31.May.2024

History made each day

Some days are more historic than others, of course, and yesterday was a corker. Will the king of the Republicans being a convicted felon matter to any of his true believers, camp followers, and lickspittles? (Hello Ted Cruz, Mike Johnson, and so many more.) Good lord. I'm old enough to remember when the Democrats and Republicans were able to be collectively outraged, and prepared to boot Richard Nixon from office for his high crimes and misdemeanors. When it was possible for earned shame to lead to accountability.

That means I'm also old enough to remember when Newt Gingrich and his Contract on America rabble were feeling their oats enough to try to boot Bill Clinton on their own, for lying about that sexual dalliance, while they cheerily were lying about their own.

Funny, there's sex at the root of this latest go-round too, but it's not just that. It's the committing crimes to steal an election at issue. (There are dozens more that have yet to be adjudicated, thanks in part to trolls in the system.)

No one covers the first draft of history territory quite as ably as Heather Cox Richardson. Her May 30, 2024 Letter from an American is recommended, short read.

"Today, twelve ordinary Americans did what Republican senators refused to do. They protected the rule of law and held Trump accountable for his attempt to rig an election."

The new new thing: NewNet

The last time I was at the library to pick up a book I'd requested, I did a quick scan of the "new books" on display, and judged OUR BIGGEST FIGHT by its cover. The subtitle, "Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity and Dignity in the Digital Age," was catchy. The author names weren't particularly familiar, but for the cost of carrying it home, I gave it a go.

This morning, I looked inside. The flappage, the table of contents, and jump to the Conclusion at the end to see if it was worth going to the beginning. It's a strong maybe. It used the abbreviation DSNP repeatedly, touting it as the foundation for a NewNet to replace the demonstrably broken internet we have now. (Is their "first stab at a name" catchy enough? "We welcome other suggestions...") I looked for an index to see where they introduced this DSNP, and was a bit shocked to see there wasn't one. Seriously? How can you take the trouble to publish a work of non-fiction and skip including an index?

It turns out the back inside flap's short bio of the primary author, Frank H. McCourt, Jr., notes that Project Liberty "includes the development of ... the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol, which shifts data rights from platforms to people," along with an institute launched with Georgetown and Stanford universities, and Sciences Po, "to advance research and develop a governance framework for the internet's next era."

Still a little miffed at the no-index, I looked up the related website, ourbiggestfight.com and saw that there's a trailer. Huh. Well, why not? The production values are a bit precious, busting in and out of the fourth wall, but being able to see the author speak, passionately, about his work and "the fight" is an even better teaser than book blurbs and flaps. (Seems like there must be a TED Talk in here somewhere?)

"Between human beings and machines, we face a choice," it begins... but aren't we fighting other human beings using machines? (Not that it might not come down to humanity/us vs. machines/them sooner or later.) Technology is "harming our kids," he says, "creating arguments," "destroying democracy," "Everybody's walking around with this weapon in their hands..." The back cover provides a motivating précis (in all caps, but I reduce the shouting here):

WE FACE A CHOICE ABOUT OUR FUTURE

"Do we want to write that future together? Or do we want our future to be written by technolgy, algorithms, and devices controled by a few giant corporations, which steaily chip away at our humanity? It's a choice between human beings and machines.

"Everything hinges on this decision."

The site also has some blurbs with photos of the blurbers, leading with The Boss, Bruce Springsteen (didn't see him coming); Walter Isaacson; the CEO of The Atlantic I'd never heard of (Nicholas Thompson); and increasingly obscure (but important, I'm sure) personages from there. Jonathan Haidt, we've heard of him, calls it "short and beautifully written" (what am I waiting for then?), and finally, usefully, 5 insights from the book.

1. The internet is broken.
2. it doesn't have to be this way.
3. Data is personal.
4. A decentralized web is good for prosperity.
5. Time is of the essence.

It was ever thus. And, thanks to that very nice book site, I've written my book review before taking the trouble to read it. I did take the trouble to take the jump to the The Project Liberty website (with the name weirly rendered on three lines as PRO // JECT LIBERTY), which starts with a disturbing hero video, depicting a boy at the age of awareness looking concerned? Opening his eyes? Sharing a sly smile of realization as the camera inexplicably pans around his shoulder. Oof.

There is a technology page which includes the essential DSNP FAQ; maybe the lack of an index (and not expanding the abbreviation in the conclusion) was a brilliant tease.

...when will users benefit from DSNP?

"People are already benefiting from DSNP. Next-gen social network MeWe has used DSNP over a blockchain known as Frequency to effortlessly migrate their social media users from a centralized model to a decentralized social web model while offering future options for choice and for governance. In addition, a number of other organizations are working with DSNP to offer decentralized functionality, choice and governance in the near future."

The "Learn More" button takes me to the full-on DSNP site with utterly bizarre light-gray on white styling. Don't they want me to be able to read What's New, and so on?! I can (barely) see there's an "about," an introduction, an overview (with "10 High-Level DSNP Concepts"), another FAQ, and a Whitepaper [sic]. I can toggle "Reader view" in Firefox to jettison their stylesheet.

The concepts start with a DSNP User Id (that GUID we've all been wanting), "which may or may not be linked to or associated with their real-world identity." And,

"User data is managed and secured via a set of control keys typically connected in a public/private key pair. The control keys are owned and managed solely by the user."

It's "designed to run on a consensus-based system such as a blockchain." There's an outline for what constitutes a DSNP system, "running continually." Publicly observable; verifiable; authenticated public input, to "ensure[] that users have control and agency over their data." Think of it as a system that "continuously records everything that happens," with "its recordkeeping in public, even if some of the data it manages may be private (encrypted)." Hmm.

30.May.2024

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

Ever-pitch perfect projection of his own faults on to others, the former guy had something to say after the verdict came down. 34 counts of falsifying business records, made felonies by their furtherance of the crime of attempting to corruptly influence the 2016 election.

Even a blind pig in a poke can stumble on a nut once in a while.

"This was a disgrace."

It's incontrovertible, but not in the way he intended it. Nor in the way his Team of Sycophants is shouting "Shameful." I don't even know how brains can work like that, always blaming someone else for his faults. He's not corrupt, the judge was corrupt. The prosecutors. The jury. Everyone, anyone but him. It's remarkable, and remarkably pathetic.

The lead story from here on out

The NYT "Climate" section is under the "World" group in its top navigation menu. It will likely stand alone before very much longer. In the 5th paragraph above the front page fold in last Sunday's NYT, ‘New Territory’ for Americans: Deadly Heat in the Workplace (gift link, and emphasis and a weather.gov link added):

"Last year was the hottest in recorded history, and researchers are expecting another record-breaking summer, with temperatures already rising sharply across the Sun Belt. The heat index in Miami reached 112 degrees Fahrenheit last weekend, shattering daily records by 11 degrees."

"Wind chill" was the new thing when I was growing up, and I remember being a little snooty about the idea of exaggerating how cold it was. Winter cold came with the territory, and we were supposed to be tough against it. It was like, yeah, it's windy too; if you can't handle it, you should get inside. (Lucky me, there was always an inside to get into.)

Living in the dry intermountain west usually gives us innoculation against needing to combine the dry bulb air temperature, and the effect of relative humidity. It's a dry heat here, as we like to say, and heat illness is driven not (just) by the heat, but the humidity. That lead story is focused on worker protection specifically, and the fact that government regulation will play a key role in expanding protection, as it has in this country since the advent of the Bureau of Labor Standards (1934), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1971.

"The surge in deaths from heat is now the greatest threat to human health posed by climate change, said Dr. John M. Balbus, the deputy assistant secretary for climate change and health equity in the Health and Human Services Department.

“The threat to people from extreme heat is reaching a point where we have to rethink how, at all levels of government, we are preparing and putting in place a response that matches the severity of the problem,” Dr. Balbus said in an interview. “This is new territory.”

The CDC, NOAA, and NIOSH remind us to Stay Cool, Stay Hydrated, Stay Informed!

Update:
Getting to the rest of the story, there's this shiny turd at the intersection of climate change and our political psychosis:

[President] Biden’s efforts to respond to the extreme heat linked to climate change will almost certainly be erased if [the former guy] returns to the White House, Republican strategists said in interviews. Initiatives like the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity could be wiped away. And the proposed OSHA heat rule would very likely be shelved and ignored.

“So far this rulemaking seems bound up in policy concerns about climate change and structural racism,” said Jonathan Berry, who served as a senior Labor Department official under Mr. Trump. “I don’t see a second Trump administration supporting rules on those bases.”

29.May.2024

Memorializing

A technical oversight on my part kept me quiet on the blog over the holiday weekend. (Just posted the item composed on May 25th this morning, "as soon as I could.") After a 5-day visit with family, we're now "catching up," with the news and what-not. Memorial Day is now becoming a test of who's holier than thou; along with an endless stream of campaign spam addressed to "Patriot," ritual obeisance to war dead is required. Then we go on about our business the next day.

There were strange things in the mix this time around. My frame for my opening remarks is Timothy Synder's introduction of his forthcoming book, "On Freedom," He's blogging the titles of its "135 vignettes," and in the 3rd of 5 installments, "Sadopopulism" jumped out at me.

Having Nikki Haley visit Israel this week, and take the time to write "Finish them" on an artillery shell, that's a hell of a thing. Just days after an Israeli strike killed more civilians in Gaza. "In a camp for displaced Palestinians," the NYT story (gift link) says. Are there any that aren't displaced?

"In an interview published Tuesday by the Israel Hayom newspaper, which is owned by the Republican donor Miriam Adelson, Ms. Haley said Israel had done nothing wrong in its invasion and bombardment of Gaza since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 people. And she said the United States should continue to support it unconditionally."

Nothing wrong. Unconditionally. Wow.

Uncoincidentally, our very own head sadopopulist is in the news, with the jury out as of 11:30 am EDT for his felony trial. As Aaron Rupar tooted, "EmoDon" was sad posting on his way to court this morning. Probably his own work, given the ALL CAPS semi-non sequiturs. Glory be to NDAs! And DEFENSE OF COUNSEL DEFENSE!

In other words, yeah he was criming, but he a lawyer told him could? (His fixer-lawyer, Michael Cohen told him he could? And then turned out to be a liar liar pants on fire? Which was just fine while he was lying in service, but as a witness for the prosecution, "not so much." On his way out the courtroom, he likened himself to Mother Teresa. Not The Onion disclaimer.

I never had a reason to follow the trial of a mobster before, but with the MAGA threatening to turn the whole country into a mob scene, a little attention seems warranted? Unless you're Matthew Walther, editor of a Catholic literary journal you never heard of, and agree with the don that all of the attempts at accountability—the impeachments, the Logan act and emoluments clause violations, talk of the 25th amendment after the insurrection— "all, in their animating spirit, partisan attempts to negate the outcome of the 2016 presidential election."

Is that all it was? Partisanship? Walk by Richard Nixon's grave and you can still hear him whispering through the dirt, "when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal." By definition?! "Exactly."

Speaking of is this fake news? NewsGuard reports that John Mark Dougan, a former marine, and deputy sheriff in Florida who had fled to Moscow after being investigated for computer hacking and extortion appears to be running a network of some 167 Russian disinformation websites "masquerading as independent local news publishers in the U.S." with names like DC Weekly, Chicago Chronicle, New York News Daily and Boston Times. Laundered Russian propaganda made its way to congress with the help of useful idiots Marjorie Taylor Greene and J.D. Vance.

25.May.2024

When in doubt, revert to brand

The NYT "On Politics" newsletter caught my attention this morning. Here's a gift link to it: The Anti-Trump Republicans Worried About the Biden Campaign. This comes at the end of the week when the last Republican opponent sort of standing, Nikki Haley, capitulated to the inevitability of Us vs. Them, and decided that in spite of her party's candidate being "totally unhinged," dangerous, "not qualified," an agent of chaos who is pals with dictators, mentally diminished, and unfit to be president, she can't see her way out of voting for him.

The Overton Window has done a head spin that puts The Exorcist to shame. Some bereft Republicans complain that Joe Biden has gone "so far to the left," they'll just have to vote for fascism and the psychopath, in spite of their reservations. It's only sort of "unthinkable" it seems, and nearly impossible to think outside the brand.

Ever more certain that he stands to lose a legitimate election, Trump is poisoning the well at a rate that beggars the imagination. His "rigged" narrative is running far longer, and hotter than ever, certain to reach ten times what it was four years ago, by election day. The data graphic excerpted here is expanded and annotated in the NYT piece Trump's Pattern of Sowing Election Doubt Intensifies in 2024 (another gift link).

23.May.2024

News quiz

What do "Christian" political activists, opponents of legalized gay marriage, miscreant "militias" occupying a wildlife refuge, the Conservative Political Action Conference, January 6 rioters, neo-Nazis, House speaker Mike Johnson, and Supreme Court Justic Samuel Alito have in common?

A penchant for waving An Appeal to Heaven Flag, which has a reputable history (by Wikipedia's account), going back to the late 16th century, before the white folks came over and called their landing spot "New England." I've seen one in my neighborhood lately, the wink-wink nudge-nudge alternative to the former guy paraphernalia that seems to be fading from favor a bit (but which I'm sure will sprout like cheatgrass come high election season).

Heather Cox Richardson's May 22 Letter from an American got me started this morning, after skimming through Tuesday's primary election results. Kevin Richert's news analysis on our "turbulent" present and future, noted that fifteen incumbents, including Senate President Pro Tempore Chuck Winder given the boot by a sufficient fraction of the scant fraction voting, after twenty were shown the door in 2022.

Richert catalogs some of the unprecedented outside spending, from The Idaho Liberty PAC, Make Liberty Win (aligned with Texas-based Young Americans for Liberty), The Idaho Federation for Children PAC, and the outgunned Right 2 Learn.

"In all, state elections officials have seen at least a $2 million surge in outside spending this year — for a midterm primary without any statewide races. “We just have never experienced this kind of outside money coming in,” Secretary of State Phil McGrane said Tuesday.

"Whether that spree continues might depend on whether outside groups get what they consider an adequate return on a speculative investment. Do they get enough for their money, ousting or promoting some candidates while wagering on some races that become lost causes?

"Regardless, the outside spending fed into a brutish primary campaign. The messaging was long on negativity, short on nuance...."

We haven't quite come to the point of caning—Professor Richardson noted the 168th anniversary of Charles Sumner of Massachuesetts being beaten nearly to death on the floor of the US Senate—but stand back, and stand by; that may be coming.

With enough of the Supreme Court already in the bag, and "a sense of power and entitlement coming from MAGA Republicans as they impose new limits on their fellow Americans and call those constraints freedom," Ron DeSantis has declared "Freedom Summer," with all colors save red, white, and blue outlawed. (Sort of.) The Pine Tree won't be quite the same, eh.

Props to Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), who HCR features for his speaking truth in the people's House.

"McGovern suggested that perhaps [House Republican extremists] were trying “to distract from the fact that their candidate for president has been indicted more times than he's been elected” and “is on trial for covering up hush money payments to a porn star for political gain not to mention three other criminal felony prosecutions.”

...“[A]t some point, it's time for this body to recognize that there is no precedent for this situation. We have a presumptive nominee for president facing 88 felony counts, and we're being prevented from even acknowledging it. These are not alternative facts. These are real facts. A candidate for president of the United States is on trial for sending a hush money payment to a porn star to avoid a sex scandal during his 2016 campaign and then fraudulently disguising those payments in violation of the law. He's also charged with conspiring to overturn the election. He's also charged with stealing classified information, and a jury has already found him liable for rape in a civil court. And yet, in this Republican-controlled house, it's okay to talk about the trial, but you have to call it a sham.”

22.May.2024

Advice to citizens

Continuing the theme of yesterday's primary election, and aware that I may be preaching to the choir here, I just have to say...

1. INFORM YOURSELF. You could have viewed your ballot (choices) ahead of time.
2. VOTE. While you still can. It makes a difference. (If you don't vote, no one wants to hear you complaining about the results.) (Not registered, you say? You can register at the polls, on Election Day. Or sooner.)
3. BE KIND. Generally applicable reminder (to me, and thee), but especially on Election Day, recognize the effort and commitment of your pollworkers, who are there to help, while faithfully upholding the law.
4. BUILD COMMUNITY. We are truly stronger together. Get to know your neighbors, talk to them about issues and candidates.

Coincidentally, Jeanette turned up a 6-year old clipping of a review of Hannah Arendt's Thinking Without a Banister; Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975 (NYT gift link). Consider one excerpt, with my emphasis added:

“What really makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other kind of dictatorship to rule is that the people are not informed,” she remarked in a 1973 interview. “If everyone always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but that no one believes anything at all anymore — and rightly so, because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, to be ‘re-lied,’ so to speak.” A lying government pursuing shifting goals has to ceaselessly rewrite its own history, leaving people not only dispossessed of their ability to act, “but also of their capacity to think and to judge,” she declared. “And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

Less prfoundly (and perhaps just a curious historical footnote), let me add an explanation of the five-way BALLOT CHOICE diagram (that we may or may not ever see again in this form):

• ALL VOTERS COULD CHOOSE A NON-PARTISAN, OR DEMOCRATIC BALLOT. The state Democratic Party does not coerce anyone into "affiliation" status, before the primary or via the primary. In other words, the party has an open primary. The Republican Party legislated themselves a CLOSED primary back in 2012.
• Voters affiliated with the Constitution, Libertarian, or Republican parties could choose their party's ballot as well.
• Unaffiliated voters could choose ANY OF THE FOUR PARTIES' BALLOTS (or the pretty lame Non-Partisan ballot); but if they chose CONSTITUTION, LIBERTARIAN, or REPUBLICAN ballots THEY WOULD BE AFFILIATED WITH THE PARTY THEY CHOSE.

Voters forced into affiliation by a ballot choice can later (today, for example) change their party affiliation, or unaffiliate themselves. The extremists in the Republican Party are working to make it harder to jump in and out. They tried and failed to pass more legislation this session; they'll likely be at it again next year. If the Open Primary initiative succeeds, their number one job will probably be to sabotage its implementation.

Primary election day debrief

Idaho's primary election day was yesterday, "ICYMI," as the vast majority of our registered voters did. Our/most populous Ada County's "live results" this morning (at 7am) show all 197 precincts reported, and just barely over 22% turnout. 66,719 ballots cast with more than 300,000 registered voters. More than a third came in from absentee ballots (25.7%) and early voting (11.5%).

The Election Day totals work out to an average of 213 votes per precinct; the one where I worked as a check-in clerk was just above that, with 223 ballots cast. That's a rate of not quite 19 per hour from 8am to 8pm; mostly a slow day. We set up 8 of the cardboard voting booths, and came close to having them all in use a couple of times, but not quite.

The newly rebuilt elementary school that hosted us was a pleasant place to be on a mostly sunny spring day. A little cool in the voluminous gym, with two doors open to the outside air. We had "transparency" with windows to the main hallway on one side, and between that and a few kids poking their heads in the doors on their way to school (we started before they did), the young and the not-so-young were able to enjoy glimpses of what the other group was up to on a special day.

The patchy closed primary engineered by the Idaho Republican party gave our place at an elementary school ten different ballots to juggle, thanks to a school district boundary through the middle of the single precinct we served. Republican, Democratic, Libertian, Constitution, and a sparse "Non-partisan" ballot with only judge affirmations. Half of the ten had a school bond levy, for those in the West Ada school district.

We didn't have to actually juggle ballots, thanks to the "Ballot on Demand" system that was rolled out to a third of the precincts, including ours. After the voter chose which ballot they wanted (with two to five choices, depending on their "affiliation" status), the printer attached to the e-pollbook would spit out the right one. No pre-printing all the various flavors, and trying to guess how many of each would be needed, and wasting the overage. The closing reconciliation only had to account for the water-marked, blank ballot paper delivered, ballots scanned (or spoiled—just one at our place), and paper remaining. Easy-peasy, and the obvious way forward for primaries, certainly, whether or not the Open Primary Initiative (qualifies for the ballot, and) wins the day in November.

We still had to tell a handful of voters that they were in the wrong precinct, and direct them to another polling place; that could be obviated by flipping a switch in the software, as they have done for the early voting facilities, where voters from any of the 197 precincts have a couple weeks to stop by and have their ballot printed on demand. There were more than 1,000 different ballots in our county this time around!

At one point, I overheard one voter at the other check-in desk whingeing about something or other, and another clerk asked him "who's fault is that?" and he replied "I blame the government," as one does. I announced "we are the government." Nothing more to add after that, eh? We half a dozen election judges and clerks, working a 14 hour day for less than you can make flipping burgers these days (but hey, more than Idaho's minimum wage) swore an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, and our state's Constitution and laws, faithfully.

Some people didn't like the process that's come out of those laws (including some of us working the polls), but we upheld them all the same, to the best of our ability.

20.May.2024

Call-out to our better angels

The only thing I have to add to Heather Cox Richardson's description of our President's commencemnt speech at Morehouse College yesterday is that the message deserves a lot more attention than the tawdry insanity of the hijacked Republican Party and the devolution of the extremists in the Supreme Court.

There's histoy in it, of course: the part I remember from the 1960s, and the part I never heard about, about a college "to educate formerly enslaved men," founded in 1867, and envisioned as "the great equalizer from slavery to freedom." It's been a long, hard road, and the end is not yet in sight.

[Biden's] world changed when an assassin murdered the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King—a Morehouse man—and the segregated city of Wilmington, Delaware, erupted with fires, looting, fights, and occasional gunfire. For nine months, the National Guard patrolled the city in combat gear, “the longest stretch in any American city since the Civil War,” [he] recalled.

After you read HCR's Letter, the transcript of the whole, 25 minute speech is available on whitehouse.gov.

18.May.2024

The new machine is all the rage

Brian Christian's 2020 book, The Alignment Problem; Machine Learning and Human Values, was recommended by a credible source as the one book to read about Artificial Intelligence, "if you're going to read [just] one." That sounded like a good place to pick up the plot. Having now read it, I can second the recommendation. I don't judge a book by its back pages, but with 139 of them in notes, a bibliography, and index, it's clear the author has covered the field, and left plenty of breadcrumbs for those who want more. Readably organized in three sections of three chapters each, one-word, evocative concept titles (sandwiched between Prologue, Introduction, and Conclusion), Christian puts the current explosion of attention into understandable context to explore our problem, the one in his title. How can we shape this new technology, even as it shapes us, without having it overrun our values? How can we remain human as we create a superhuman technology that has potential for nearly incomprehensible good, and bad?

The trouble, as ever, is that "we" don't all value the same thing. Make money fast(er) has too often been the default, and our big winners' values don't necessarily align with the good of humanity, however one measures that. Elon Musk wants a billion followers to stroke his narcissism, as he fills the sky with satellites that will be burning up and leaving conductive metal pollution in the ionosphere at a rate tens of times higher then what comes from the 50 tons of ("natural") space rock vaporized by the atmosphere every day. We'll find out what could possibly go wrong with an uncontrolled (but profitable!) experiment on an essential component of our biosphere.

Musk has a cameo in the book, an epigraph for chapter 7, "Imitation." "Watch this" he said to Peter Thiel. "Immediatly before losing control of an crashing his uninsured $1 million McClaren F1." That note led me to find the hour-long, 2012 interview with him, in which the bubbly CEO of PandoDaily starts with "you seem to play this game differently than everybody else," before they chat about how "crazy" he assesses himself to be. They get to the McLaren story in the first 5 minutes.

"So we're driving up Sand Hill Road, didn't really know how to drive the McLaren, and Peter says, 'so what can this do?' [laughing] And then like, I'm probably #1 on the list of famous last words, I said 'watch this'." [Ha ha ha ha.] "So I floored it, I floored it and did a lane change..."

It's quite the tale of "stupid and lucky," after they spun like a discus and landed the right way around; "the core chassis and engine were ok, but all the glass and the wheels and everything were shredded... massive body damage..."

"Is there a parallel with how you build companies in that story?" Sarah Lacy asks, and he says "I hope not!" and every body laughs again. The joke's on us all. "Watch this" "could be awkward with a rocket launch" Musk reflected.

"Would you ever do an internet company again, or do you find the internet boring?" Lacy asked, as they moved on. Musk thought it was "unlikely," not that he finds it boring at all. He said he's "trying to allocate my effort to that which I think would most effect the future of humanity, in, in, in a positive way...." That's nice. His halting progress is displayed daily (hourly!) on Xitter, his latest internet company that someone else started for him.

Speaking of AI and the internet, the International Energy Agency recently estimated that data centers, cryptocurrency, and AI taken together reached "almost 2% of global energy demand in 2022" and forecasted to double by 2026, "which would make it roughly equal to the amount of electricity used by the entire country of Japan." We love our "always on" fount of (real and imagined) knowledge, and connection.

Humans thirst for knowledge; data centers thirst for cooling water. After a fight against disclosure, with the city's attorneys claiming Google's water use was a "trade secret" for them, the company relented (perhaps coincidentally) and reported its usage there, and worldwide. Deprecating it as just a couple desert golf courses. (Maybe not as much as Saudi farms growing alfalfa in Arizona, before that came under scrutiny.)

17.May.2024

In the springtime

A Facebook friend reposted "Destination Italy's" homage to the work of Sandro Botticelli that can be viewed at the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence ("and in my new house!" she added). Somehow, all my studies of the arts never brought me to contemplate this image, and I was piqued by understanding what all was depicted, most particularly the one woman not in a white, diaphonous dress. I looked it up on Wikipedia, as one does.

I'm not the first person to be piqued by this painting from the 15th century, I see. Says there, it's "one of the most written about, and most controversial paintings in the world," and also "one of the most popular paintings in Western art." How could I have missed it all these years, I wonder.

Controversy isn't what it used to be either, but the Three Graces, the winged cherub with the bow and arrow are familiar enough. Venus at the center of attention in the composition, but who else? Mercury, alone in a crowd, and poking at a cloud, a very creepy Zephyrus groping Chloris (later his wife, made into a deity, and supposedly the goddess of Spring, but I've never heard of her).

"The pastoral scenery is elaborate. There are 500 identified plant species depicted in the painting, with about 190 different flowers, of which at least 130 can be specifically identified."

Flora is the one who caught my eye, third from right, certainly the most vernal of goddesses. She faces us, looks at us across the 5½ centuries, with a smile that "was very unusual in painting" in the late 1400s, decades before Leonardo did that thing.

Embodied in the original, 1973 canonical taxonomic treatise by Hitchcock and Cronquist, I carried Flora into Hell's Canyon from Pittsburgh Landing, in the glorious 23rd spring of my life, to better understand her handiwork in all its particulars.

15.May.2024

Democracy can die in broad daylight, too

There are lots of important things to discuss these days, including multiple wars, nuclear proliferation, and climate catastrophe ("zombie fires" burned through the Canadian winter, and now in May, the "season" is kicking into high gear, driven by higher temperatures, and drought, and sending smoke to the big eastern cities without regard to the US border; more than 45 million acres burned last year, about the same area as the whole state of Washington).

And then there's the state of democracy in the US, centered around the short-fingered vulgarian who has fully cuckolded one of our major parties, packed the Supreme Court to enable full-blown corruption to rewrite laws wholesale, and is doing his damndest to destroy the judiciary and place himself above the law.

Is Trump orchestrating a new criminal conspiracy? Judd Legum asks on Popular Information, with an all-too obvious answer. In the criminal trial in New York,

"[Judge] Merchan's order prohibits Trump from "directing others to make public statements about known or reasonably foreseeable witnesses." The order also prohibits Trump from directing others to attack the jury, the court staff, or family members.

"Asked on Tuesday if he directed the Republicans to speak about the trial on his behalf, Trump described them as his "surrogates" and praised them for "speaking very beautifully." Trump has also entered the courthouse flanked by his surrogates, effectively giving them his imprimatur. If Trump directed his surrogates to speak, their comments could constitute criminal contempt of the gag order by Trump.

"Trump’s attorneys challenged the legitimacy of the gag order, but the New York Supreme Court rejected his argument on Tuesday. A five-judge panel found that Judge Merchan appropriately balanced "the competing considerations of [Trump's] First Amendment rights to free expression and the effective functioning of the judicial, prosecutorial, and defense processes."

The Trumpublican party members making an appearance to attack the integrity of NY's judicial system now include Sen. J.D. Vance (OH), Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (NY), Sen. Tommy Tuberville (AL), Gov. Doug Burgum (ND), Rep. Byron Donalds (FL), Rep. Cory Mills (FL), former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, and the bloody Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson (LA).

Legum quotes some of the vile statements made by this sorry bunch (Mr. Speaker, referring to the allegations about the judge's daughter business as an "atrocity") and concludes that "the similarity of the comments suggests an organized campaign."

It's more than a suggestion. This is more organization than the House majority of the 118th Congress has shown for their actual jobs in their whole term. And coach Tuberville, never the sharpest football in the bag, said the quiet part right out loud.

Tuberville, in an appearance on Newsmax, admitted that he traveled to New York to help Trump "overcome this gag order." Tuberville said that he and other Trump supporters were there to "represent" Trump and speak "for President [sic] Trump." Similarly, Vance acknowledged that he came to Manhattan specifically to say what Trump "is prevented from saying."

14.May.2024

Creatures from the swamp, in NYC

It ain't the trial of the century, exactly, and it ain't the Big One (or the Next Big One, or the Perfect Call to Georgia One), but if it's all we're getting before the Election like You've Never Seen Before (that you have, actually, seen before), and great dog almighty, I'm starting to use drumpfish Title Case. Joyce Vance:

"This is, in many ways, a documents case, as we discussed last night. The false records are all in evidence. Weisselberg’s handwritten notes documenting the details are too. And then there is Trump’s tweet. After the Stormy Daniels story broke in 2018, he tweeted this:...

[ Take the jump if you need to, not embedding Xitter anymore. ]

"There really is a tweet for everything, apparently."

Also, monthly invoices, and checks signed by The Boss. A "cover story," ha ha. Just a "non-disclosure agreement, or NDA" the king of shady dealing and cover-ups instructed us in the middle of his tawdry term. You know, the one between "Dennis Dennison" and "Peggy Peterson." (Charles Dickens was not on staff, alas.)

Speaking of NDAs, I'm old enough to remember when Michael Avenatti convinced "Peggy" to file suit because Trump Didn't Sign At The XXX was a headline on the NPR Two-Way. (When there was an NPR Two-Way.) Good times.

As Michael Cohen wraps up his testimony and defendant No. 1's legal team tries to make him cross on cross, I'm wondering just what the alt-story is going to be, or whether it's just a bucketload of chaff about Cohen's past bad acts (many in service to D-No. 1), to find some "reasonable doubt" about the blindingly obvious facts in the case. More Vance:

"For Trump, it’s always about loyalty, not truth. The truth for him is transient, and he is used to convincing people around him to accept his changing truths, his alternative facts if you will, at his whim. But juries don’t like stories that don’t add up, and Trump’s doesn’t."

The case comes down to the one guy who flipped, confronted reality, paid a heavy personal price for it, did his time, and came out the other side, ready to come clean to the judge. And jury. The defense team just needs one juror to go wonky for whatever reason. It could certainly be fear of retribution, Donald J. Trump's main line of business these days.

There was a circus parade of politicos making an appearance in the courtroom today, shuffling seats to get a good photo-op, and then standing in the New York sunshine to give their take on their exalted leader's criminal trial.

Rep. Byron Donalds (FL), ND Gov. Doug Burgum, "both considered possible vice presidential candidates"! and the former super-long shot candidate Vivek Ramaswamy where there, in matching outfits, no less, to smile and nod and garble something like "nothing has been done poorly by President [sic] Trump."

It was a Perfect liaison, a Perfect cover-up, NDA, a Perfect falsification of business records. Given the absence of facts on their side, they picking up the attack on the judge's daughter, the one the Boss started before he was gagged, and found in criminal contempt for violating the order, ten times.

Last but not least, the servile Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, after listening to "a few moments" of testimony, standing outside the courtroom to spew out some casual slander to whoever will listen.

Johnson is as vile any sycophant in the far-right swamp, more dangerous for the oleaginous religiosity he wears on his sleeves and his smooth speaking style. Mr. Speaker, no less.

As ever, his projection is straight to the bulls-eye. Johnson is a man who is clearly on a personal mission for aggrandizement and servility, who we have come to see in such a short time on the national stage as a factotum who has no trouble manipulating "truthiness" to serve his purpose. And totally fine with destroying the justice system along the way, if that's what it takes to serve his psychopathic master.

Update:
Let me second the (relayed) rhetorical question for the Speaker from emptywheel, translated into the original Anglo-Saxon.

The second link in that is to a substack introducting Marcy Wheeler's Ball of Thread series, turned into a podcast, "unwinding the story of the attack that has brought us to the brink of fascism," so we can step back.

It's about "what brought us to the place where at least three, and possibly five supreme court justices believe outright bullshit, and because they believe that, they're going to rewrite the Constitution to basically permit a king... to pave the way for an accountable authoritarian to come in."

13.May.2024

Clash of the Harpies

It seems I've been reading "breaking news" wrong all this time. In Idaho, it's news about extremists breaking things. Like government. Daniel Walters has a blockbuster about our through-the-looking-glass world were Mike Moyle isn't conservative enough for the far-right, and God's preference for men over women in leadership is under discussion.

It seems someone made a secret recording of the catfight between Rep. Heather Scott and "Freedom Caucus Network power broker" (who knew that was a job?) Maria Nate, wife of the former Rep. Ron Nate, who is now running the Idaho Freedom Foundation, after Wayne Hoffman got tired of it, or something.

“Even their own guys have said ‘IFF has gone crazy,’” Moyle told InvestigateWest. “Their own guys are saying they’re nuts.”

As for the recording, we don't know who did it, but somebody could be in a heap of trouble.

"Last month, that recording was leaked to InvestigateWest by a third-party source not involved in taping it. When asked for comment, Scott and Nate refused to talk, and the Idaho State Police reached out to InvestigateWest to let us know the recording was part of a criminal investigation and to warn of potential criminal liability if we disclosed the recording’s content."

If you get to hear an illegal recording and write about what's on it, you could get 5 years in the state pen? But then there's that 1st Amendment thingie, and Idahoans are big on the low-numbered amendments, so who knows?

If nothing else, I've got a new news organization on my radar. Says there, "InvestigateWest is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest." More power to them.

Just some headlines (and links)

Two Virginia schools in the will be bringing back their traitor names ("Stonewall Jackson High had been named in 1959, during Virginia’s “massive resistance” to integration." Doesn't say much about Ashby-Lee.)

• Immigrants are saving the American economy - Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria
• Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership
• Rick Scott's one-man rally for Trump exposes GOP abandonment - Digby
• Yet another front in the culture war: The Right’s War on Divorce
• Trump's price for selling the planet: $1 billion; and what Trump promised oil CEOs if the come through with the vigorish.
• Florida con: Mom and Barron made other plans, actually.
• Untangling disinformation is way harder than cooking it up, or getting the Heritage Foundation, Elon Musk, and Marjorie Taylore Greene to amplify it.
• Anne Applebaum's cover story in the June Atlantic: THE NEW PROPAGANDA WAR (Gift link, good for 14 days.) "Autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world." Modern autocrats are selling "fear, cynicism, nihilism, and apathy, coupled with disgust and disdain for democracy."
• HCR's May 12, 2024 letter deconstructs the "cowboy myth" and its current sequel.
• Trump backs surveillance and prosecution of women to enforce abortion bans

12.May.2024

Kangaroo court

Judge Eileen "Loose" Cannon had the gall to cite "the public's interest in the fair and efficient administration of justice" as she put the theft of government secrets case against +rump off until forever, as far as we know. Joyce Vance's latest, Mar-a-No-Go: "This case could and should have been ready for trial in December or January" if the judge were competent, and doing her job.

"Judge Cannon’s action here bears a striking similarity to what Trump asked her to do back in July of 2023, when he and co-defendant Walt Nauta filed a joint motion asking her to “postpone initial consideration of any rescheduled trial date until after substantive motions have been presented and adjudicated.” She didn’t then; she scheduled the May trial date. But now, she has given Trump what he wanted all along, and it’s contrary to what the law directs judges to do....

"Refusing to set a trial date is not what the rules authorize federal judges to do; in fact, the rules direct judges to set a trial date at the beginning of the case, before all of the motions are even filed. Here, we have a Judge who won’t set a trial date because of eight motions that are still pending on her docket because she has refrained from deciding them."

In the list of 14 things that are on the judge's calendar, "Speedy Trial Act report" is 12th, set for July 19. No joke. As Cannon does her damndest to lose the plot, a brief refresher of what this is about:

"Trump not only kept classified information he was not entitled to, spreading it across bathrooms and ballrooms at Mar-a-Lago in a careless fashion, he also obstructed efforts by the government to get it back as well as the criminal investigation, in a way that clarifies his intent to violate the law."

10.May.2024

The tightwad, the porn star, and the fixer

On February 12, 1999, we were driving through the Blue Mountains on our way to visit family, listening to NPR's live coverage of the Senate trial for the impeachment of Bill Clinton. The moment etched in memory with the climb to Deadman Pass is when the the vote for "Not guilty" had won the day. Refreshing the history from 25 years ago, I see in Wikipedia's entry that the final votes came after "closed-door deliberations." The witness depositions had also been done out of public view, after the whole scandal had been cocked up by Ken Starr's $70 million fishing expedition that distilled "alleged abuses" over Whitewater, the firing of White House travel agents, and misuse of FBI files into two articles of impeachment; for perjury, and obstruction of justice.

The articles were passed by the lame duck 105th Congress, after the 1998 midterms had produced a gain of five seats for the Democrats, rather than the +30 that Newt Gingrich expected for his party. He quit his job in shame, and "Speaker-designate" Bob Livingston presided over the House vote on the impeachment articles in December, 1998.

Gingrich's rise to power was driven by ruthlessness, with the main talking point that government was awful. Cast your mind back to those halcyon days, when the federal budget had been balanced for the first time in our lifetimes, and after nearly two decades of Supply-side economics (so aptly named "voodoo" by George H.W. Bush, in 1980), the deficit had well and truly exploded.

To say the impeachment of Bill Clinton didn't go well for the Republican leaders is an understatement. The one name I recognize now of the House managers for it, who still makes waves in Congress is Lindsey Graham, go figure. From Wikipedia:

Livingston "announced the end of his candidacy for Speaker and his resignation from Congress from the floor of the House after his own marital infidelity came to light.... Many other prominent Republican members of Congress (including Dan Burton, [Idaho's] Helen Chenoweth, and Henry Hyde, the chief House manager of Clinton's trial in the Senate) had infidelities exposed about this time, all of whom voted for impeachment."

Still, it put enough of a taint on Clinton's veep, Al Gore, that in spite of winning the popular vote in 2000, and by the best evidence that's been assembled, winning the state of Florida as well, the Supreme Court stepped in and corrupted the Florida proceeding to seal the deal for George W. Bush, and you know how well that turned out.

My little imagined trip down memory lane was sparked by Joyce Vance's latest, Getting to Michael Cohen, with a buoyant recap of yesterday's court proceeding, in which "Stormy Daniels owned cross-examination." Responding to +rump lawyer Susan Necheles (who "came at her with guns blazing"), Daniels "answered questions directly and forthrightly," as the prosecutors set the stage for Cohen to testify that yes, of course, Donald Trump knew exactly what he was doing in paying to quash one of his too many loose sex scandals at a moment when those still seemed to matter. A little. Before the bumbling Jim "Dudley Doright" Comey had a little something to add.

The Republican Party is so over caring about such things now, though. The only element of suspense is, how will the jury see it? Because—Spoiler alert!—Cohen already testified (truthfully, it seems, at least that time) on February 26, 2018:

“I pled guilty in federal court to felonies for the benefit of, at the direction of, and in coordination with ‘Individual 1,’” Cohen said, reading from his prepared statement. “And for the record: ‘Individual 1’ is Donald J. Trump.”

That direction and coordination ("collusion," you might call it) is what makes Trump's misdemeanor falsifications of business records (now well-established in the current New York trial's record) felonious.

9.May.2024

The wave of nepotism

Now that Barron has turned 18, and is on the verge of graduating high school, we can talk about him, right? I wonder how did he get to be so tall, first of all. We all look forward to his HS graduation next week, which his dad will be attending, to get a hall pass out of Judge Merchan's courtroom for the day.

The Guardian report that Barron "has been chosen to serve as a Florida delegate to the Republican National Convention" is kind of interesting. (He'll be there with half-siblings Junior, Eric, and Tiffany, while Ivanka is keeping her distance; if only the rest of us could, too.)

But the photo is a bit more interesting than the story about the Party Of Trump renominating last election's loser and pending felon. The caption doesn't spell out who the shadowy presence over pop's left shoulder is, nor the sour-faced minister, but really, we're all this guy by now, aren't we?

The possum and the orange turd

It's like a car wreck, ok? Who can just look away and go on about their business? More following Laffy (@GottaLaff) following the reporters at the trial in NY. In one from "McB," as we learn more about Stormy's business ventures (and after the "Patron Saint of Indictments" candle someone came up with, this:

"...a TV show fka Spooky Babes, about the paranormal, and she was on a podcast in which she claimed to be able to speak to dead people.

"Daniels jokes that a lot of the "paranormal activity" was debunked, in one instance it was just a possum under the house, and the press laughs as Necheles moves to strike and instruct the witness to answer the questions—overruled."

So, the possum stays on the record. And McB adds "As Daniels answers questions about tarot cards, paranormal possums, and communing with the dead, I wonder if the jury is beginning to lose the plot. I sure am." The plot in Necheles' cross-examination of Stormy Daniel is to discredit the witness, which is not going all that great, from what I read.

Not to leave it just hanging there, the other reference in the headline is from the swamp of antisocial media that draws us in, sooner or later. Also from McB:

...Daniels, [] responding to someone calling her a human toilet: "Exactly! Making me the best person to flush the orange turd down."

His lawyer wants to make sure it's on record that this is about Trump, right? "Daniels jokes that that's her interpretation, getting a good laugh." And from Klasfeld:

Daniels pushes back at the implication that's about her being supposedly "instrumental" in putting him in "jail."

Daniels, coolly, factually and with a hint of indignation: "I responded to hundreds of tweets like this, calling me names.""

Attacking the witness' credibility also means going over a 10+ year record of media statements that aren't perfectly congruent. Can you imagine if we had to do that for the defendant's antisocial media presence? I mean, he's got his own antisocial media platform now, after flaming out on Xitter. Tens of thousands of lies. We'd never get through this trial.

Update:
The deal from two days ago, the first day of Stormy Daniels' testimony, when the judge spoke to Trump's lawyers about his misbehavior in court.

“I understand that your client is upset at this point,” Merchan said to the defense attorney, according to the transcript, “but he is cursing audibly and he is shaking his head visually and that’s contemptuous. It has the potential to intimidate the witness and the jury can see that”...

“I am speaking to you here at the bench because I don’t want to embarrass him,” Merchan said. “You need to speak to him. I won’t tolerate that.”

Once again, Donald Trump is being treated very unfairly. An ordinary defendant who pulled this stunt (after being cited for criminal contempt ten times already) would have been jailed.

8.May.2024

Political malpractice

Speaker Mike Johnson was feeling his oats on Tuesday, news that got upstaged in real time by Stormy Daniels testifying, but remaining hanging in the air like a stale fart. Johnson Demands All Trump Prosecutions Cease, Vows to Use Congress ‘In Every Possible Way.’

An outrageous threat to attack the executive branch, the judicial system, states’ rights, and the rule in law, because what now?

"President Trump has done nothing wrong here," his bloviation begins. If you just ignore what evidence has been presented and make stuff up, ya you betcha. Points for chutzpah here:

"It's about the people’s faith in our system of justice."

True dat! And so... "we're gonna get down to the bottom of it." Yes, let's do. It's a long way down, but we need to definitely get to the very bottom of it. But then the utterly whack factotum non sequitur:

"All these cases need to be dropped, because they are a threat to our system."

You want threat to the system, that would be it, right there. Putting one dangerous pyscopath above the law.

Today's House proceedings didn't get into that, but after one more attempt at jumping up and down and holding their breath until their faces turneed blew, the 11 most extreme members of the House of Representatives did NOT get their way. They wanted to open debate on a new round of chaos by ousting yet another Republican speaker who wasn't extreme enough for them. For the record, the wurst of the worst:

• Andy Biggs of Arizona
• Eric Burlison of Missouri
• Eli Crane of Arizona
• Warren Davidson of Ohio
• Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia
• Paul Gosar of Arizona
• Thomas Massie of Kentucky
• Alex Mooney of West Virginia
• Barry Moore of Alabama
• Chip Roy of Texas
• Victoria Spartz of Indiana

32 Democrats weren't willing to hold their noses and vote to give Johnson a pass, 7 voted "present," and the rest of the body decided that maybe some actual governing was needed. 359-43 smackdown for the Georgia goober. From the NYT's report:

"...[S]he tried to negotiate a series of demands in exchange for not calling the ouster vote. Among the demands were cutting off all future U.S. aid to Ukraine, defunding the Justice Department, and imposing a 1 percent across the board cut on all spending bills if lawmakers are unable to negotiate a deal to fund the government in September.

“What I’m demanding is simple,” Ms. Greene said on Tuesday on Steve Bannon’s podcast, War Room. “We need to act like Republicans. We need to demand control and we need to stop the government from being used for politics.”

Good things

Since it seems I'm almost always motivated to write here about bad things, while I was on my way to the grocery store this morning, it occurred to me we're all due for an occasional respite.

First of all, when I turned left onto the often busy arterial near us, a decent interval from two cars coming my way, one in each lane, I figured I'd ease on to the sidewalk, for the short block before my next turn, but there was a pedestrian coming. Knowing that I'd need to hold the lane, I checked my rearview mirror... and saw the driver in the right lane had changed lanes to give me space. Yay.

Secondly, what a privilege it is to have a fully stocked grocery store a short bike ride away, and enough money to buy whatever we need.

On the way home, at the stop sign waiting to cross that arterial, a driver in the left lane slowed and then stopped to yield to me. One car whizzed by to her right, two others were behind her, and I am totally ok with waiting however long it takes for a legit break in traffic to cross four lanes from a standing start. I waved her by. She wouldn't go, waved me to go. Sigh. Still, it was done with generous intent.

Fourthly, it was chilly, barely up to 40°F, but I was dressed for it. Didn't need to break out the mittens here in early May. (And, they're still forecasting 70s in the coming days, and 80s this weekend. Right after more isolated showers this morning, and more 11-17 gusting to 26 WNW.)

Fifthly, the dogwoods are still in flower, brightening a cloudy day, and the apples, peaches, and plums are setting.

Oh, and WE VOTED yesterday, early, so we could be poll workers for Idaho's primary election in two weeks.

Monkey business

Appreciate Judd Legum's follow-up on Georgia's congressman, Mike Collins, who cemented "Ole Miss taking care of business" in the lexicon of disgusting racist tropes. After refusing to back down, Collins did back down, a little. He said he "understand[s] and respect[s] the feedback that has been shared regarding a single individual during the Ole Miss protests," but has not yet understood well enough to remove a video snippet from his xitter account.

A second look at the (still) image in the tweet made me think of grade-school taunting, in which I'm sure that I imitiated a monkey at some point. "Monkey see, monkey do!" (and "Made you look!" etc.) was said more than once. We humans are raised on imitation, after all. Mirror neurons are a fascinating field of study. But I digress.

In local news, above the Mason-Dixon line, we read that prosecutors have declined to charge [just one?] suspect in the Coeur d’Alene racial harassment of the Utah women’s basketball team, one of the most recent Idaho embarrassments in national news. A high school student, old enough to be legally an adult, if not to know better, said he was trying to be "funny."

Comedy is hard. The language was "racist and misogynistic" and also "protected speech" in the eyes of the prosecutor, who took the trouble to spell out his own assessment, that "the sum of the evidence supports that Mr. Myers’s intent was to be funny."

The paragraph following that, quoting the prosecutor is something I'm having a hard time believing is actually in a newspaper in its particulars. (You'll have to take the jump to read it.) But the "evidence" discussed is what the white male occupants of the vehicle all agreed was "thought it would be funny."

“What has been clear from the very outset of this incident is that it was not when or where or how Mr. Myers made the grotesque racial statement that caused the justifiable outrage in this case; it was the grotesque racial statement itself.”

It's not as bad a story as Kyle Rittenhouse getting away with murder, anyway? The prosecutor said his office "shares the outrage," but they just don't have probable cause that a crime was committed.

7.May.2024

Live from New York: It's TUESDAY MORNING!

Dropped in to the NYT live feed from the former guy's business/election fraud trial, on Stormy day. Who could resist?

Jonathan Swan: "Daniels is describing Trump’s suite in Lake Tahoe in minute detail, every aspect down to the color of the tiles. She seems to have a photographic memory."

Alan Feuer: "Other presidents have had their secret affairs whispered about over the years — think John F. Kennedy — but it is surreal to have Stormy Daniels describing an encounter with Trump in this way, live from the witness stand."

Sounds like everybody's on edge, with the star witness "a fast talker, unfettered, prone to asides that are sometimes funny and sometimes distracting." Jesse McKinley says that's "consistent with interviews I’ve seen of her. This is, in short, how she is: she is not putting on a show, or any staid artifice, for a courtroom audience."

"Staid" is a funny word there. No, our adult film actress, writer, and director, is not "characterized by sedateness and often a strait-laced sense of propriety; serious and conventional." Lots of objections, as the prosecutors, defense, and judge try to steer through the lurid shoals of a "playboy" called to account.

The topic of testimony in today's criminal trail go back almost 20 years, when the witness was 27, and the defendant 60, one year into his third marriage (the one he's still in, incredibly) and, allegedly, having himself a fling at his place in Lake Tahoe.

The defendant had "a sour look" when Daniels says +rump told her he didn't sleep in the same room as his wife, whereas "her derision toward Trump is very clear, and the tension in the courtroom during her testimony about him is the highest it has been at this trial so far."

Whew. If you need something outside the paywalls, here's Laffy's live-posted thread on Mastodon, 91 toots and counting just now. (She boosted George Conway's toot of People's exhibit 226, in evidence, shown here, with its watermark to Stormy's MySpace page. Alt-caption, "It was fun while it lasted, but it didn't last long.")

Laffy starts with what I'm sure I would have missed otherwise, the testimony of Penguin Random House Senior Vice President and Executive Managing Editor Sally Franklin, looking at their book, "Trump, How to Get Rich," while we're in the middle of the sequel, "And How To Lose It All." One juicy excerpt:

PAY ATTENTION TO THE DETAILS
"If you don't know every aspect of what you're doing, down to the paperclips, you're setting yourself up for some ... surprises."

And:

SOMETIMES YOU STILL HAVE TO SCREW THEM
"For many years, I've said that 'if someone screws you, screw them back. When somebody hurts you, just go after them as viciously and violently as you can. As it says in the Bible, an eye for an eye.'"

Quite possibly his favorite book in the Bible.

"Franklin, records custodian witness, continues to read excerpts from the book, each speaking to Trump's attention to financial details, penny pinching, belief in inevitable sexual relations between him and other women, and other themes, ostensibly in Trump's own words."

Ostensibly. And, with my emphasis added, that's what he said:

"I always sign my checks, to make sure where my money is going. Check through your bills. My parents hammered frugality into me at an early age."

The acknowledgements page [of "Trump: How to Get Rich"] includes a thanks to [his ghostwriter] Meredith McIver, a "woman of many talents," who was also an Executive Assistant at the Trump office, has "heard everything," and has "taken good notes."

Not the first (or last!) time for crimey Don to be hoist on the petard of a good note-taker.

6.May.2024

Grossed up

As the New York court slogs its way through the minutiae of criminality, we're reminded of the precious fact that the payments laundered through sleepy Don's fixer were expanded to include Michael Cohen's sundry expenses, and the taxes for payments made to look like compensation. Of coure, it was on the AP wire more than a year ago that $130,000 for "Stormy," and $150,000 for Karen McDougal, and a $60,000 "bonus" (and idk, $20,000 for walking around money?) added up to $420,000 in payments from Trump to Cohen.

"Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, “grossed up” Cohen’s reimbursement for the Daniels payment for “tax purposes,” according to federal prosecutors who filed criminal charges against the lawyer in connection with the payments in 2018."

Such a nice detail. Who says there's no honor among thieves? Cohen's already done jail time for his role in it. Time for accountability for the boss. Who, ICYMI, got another charge of criminal contempt today.

Update #2: Jonathan Alter's op-ed

Update:
Looks like the factual evidence has different particulars than the press reported back in the day. Reading @GottaLaff's multiply-sourced first thread of the day, there was

1. $130k reimbursement to Cohen for the Stormy Daniels payment;
2. $50k reimbursement for Cohen's payment to Red Finch for tech services; [further down, we read this could be another campaign expenditure, kept off the books]
3. Weisselberg wrote down that Cohen should be "grossed up" for state, federal, and city taxes;
4. Weisselberg also wrote $60k for additional bonus, which McConney understood was to "make up for what [Cohen] thought he was owed" for the prior year's bonus.

Which is $240k, not a familiar sum. Other reports have the $60k bonus as $50k (whoops), and $180,000, doubled to gross it up, would be $410,000, but with a $60k bonus, the $420,000 number we've seen before. To be paid out at $35,000 per month for 12 months to make it look like it could be a retainer. Sure, that's it. "Legal expenses."

Hey, whatever happened to Trump's CFO Allen Weisselberg, anyway? (JK: He's in the Rikers crossbar hotel for his second 5-month stay.)

The +rump orgs reported all $420,000 on 1099-MISC forms to the IRS, that's nice. And my favorite part, the notoriously tight-fisted Donald J. Trump paying more than 3x retail for a $130,000 "confidentiality" agreement (you remember, the one between "David Dennison" and "Peggy Peterson", with the secret decoder ring kept in Michael Cohen's lockbox), to try to turn it into "legal services" rather than "illegal campaign contributions."

Privacy redux

It's been close to forever since I dug into the topic (having started more than 24 years ago, when Double Click seemed a bit player, long before it became the center of the Google universe), but a friend offering a link to what he called "a very good article about Facebook's business model, from the company itself" caught my attention.

What Data Does Facebook Collect When I’m Not Using Facebook, and Why? was shiny and new 6 years ago, close to an internet lifetime. It was shortly after Mark Zuckerberg testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. on April 11, 2018. Four and a half hours, oof. Meta's Product Management Director, David Baser, said "he answered more than 500 questions and promised that we would get back on the 40 or so he couldn't answer at the time," and offered the public explainer in the meantime.

Highlights from Baser's word cloud:

Business is making content and ads "more engaging and relevant" in myriad ways. They want to help you share your friends with them. (They want a piece of you. And them.) They want to know all about you (to "better understand how [you] use their services"). They want to "understand the effectivess of their ads." "[E]ven if you're logged out or don't have a Facebook account." They're not alone coming after you. Lots of companies "offer advertising services" (to advertisers; who want to "service" you).

"In fact, most websites and apps send the same information to multiple companies each time you visit them."

"To make content and ads better." Which is to say more profitable for them. The brilliantly named "cookies" remain at the heart of the reticulating transaction network focused on you, the user. These are "identifiers that websites use to know if you’ve visited before. This can help with things like saving items in your shopping cart."

"A website typically sends two things back to your browser: first, content from that site; and second, instructions for the browser to send your request to the other companies providing content or services on the site. So when a website uses one of our services, your browser sends the same kinds of information to Facebook as the website receives. We also get information about which website or app you’re using, which is necessary to know when to provide our tools."

Which is to say, first of all, what you asked for, and secondly, a whole lot of stuff you didn't ask for. His "three main ways we use the information we get":

1. providing our services to [other] sites or apps;
2. improving safety and security on Facebook; and
3. enhancing our own products and services.

It's updated May 1, 2018, with a link to announced plans to build Clear History, which sounds like a verb-object recipe imperative, but also like purposeful misdirection. (Is that clear enough for you?) They estimated it would take "a few months" to build it and "work with privacy advocates, academics, policymakers and regulators." I can imagine it would take a few months just to set up a few meetings with all those folks, but "a series of roundtables in cities around the world" were already spinning.

It was late January, 2020 that tech news reported the "clear history" button arrived. (Buttons are definitely verbs.) Both Slate and PC Mag had it in quotes, because the thing turned out to be labeled "Your Off-Facebook Activity" and because "it won't let you completely stop the practice" [PC Mag] and "don’t assume it will change much about how Facebook uses your data to help power its business." [Slate]

Slate provides the link to what's more than a button, and shows me that I "have no available activity to show at this time" (and oh, "Some of [my] activity may not appear here"). There is just one "connected apps," a news site I rarely visit, "Reconnected [sic] on August 2, 2020."

Have I set my Meta/Facebook privacy so solidly that they've stopped monitoring me? Says there, my "off-Meta activity is currently turned off," and I used Facebook Login to log into that one site. Most of 4 years ago. Interesting. I can clear previous history, but it doesn't appear there is any (they'll divulge). And I can Manage future activity (on both Facebook and Instagram) to either Connect it, or Disconnect, with the latter my "current experience." That's good.

On the flip side, "B2B" and "SEO," our friends at GoogleClick offer to help advertisers Deliver better results with automated bidding. Make yourself seen out of the "billions of searches per day," and "make sure you set the right bid and ensure potential customers see your ad." Drive value, and maximize sales. "More than 80% of Google advertisers are using automated bidding," they tell us, in real-time auctions taking place between the hapless user click and content+ad delivery. It's "smart," and if that's not enough, they've got some AI-powered "solutions," too.

Who's winning?

5.May.2024

On the road to oligarchy

There's always a lot I've missed, so I appreciate Thom Hartmann's weekly roundup of his blog's dailies. If you've had a look at the Hartmann Report, you know he's not one to pull his punches. The headlines alone spell it out.

Why Democratic Voters Won’t Accept Republican Defectors compares the (sparse) traffic between Great Britain's Conservative and Labour parties with the (nonexistent) defections of Republicans to Democrats here. The long list of reasons all stem from our Supreme Court's "conservative" faction "legaliz[ing] political bribery, most recently with Citizens United." Not to put too fine a point on it:

"Republicans on the Court have been pushing their bizarre idea that bribes by the morbidly rich and giant corporations are actually “First Amendment-protected free speech” for five decades now, and the result has been that Dwight Eisenhower’s GOP has degenerated into a corrupt neofascist movement animated by billionaire money. No other developed democracy in the world tolerates anything like this."

As compared to...

"There are no Tories in the UK who want their nation flooded with guns, who want to deny their constituents healthcare, or who want to surrender Europe to Putin. But America is now infested with Republicans pushing those same positions on behalf of billionaires and industries that profit from the death of our children."

3.May.2024

College daze

The center of the Baby Boom and I turned 15 in 1970, steeped in the bloody news from Viet Nam, and then the shock of the National Guard killing four at Kent State University, 54 years ago tomorrow. The current college scene (and "how we got to this moment," chronicled by Heather Cox Richardson) has a lot to do with that history, as Will Bunch's two-years ago column (h/t to HCR for the link) details. How the Kent State massacre raised your tuition.

My cohort, coming of age in the mid-70s, missed the draft, and still had the opportunity for modest (or no!) tuition to attend college, after the post-WW II GI Bill boom in higher education. The University of Idaho's deal by the time I showed up and became a resident was fees (no "tuition," per se) of just under two hundred bucks per semester. That'd be $1,200 or so in today's dollars, as compared to the current $5,000 or so per semester. Bunch, with his emphasis and links:

"Today, polls show most people who know about the May 4 shooting consider it an abuse of government power, but it didn’t look that way to Middle America in 1970. An instant Gallup Poll showed 58% of Americans blamed the students for the bloodshed, with only 11% blaming the Guard. At a memorial service in Kent, locals disrupted the event chanting “Kent State Four! Should have studied more!”

"A new breed of conservative politician was poised to jump on the backlash -- including Nixon, who’d called student protesters “bums” just before the shooting. But the king of the new resentment politics was Ronald Reagan, who’d won a shock victory as California governor in 1966 by railing against chaos on the Berkeley campus and the new hippie “who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah.” Reagan pushed (and was met with pushback) to end California’s once-cherished tradition of free public university tuition for residents, arguing that “taxpayers shouldn’t subsidize intellectual curiosity”...

[Now,] Some 45 million Americans owe an unthinkable $1.75 trillion in debt, forcing today’s young people to put off the markers of adulthood like buying a home or getting married. Millions more are shut out of college, and any doorway to the middle class, as “deaths of despair” mount among those without degrees."

The Biden-Harris administration has chipped away at that mountain of debt, a little. A month ago press release featured their approval for "$146 billion in student debt relief for 4 million Americans through more than two dozen executive actions." The Supreme Court's attempt to kibosh the effort notwithstanding. So that's... 8% of the problem? Reducing the "barrier to opportunity" benefits the entire economy.

May Day, 2024

The bees in the brain go round and round

My dear readers must have subscribed to Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American by now, yes? If somehow you missed the umpteen jumps, the April 30 edition is today's must-read. She starts with Eric Cortellessa's report in Time magazine, our would-be dictator in his own word salad: How Far Trump Would Go.

“I ask him, Don’t you see why many Americans see such talk of dictatorship as contrary to our most cherished principles?” Cortellessa wrote. No, Trump said. “I think a lot of people like it.”

As she does so well, HCR outlines the historical arc of replacing fact with fantasy, in service to exploitation, William F. Buckley's National Review, the 1971 Powell memo, the invasive species of the Fox News Channel, all the way to the current climate of some measure of accountability. FNC's $787.5 million defamation settlement to Dominon Voting Systems, and taking down its Hunter Biden "mock trial."

A former president needing a gag order for his criminal trial, unwilling to obey it, and now found in criminal contempt. The $9,000 in fines are hardly a deterrent; but the real threat of spending some time in the cooler down the hall seems to have worked. "[Yesterday] afternoon, Trump’s team deleted the social media posts" that the judge ruled were violations of the order not to attack witnesses and jurors.

Time offers us the full transcript of Cortellessa's interview, says it's an 83 minute read. (Plus 21 minutes for the fact-checking.) You don't have to dive that far in to get to Trump's plans for his military dictatorship, complete with the unhinged dog-whistle about Jan. 6 being Nancy Pelosi's fault. Prompted for specifics about the massive deportation plan,

What’s your plan, sir? and Does that include using the U.S. military?

Trump: It would. When we talk military, generally speaking, I talk National Guard. I've used the National Guard in Minneapolis. And if I didn't use it, I don't think you'd have Minneapolis standing right now, because it was really bad. But I think in terms of the National Guard. But if I thought things were getting out of control, I would have no problem using the military, per se. We have to have safety in our country. We have to have law and order in our country. And whichever gets us there, but I think the National Guard will do the job. You know, had Nancy Pelosi used the National Guard. You know, I offered them whatever they wanted...

In addition to total immunity for himself, Trump said "I want to give police immunity from prosecution." What could possibly go wrong? (And he said nice things about the Supreme Court, such "great respect" for them while they're delaying his criminal trials for the insurrection, and stealing national security documents to consider his "total immunity" bid.) He perseverates on his greatest hits (that never were). Build. The. Wall. for example. Walls and Wheels.

Trump: "I think what we will do is we will complete—and when you say and when I say complete the wall, I built much more wall than I ever thought necessary. But as you build it, you find out that you need it. And we built it, and there were certain areas then you find out that are leaking and they leak. Like a politician leaks, they leak. And we would get that and we would build that and then you build something else. And it was just a system, we had a great system going. And we could have added another 200 miles of wall and good territory for it. Because it really does work, you know, walls work. Walls and wheels. I would say, you know, a lot of, see what you have here, your tape recorder, everything else is going to be obsolete in about six months. You'll have something that's much better. But the two things that are never obsolete are walls and wheels."

The Lincoln Project put together a little something over the perfect musical selection, the "Moonlight Sonata." "Trump just isn't the same. Old, sleepy, confused, weak - no one can deny what we all see." He's getting nastier, too. (I think a lot of nasty people like it.)

raveling

Tom von Alten