Trump Has Admitted His Guilt
June 1, 2018 at 2:50 pm | Posted in Crime and punishment, Enemies of Freedom, Abuse of Office, Presidential election, Disinformation | Leave a commentTags: 2016 Presidential election, Jeff Sessions, Paul Waldman, President Chump, President Trump, Putin, Washington Post
Men in Bramhall stocks, Bramhall, England, 1900, unknown photographer.
Trump has admitted his guilt, without realizing that he has done so.
This point was made recently by Paul Waldman, in an article in the Washington Post.
Quoting from that aricle, “According to a January New York Times story, when Sessions decided to recuse himself, “the president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him.” (Emphasis added.)
There would be no need for the Attorney General to protect Trump from the investigation of Putin’s interference in the the Presidential election in 2016, if Trump had not done something illegal in connection with that election.
The Attorney General’s job is to protect the American people from crime, not to protect the President – or anyone else – from the consequences of illegal actions.
About the nature of Trump’s crime, we know only that it pertains to Putin’s interference in the Presidential election in 2016. That is the topic that always presses Trump’s buttons, and elicits his most feverishly desparate reactions.
Further evidence of Trump’s knowledge of his own guilt occured in Trump’s meeting with Sessions in March 2017. According to Paul Waldman’s article, “[Trump’s] grievance was with Mr. Sessions: The president objected to [Session’s] decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Mr. Trump, who had told aides that he needed a loyalist overseeing the inquiry, berated Mr. Sessions and told him he should reverse his decision, an unusual and potentially inappropriate request.” Why would Trump need “a loyalist overseeing the inquiry”, if he wasn’t scared about some fact connected to this particular topic?
See also the previous post on this blog.
I know it won’t happen, but for such a hypocrite I cannot resist: “Lock him up!”
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A Fallacy About Guns
March 2, 2018 at 1:52 pm | Posted in Dysfunctional Politics | Leave a commentTags: Marc A. Thiessen, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Mark Spies, New Yorker magazine, Nikolas Cruz, Parkland school shooting, Stephen Willeford, Sutherland Springs church shooting, Washington Post
In a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post, Marc A. Thiessen recounted an incident in which a private citizen, Stephen Willeford, used his own AR-15 to interrupt Devin Patrick Kelley from continuing a mass shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland, Texas, on November 15, 2017.
The AR-15 is the same type of assault rifle that Nikolas Cruz used to massacre students and teachers at the at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, 2018.
Thiessen uses the incident in Sutherland to argue that it would be perverse to conclude from the incident in Parkland – and from the many other incidents – that access to assault weapons should be restricted.
Thiessen’s argument rests upon a fallacy of omission. He does not mention that Willeford’s gun-assisted intervention would not have been necessary if Kelley had not had access to an assault weapon.
In fact, that would have been a better solution, because it would not have relied on the rare circumstance that a neighbor had an assault weapon, and was at home at the time, and was willing to engage the shooter.
Looking for the best solution to a problem is mathematically equivalent to trying to identify the tallest peak in a region that hosts many hills and mountains.
A mathematician, a scientist, or an engineer would say that Thiessen identified what was merely a local maximum, but didn’t notice the global maximum nearby.
Thiessen spotted the crest of one of several foothills, but failed to notice the mountain that towered in their midst.
To see more clearly why Thiessen’s argument is incorrect, imagine his argument being applied to cars. Someone in a car can pursue a criminal who used a car to commit a crime. Applied to cars, Thiessen’s logic would imply that driving a car should be unrestricted, and shouldn’t require a license.
In fact, the issues in gun control are closely analogous to those in automotive and aeronautical control:
As was noted in a previous blog, and as has recently been noted by others, the argument for restricting acess to assault weapons is the same as the argument for requiring a license for driving an automobile, and for requiring a more restrictive licence for driving 18-wheelers, and for requiring a still more restrictive license for piloting an aircraft.
Freedom to travel within the United States does not mean unrestricted freedom to travel by driving a car, nor by driving a truck, nor by piloting an aircraft. It also does not mean that access to particular locations cannot be restricted to only particular people.
Analogous statements should apply to guns.
A recent very enlightening article by Mike Spies in the New Yorker magazine describes how we started from a reasonable, rational approach to gun laws, that had lasted for at least a century, and how the discussion was perverted into the present frenzied, dysfunctional tug-of-war.
Gun laws today
The ‘Racist Right’, Not the ‘Alt-Right’, and Not ‘White Nationalist’
May 16, 2017 at 2:11 pm | Posted in Conceited, Disinformation, Enemies of Freedom | 2 CommentsTags: alt-right, John Woodrow Cox, Laura Vozzella, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, nationalist right, Nazi, racism, Richard Spencer, Stephen Bannon, Washington Post, white nationalist, white racism, white supremacist
A dune-dwelling Aptostichus sp from Baja California. Photo by Marshal Hedin.
There is no such thing as the ‘alt-right’.
What presently calls itself the ‘alt-right’ is really the white-racist right.
It is racist because because the group favors people solely on the basis of birth – upon skin color and ethnic ancestry – not upon earned achievement (moral/humanitarian, intellectual, artistic, or athletic).
The present usage of ‘alt-right’ is a ‘framing‘ trick, designed to hide the group’s goals behind a phrase that sounds more benign than ‘white racist’ or ‘white supremicist’.
In part, Richard Spencer’s appropriation of the term was probably because ‘alt-right’ sounds almost like ‘all right’. That would heighten the mask of benignity.
The term ‘alt-right’ is camouflage, like the false surface created by a trap-door spider.
Promyrmekiaphila burrow entrance closed, in northern California. Photo by Marshal Hedin.
Spencer also uses another phrase as camouflage: ‘nationalist right’.
In using that phrase he wants to hide behind the long pedigree of nationalism, in an attempt to pass his radical position off as being somewhere on the mainstream spectrum.
But he reveals the racism underneath by having used his new term at demonstrations against the removal of monuments to the Confederacy. No matter how the racists try to deflect attention from the fact, the Confederacy was an attempt to ensure the long-term survival of slavery. That reveals that white-racism underlies the ‘nationalist right’.
When coupled with Spencer’s views and goals, it is impossible to forget an earlier use of ‘nationalism’ as a camouflage for racism. ‘Nazi’ was the abbreviation of the German words for National Socialism.
This is not just guilt by association. There is evidence for a real connection.
John Woodrow Cox interviewed Richard Spencer at a party that Spencer’s group held in Washington, DC, not long after Trump’s election. Some at the party gave a Sieg Heil salute. At one point, Spencer said “Let’s party like its 1933.” Spencer had previously dated an Asian-American woman, but now regrets his deviation from racially-pure behavior. He said that he would never again date a non-white woman and that interracial relationships should be forbidden. Cox asked, “How, in a nation with more than 100 million blacks, Asians and Latinos, could a whites-only territory be created without overwhelming violence?” Spencer’s answer: “Look, maybe it will be horribly bloody and terrible.”
Just last week, Spencer led two rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, opposing the removal of Confederate memorials there. One of those rallies was lit by torches. Charlotteville’s Mayor pointed out the wrong-headedness of the rallies, evoking a storm of racist tweets. One of them said “I smell Jew.” (The Mayor is Jewish.)
(Interestingly, one of the chants at the second rally was “Russia is our friend”. An echo of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.)
Every time that you say or write ‘alt-right’ or ‘nationalist right’, you are falling into the trap, and are inadvertantly advancing the white racist cause.
Promyrmekiaphila burrow entrance open, in northern California. Photo by Marshal Hedin.
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Donald J. Trump is Persona Non Grata at our house
March 5, 2017 at 10:28 pm | Posted in Conceited, Disinformation, Enemies of Freedom, Enemies of Planet Earth, Presidential election | Leave a commentTags: Fortune magazine, John Baron, John Barron, John Miller, John Oliver, Soutern Poverty Law Center, The New Yorker magazine, Trump, Washington Post
Detail of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, retouched by Bluszczokrzew .
Donald J. Trump is Persona Non Grata at our house.
We will not welcome him in, nor shake his hand. In fact, we will not let him in. We do not want to see his face – not in person, nor in the news. We do not want to hear his voice, nor his self-serving opinions.
This rejection also applies to John Miller and to John Barron/John Baron, if Trump again lies by pretending to be them, and feeds major newspapers “their” views on Trump, in a bizarre attempt to trick the newspapers into adopting positions favorable to Trump’s ‘brand’. For examples of Trump doing this, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Yes, the same Donald Trump who claims that every unfavorable news report is fake “news” has tried repeatedly to create fake news.
A national organization should host an online registry where millions of Americans, and millions in other countries, could declare that Trump is persona non grata to them, too.
The hosting organization should not be one like CREDO Action nor MoveOn nor the ACLU, whose positions on other issues are divisive enough to repel many of those who would otherwise sign against Trump.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) would be an ideal hosting organization. (The SPLC’s scope is much wider than its name indicates: it monitors and educates against bigotry and injustice against every ethnic group.) So would any major environmental organization.
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Putin => Wikileaks => Trump
July 24, 2016 at 5:16 pm | Posted in Disinformation, Dysfunctional Politics, Enemies of Freedom, Presidential election | 2 CommentsTags: Abby Phillip, Amber Phillips, Democratic National Committee, DNC, Hillary Clinton, Putin, Putinia, Russia, Trump, Washington Post, Wikileaks
Trump Approves of Putin. Image created by thepoliblog.WordPress.com.
(After writing this posting, I searched for URLs to cite as evidence for what is asserted in it. It immediately became evident that others had come to the same realizations: see the articles by Abby Phillip and by Amber Phillips in the Washington Post. But since different aspects are emphasized in what follows, it seemed non-redundant to go ahead and post it.)
Putin is the Tyrant of Putinia (which has replaced Russia).
Putin ordered his minions to hack into the computer files of the Democratic National Committee to steal the emails and plans of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Putin wanted to use that information to boost Trump’s chances in the US Presidential election in November.
Putin wants Trump to win.
Trump and Putin like each other’s philosophy and style. Both are authoritorian and greedy. Each hides his insecurity by projecting brazen self-confidence. Neither of them gives a hoot about the constraints imposed by laws, or even Constitutions.
Trump also drools over the potential for business opportunities in Putinia. So he is careful to always ‘make nice’ to Putin, and never challenges what Putin does.
Some leader of the free world Trump would be! He has a built-in conflict of interest.
Putin cannot legally afford to admit that he is responsible for the hacking.
Also, if it were known that the release of the information was intended to aid Trump, then the impact of the released information would be diminished.
So Putin had the stolen information forwarded to Wikileaks. Having Wikileaks release the information gave Putin deniability.
Wikileaks – having no sense of privacy and decency, and deserving none – eagerly made the stolen information public.
Releasing the stolen information can have had only one possible purpose: to embarrass and hamper Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Trump is guilty of many things, but he had no knowledge of this.
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Trump’s Tax Forms
July 1, 2016 at 9:26 am | Posted in Conceited, Disinformation, Enemies of Freedom, Presidential election | Leave a commentTags: Karen Tumulty, Presidential campaign, Robert Costa, tax forms, Trump, Washington Post
Upside-down version of Trump Sr. at Citizens United Freedom Summit in Greenville South Carolina May 2015, photo by Michael Vadon.
Trump has repeatedly promised to release his tax forms for the past several years, but has always delayed doing so. He is stone-walling.
Prior candidates for the Presidency have released theirs.
Trump claims that his tax forms contain nothing interesting.
But a recent article in the Washington Post shows that Trump is a hypocrite.
The article, by Robert Costa and Karen Tumulty, is about Trump’s vetting of possible running mates.
The article says
“The contenders under the most serious consideration … have been asked … to answer more than 100 questions and to provide reams of personal and professional files that include tax records and any articles or books they have published.”
So Trump knows that tax forms reveal important information about a person’s character and actions.
He refuses to release his tax forms. What is he hiding?
Either his income is much less than he boasts,
or his contributions to charity are much less than he boasts,
or both.
Those are the only possibilities.
One of those three must be true.
No matter which of them is the truth, any of those statement proves that
—————————-Trump is a liar,——————————————
———————————-and—————————————————
—————–Trump doesn’t believe what he says.
But we knew that already. This is just additional proof.
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For previous posts about The Trump, see here, here, here, here, and here.
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Two Monsters
June 5, 2016 at 11:34 am | Posted in Crime and punishment | Leave a commentTags: bullying, David Eisenhauer, Moriah Balangit, murder, Natalie M. Keepers, Nicole Lovell, North Korea, sex offender, sex with a minor, T. Rees Shapiro, Washington Post
Photo in 1887 of the actor Richard Mansfield, by Henry Van der Weyde (1838-1924; London,
A previous posting on this blog tried to make sense of the murderer of a sweet, trusting, in-love teen age girl by a high-achieving college student, who was both a good student and an althlete.
The only picture that seemed plausible at the the time was that the murderer was ordinarily a decent human being, but had been scared into becoming a murderer. His accomplice was hardly discussed in that posting, because she seemed to be a cipher. But it was implicitly assumed that she, too, was ordinarily a decent person, who had been driven by friendship to commit evil.
I was wrong.
A recent article by T. Rees Shapiro, Moriah Balangit in the Washington Post shows that David Eisenhauer and Natalie Keeper were pysochopathic monsters. They each really are both Jekyll and Hyde.
Indeed, the incident that begins the plot line in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel bears an eerie resemblance to the sequence of events that unfolded from Nicole Lovell’s natural search for romantic love, a search whose natural strength would have been intensified by the self-doubt and desire for vindication that resulted from the ‘mean girl’ bullying she had endured at her middle school.
David Eisenhauer and Natalie Keeper constitute potentially instructive examples of how two people, well-raised in presumably loving families, could become like the SS troopers in Nazi concentration camps, and like the ‘guards’ in the present day concentration camps in North Korea.
We need a detailed understanding of how that happens.
How to Block the Evil Eye on Your Computer
August 19, 2014 at 12:22 pm | Posted in Privacy | 4 CommentsTags: Andrea Peterson, Barton Gellman, hackers, information security, malware, Morgan Marquis-Boire, Munk School of Global Affairs, Privacy, The Citizen Lab, Trojan Horse, University of Toronto, Washington Post, webcam
“Webcam000c1” by Simon.zfn – Own work. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Webcam000c1.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Webcam000c1.jpg
You may have turned your webcam off. But malware may have subsequently turned it back on.
You may think that your face, voice, actions, and the appearance of your current location are private, when they are not.
This danger has been known for a while. The Wikipedia page on webcams says “… privacy is lost when Trojan horse programs allow malicious hackers to activate the webcam without the user’s knowledge, providing the hackers with a live video and audio feed. … Some webcams have built-in hardwired LED indicators that light up whenever the camera is active [, but] sometimes only in video mode. It is not clear whetherthese indicators can be circumvented when webcams are surreptitiously activated without the user’s knowledge or intent, via spyware.”
We have recently learned that the problem is far worse than that. We know that from a report by Morgan Marquis-Boire that was published by The Citizen Lab (University of Toronto, Munk School of Global Affairs), as summarized by two recent articles in the Washington Post: How your cat video addiction could be used to hack you, by Andrea Peterson and Barton Gellman, and U.S. firm helped the spyware industry build a potent digital weapon for sale overseas, by Barton Gellman. Both articles contain important revelations that are not discussed in this blog post, and are well worth reading. The second article even provides a link for downloading Marquis-Boire’s report.
The report and the articles describe how watching a YouTube video,or visiting just about any web site, or updating a Flash player or Java, can result in malware being surreptitiously installed on your computer, without the web site cooperating or even knowing that it was infectious.
This has become another route by which hackers can install in your computer malware for turning on your webcam, against your will and without your knowledge.
The present blog post will concentrate on ways to prevent being viewed when you think that your webcam is off, but has secretly been turned on. As discussed below, defences against being overheard are fewer than defenses against being seen.
The countermeasures described here are fairly obvious, and may be well known. But the obvious is often what most needs to be repeated. (That is why there are sermons and other pep talks.)
The history of breached defenses against hacking suggests that there is probably no way to ensure that any defense based on software or on electronics cannot be overcome. So the safest defenses are physical blocks that only you can control and inspect. These blocks are all free or inexpensive, and are very simple.
If your webcam can readily be disconnected, by far the best countermeasure would be leave the webcam physically disconnected from the computer except when you want the webcam to be activated. That would prevent capture of your audio as well as of your video, unless you are using a voice-operated computer or a headset with a microphone, which would provide alternate routes for audio signals to enter your computer.
If it is cumbersome to disconnect and reconnect your webcam, it may be possible to hang a piece of paper or cardboard or cloth over the webcam’s optical aperture. The webcams audio transmissions would continue, however.
If the placement of the webcam makes it difficult to loosely drape anything over its optical aperture, then it should still be possible to block the aperture with an opaque removable adhesive tape: transparent or semi-transparent tape that hosts a strategically-placed piece of paper, or a small adhesive bandage (either a strip or a disk), or a removable adhesive sticker such as those that children play with, or such as the stickers that are used to temporarily mark luggage or other items. Of course, you’d want to be sure that the adhesive never touches any optically coated lens or screen. Again, these methods would not block the audio.
The caption on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcam says “Webcams typically include a lens (shown at top), an image sensor (shown at bottom), and supporting circuitry.” “Sweex USB webcam PCB with without lens close up” by Original uploader was Mike1024 at en.wikipedia – Originally from en.wikipedia. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sweex_USB_webcam_PCB_with_without_lens_close_up.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Sweex_USB_webcam_PCB_with_without_lens_close_up.jpg”
It is a shame that to protect themselves against criminals and intrusive governments, everyone now has to take precautions that formerly were needed only by dissidents in countries run by repressive governments.
One of several versions of the painting “The Scream” (title: Der Schrei der Natur, ‘The Scream of Nature’) . The National Gallery, Oslo, Norway. (This is the caption in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream .) “The Scream” by Edvard Munch (1863–1944) – WebMuseum at ibiblioPage: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/munch/Image URL: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/munch/munch.scream.jpg. Via Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Scream.jpg#mediaviewer/File:The_Scream.jpg
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Mental Mirroring and Mothers
January 23, 2014 at 5:00 pm | Posted in Brain and mind | 3 CommentsTags: baby, eLife, empathy, Evolution, father, Human, infant, Intelligence, Meeri Kim, mental mirroring, mother, parent, Peggy Mason, pup, puppy, Washington Post
Discussion between mother and child, photographed 31 May 2005 by Marty from Manitou Springs, USA.
Several posts on this blog have pointed out how our ability to mentally mirror the feelings and thoughts of others might have developed, and might then have blossomed to give us our values, heightened sense of fairness and kindness, and our sophisticated intelligence, including our science, our fondness for narrative, and a proclivity for religion – that is, most of the the features that we regard as making us human.
Those posts are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. One post also constitutes an example of a human who is mentally mirroring a squirrel!
Those posts pointed out that other types of animals also mirror to some extent the minds of other members of their own species, and also members of other species. For example, dogs that are able to sense the moods and plans of humans have, on average, thrived better than those who didn’t, and were therefore more likely to have puppies that would themselves grow up to have puppies.
Golden retriever puppies at 4 weeks, photographed 10 January 2011 by Koosg.
Humans anthopomorphize inanimate natural phenomena, by applying to them the mental mechanisms that originally developed for mentally mirroring humans and other animals: the mirroring of inanimate natural phenomena produced science as well as superstition. But dogs, too, mentally mirror an inanimate phenomenon as if it were animate, as when a dog cringes and wimpers at the sound of thunder.
A mongrel puppy not more than one month old, photographed 6 February 2012 by Kcdtsg .
A new study has now given us more specific information about the initial development of mental mirroring. The study was published in a free online journal, eLife (see here and here), and its results are described by Meeri Kim in an article in the Washington Post.
The study’s main result is that rats – and therefore presumably also some other kinds of mammals – empathize with and therefore help only rats that look like the types of rats that they previously lived with.
The aspect that is of greatest relevance here was pointed out by Peggy Mason, one of the authors, in a comment to Meeri Kim: “Helping and empathy are evolutionary advantages,” Mason said. “If Mom doesn’t know how her pups feel, the pups die — and that’s not going to work evolutionarily.” (In that statement, the pups were rat pups, but the statement is true in general.) Kim goes on to observe that “In social animals, including humans, empathy starts with the mother-child bond but develops to include a peer network.”.
This would apply to all species of mammals, some species of birds, and apparently, in the past, even to some species of dinosaurs.
Although the article in the Washington Post doesn’t say so, the same should be true for fathers, in those species where the fathers stay around to help feed, protect and possibly eventually teach the young.
Empathy requires mental mirroring. It is quite likely that active parenting was responsible for a huge increase in our ancestor’s skills in mental mirroring, thereby opening the way for the advanced capabilities that were listed at the beginning of this post.
It would be very informative to see the results of experimental studies of the comparative mirroring skills of mothers and fathers in species where one or both raise the young. A plausible hypothesis is that, on average, mothers are more skilled at mental mirroring than are fathers, and that, on average, mirroring skills are better in species that raise their young through several stages of development than in species that merely feed and protect the very young, and, finally, that on average, empathy and sympathy are stronger in the species and in the sexes that are more proficient at mental mirroring.
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Proselytise Chief Justice Roberts, and thy Neighbor?
January 21, 2014 at 2:33 pm | Posted in Privacy, Uncategorized | Leave a commentTags: abortion, Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Chief Justice, Clarence Thomas, Elena Kagan, free speech, freedom of speech, John G. Roberts, John Roberts, Justices of the Supreme Court, McCullen v. Coakley, Privacy, Robert Barnes, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen G. Breyer, Supreme Court, Washington Post
Controversy, a sculpture “Auseinandersetzung”, by Karl-Henning Seemann, 1979 in Lammhof, Tübingen, photographed by Собственное фото .
According to a recent article by Robert Barnes in the Washington Post, the Supreme Court is presently deciding the size of the buffer zone around abortion clinics. At issue is whether a person entering an abortion clinic can choose to avoid hearing the arguments of protesters, and not be forced to have a discussion with them, by staying within a wide-enough buffer zone.
More broadly, the issue is about the tensions between freedom of speech and privacy, including the right to choose not to engage in a discussion – the right not to be subjected to another’s attempt to persuade.
The Justices of the Supreme Court should remember that the existence and size of the buffer zone that results from their decision in this case will, by logic, apply also to the Supreme Court itself, as well as to the Justices’ own homes, and to their persons, when shopping or traveling or strolling. If the buffer is thin, anyone will be able to approach Justice John Roberts, or any of the other Justices, when the Justice seeks to return or to leave home, or any time and place when the Justice is outside home, to convince the Justice of the errors in his or her judgement, or of the rightness or wrongness of either side in any case that is before the Court.
The outcome of the decision will also apply to all lower Federal courts, and to the dwelling places and sojourns of their judges, as well as to the workplaces, dwelling places and sojourns of all Federal civil servants, regardless of whether their work is classified or not, and to those of all members of Congress. They will apply also to every house of worship in the land, and to the NRA, and to the Koch brothers.
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