarial drug after consulting the White House doctor, though stopped short of saying his physician had actually recommended the drug.
“A couple of weeks ago, I started taking it,” Trump said. He later said he’d been taking it every day for a week and a half. [CNN]
The obvious questions: Is he telling the truth, or did that just come flying out on its own? If he’s taking anything, are they real meds – or is he taking sugar pills? Even this: Did his source of the med give him sugar pills?
But why?
President Trump’s relationship to his base requires that he be the tough, know-it-all amateur who represents them. This is the next step in proving to them the validity of their position – by taking a medicine that he’s advocated. In this, he is tougher than, say, disgraced televangelist Jimmy Bakker, who I very much doubt has ever taken the silver solution he has, until recently, been advocating.
At first, it occurred to me that this is a big risk for the President, because if he becomes ill, his base will fracture. And that’s why I think he’s lying. There’s no way to prove it, but I think this is purely the result of a political calculation. He can’t win without his base, and so he’s done what’s necessary to settle them down and reassure them that he’s still on their side in terms of the relationship between them and the experts that the Republican Party has despised since at least the days of Gingrich.
But this is, in its essence, a story. What comes next? What if Trump comes down with a cold? Does he tell his base that’s perfectly normal with hydroxychloroquine? Does he claim he has COVID-19 and hydroxychloroquine is saving his life? His base believes him implicitly, so he can say anything that advances his cause.
Comments Off on In Danger Of Getting History’s Sneer?
I’m no lawyer, but I found this decision by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, a partisan battleground that is still 5-2 Republican dominated, but scheduled to become 4-3 in August after the crushing defeat of Justice Dan Kelly (R) by Judge Jill Karofsky (D) in the recent Wisconsin elections, to be quite interesting. It is the overturning of Governor Evers’ (D) executive order of stay at home and close businesses. The lawsuit, brought by the GOP-controlled legislature, was won by the Legislature, but not 5-2, but 4-3:
The euphoria that Wisconsin Republicans felt after winning yet another major political battle in the state Supreme Court this week is being dampened by a scathing dissent written by one of the conservative justices, raising doubts about how solid the conservative majority actually is.
“Conservatives have been snookered,” former state Rep. Adam Jarchow tweeted within minutes of the court’s ruling Wednesday, in reference to Hagedorn. “We will never learn.” [AP]
He certainly knows what to say to appear to be a professional jurist:
“During my campaign, I said that my job is to say what the law is, not what I think the law should be. I meant what I said,” Hagedorn told the AP in a text message. “To the best of my ability, I will apply the law as written, without fear or favor, in every case before me.”
Unlike his conservative colleague:
Hagedorn’s position drew scorn from conservative justices in the majority, including Justice Dan Kelly, who was defeated last month and will leave the court in August. Kelly wrote that Hagedorn had delivered an “insult” to the majority with his dissent.
“We swore to uphold the Wisconsin Constitution,” Kelly wrote. “He’s free to join in anytime he wishes.”
That the Wisconsin State Supreme Court is nakedly political is, I think, no longer in doubt. When former legislators don’t question the judgment of a Justice, but, instead, their party loyalty, that speaks to the degradation of the institution, from an interpreter of laws to a hand puppet of the party. This is not good for society or government. A neutral arbiter is necessary in order to interpret the laws and constitution of the land.
I’ve not been on this topic in a while, but I have long argued that the seats of judges, from the lowest to the highest, should not be elective positions, subject to the pressures and whims of the institutions that will fund their elective runs, the high fashionable needs of commerce, and other trivial topics. Instead, judges should be appointed by the Executive, but not be vulnerable to the Executive. They should be vulnerable to the Legislature, but only if a high bar can be surmounted: gross incompetence, felonious behavior, and other activities in the category. They should be term limited, although promotions, again through appointments, are possible and even probable. If a judge or justice is no longer vulnerable to the whims of political society, then they are better prepared to render service properly reflective of their neutral role. Can anyone see the unprofessional reactions of the majority in this case as neutral?
The recent eruptions over the races for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and its recent rulings, have really cast a cloud of disapprobation over the entire institution. I have to wonder if, had they been appointed by an Executive using all of its resources to find good candidates, we would have seen behavior that appears to be so politically motivated.
Cartoonist Fevzi Yazici is the victim of Turkish President Erdoğan’s fear – perhaps justified – of Turkish Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen. WaPo has an interesting profile of the cartoonist, currently residing in a Turkish prison upon conviction of aiding a supposed Gülen-inspired conspiracy. I particularly liked this depiction of, well, you figure it out:
Over the last couple of days I’ve written about a possible future trend in American shared thought, and I’ve decided to make that a menu page, as you can see above. Sign Posts may be updated from time to time with your ideas as well as mine. I see it as a corrective away from the crazed fringes on both sides of the political spectrum into which we’ve strayed – much to our dismay, in my opinion. Because of these mistakes, we’ve suffered, and now the world’s people are starting to pity us, we need to rethink our core ideologies, theologies, and philosophies. Sign Posts contains ideas for quick identification and rejection of those who would lead us down primrose paths to disaster.
Comments Off on That Darn Climate Change Conspiracy, Ctd
There have been some positive reports on how the Covid-19 outbreak has had some positive effects on the environment, and so presumably on anthropogenic climate change – although probably immeasurably small – but it’s not all silver linings.
Spring wildfires across Siberia have Russian authorities on alert for a potentially devastating summer season of blazes after an unusually warm and dry winter in one of the world’s climate-change hot spots.
Some of the April fires in eastern Russia have already dwarfed the infernos from this time last year, which ultimately roared through 7 million acres in total — more than the size of Maryland — and sent smoke drifting as far as the United States and Canada.
Siberia also is among the areas of the world showing the greatest temperature spikes attributed to climate change. This year, the average temperatures since January are running at least 5.4 degrees (3 Celsius) above the long-term average, according to a report released Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin last month, Russian Natural Resources Minister Dmitry Kobylkin said “this year’s summer [in Russia] may be one of the abnormally hottest in history, or if not the most abnormally” hot.
Warming trends in Siberia are melting permafrost, which releases vast amounts of planet-warming greenhouse gases. The massive blazes in the summer also potentially accelerate global warming. [WaPo]
It’s not unusual to have fires in Siberia in spring and summer, but it appears the magnitude is growing – and reinforcing the problematic gases. So how does this connect to Covid-19?
“It might be one of the indirect effects of coronavirus,” [volunteer firefighter Andrey] Borodin said. “Because people are in self-isolation and don’t go to work, they have more time to go out, especially people in the villages near forests and fields. And they can cause fires — maybe with a barbecue or something else.”
Many Russians flocked to their country homes, or dachas, during a six-week national “nonworking” period intended to stunt the coronavirus’s spread.
Another ripple effect of the pandemic: Borodin said volunteer firefighters who would typically go out in groups of seven or eight have been told to work in pairs or trios to follow social distancing guidelines.
These pansies managed to survive the winter. I’ve never seen pansies make it through a Minnesota winter before, and I have often planted them in the front garden.
Glorious!
And our perennial Lamb’s Ear is perking right along. I liked its freshness.
I wouldn’t ordinarily steal from another publication’s Word segment, but this one is too cool and amusing.
Troglomorphism:
Deep within cave systems, creatures live their entire lives shrouded in darkness. Some, like the aptly named blind catfish, have even evolved to be entirely eyeless. Others, like certain cave spiders and centipedes, have elongated limbs that serve as sensory organs. Nearly all are semitranslucent and devoid of pigment. These adaptations to the dark are known as troglomorphisms. If you venture into the word’s etymological depths, you’ll find the Greek root morph, meaning form or shape, lurking behind the prefix troglo, or cave-dwelling. [“That Word You Heard: Troglomorphism“, Discover, June 2020]
It’s certainly hard to get, isn’t it? In the context of our current crisis, perhaps the most outstanding example was President Trump’s carnival barker-like promotion of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as treatments for Covid-19[1]. From word that a study suggested it was effective, to White House sources suggesting Trump’s advisor Peter Navarro treated Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Trump’s primary advisor with regards to the crisis, like an overly cautious nitwit that he was able to argue with on a level field, to the news that the medications were, in fact, dangerous when used improperly, and … not efficacious. It crossed the T on the message that getting trustable information from this Administration is a lost cause.
But a question little asked by the public is Where does bad information like Trump’s come from? Does it get pulled out of Trump’s ass by a troupe of men and women hired specifically for the task?
While that may seem quite likely, the answer is rather more mundane, and, unsurprisingly, related to that mixed blessing called the World Wide Web. The answer is the science pre-print servers. NewScientist (9 May 2020, paywall) has a useful description of them in the current context:
These are online repositories of preliminary findings that haven’t yet been independently reviewed. They were invented because of dissatisfaction with the conventional peer-review model, and to take advantage of new opportunities afforded by the internet.
For those somewhat-justified paranoiacs with an eye for ossified social structures, or power structures out to protect themselves, pre-print servers sound like a good thing, a way to get otherwise-suppressed information out where it can be evaluated. But I like this description of the actual results:
Preprint servers enable information to “flow directly from people who are making scientific claims to users who don’t have the savvy to evaluate those claims”, says Jonathan Kimmelman, a biomedical ethicist at McGill University in Canada.
And this is where the claims concerning chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine came from.
The much-touted antimalaria drug hydroxychloroquine is a good example of the system going badly wrong. A preprint about the drug’s efficacy against covid-19 in a small clinical trial appeared on 20 March (medRxiv, doi.org/dp7d). The trial was poorly conducted, says Alfred Kim at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, who wrote a critique of it in the Annals of Internal Medicine (doi.org/ggq8b4). Among other issues, the trial had a sample size of just 20 people (see “How to sniff out the good science studies from the bad”).
A second preprint by different researchers detailing methodological flaws in the trial appeared three days later (Zenodo, doi.org/dtsn).
And if this is the study over which Fauci and Navarro argued, that argument shouldn’t have happened. Navarro should have seen the sample size and tossed the printout in the garbage can, and maybe assigned an intern to keep an eye on the medRxiv pre-print server for more studies on the two medicines. But whatever Navarro’s problem is, hubris or smarts, he didn’t.
Scientific studies are hard to do. To the layman – like me[2], but without the science groupie bug – it may seem like it should be commonsensical: give the sick people who have these symptoms a drug, if they get better, we win! More advanced thinkers will think about people who get better from strong immune systems and those who do not, and try to design the study accordingly. Even more advanced will consider nutrition. Even mooooore advanced: exercise. And, hey, what about prayer?
And then you start running into shit like the placebo and nocebo effects. If you’re thinking common-sense rules the day, read up on those known effects and try to repeat your statement. If you’re not laughing at yourself, you’re not paying attention. Scientific studies are hard. Gathering data, evaluating it, controlling for interfering factors, are the results significant, these are all hard, hard things to do. Let pride and self-confidence get in the way and they’re even harder.
Or, let’s take a different example against common-sense for you visual types. Bridges. Here’s a creek, let’s put together a couple two by fours, a sheet of plywood, maybe some rails for the unsteady, and we’re a success. Yes? How about that abyss over there? OK, a bit more complex, design-wise, right? Materials have strength limitations, so we add a few supports, maybe that new bridge near Stillwater, MN, is a good illustration. Still, the design is conceptually easy, all the hard stuff is managerial, yeah. Right?
Just a little wind and the laws of physics, which don’t care about common-sense, takes down a bridge. Whoda thunk? Not the common-sense yahoos who built this bridge.
Back to the President’s erstwhile favorite medicines. It turns out that Retraction Watch has been covering the issue of studies regarding Covid-19, most immediately those that have been retracted or have had concern expressed about them. and if you worry about the quality of information, you may want to bookmark that page for research purposes, although, of course, retractions can be slow, even untimely. Given how hard it is to do a good study, we can expect a lot of retractions, because, as NewScientist notes:
Since the pandemic began, thousands of studies related to it have been published. “The research community has mobilised in the face of the pandemic in an unprecedented way,” says John Inglis at academic publisher Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in New York.
From a larger perspective, I have begun to see the incidents of the Administration pushing certain treatments as examples of magical thinking. This is a thought process which refuses to see critical objections and obstacles on its way to a preferred conclusion. It may employ uninvented or even impossible processes as a way to reach that conclusion, because, after all, That conclusion is needed for our greater purposes, and so it will be. Magical thinking is a process that should be abhorred by serious people.
Yesterday I wrote about how the United States may be coming to a fork in the road, a fork that we’ve been seeing for years, but haven’t really made a decision due to a lack of feedback concerning the results. The fork is implicit in the public controversies over whether anthropogenic climate change is happening, evolution, the Iraq War, vaccination … and pandemic preparations. I suggested that pity directed at the United States by other advanced nations, pity for our poor decisions since the fall of the Berlin Wall, may accomplish what all the enraged arguments have failed to do: pull us together, in the face of negative consequences, into concordance on the proper decisions regarding important public controversies.
In doing so, it will also begin marking positions which are evidence of people devoted to these damaging ideologies, theologies, and philosophies. I listed a few at the link, above, such as anti-vaxxers, and now I’d like to add magical thinking to the list. I realize this may offend a wide range of people, both in the business and religious fields, but magical thinking has led to so many poor outcomes that it really needs to be recognized as an intellectual fault signaling untrustworthy outcomes.
And tarred and feathered as such. You provide the rail.
1 President Trump’s ruminations on somehow ingesting ultraviolet light and injecting various disinfectants, such as bleach, on the other hand, I would classify as the meat and potatoes of bizarre side shows. Your mileage may vary.
2 I hold a Bachelor of Computer Science Degree the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. One might consider computer science to be just barely within the domain of science, as it hardly ever indulges in studies of natural phenomena; more rigorous thinkers might suggest that computer scientists, without additional training, are crippled mathematicians. In case you are wondering, mathematicians are not necessarily scientists. They are something else entirely, and don’t ask me what. On second thought, mathematicians are hardy specialists in a field of logic dedicated to a logical system corresponding to fundamental reality. And, no, I’m not getting into the argument of whether mathematics is a subfield of logic, or vice versa. It seems clear to me that the proper position is the former, but I’m just a rank amateur who runs his fingers a lot.
But it’s not, and there are thousands of fossils of it. Tully’s Monster, one of the mysteries of paleontology that I had not heard of until today, gets another addition to its family of controversial deductions concerning its nature:
A bizarre ancient creature that looks like a sci-fi reject may actually have been a backboned animal related to fish.
The claim relies on chemical analysis of fossils of the creature. However, other palaeontologists remain cautious.
The animal is called Tullimonstrum gregarium, or simply the Tully Monster. It lived around 300 million years ago in shallow waters covering what is now Illinois. There are thousands of good fossils, all from one formation called Mazon Creek. …
When soft tissue fossilises, chemicals like proteins degrade in predictable ways, says Wiemann. “We can still extract biological information,” she says. Crucially, invertebrates and chordates remain chemically distinct.
[Jasmina Wiemann of Yale University, a specialist in chemical analysis of fossils], [Victoria McCoy at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee] and their colleagues studied 32 samples from Mazon Creek rocks. Known chordates and invertebrates were readily distinguished, and the Tully Monster grouped with the chordates.
But …
[Maria McNamara at University College Cork in Ireland] has studied metals in the Tully Monster’s eyes. These suggested it was a cephalopod: an invertebrate group that includes octopuses and squid. “Why are the organic and inorganic components of the chemical signature showing these conflicting results?” she asks. [NewScientist, 9 May 2020, paywall]
What’s all the hubbub about, you wonder?
Two Tully’s Monsters, passing in the night. Wikipedia
That funky crossbar? That’s right, just like a hammerhead shark – eye stalks. Did they move? You’d think they’d have to if they were to be useful – but primitive critters were not necessarily refined.
If I had a fossil of one of these, it’s go right up on the wall. So bizarrely cool. It looks like some of my software designs, in retrospect.
Phillip Kennicott of WaPo has written a fine piece on the role of pity in America’s future:
For the first time in the lives of many Americans, the coronavirus pandemic is conflating private pain with large-scale, public suffering. Now, the entire country participates in a conjunction of misery that was before limited to Americans who lacked privilege, or were unlucky. The anger we feel at the utter collapse of responsible governance isn’t abstract and, for the most part, it isn’t ideological; it is personal, because now our lives are in danger and family members are dying. Pain and suffering are no longer isolated or remote or contained; they are universal, and with that, there is an uncanny realization that this suffering is no longer a drama on television or a headline in the newspaper. We suffer in the midst of history.
That makes the processing of pity even more complicated, because while we may resist self-pity, it seems there may be no going forward, no hope for the country at all, if we can’t take pity on ourselves as a nation. Unless we can see ourselves as the world sees us — including those who say we are broken, corrupt and failing — we may not be able to survive, rebuild and reclaim anything of our past sense of national identity. Unless we can say to ourselves collectively what we say to ourselves individually — we are sick — there’s no hope of any kind of return to health.
And we can trace a lot of the pity, memorably expressed by Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times (paywall, but available at other locations for free), to the poor decisions many of us have made individually since, say, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Enumerating them all would be a chore, and it’s hard to balance them ideologically, but here’s a few:
The invasion of Iraq
The Lewinsky / Clinton blowjob
The Bush Election and re-election, and all the fraudulent hijinks that went with it (Swiftboat Veterans ad, for one example)
The use of torture during the invasion of Iraq
The uninhibited worship of the dollar sign, and the Great Recession that was the consequence
The removal of laws designed to inhibit recessions that may have led to the Great Recession
The decision of voters to elect Donald Trump
And there’s many more, some political, some economic. I’d even put NAFTA on the list, if only to provoke thought. It was, after all, a treaty meant to do away with redundancy by allowing countries to specialize more and more, thus increasing efficiency and, BTW, profits.
Shame, a word currently unpopular due to its overuse over the last, oh, two millenia, has a useful effect as a corrective to activities not desired by the leaders of a community. Notice I don’t say “bad actions,” but merely those community leaders disapprove – or, if you prefer, loathe, hate, and many other negative adjectives. When community leaders substitute their personal dislikes and biases for community good, which is an easy thing to do, then we often get shameful uses of the concept of shame.
But it’s important to separate the functionality from its appropriate use. One does not flow from the other, or at best, weakly. Its strength comes from collective use and childhood training to consider something shameful.
But how does shame work nation to nation? In a word, it doesn’t.
But pity, now, pity’s an interesting word. It’s one thing to cry shame down on another nation, because shame is an aggressive concept, easily seen as manipulable, as well as not applicable from one nation to another, no matter how loud it’s cried. But pity? Pity can be brought about by many things, some beyond a community’s control, such as plague. But it can also be elicited by bad decision making, now can’t it?
Look at these people, we told them they were wrong but they ignored us, and now look at the mess they’re in!
One can easily imagine a bunch of Neanderthals looking across the La Brea Tar Pits at their erstwhile neighbors, now sinking under the bubbly surface, where once they tried to run their plows …
Pity is, in a sense, a step beyond shame. The consequences of actions motivated by ideologies, of theologies and philosophies, will finally come to into view, and if those consequences, rather than exciting admiration, instead elicit pity, that throws understandable doubt upon those ideologies, theologies, and philosophies as valid and good selections. Just as we pity the anti-vaxxer who loses their child to the measles, but know that they brought this upon themselves, so a nation’s people, brought up against the publicly expressed pity – not anger, but pity – of foreigners for their contretemps may realize something’s gone amiss. It’s the recognition that their straits are sore, and if the pitied don’t realize it yet, it may only be a matter of time.
Pity may turn out to be the toilet brush we will need to begin scrubbing our lives of those ideologies, theologies, and philosophies that are hurting us. From relatively superfluous crap like anti-vaxxers, who trade in nothing more than congruencies to conspiracy theories, to anthropogenic climate change doubters, whose theology won’t let them acknowledge that our very civilization is poisoning itself, the pity of the majority of humanity for us may be the thing that finally prompts those not wed to those pathological institutions to realize that they are destructive to our individual and collective lives, and as we absorb these lessons, those words, anti-vaxxers and climate change doubters and anti-evolutionists – all positions for which the evidence is, at best, junk science – will become code words to the uncommitted to stay away.
For example: That politician, who is asking for your vote, doubts evolution and climate change? Easy decision, vote for their opponent, even if they hold policy positions I don’t like – but admit might be reasonable. It’s that concept that we have to comprehend – some clashes of ideas are truly clashes in which opinion, even learned opinion, can legitimately differ, while others are just fringe characters trying to make their ludicrous ideas seem reasonable, even acceptable.
Experts have repeatedly warned about reopening states before the data shows conditions are safe enough. In testimony before the Senate on Tuesday, at which Scott was in attendance as a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Dr. Anthony Fauci said reopening states too early could lead to “spikes that might turn into outbreaks.”
From the May 13 edition of Fox News’ “Fox & Friends”:
BRIAN KILMEADE, co-host: The problem is, I’m led to believe, just by looking at what’s going on with red and blue states, the blue governors are reluctant to open up their states, and the reds seem more than willing to do it, and I’m wondering if you see politics in this?
SEN. TIM SCOTT (R-SC): I smell the stench of politics, partisan politics driving behavior for election results, not focusing on supersound science, as Dr. Scott Atlas said.
Supersound science is where we should focus our attention that leads us to the conclusion that, if you don’t have two underlying conditions, the chances are, you’re going to be okay. If you’re under the age of 60, the chances are really high you’re going to be okay, and in South Carolina, if you’re under the age of 20, we’ve had not a single death.
So we have a lot to celebrate and we need to look at the information and the facts through a prism of optimism, and not simply through the prism of the worst-case scenario every single time we start talking about the pandemic.
But does Senator Scott smell the stench of politics because Democratic governors are evil, or because this is what he thinks Republican governors would, or even should, do if it was a Democrat in the Presidency? One might argue that Governor Walz (D-MN) is pushing the envelope in his move, announced yesterday, to cautiously get the state open, and I’m a little worried that we’re going to see another spike in our numbers. Here’s the latest graph fromThe New York Times:
We can see a peak somewhat defined, but nothing is guaranteed – if we reopen precipitously, we could return to climbing that peak, much to our sorrow.
Back to my point, I suspect Senator Scott is projecting what he’d be urging Republican governors to do if the situation were reversed.
Comments Off on The 2020 Senate Campaign: North Carolina, Ctd
Senator Richard Burr’s (R-NC) potential scandal continues to advance as the FBI just seized his phone:
Federal agents seized a cellphone belonging to a prominent Republican senator on Wednesday night as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into controversial stock trades he made as the novel coronavirus first struck the U.S., a law enforcement official said.
Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, turned over his phone to agents after they served a search warrant on the lawmaker at his residence in the Washington area, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a law enforcement action.
The seizure represents a significant escalation in the investigation into whether Burr violated a law preventing members of Congress from trading on insider information they have gleaned from their official work. [The Los Angeles Times]
I find this very interesting:
Such a warrant being served on a sitting U.S. senator would require approval from the highest ranks of the Justice Department and is a step that would not be taken lightly. Kerri Kupec, a Justice Department spokeswoman, declined to comment.
The pressure is surely getting stronger, as The Charlotte Observerreports:
U.S. Sen. Richard Burr said Thursday he is temporarily stepping down from his post as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee amid an ongoing federal probe of his stock sales.
“It’s a distraction to a committee that’s extremely important to the safety and security of the American people and a distraction to the members of that committee being asked questions about me, so I tried to eliminate that,” Burr told McClatchy on Thursday outside the Senate.
Burr, a Republican, currently has a TrumpScore of 92.2%, but as chair of the Senate Intel committee, he has been involved in work that has not disputed intelligence reports that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election (see The Charlotte Observer report, above). Will Trump and AG Barr throw Burr to the sharks? I’m betting the answer is Yes – he’ll be an object lesson, not from Trump himself, but from the top leadership of the GOP to the rest of the membership, members of Congress on downwards, that election doesn’t free you from the overt obligations of Party membership. And that’s to protect the top leaders no matter what. There will be no application of ethical and moral standards to those leaders; they are to be considered Gods.
Waxing a bit purple today, aren’t I? Think of it as a psychological defense mechanism.
In any case, they’ll bet their marketing power will bring them victory in a special election in North Carolina. However, it’s worth noting that if Burr resigns before the November elections, Cooper, if he’s so empowered, will appoint a Democrat to replace him, much to the outrage of the North Carolina Republicans. That could bring more machinations.
Speaking of Burr’s home state, how are they feeling about Senator Burr? An Observer editorial:
Now, everything he does will be colored by that failure. Republicans know Burr is an albatross, an example opponents will use throughout this election season to argue that too many in the GOP, especially the president, have seen COVID-19 through the lens of personal gains and losses. North Carolinians know that he will be a source of shame to our state, that until he honors his long-ago pledge to retire in 2022, he will be the N.C. senator who tried to steal a lifeboat all for himself.
As the coronavirus crisis worsens here and across the country, so will the weight of what Richard Burr did and didn’t do. It’s difficult to see him as a visible or viable representative of our interests. His effectiveness as a leader has been profoundly hobbled.
And yet, Burr seems to have no intention of doing everyone a favor and resigning. Sadly, that’s not a surprise. At the moment we needed him most, Richard Burr was thinking mostly about himself. One week later, that hasn’t changed.
My favorite lickspittle, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, former AG of the United States and Senator for Alabama, knows he’s in trouble in his race to recover his seat, and in response has published a letter pledging his undying support for President Trump – the guy who just kicked him in the face, ya know – and then went on to diss his primary opponent, Tommy Tuberville:
My principles, like my faith, are immovable and non-negotiable. I believe it is always right to do the right thing. My opponent, Tommy Tuberville, calls that weakness, which reveals his true lack of integrity. [AL.com]
And more:
Mr. Tuberville is an opportunist who isn’t from here. He stopped here for work for a while, and moved on, eventually retiring in Florida. He doesn’t know the first thing about Alabama. He says the President is wrong on China, says we must import foreign workers to take American jobs, and up until a few months ago, he said he favors amnesty for illegal immigrants. If you don’t like his position on an issue, just wait a few weeks and he will change it. His house is built on sand.
Alabamians have long resisted pressure from people in Washington telling them how to vote. In fact, Alabama’s motto is – “We Dare Defend Our Rights.”
That’s true. They elected Senator Doug Jones (D) last time, Mr. Sessions.
When I return to the Senate, I look forward to helping the President build the wall, protect American workers, and fundamentally reset our relationship with Communist China.
I can agree that the China relationship will need some serious revisions, although unfortunately our farmers are probably addicted to the Chinese yuan. However, the real question here is whether Sessions and Tuberville fans are now sufficiently alienated that each won’t support the opposing candidate, should their own candidate lose the primary.
The moribund thread concerning deepfakes, the difficult-to-detect manipulation of videos for malign purposes, gets an airing on Lawfare in the form of a response by Bobby Chesney of the University of Texas Law School to an opinion that maybe deepfakes aren’t all that important after all:
Making matters worse, growing awareness of the deep fake threat is itself potentially harmful. It increases the chances people will fall prey to a phenomenon that two of us (Chesney and Citron) call the Liar’s Dividend. Instead of being “fooled” by deep fakes, people may grow to distrust all video and audio recordings. Truth decay is a boon to the morally corrupt. Liars can escape accountability for wrongdoing and dismiss real evidence of their mischief by saying it is “just a deep fake.” Politicians have already tried to leverage the Liar’s Dividend. At the time of the release of the Access Hollywood tape in 2016, for example, then-candidate Trump struggled to defend his words of “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” A year later, however, President Trump tried to cast doubt on the recording by saying that it was fake or manipulated. The president later made a similar claim in trying to distance himself from his own comments on the firing of FBI Director Comey during an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt. Such attempts will find a more-receptive audience in the future, as awareness grows that it is possible to make fake videos and audios that cannot be detected as fakes solely by our eyes and ears.
Can technology really save us, as [Tim] Hwang suggested, by spawning reliable detection tools? As an initial matter, we disagree with the claim that detection tools inevitably will win the day in this cat-and-mouse game. We certainly are not there yet with respect to detection of deep fakes that are created with Generative Adversarial Networks, and it is not clear that we should be optimistic about reaching that point. Decades of experience with the arms races involving spam, malware, viruses and photo fakery have taught us that playing defense is difficult and that adversaries can be highly motivated and innovative, constantly finding ways to penetrate defenses. Even if capable detection technologies emerge, moreover, it is not assured that they will prove scaleable, diffusible and affordable to the extent needed to have a dramatic impact on the deep fake threat.
I think retreating from the belief that videos show the unvarnished truth to the position that no video is trustworthy would encourage a creeping belief that there is no truth, no facts, just positions, supported by manufactured evidence, taken by people seeking power. We’ve seen a lot of that from the right-wing extremists, from their disregard of scientific research concerning subjects as diverse as abortion and climate change, to the memes coursing through the conservative blood stream attacking the veracity of Snopes, the decades-old website dedicated to uncovering Internet-based hoaxes, lies, and affiliated deceptions. In fact, for the last few years Snopes has been forced into a quasi-bizarre legal quagmire by their own website hosting service (this is their GoFundMe page), which I do not pretend to understand, but appears to be a malicious attack by the forces who fear the truth. Similarly, although to a lesser extent, the American far left also seems to disregard truth in its attacks on the traditional power structure, although here my knowledge mainly derives from the occasional rebuff Andrew Sullivan delivers them in his weekly diary entries. They want to disregard the biological effects of being one sex or the other; Sullivan wishes to acknowledge and even celebrate them. To the left, I can only say that disregarding ugly facts may be alluring, but not the strategy of a successful engineer. Well, that goes for both sides, now doesn’t it?
Be that as it may, I have my doubts about the technological capability of detecting frauds, and therefore I have to wonder if a more social solution to this problem may be necessary, such as creating a registry of videos. No doubt that’ll provoke screams – really loud screams – and then we’d all have to learn to check the registry rather than just presume this or that video is really authentic. And then initial authentication, this is an untampered film of a real event, becomes an issue. It all makes my head spin.
But being forced to distrust everything that we didn’t personally experience is a recipe for breaking up a society. The anti-vaxxers are, in a sense, well on their way to doing that by spreading false information built on distrust of corporations whose main driving force is often just profits. In that sense, their position is understandable due to the behavior of many corporations, or, in other words, their execs, in always driving to increase profits rather than increase the social capital[1] of their corporations. They become the bad guys, even when they aren’t, because they have not articulately communicated to each other, their successors, and their customers the importance of delivering an honest product for an honest fee that hasn’t been built on the backs of the vulnerable, human and non-human.
And sometimes it just feels like it’s getting worse, and that’s because it is. Extremists who don’t like today’s realities call it hoaxes or social constructs and then try to blunder right through them. But when it comes to foundational realities, that doesn’t work so well.
So I hope we can find a way around the deepfake problem, whether it’s technological, verificational – or we just push every person who commits a deepfake off a sea-cliff for the orcas to eat. Otherwise society may disintegrate, or more likely mutate, into something that is less friendly and productive.
1Social capital, a term I haven’t run across in a very long time, might be best understood as the measurement of how much the institution in question contributes to society. This is versus the usual financial measurements used to decide how well a company is doing – and the deserved “compensation” for the corporate executives. Perhaps society needs to shift away from financial to social capital measurements.
Beginning a thread on the pledges that ought to be asked of the candidates for the 2020 election. This need not be confined to the Presidential elections, either.
(For the Democrats) Jake Tapper, a journalist with CNN, has said that he has observed that when one Party pushes back the norms and boundaries of the Presidential office, the other Party won’t hesitate to take advantage of the new powers when it wins the Presidential office. Will you, Democratic candidate, pledge to restore the boundaries and norms that have been allegedly destroyed by the present and previous Administrations? Will you give consideration to the modification or even repeal of the legislation in which Presidents may give themselves emergency powers? [I.e., begin the migration of power back to Congress.]
Will you pledge to not use precision messaging during the balance of your campaign, and to confine all political message to the public arena? [Precision messaging is the transmission of campaign material to a voter on a private line, such as an email, which permits the material to be tailored to the point where different voters are told opposite information, depending on who they are. That lies must result should be obvious.]
For some reason, Steve Benen’s description of the proceedings in the case of former National Security Advisor (NSA) Michael Flynn has really brought the probable true nature of the top of our political ladder into focus. For those readers not up on the Flynn incident, Flynn was Trump’s first NSA for a little over a month, at which point allegations that he lied to the FBI about contacts with the Russians forced him to resign. Subsequently, he was charged with said lying, pled guilty twice, but, for reasons of cooperation with prosecutors, had his sentencing hearing delayed. Eventually, he sought to retract his guilty pleas, which was under consideration by presiding Judge Sullivan. Now the DoJ has sought to drop the charges, which resulted in a second letter calling for the resignation of AG William Barr, signed by 2000+ former employees of the DoJ of all political persuasions.
Harvard Law School’s Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge, told the New York Times. “I would predict that he holds a hearing and has the prosecutors justify the decision they made. The judge could be concerned this is cronyism.”
That would be a reasonable concern given the unprecedented circumstances.
Let’s also not lose sight of the judge’s previous comments regarding the case. In December 2018, for example, during a sentencing hearing, Sullivan made little effort to hide “disgust” with Flynn over his felonies, briefly broaching the subject of whether the former White House national security advisor had committed treason.
The judge — a Republican appointee with a conservative reputation — at one point told Flynn, “Arguably, you sold your country out” by working as an unregistered foreign agent.
This is the same judge who’s now open to receiving briefs about the Flynn case before deciding whether to accept the prosecutorial strategy of the Trump/Barr Justice Department.
Gertner’s remark about cronyism really hits home for me. This isn’t about policy differences, the political “assassination” of Flynn, or clashing ideologies, is it? If it was, Judge Sullivan wouldn’t have made his disgust concerning Flynn known. He would have approved dropping the charges without comment, or even with an approving comment. He didn’t.
The federal judge overseeing the case involving retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn took the unusual step Tuesday night of inviting briefs from third parties, and he plans to setup a schedule soon to accept those filings.
Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said in a filing Tuesday he’ll allow individuals outside of the Justice Department and Flynn’s attorneys to submit filings in the case that might be able to provide the court with additional information or perspectives that might help him make a decision on whether to dismiss the charges against Flynn or let him withdraw his guilty plea. [NBC News]
This is about rescuing a crony, who may have incriminating information, from the clutches of law enforcement. Clearly, presiding Judge Sullivan has his suspicions, and I suspect mine are congruent: the top levels of the GOP have been taken over by a criminal element. Composed of con-men, they have used the campaign tools built by the GOP to leverage themselves into positions of power, and now they seek to preserve their power, not only by winning reelection, but by pulling Flynn out of danger (presumably, “he knows too much” – which probably makes both him and Trump sweat), and by rebuffing all attempts at retrieving Trump’s tax information. To that latter, taxes may be dull, but they contain some of the most interesting stories.
Sullivan’s next move may be one of the most important legal decisions this nation has seen. I’d give $100,000 for him to respond, in open court, with this question for the government attorneys:
Please explain why you’ve not charged Mr. Flynn with treason? And don’t bother me again with a filing requesting all charges be dropped.
And I’d want to be there to see those government attorneys faint. Barr would probably have a heart attack.
If you like off-beat documentaries – possibly a non-sequitur when it comes to documentaries – Pretty Ugly (2014) may fit the bill. Or it may be one of the more clever bits of self-promotion that I’ve seen. Either way, it provoked a lot of conversation between myself and my Arts Editor, as the chronicles of how supposed dead-ender and self-described gargoyle Del Keens is trying to take his modeling outfit Misfit Models to success. A former model himself for Levi’s and other big firms, he knows the business and what he wants – and he’s definitely atypical.
And he and his models do tend to fascinate. Give it a shot if getting a look into an oddball nook of the modeling industry fascinates, along with a mini-bio of a dude who has had to struggle with societal bigotry in order to do anything at all.
It’s been a hallmark of Trump’s candidacy and Administration that his accusations, as wild and profligate as they can be, are often based on a shred of truth concerning himself. We’ve seen this with his response to Clinton’s accusation during the debates of Trump being a Russian puppet with his childish retort that she was the puppet, for example.
So, last night when we saw the baffling clip of President Trump asserting there’s a scandal out there called Obamagate, and “everyone” knows about it, I was, secondarily, baffled, but primarily left wondering just what the hell is now brewing in the super-swamp known as the Trump Administration. Fromwhitehouse.gov:
Q Mr. President, in one of your Mother’s Day tweets, you appear to accuse President Obama of the biggest political crime in American history, by far.
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah.
Q Those were your words. What crime exactly are you accusing President Obama of committing? And do you believe the Justice Department should prosecute him?
THE PRESIDENT: “Obamagate.” It’s been going on for a long time. It’s been going on from before I even got elected. And it’s a disgrace that it happened. And if you look at what’s gone on, and if you look at, now, all of this information that’s being released — and from what I understand, that’s only the beginning — some terrible things happened, and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again.
And you’ll be seeing what’s going on over the next — over the coming weeks. But I — and I wish you’d write honestly about it, but unfortunately, you choose not to do so.
Yeah. Jon, please.
Q What is the crime exactly that you’re accusing him of?
THE PRESIDENT: You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.
Watergate was, of course, possibly the biggest scandal in American political history. Trying to redirect everyone’s attention to an Obamagate just makes me wonder: what does Trump have his fingers into now? The testing shortages, scandalous as they are, don’t really equate to Watergate. What’s coming down the pike now?
When AG William Barr was nominated to the position by President Trump, the conservative talking point – not unreasonably – was that he was a widely respected former AG for President Bush (43). He would be following (technically not succeeding) the widely derided Matthew Whitaker, and I’m sure his nomination occcasioned a breath of relief for many not in the Trump cult, despite an unfortunate memo Barr had written criticizing Mueller investigation as being illicit: finally, a professional, even if the Democrats in the Senate largely voted against his appointment. No doubt many Republicans were outraged that the vote was not more in Barr’s favor.
Since then, Barr has done little but mar his reputation. He led off with outraging Special Counsel Mueller by allegedly misrepresenting his conclusions; later, he earned an unprecedented public letter calling for his resignation, signed by a large number of former DoJ members from both sides of the political spectrum, for his shocking interference in the Roger Stone case’s sentencing phase.
Apparently, AG Barr has a bare spot on his wall of professional awards at home, because now he has a second letter calling for his resignation.
Many of us have spoken out previously to condemn President Trump’s and Attorney General Barr’s political interference in the Department’s law enforcement decisions, as we did when Attorney General Barr overruled the sentencing recommendation of career prosecutors to seek favorable treatment for President Trump’s close associate, Roger Stone. The Attorney General’s intervention in the Stone case to seek political favor for a personal ally of the President flouted the core principle that politics must never enter into the Department’s law enforcement decisions and undermined its mission to ensure equal justice under the law. As we said then, “Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics; they are autocracies.”
Now, Attorney General Barr has once again assaulted the rule of law, this time in the case of President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn. In December 2017, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States. Subsequent events strongly suggest political interference in Flynn’s prosecution. Despite previously acknowledging that he “had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI,” President Trump has repeatedly and publicly complained that Flynn has been mistreated and subjected to a “witch hunt.” The President has also said that Flynn was “essentially exonerated” and that he was “strongly considering a [f]ull [p]ardon.” The Department has now moved to dismiss the charges against Flynn, in a filing signed by a single political appointee and no career prosecutors. The Department’s purported justification for doing so does not hold up to scrutiny, given the ample evidence that the investigation was well-founded and — more importantly — the fact that Flynn admitted under oath and in open court that he told material lies to the FBI in violation of longstanding federal law.
Evidently, they didn’t buy into Barr’s claim that the antecedents of the investigation were illicit. Other evidence of the political nature of Barr’s interference? The filing for withdrawal of Flynn’s prosecution was not signed by any professional DoJ prosecutor – it was signed by a political appointee.
Barr’s reputation is in irreparable tatters.
But, in a way, this is unsurprising. Back in October 2019, as Catherine Rampell of WaPo reported, Barr gave a speech:
On Friday, in a closed-door speech at the University of Notre Dame, Attorney General William P. Barr talked at length about a “campaign to destroy the traditional moral order.”
The alleged perpetrator of this campaign?
“Militant secularists,” who insist upon keeping government institutions free from the influence of any faith or creed.
To be clear: This was not merely an affirmation — delivered by a devout Catholic, while visiting a Catholic university — of how privately taught religious values can contribute to character development or stronger communities.
No. This appeared to be a tacit endorsement of theocracy.
Theocracies are predicated, at least outwardly, on a single source of inerrant rules. If Barr believes liberals are the source of the problems plaguing society, if he thinks that’s God’s opinion, it’s no surprise he’d ride in on a charger to save a conservative – even a conservative who’s confessed to sin, shall we say, twice.
I don’t expect Barr to resign just because all the professionals have condemned him. He’s doing God’s work here. Rescuing a sinner from punishment. It’s of a piece with the fairly unbelievable behavior of the evangelicals.
And Barr’s entered into the same category as most of Trump’s nominees to important posts – second- and third- raters who are either of dubious morality, or simply don’t understand the secular morality this nation has gradually built up since the days of President Washington. It’s too bad. We could have used a competent Attorney General.
It’ll be interesting to see how Barr’s action and the second letter calling for his resignation impact the independents’ opinion of the Trump Administration and its reelection campaign.
criticizing someone or something in a severe and unkind way:
scathing criticism
He was very scathing about the report, saying it was inaccurate. [Cambridge Dictionary]
I used this word in an email today while referencing this post. I bring up this word not because it’s unusual, but because I haven’t actually seen it, that I can think of, for at least a decade.
