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Archive of "Other Ideas" Category
For Springsteen Fans Now Angry with Bruce
Stephen Colbert is off the air. I waited to write this to make sure that our democracy, despite what Colbert and his regular guest Bruce Springteen are saying, remains intact. It does.
Colbert and the old Springsteen are mourned because the two saw a chance to make a very large amount of money telling people already pre-positioned to believe the sky has fallen. They are living embodiments of the blurring among entertainment, righteous protest, and partisan affirmation. Their audiences increasingly want just confirmation. Springsteen in particular sounds like he’s reciting some AI-scrubbed version of outtakes from the Declaration of Independence; the poetry that reached a hand across barriers seems lost.
They are men of their times. We live in a world of constant media stimulation, with every day being the day the doctor calls with the test results. Americans have convinced themselves they are living through a uniquely apocalyptic moment for freedom in general and the First Amendment in the particular. Every unpleasant event becomes evidence of democracy dying. Social media posts become the Reichstag Fire. A conservative commencement speaker becomes the death of free inquiry. A television cancellation becomes political persecution. It’s all about as shallow as a puddle.
Nothing can simply happen anymore. Not sure? One of the seemingly most critical issues facing our government today is whether to build a ballroom next to the White House. If every Trump-driven event is an existential threat, then every minor programming change must also be existential. Something as transient through our pop culture as a TV show can’t just have become old or irrelevant like “I Love Lucy” and “Father Knows Best”. Every era produces another so-called permanent cultural fixture that instead still ends up disappearing so completely younger people assume it was a local fast-food chain. Vaudeville disappeared. Radio drama disappeared. Video rental stores disappeared. And television shows end. They always end. That is literally the business model.
Instead, fascist, anti-democratic forces must be silencing truth-tellers. We’ll soon, it all suggests, be passing video loops of Colbert hand-to-hand like Soviet-era dissidents shuffling mimeographed manifestos around smoky coffee shops.
It’s funny the resistance chose as its spokesman Colbert, hardly a rebel broadcasting via pirate radio. He hosted one of the most expensive network television programs in the country. He operated with corporate backing and fawning celebrity access. This is a wealthy comic employed by a multibillion-dollar corporation. Springsteen is reputed to be a billionaire himself, and plays to audiences who can swing thousands of dollars for a ticket. But this isn’t an argument that only poor artists can discover truth, but instead a reminder that Colbert and his supporting acts are part of a system of money and influence and corporate greed as big or bigger than MAGA. Their comedy/commentary is no longer sharp or clever. It is simply mocking and humiliating, as crude as when Colbert called Trump “Putin’s c*ckholster” and Springsteen claimed (on Colbert’s show) that those who supported Trump were “small-minded people who got no idea what the freedoms of this beautiful country are supposed to be about.” It is likely Colbert could stand in front of an audience and just say “Trump sucks” over and over to applause. That takes no courage. Our American political culture is exhausted, and the progressive electorate is now dependent on such one-sided narration to tell it what to believe. That cheapens us.
Despite being a Springsteen fan since I was 17, and Bruce was not much older, I’ve never met him. But I suspect today if we met, he would not be interested in talking with a guy like me. Bruce at his angriest in songs like Born in the USA or The Ghost of Tom Joad, was an inclusive populist, talking about the hardships we all shared in one form or another as Americans no matter how we voted. In the blistering song about the death of industrialization in the Midwest, Youngstown, Springsteen does not ask if the forgotten steel workers are Republicans or Democrats. What if in the aftermath of 9/11 Springsteen wrote a song condemning half of all Muslims instead of the prayer that became The Rising?
In his very best music, like his own hero, Woody Guthrie, before him, Springsteen retains hope — at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe, everything that dies someday comes back, I believe there’s a promised land. Artists who once, like Guthrie, translated shared American pain into art now too often exploit partisan identity into dollars. Bruce once not too long ago allowed for sincere beliefs that differed between honest men and women without condemning those who disagreed, because what we shared mattered more than how we differed. He professed we need a conscience, not a party affiliation, to make America great. I am mourning here something larger than just celebrity political disagreement. I mourn the loss of a shared American vocabulary. Bruuuuce!!! Bruce?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
School Violence and China
Two unrelated events collided recently: President Trump went to China, and I learned that the boy who bullied me in high school died. He wasn’t Chinese. But the two events connected in my mind in an unexpected way.
The media, bullies themselves, of course found the China trip largely a disaster. Trump generated predictable coverage, panic over diplomatic protocol, endless parsing of symbolism, and stories about EVs and AI. As they do at home reporting on every Trump gaffe, act of pantomime-like resistance, and negative turn in the Iran War, the purpose is to humiliate tRump and mock the Orange Man.
The other media thing that emerged, especially when nothing really significant came from the Trump-Xi meetings, is some American journalists rediscovered the soft piece, a short video about how strange stuff is in China, or how they venerate their elders, or maybe about a family where the Yoda-like grandpa fought with Mao while his young granddaughter wears a miniskirt. There is also the serious “think” piece, where a journo discovers Chinese math-centric schools have lessons to teach America. But he’ll likely miss the point: America’s deeper school problem is not simply academics.
The sad thing is that there is too much truth to the claim that American education is terrible, and that that contributes to the failures of our society in so many ways. The think piece on Chinese education will however not include anything on bullying or violence in their schools, our pervasive problem. The journo’s Chinese government translator will not tell him about the bullying in local schools. China has its own school problems, including conformity, academic pressure, social exclusion, but American schools often tolerate something more openly physical. In China, social exclusion can be severe, particularly in a world where fitting into peer groups is highly valued. Students may be ostracized for appearing different or violating expectations. In some cases, classmates create online groups on WeChat to spread rumors. Success on exams by itself can determine admission to top universities. This pressure creates stress, anxiety, and competition. Students who perform poorly may become targets of ridicule, while high achievers may be bullied for appearing overly ambitious or socially awkward. Imagine an American kid bullied over a high SAT score.
Chinese schools may be harsh and conformist. American schools often normalize violence. Both systems fail students in different ways. We share humiliation. But the key difference between Chinese high schools and my old one is violence, straight up physical brutality in cases, that trains American kids to be violent themselves, condone violence, quietly endure it, and leaves long-term social scars. My suburban Ohio high school was a violent place, even as it failed to compete statistically with the assault rates in nearby urban schools. My bully, Jimmy, was on the varsity football team when I was barely holding it together on the junior varsity crew. I had stopped growing a year before, and my interest in being one of the smaller kids on the squad was lessening all the time. Jimmy singled me out.
In a coaching era where drinking water at practice was considered a sign of weakness, Jimmy would take away my lunchbreak thermos, meaning nothing to drink halfway through the two-a-day football practices during those 95-degree humid Ohio afternoons. The grit from the high school track in my mouth was awful without a splash of water to wash it down. Jimmy would chug my thermos while I stood there watching. He was bigger than me and I knew nothing about fighting, so I never thought to fight back. He’d often pretend to hold the thermos out to me so I could have a sip then pull it back. He’d offer it to another varsity player, and usually finish the daily show by dumping whatever he did not drink onto the ground. If I ever got anything to drink, it would be room-temperature water snuck from the groundskeeper’s upright spigot. These behaviors exist on a spectrum ranging from cruelty to severe physical violence. They created a ritualized environment in which I felt unsafe in places that are supposed to foster learning and development.
Jimmy would also take a few swings at me, after school, before practice, whenever. But those just hurt. In retrospect the water thing humiliated in a way long after my split lip healed. When I learned recently Jimmy died at a fairly young age while Trump was in China, I did not feel that was a bad thing.
I was not the only person bullied in my high school. Most assaults, like mine, went unreported because of fear of retaliation, masculine embarrassment, or disbelief from adults. Bullying was endemic and what made it worse is how it was allowed by the people who could have helped us. My father brushed it all off over the newspaper as “boys will be boys” and my mother responded by buying me a bigger thermos in hopes a few drops would be left for me post-Jimmy. We had no school resource officers to intervene. The football coaches were with us every minute of every practice, like Marine Corps drill sergeants, except for a brief period during lunch break every damn day when not a single adult was to be found. That’s when the bullying took place. The regular teachers who elsewhere patrolled the school restrooms for under age cigarette smokers somehow never paid any attention to the wood shop corridor. And of course none of the students there never saw nothin’.
Luckily this was before mass shootings became routine. But many of us graduated believing the world was fundamentally unsafe, that authority figures would look away, institutions would fail, and humiliation was simply part of life. That lesson may have had more lasting impact than anything we learned in class.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Mayo Clinic: I Had Open Heart Surgery
The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota is like a theme park for healthcare. It is physically larger than two Midwestern football powerhouse universities and employs 40,000 people across its facilities there alone (never mind at satellites in places like Phoenix.) The impression is you can get anything fixed, literally whatever ails you, and I was here myself for a serious heart problem.
Here’s how good these people are: I was technically dead for awhile as they stopped my heart to connect it to a Dick Cheney-like pump device so they could work on me undisturbed (I came to with a strange desire to invade Wisconsin.)
The world I lived and briefly died in is what real privilege looks like; this is what semi-wealthy people (or those with decent insurance like me) spend their money on when the grandkids are too old for Disney and they are too unhealthy for the all-you-can-eat on some cruise line. You buy health. You buy time.
The attitude here is “we can fix it” though no one would be so crass as to use a simple marketing tag line around the GOAT of hospitals. Instead, the staff here work every problem to the, sorry, bone.My heart condition had previously been treated at two less-known hospitals in New York City, and you can tell the difference. For example, at Mayo the staff needed some data quickly from my hometown doctor, and his fax machine was down (FYI: never mind all the technology, doctors love to fax things to each other. There is still this odd niche market for those old machines the size of dishwashers.)Nonetheless, the quickest way around the problem of my doctor’s busted 1995 fax-o-matic was to email the data to the Mayo nurse on duty’s personal account, after which she would print it, and time travel-walk it to the doctor who needed it on paper in 2022.Yeah, I hear you, big deal. But as an example it sings Mayo — identify a glitch, find a creative solution if needed, have someone take personal responsibility, and solve the damn problem. If every business worked this way it’d be 1962 again in a very good way. Knowing that work attitude was behind the hands inside my chest was reassuring. You get what you pay for.
It wasn’t all fun. Immediately after my six hours of open heart surgery I was a prisoner of the intensive care unit. I was intubated to help me breathe but because of the same could not speak. My hands were restrained to prevent me from knee-jerk pulling out the tube. I literally could not move or cry out. They left MSNBC on the waiting area TV.
Health care is waiting. Yet despite all the waiting no one is just hanging around. It gives the place an intensity. It must be a helluva place to work. For me, maybe too much emotion, too much real drama as lives play out. Maybe like an airport in the old days before rage took over as our travel companion. You start to hear “They said I can go home” as the sweetest words, besting the here-ambiguous “I love you” which often stands in for difficult goodbyes.You start to get to know the people around you in an odd way. You hear those things, apologies, thanks, a father mumble about regards (or was it regrets?) People hug in public, not a Midwest-Lake Wobegon thing really, but here ok. There are often tears in the waiting parties eyes, held back as one partner heads off behind the double doors with a stranger to surgery. Here’s the end of for many a long road of visits and testing, always more testing wasn’t it, honey? The men’s ball caps betray they were not always so broken — Airborne, Republic of Vietnam, Korea, and ship names.It is in the end not a place that promotes conversation. There doesn’t seem to be much of incentive to talk to one another as fellow patients, so you ask over and over again of the nurses where they’re from, how long they’ve been working here, those kinds of first date queries until everybody sort of knows the answers.My end of the hospital seemed to have older men as heart patients at least 9:1 over women. The wives pushing the heavy hospital wheelchairs in from the drop off cul-de-sac, after their husbands emerged from Ford Fusions like astronauts climbing out of Apollo 12, did not smile. They looked lost and scared. Their charges looked at one another, as if whatever they had done in life had not prepared them for this as one of many interim endpoints.I failed to strike up a real conversation with anyone. I was turning to them for unrealistic refuge and no one could be in a giving mood. While I was at Mayo it was unusually warm weather with sharp sunny afternoons but it stayed cold in each other’s’ shadows.If the fellow patients you might like to talk to are off limits, so are the people who do hard work pushing the mops and picking up medical trash, sharps, stuff wet with body fluids. You wonder what they think about having immigrated from the country where they started out life at a disadvantage now that they’re on the golden streets of America cleaning up after us. If Trump wanted to stop the rush on the border without that wall, he probably need do very little other than show videos of what jobs are ahead if someone makes it past la migra.This is not a Yelp review of Mayo, though I was cared for superbly. Most of the time I actually feel kinda awful, not because of anything other than the healing process being long and slow. Nature objects to people spelunking around inside your chest cavity for a couple of hours. You take each event — some pain, a positive prognosis — in context. It’s like evaluating a disagreement in a marriage for someone who says “I’ve been hitched only six months” versus one who says “We just celebrated our 50th.”The real currency is pain and what you’re purchasing at Mayo is time. The goal is, one of the better doctors said, adding life to years not just years to life. And so a long view is needed even when your body is demanding everything about you be in the short term. You need to understand all these passing things are simply part of a much larger picture difficult to get a hold of.
The ones that really make you think are the children’s cardiac unit patients I saw when allowed to walk around the ward. These are mostly kids too young to tie their own shoes but who are getting open heart surgery because they were born the wrong way. Their rooms are decorated with Mickey Mouse but nothing can really make something like this seem joyful amidst 60- and 70- year-old men hunched over their walkers and other four-year-olds playing dully on their beds nearby.
Perspective? It doesn’t matter if you realized it, but it was all borrowed time, kid. It’s one thing when they say to a man my age it’ll give you another 10 or 15 good years and when you look down and see the cardio unit children who haven’t even had their first good 10 or 15 hearing the same thing.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Wages of DEI at Thomas Jefferson High School
The results are in for one school — after four years of DEI-driven, basically race-based admissions, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known as T.J., in Alexandria, Virginia has seen its national ranking fall to 14th place and its number of National Merit Scholar semi-finalists cut nearly in half. And according to the Virginia Attorney General, as of May 2025 it is in violation of the Virginia Human Rights Act and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for discriminating against Asian American students in the admissions process at the school and under Federal investigation. It is steadfastly sticking to its radical admissions policy despite the negative effects. Given T.J.’s role as a STEM feeder school into the Ivies and Big Tech, this is more than another culture war battle. It affects national security.
Until four years ago the only way into T.J. was via a rigorous entrance exam. Then in 2020, following the death of George Floyd, T.J. officials became concerned about their negligible number of black and Hispanic students and changed admissions standards. The test was gone, replaced by a “holistic review” including “students who are economically disadvantaged [who now make up over 11 percent of the student body] English language learners, special education students, or students who are currently attending underrepresented middle schools.”
Without the entrance test, the black student population grew to seven percent from one percent of the class, while the number of Asian American students fell from 73 to 54 percent, the lowest share in years. A group of mostly Asian American parents objected to the new plan and started the Coalition for T.J. The coalition filed a lawsuit with the help of the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation. Instead of seeing weighting of experience factors as a way to level the playing field for underrepresented groups, they saw racism. The experience factors were just a work-around for straight up race-based decisions.
In 2022, a federal judge found the school board engaged in impermissible “racial balancing” when it overhauled admissions. In May 2023, however, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in favor of the new admissions process, finding T.J. had not discriminated against Asian American students in its admissions policies. The appellate court found that there was not sufficient evidence the changes were adopted with discriminatory intent. The court said that the school had a legitimate interest in “expanding the array of student backgrounds.” Too bad for the Asians, America’s on-and-off again minority; there’s only so many seats available at T.J. The court found T.J.’s essay-based admission policy was not a proxy for race-based decisions. T.J. was thus able to make racially-motivated decisions without appearing legally to make racially-motivated decisions. Because of this twist of logic, Supreme Court decisions in key affirmative action cases, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina, did not apply.
The Supreme Court then declined certiorari—it would not hear the case—in Coalition for T.J. v. Fairfax County School Board. The conservative Court’s denial left in place the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals affirming the discriminatory policy. The declination is in contrast to the Court’s earlier rejection of affirmative action, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard, and of race as a primary admissions factor. T.J. was free to not really/but really discriminate in its admissions process.
One factor T.J. would rely on was an applicant’s public middle school zip code, a good indicator of race in a divided Fairfax county. Zip code was to become one proxy for race, a work-around to Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard which supposedly outlawed race alone as a primary admissions factor. Schools like T.J. may use race as an admissions criterion so long as it is not the only basis for a decision, with the implied so long as the goal is diversity (supposedly good on its face) and not whitewashing (naughty.) It is this policy the Supreme Court refused to review. “The holding,” Justice Alito added in his dissent, “effectively licenses official actors to discriminate against any racial group [Asians, in the instance of T.J.] with impunity as long as that group continues to perform at a higher rate than other groups.”
That is all history because enough time has passed that we now know the results of this legal tomfoolery. Once the top-ranked public high school in the nation, T.J. fell to 14th place in the 2024 U.S. News rankings. According to the U.S. News Best High School Rankings Methodology, academic performance constitutes at least 50 percent of a school’s overall ranking. This includes standardized test scores and participation and success rates in advanced courses like IB and AP, contributing to two categories that hold significant weight in determining a school’s ranking: college readiness and state assessment proficiency.
Also, the school, which once boasted 157 National Merit Scholar semifinalists in 2020, saw that number nearly halved for the 2025 scholarship competition (the school says the data may also reflect problems during Covid.)
“The decline is the inevitable consequence of elevating ‘equity’ over excellence,” wrote Mark Spooner, on his blog Fairfax Schools Monitor. “In 2020, then-Superintendent Scott Braband announced the School Board’s determination that DEI would no longer be ‘a thing’; it would henceforth be ‘the thing’ in the Fairfax County public school system. T.J. was the obvious first target for this ‘social justice’ initiative because more than 70 percent of its students, admitted under rigorous academic criteria, were Asian Americans. The racial imbalance was deemed unacceptable.”
Spooner went on to write “We are more than three years into the T.J. experiment, but the Fairfax County School Board hasn’t yet addressed its successes and failures. Whether an objective analysis will ever be conducted is questionable, for the program was adopted primarily for ideological reasons, and the Board may be reluctant to subject its ideological assumptions to scrutiny. The elimination of entrance exams and other academic criteria forced T.J. to introduce remedial math courses for academically unprepared students. How many students needed to be enrolled in these programs? And did the programs succeed in rapidly bringing students up to speed so they would thereafter thrive at T.J.? We don’t know, but there are disturbing clues. Information has emerged that the drop-out rate at T.J. has spiked, particularly among some minority groups. If this is true, it suggests that the softened admissions standards may have hurt the very students who were intended as beneficiaries.”
Though it appeared to have been settled by the Supreme Court’s non-intervention, the Virginia Attorney General’s recent move may reopen the issue. According to the Attorney General, Asian American students received 56 fewer offers of admission immediately following the shift in policies, after consistently making up more than 60 percent of admitted students. He said the school was already a “minority majority high school,” but the board “determined it was the wrong minorities. The board abandoned a race-neutral, merit-based system that previously was in place, and they adopted a policy structure specifically designed to reduce the number of Asian American students.” The Attorney General referred the matter to the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice for further enforcement under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act as a next step. The Trump administration has threatened to withhold money from schools and colleges over DEI efforts that amount to discrimination, and has opened an investigation into T.J.’s admissions policy.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Five Questions Explain Why the H1-B Visa Needs Reformed
Five questions to explain why the H1-B visa needs to be reformed.
1) What is an H1-B visa?
Visas for foreigners to travel temporarily to the U.S. are designated by letters and numbers. B-1 is a business visa, B-2 is for tourists. H1-A allows foreign nurses to work in the U.S. while H1-B is for highly skilled workers — think AI scientists, programmers, and engineers — to work in the U.S. Unlike most nonimmigrant visas, H1-B is considered a visa with duel intent, meaning it is understood most holders will go on to apply for green cards, permanent residence in the U.S., and never return home to their foreign residence.
Created in 1990, the H-1B is an employer-sponsored visa that authorizes foreigners to work in the U.S. for up to six years. Tech companies and IT consultancies are the top recipients. Every year, a government lottery awards 65,000 slots to applicants with an undergraduate degree and another 20,000 to those with advanced degrees (universities and nonprofits are exempt from these caps.) The private-sector allocation is typically filled within days, hence a lottery to chose finalists for the visa. More on this in a moment.
2) Who are the H1-Bs in the U.S.?
The majority of H1-Bs work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, with computer-related occupations accounting for 65 percent. This was followed by about 10 percent distributed among architecture, engineering, and surveying. Amazon was the top employer of H-1Bs in 2024, hiring more than 13,000. Other top employers were Google (4th), Meta (6th), Microsoft (7th), Apple (8th), and IBM (10th.) Tesla ranked 22nd. The rest of the top employers are Indian staffing companies (see below.) All successful H1-Bs came through the lottery system.
3) Does the Lottery Assure the U.S. of Getting the Best and Brightest from Abroad?
Since 2004, the number of new H-1B visas issued has been capped at 85,000 per year, 20,000 of which are reserved for foreign students with master’s degrees or higher from American universities (the cap does not apply to universities, think tanks, and other non-profit groups, so more are issued.) These limited slots are chased by some 386,000 approved H-1B applications in fiscal year 2023, all thrown into that lottery.
So that winnows out the best candidates? Nope, sometimes just the opposite. Or maybe better to say any of the best and brightest are chosen by dumb luck and have just as much chance as the dull and dim. Because so many more people want an H1-B visa than there are visas available, a lottery is held. The lottery does not look at the quality or credentials of the applicant; he’s just thrown into the hopper to try his luck. All that is needed is the minimum qualification to enter, so many excellent candidates to fill jobs badly needed in the U.S. are never even considered.
Worse yet, the lottery is dominated by IT staffing firms which routinely flood it with entries, often for more visas than they need, crowding out companies that play by the rules and submit for specific, individual workers. Many of the world’s smartest engineers are shut out from the most lucrative, in-demand jobs, and shortages at the top end persist. It works like this: American Company A needs a programmer. Rather than try to recruit abroad and then navigate the cumbersome U.S. immigration system alone, they contract with an IT staffing firm, usually located in India (there are more than a million Indians in the U.S. on H-1 B visas, 72 percent of the whole; five of the top ten H1-B firms are Indian), for such a person, any person who fits the general bill. The IT staffing firm then recruits say 100 such programmers and dumps them all in the lottery hoping one will win. That’s your man!
The paperwork is sometimes tidied up to change the employer from the staffing firm to American Company A. In some cases even the lottery winner can be substituted for a preferred candidate. It makes it near-impossible for a specific individual to make it through the process. The lottery — by design — doesn’t reward top talent. It rewards luck and gaming the system. So it is not surprising 85 percent of H-1B petitions are awarded to employers paying well below the median wage, as determined by occupation and location. The floor for the H-1B visa salary is only $60,000, a number that has not be raised since, well, since when 60k was a decent salary in the IT industry. Even the the median compensation was only $118,000 fiscal year 2023.
4) Do H1-B Workers Compete with Americans for Jobs?
The law says H1-B workers are supposed to be paid the prevailing wage for their job, based on the Department of Labor statistics. In reality, the Economic Policy Institute found that 60 percent of H-1B positions were assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the occupation. A Government Accounting Office report found that between June 1, 2009, and July 30, 2010, 83 percent of H-1B jobs were certified at Level 1 (Entry-level.) This does not mean the workers themselves were entry-level, only that to save money some highly-skilled workers were down-labeled to make them cheaper to hire. Companies get low-cost employees, and the worker himself considers the eventual Green Card enough a part of his compensation that he tolerates the lower wage. The H1-B workers can’t complain too much; their visa is for a specific company and they are like indentured servants, unable to freely change jobs and thus made to take what they are given. Too bad about the displaced American workers priced out of the market.
5) What Can Be Done to Fix This?
Elon Musk and other tech barons argue the H-1B visa program is critical to ensuring American companies can find highly skilled labor that may not be easily available in the U.S. labor force. Trump himself has spoken highly of the program, ensuring its continued viability.
“Ultimately, if you’re going to have a skilled worker program for ‘skilled’ workers, you don’t award these visas via a lottery,” said Eric Ruark, the director of research at NumbersUSA, an organization that advocates for tighter immigration controls. “Obviously, that’s not how you find the best and the brightest.” To make the program better, dump the H1-B visa lottery in favor of a merit-based program for skilled workers that assigns points for various criteria, including education and work experience, similar to how Canada and other Western nations allocate their “Green Cards.” Another possible approach, considered during Trump 1.0, would be to prioritize allocation of visas by wages. One way or another replace luck with skill to the benefit of the United States.
It is also time to raise the salary floor for H1-B workers to make Americans more competitive for their jobs. The Department of Labor needs to update salary schedules more frequently, with an eye toward what real wages in the IT world are. And enforcement of H1-B regulations must eliminate more highly-skilled workers being used to fill entry-level jobs to get around wage caps. There should be no competition between American workers and H1-Bs.
Raise the overall number of H1-B visas available. Exempt “critical” industries such as defense oriented companies from the numerical cap. To get more of the world’s best, the U.S. needs to open more doors to them.
Continue to streamline the H1-B application process. The January 17 H-1B visa reforms are a good start but still not enough.
What should not be done is to eliminate the H1-B visa. The program as it stands today is necessary but not sufficient, and ripe for overhaul as part of the greater scrutiny Trump seeks to apply to all immigration to the United States.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump’s Five Million Dollar Gold Card Visa
If you’re hung up on the idea of selling American citizenship, that horse left the barn decades ago. What’s left at issue is just how much it should cost.
“We’re going to be selling a gold card,” President Donald Trump said from the Cabinet Room recently. “You have a green card. This is a gold card. We’re going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million, and that’s going to give you green card privileges, plus it’s going to be a route to citizenship. And wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card.” Highly skilled people can also get in on the deal if they can find a sponsor. “Companies can buy gold cards and, in exchange, get those visas to hire new employees,” Trump said. He estimates he can sell a million of them.
Trump is talking about changes to America’s current citizenship for sale scheme, the EB-5 visa. That visa, if it is held for six years, leads to citizenship. It requires a foreigner to create a new business through investment that creates or sustains at least 10 American jobs, or buy an existing business resulting in at least a 40 percent increase in the net worth or number of employees. In the case of a troubled business, an EB-5 investor may rely on “job maintenance,” that the number of existing employees is, or will be, no less than the pre-investment level for a period of at least two years.
What’s really required, in addition to the usual vetting, is money, at least $1,050,000 in most cases, $800,00 if the investment is in a rural or high-unemployment area (most investors go for the cheaper option, called a Targeted Employment Area.) The paperwork is significantly backed up, but after you invest the money and wait three to six years for adjudication, you’ve bought yourself a path to U.S. citizenship.
The problem is the scheme has not worked as well as it should have. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik stated the program is rife with “nonsense, make believe, and fraud.” He was likely referring to the many fraudulent investments marketed to EB-5 investors abroad, particularly housing developments and golf courses that absorb investment money but never seem to appear on the ground. He may also be referring to a U.S. government decision to allow overseas investors to pool their money for an investment, meaning no one person puts a million dollars at risk. Another decision allows the investor to borrow his million abroad, a loan to invest in the U.S., meaning if the loan went sour abroad so did the U.S. investment. Things got even shadier when promissory notes began being accepted in lieu of the bulk of the one million investment as cash. There were also some notable successes funded with EB-5 money, including Hudson Yards in Manhattan and the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn.
Overall the program suffered from a lack of transparency in what investment would be approved by the USG, and a lack of enforcement to ensure the investors followed through on their side of the deal after the visa was actually issued. Traffic was only so-so — desire for the visa peaked in 2015, when the minimum investment was only $500,000. At that peak the government approved about 15,000 visas a year, a long shot short of Trump’s projected million visas sold for his $5 million Gold Card. The long processing times have not helped business. Overall, 2020, 78,278 investors applied for the EB-5 program. Some 80 percent of those investors came from four countries, China, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom, with China clearly in the lead: in 2014, of the total of 10,692 EB-5 visas issued, 85 percent were for Chinese nationals.
The lack of broader interest in the American EB-5 has nothing to do with actual demand by the world’s wealthy.
The world’s wealthy love second passports, especially if the principal happens to have a lot of money but only a passport that opens few doors or can easily be taken away in a country like Nigeria or Vietnam. Brokers suggest passports from some 28 countries might be available, including NATO member Turkey (about $400,000) and EU member Portugal (roughly $541,000.) A number of smaller Caribbean nations like St. Lucius offer passports for sale, or, if a little lipstick is needed for the pig, passports for investment. Details and requirements vary greatly, as does cost, from a few hundred thousand to over one million dollars. To apply for a Portugal golden visa, for example, one qualifying option is to make a large non-refundable contribution to an approved cultural organization. In the Caribbean, you can make a contribution toward funds the government designed to help invest in varying sectors, like infrastructure. Some Caribbean countries also allow you to qualify for citizenship by purchasing real estate. One popular but pricey option is EU Malta’s Citizenship by Naturalization, which requires a $780,000 non-refundable contribution to the economy. Applicants must also pay $52,000 for each qualifying dependent, lease or purchase a property in Malta for six years, and donate to a Maltese charity. All of these options would compete with Trump’s Gold Card for buyers.
Desire for a second passport does not rest with Nigerian princes and Vietnamese oligarchs alone. Many wealthy Americans are in the market (though obviously would not be in the pool for a Trump Gold Card.) Henley & Partners, a law firm specializing in high-net-worth citizenships, said Americans now outnumber every other nationality when it comes to securing alternative residences or added citizenships.
Recent high-profile examples of second citizenships include billionaire Peter Thiel (New Zealand) and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (Cyprus.) The head of private clients at Henley & Partners added “If I’m wealthy, I would like to hedge against levels of volatility and uncertainty. The idea of diversification is well understood by wealthy individuals around what they invest. It makes no sense to have one country of citizenship and residence when I have the ability to actually diversify that aspect of my life as well.
“Globally, millionaire migration was expected to have hit a new high in 2024, as wars, government crackdowns on wealth, and political uncertainty drove more wealthy residents to other countries, with an estimated 128,000 millionaires forecast to move to a new country,” according to Henley. The U.S. remains a top destination for the global wealthy, with an inflow of 2,200 millionaires in 2023 and an estimated 3,500 in 2024. China remains the biggest source of out-migration, losing 13,500 millionaires last year.
So what might this mean for Trump’s Gold Card? There is first of all the problem of getting rid of the creaky EB-5 visa and replacing it with the Gold Card. Trump says an Executive Order will suffice, but most experts agree only Congress can revoke or create new visa categories. Assuming Trump can get past that hurdle (no small task), is his Gold Card in the clear?
On the plus side he is in fact marketing the U.S. as the world’s best destination. While someone may scoop up a Maltese passport for travel convenience, he is unlikely to want to move his fortune there, invest further or set up house. The U.S. is different, and the Gold Card on sale for a single fee, transactional and quick, no risky investing needed, no subjective adjudication. Despite Americans’ fears, the U.S. passport is still one of the most useable in the world, and for the rich, American wealth-creation, education, and medical care rank close to number one. The U.S. is a highly desirable location not just for a convenient passport but as a place of residence.
The problem is price. Trump’s Gold Card, if offered at $5 million, is dramatically more expensive than its competitors. The pool of potential buyers, though not small, is not that deep. Simply put, is the price too high?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump May Succeed Where Others Failed in Personnel Cutting
Disclaimer: Then-Vice President Al Gore awarded my State Department team in Seoul in the mid-90’s a Hammer Award for helping “reinvent government.” Gore was in charge of the Clinton-era plan to create a government that costs less and works better. The plan mostly depended on us run-of-the-mill employees to come up with cost saving hacks and strategies within our own offices.
The award, a mounted gold-painted hammer, was supposed to remind us of the expensive, wasteful procurements by the military, in this case an ashtray that would break into no more than three pieces when hit by a hammer. It’s true! So while as a Gore team award-winner I might seem a bit biased toward what Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing, the truth is actually the opposite. And that’s because one strategy failed while the other still has a decent chance of succeeding.
Trump is far from the first president to want to reform the Federal government. Ronald Reagan in 1982 launched a group led by 150 private sector CEOs to review federal agencies and make recommendations to reduce waste. “Be bold. We want your team to work like tireless bloodhounds. Don’t leave any stone unturned in your search to root out inefficiency,” the president told commission members. Officially called the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control in the Federal Government, it was better known as the Grace Commission after its chair, Peter Grace. Grace was well-known at the time for a speech where he said food stamps were basically a subsidy for Puerto Ricans.
In due time, the Grace Commission issued a report suggesting over 2,500 recommendations to increase government efficiency. Most of them required Congressional action and so in the end not much was done.
As mentioned, led by former Vice President Al Gore, the National Performance Review had similar aims as the Grace Commission, but went about achieving them in a different way. Rather than bringing on private sector outsiders like Reagan, the Clinton administration relied on federal employees. “It is career bureaucrats who know, better than anyone else, what works and what doesn’t,” said a Gore aide. “A successful reform effort cannot take place without their wisdom and without their participation.”
Part of that wisdom was my team out in Seoul. We were then the busiest visa issuing embassy in the world, and were literally struggling for air amid Korean visa applications for travelers to the United States. Our rewarded hammer wisdom was to couple a hiring blitz with a range of kinda-makes-sense administrative changes to our workflow. Because we were processing close to a million visas a year, even small adjustments could have a big impact (a small thing times one million is a big number.) It made it all seem dramatic, and we wrote it up nicely, hence the award from Gore. We hung it on the wall near the restrooms where everyone could see it daily.
Gore’s program got a little help, I mean, besides from my team. Between January 1993 and September 2000, the federal workforce shrunk by 426,200, making it the smallest one since the administration of Dwight Eisenhower. The reduction was brought about through a large-scale buyout program and about 25,000 layoffs. Still, overall only $136 billion was saved and the workforce grew back again under subsequent administrations. A 2013 Government Executive article criticized how the shrinkage was achieved. “The reduction didn’t happen in a way that matched workforce needs because they used a strategy for downsizing to hit a target. The effort got in the way of the ‘making government work better’ piece. Many with special skills left, and people who stayed might have been those we’d have wanted to leave.”
Here’s where with lessons learned Trump may have a chance to succeed where Reagan and Clinton did not.
— No commissions or blue ribbon panels. One of Reagan’s mistakes was to create a commission with the power to peer into all aspects of government without the power to do anything about the problems they uncovered. A report was produced (purposeful use of the passive tense there) and dumped onto Congress’ lap where it slowly faded from memory. Though the wire diagram is a bit fuzzy here in 2025, Elon Musk clearly has more power in his hands than simply to produce a report. His ability to act, whether by ordering in Trump’s name actual de facto closures of agencies like USAID, or by offering government-wide buyouts ahead of a RIF, is significant. That alone may make DOGE more successful than its predecessors.
— Understanding people are the problem, unlike Gore. Gore made the mistake of handing over uncovering waste to the very people perpetuating it, trusting them to hack themselves into efficiency. Musk, instead of encouraging workers to flush out waste, assumes those employees are actually the drivers of it. The hammer this time is a pink slip. Gore did produce some nice optics and had a publicity-forward edge to it all, but resulted in little actual money-saving change or added efficiency. But contrast the media response to Gore’s approach versus Musk’s on-purpose bully-in-a-china shop tactics as an indicator to how long he’ll get away with what he is doing.
— But without some guidance as to who to cut, Musk risks the same problem Reagan and Gore had, throwing out the good, needed employees with the bad ones when the only criteria is headcount. You can bet that nearly every employee inside government is considering how to bail out right now. The problem is that given lucrative government retirement and pension plans, anyone close to “real” retirement is going to try and tough it out. These may not be the best employees, or maybe they are, but they’ll be the ones to cling to their jobs for another six months or a year or whatever. Statistically they are more likely to have a coronary at their desk then to leave without a fight.
The second group of government employees who will hang on like a dog with a turkey leg in its mouth are the worst of the worst, those employees who have no transferable skills into the private sector. They have nowhere to go and nothing to lose and unless identified and micro-targeted by RIFs may be who is left to turn out the lights in many government offices a year or two from now, the true Deep State, dug in even deeper.
Musk needs guidelines in his efforts beyond “move fast and break things” and creating some commission a la Reagan which will spend a year creating a report of little value. With that said, so far so good. Unlike Gore, who also just used crude headcount goals, Musk will need to engage departmental leadership for those agencies he hopes to redeem and make informed choices over which employees to RIF and/or which sub-departments to close. Of course none of that matters if your goal is to delete an entire agency, as with USAID or Education. The wood chipper has its uses, too.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Viva La Resistance, Hawaiian Style!
If you were to nominate a place for being the most resistant to Donald Trump’s immigration policies, particularly those large-scale deportations, where would it be? True Blue states like California or New York or Colorado? Or just maybe so-called sanctuary cities like Manhattan, Chicago or L.A.? The jury is still out, but an early leader for the most resistant place is Hawaii.
Hawaii is one of the bluest states in the union. Some 34 percent of registered voters are Democrats, verus only 18 percent Republican. A whopping 43 percent are officially unaffiliated but tend to vote Democrat (voters do not have to register a political party.) About 61 percent of voters chose Kamala Harris over Trump in the last election. The governor is (always) a serious Democrat. The state legislature is handily controlled (always) by the Democratic party.
So it is no surprise that while most centers of resistance have chosen a passive cooperation model for dealing with ICE and the mass deportations, Hawaii has gone insane actively trying to place stumbling blocks in front of ICE. The legislature is considering fast-tracked (run to the head of the line of 122 previously submitted bills on various topics) immigration-related bills advocates believe are critical to putting up walls to protect immigrants from an administration eager to see them gone, along with other initiatives.
— One bill would push back on a Trump order rescinding a policy limiting where immigration enforcement actions can take place (such as schools, churches, courts, hospitals.) HB 440
— Another would appropriate funds so people in immigration court have access to an attorney. HB 438
— A third would require state and local law enforcement agencies to notify people in custody, in their native language, of their rights before immigration agents interview them. That bill would also require a person’s attorney to be notified before immigration authorities take them into custody. HB 457
— A fourth bill would prevent state and local law enforcement agencies from collaborating with federal authorities on immigration enforcement. HB 22
— There is also a bill making the rounds that would prohibit Hawaiian public lands from being used for immigrant detention centers. HB 73
— Before leaving for Washington D.C. to testify against RFK, Jr., the governor announced he was budgeting $20 million for the Attorney General’s Office to support lawsuits opposing Trump policies, including immigration.
— The ACLU of Hawaii said workshops are being planned to keep immigrants apprised of their legal rights.
You’d think all this and the liberal angst which accompanies it would be aimed at a large illegal population, but Hawaii has only about 41,000 illegals in the whole state, about half of whom are from the Philippines. And ICE has arrested for deportation all of 20 people to date.
In addition to over-reaction, hypocrisy is also well-practiced by the Democratic government of Hawaii. While fighting back against the Federal government over immigration, the Dems are more than happy to suck up funding at the public teat. Direct Pentagon spending pumps $7.2 billion into Hawaii’s economy, about 7.7 percent of the state’s GDP. Hawaii is second in the United States for the highest defense spending as a share of state GDP, and that’s just the overt stuff. Rumor has it the NSA has multiple facilities strewn around western Oahu with thousands of employees. All those government personnel, uniformed or covert, do a lot of personal spending in the local economy, much as they do in the modern day shanty towns which ring American facilities. Everyone relies on local utilities like water, power, and sewers, and those bases need engineers, plumbers, electricians, and others. Many are local residents either directly employed by DoD or working through contracts with private companies. The point is even more then tourism, this large sector of the economy is controlled by the government.
And speaking of socialism, another important sector of the Hawaiian economy is also government controlled, those who live entirely on public benefits. Benefits in Hawaii are the highest in the nation, an average of $49,175 and untaxed. For the last nine years Hawaii spent more on public welfare benefits, about 20 percent of the state budget, then it did on education. More than 1 out 10 people in Hawaii get food stamps (SNAP), though the number is higher if you include free lunches at school and meals for the elderly. Hawaii vies with California for the nation’s highest state income tax. Hawaii is nearly always one of the top states in terms of homelessness, poverty, unemployment, food insecurity, and diabetes. The people behind those statistics live in a relationship with the ultra-rich that is mostly like those little fish that swim inside a shark’s gills.
The government in Hawaii owns the land. The Federal government owns about 20 percent of everything, and the state of Hawaii owns some 50 percent of the rest. Do Not Enter – U.S. Government Property signs are everywhere if you take a drive out of town. There are also plenty of private roads and gated communities to separate the rich from the poor, but the prize goes to Oracle owner Larry Ellison, who owns almost the entire island of Lanai. For the rest of the people, homeownership rates in Hawaii are some of the lowest in the nation. A third of the state’s residents are thinking of moving away due to high costs. Never mind California, this is what the results of the great Democrats’ Experiment looks like.
Then there is Lahaina, on Maui. The city was nearly completely destroyed by fire a year and a half ago. Over 2,000 properties with residential structures were either destroyed or suffered major damage. Those properties include multifamily buildings, meaning the number of individual units damaged or destroyed is likely higher. Yet after 18 months only a total of 3 of those homes have been rebuilt. The problem lies in bureaucratic red tape, specifically in high costs and long waits for building permits that were instituted over the past few years. County officials have only approved a fraction of the disaster recovery building permits submitted by homeowners, not exactly a model for California.
And worse yet, because of new, stricter laws, many people will be forced to rebuild under more burdensome regulations and restrictions than when those homes were first constructed, meaning many of them cannot be built back in the way they were previously. Locals contrast what’s happening on Maui with when Hurricane Iniki destroyed some 2,000 homes on the island of Kauai in 1992. Most of those homes were rebuilt within a year.
You’d think that with all those issues on the to-do list leaders’ attention might be focused somewhere other than on a handful of illegals getting busted by ICE. But then you wouldn’t be a member of the Democratic resistance of Hawaii.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Letter from Japan 2025
Japan 2025 is a version of Japan 2000, albeit with fewer young people, many more old people, and a society that has no idea where it is going so it simply runs in place waiting to see what might evolve next. Change comes slowly in Japan but eventually will accumulate enough to nip you in the oshiri. It’s almost that time. You want it to happen so badly, to be the future, but Japan stubbornly refuses to accept the assignment.
None of that is visible at first or even second glance in a place like Tokyo. The trains run frightenly on time, down to the second. The airport ticket machines are still overly complex but accept Y10,000 yen notes (about $63) casually in a country where many people outside the big cities still conduct life almost entirely in cash. Apple Pay from your American smartphone? Maybe not as much. The ticket machines do have an “English” button that removes some but not all of the mystery and if not, an attendant is nearby at the airport station at least to remove some but not all of the mystery.
In the news you can’t miss what’s going on. Japan leads the world in per capita sales of adult diapers. Japan’s population is getting so old that one major diaper manufacturer is only making products for adults, not babies, anymore. Japan’s births dropped more than five percent in 2023, its lowest in centuries. It had more than twice as many deaths as births, leading to a natural population decline of over 800,000. There’s an article about the government asking schools and companies to schedule group excursions outside of peak season, because a labor shortage makes it impossible to serve everyone properly. Some of the blame falls on us, it says, the foreigners traveling to Japan to enjoy the weak yen, no matter that tourism is one of the few growing sectors nationwide thanks to that cheap currency plus the lure of anime and manga. Plenty of that, no shortages there. Forget steel and Toyotas, Japan wants to double the number of foreign tourists over the next few years as a major industry.
But even if you missed the news, signs of a labor shortage are not hard to spot. More and more of Japan’s famous convenience stores and supermarkets are nearly 100 percent vaguely overwatched self-check out now, taking advantage of the extreme honesty of the Japanese people. In smaller subway stations there are no longer attendants to resolve problems. You’re on your own with the machines there alongside 124 million (and shrinking) Japanese.
One solution in play is promoting elderly employment. To address the labor shortage, Japan has been encouraging older people to remain in the workforce longer. The government raised the retirement age and is promoting “silver workers” (elderly workers.) But many of these jobs appear to be make-work type situations instead of giving the old folks some responsibility. Ushers in a bank lobby to show patrons to a seat, human light poles to direct traffic around construction, that sort of thing. It feels like too little, especially as 20 percent of people over 65 live in poverty.
The country’s population peaked in 2008 and has since been steadily decreasing due to low birth rates and an aging society. In 2023, approximately 29 percent of Japan’s population was aged 65 or older, making it one of the oldest populations in the world. The proportion of elderly people is projected to rise even further, possibly reaching 40 percent by 2050 if current trends continue. This is coupled with a low birth rate. Japan has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. The low birth rate is due to various factors, including social and economic pressures, high cost of living, delayed marriages, and changing attitudes towards family life. On the other end of the scale, Japan has one of the highest life expectancies globally, with average life expectancy at birth around 82 for men, 87 for women.
Visiting a Japanese friend in a Tokyo suburb, there’s a daily announcement at 5 pm asking everyone in the massive Eastern European-style block apartment complex to look for the handful of Alzheimer-afflicted residents who wandered off during the day, as if that has always been something announced. People look out their windows to try and help, and moms in the playground are especially alert, as many of the old people like to collect there to watch the children. It can make you cry if you let it but no one in Japan lets it.
With a rapidly growing elderly population, Japan has seen an increasing demand for caregiving services. The burden is often placed on family members, particularly women, taking them out of the workforce. The government has been trying to address this with various reforms, including allowing more foreign caregivers to work in Japan, but talk is talk and it all seems to end up more active on Sunday morning political talk shows than on the street (or on the playground) where it it needed.
It can be hard to sort out, this modern Japan. It is so clean, everywhere. Crime only exists in the most organized fashion and rarely touches the average person, at least one who shies away from loan sharks. If you drop something someone will pick it up and try to return it to you. There are few public trash cans because there is no one to empty them. People thus carry their daily trash of food wrappers and cigarette butts with them, until they get home if necessary. You could eat off the subway floor, while in New York homeless on the trains are immolated for kicks. Even the growing homeless population gathered near Japanese train stations is quiet and neat, not wanting it seems to make a fuss or cause a disturbance. In nearly any such way Japan is a better, cleaner, and safer place than nearly anywhere else in the world. It can be hard to get past such a miracle to criticize her.
And that’s what makes a visitor want to scream out loud “You are almost there,” just let in some immigrant nurses to care for the elderly, and create a subsidized childcare system so mothers who want to work can. That should also encourage women to have children, alongside a national campaign to assure people working moms are a valuable part of the economy. But no one seems to be listening; the government’s current effort is to offer women only a measly sum of about the equivalent of US$630 as an incentive to have children.
If Japan does not successfully address its demographic challenges, the country will face long-term economic stagnation, reduced productivity, and increased societal pressures. However, Japan’s advanced infrastructure and technological innovations may allow it to continue to mitigate some of the most severe impacts of its aging population and run in place for many more years. The popular culture answer is just that, in the form of robots. You see them on the TV news from time to time, either in the form of a movie-like android walking awkwardly or the dream slot, as a classic Japanese femmebot receptionist. No robots lifting an elderly woman out of the tub, or changing a diaper. It’s all for the good one supposes, but it seems Japan 2025 has left too many questions unanswered.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Anti-Democratic Dem Manipulators Strike Again (and Again)
The Democrats continue to run to course — manipulating — most recently, Joe Biden out of the presidential race. Their history for the last decade has been one of manipulation and dirty tricks, false promises and anti-democratic actions. They campaign claiming Trump is out to destroy democracy when at the same time can’t seem to find enough anti-democratic ways to behave themselves.
Dirty tricks have long been a part of politics, but in the last decade the Democrats have turned the machine up to eleven. The year 2015 was a pivotal one in that it presented to the American people a massive plot to undermine a candidate for president based solely on direct lies. Russiagate was comprehensive in scope, touching not only on candidate Trump but also on his advisors and key staff. The plot was so outrageous — Trump was an actual Russian agent, a living Manchurian candidate — that it had to be true. The MSM certainly believed it. Indeed, the MSM’s hand-in-glove cooperation with the Democrats is another key feature of the last decades’ evil shenanigans. Had the Democrats had a straight-forward enough candidate to run against Trump (Hillary dragged way too much baggage around with her to beat a Trump in the process of creating a movement with MAGA, never mind winning an election.)
Clinton was not necessarily the only loser in 2016. “The seeds,” writes the New York Times, “of President Biden’s reaction to the Democratic Party’s 2024 crisis of confidence in him were planted in that manipulation to send her to the head of the ticket. It was in October 2015 when Biden, then vice president, announced in the White House Rose Garden that he would not run against Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination.” What was left unsaid was the manipulation applied to Biden to not take his case to the people but instead allow President Obama, Clinton and others in the Obama camp to force him to the sidelines. He was manipulated into not running to clear the path for Hillary, Bernie’s surprising showing not planned nor withstanding. He’d be dealt with by a similar process, leaving behind a very successful run only to be humiliated at the Convention as a has-been. The anti-democratic message to both men was clear: tonight ain’t your night, kid, the boys from Chicago got the fix in. Yer gonna have to take da’ dive.
Trump’s 2016 win was not the end of the Democrats’ manipulation and dirty tricks, simply the beginning of another phase. In addition to the remnants of the whole extended Russiagate plot, Trump faced down the Emoluments Clause, two impeachments, claims Trump gave away intelligence info to Putin in Helsinki hoax, the Putin is Trump’s spy handler hoax and Trump has been an agent since the 1980s hoax, and a bizarre celebrity Twitter contest about the best way to decapitate Trump (a full list here.) The intent was to try and drive Trump from office either indirectly by humiliating him or directly, by claiming he was mentally ill and the 25th Amendment needed to be invoked. If he could not be actually removed from office, the manipulations were hoped to neuter the president politically even as he still sat in the Oval Office. That they all failed was not for a lack of trying on the part of the Democrats.
If the 2024 presidential campaign started the day Trump left office in January 2021, so did the Democratic manipulation campaign against him, this round built on lawfare, the manipulation of actual laws to force Trump into court, convict him as a felon, maybe bankrupt him, certainly embarrass him, all in hopes of driving him from the race or at a minimum weaken his hold on large numbers of voters. Though several cases will likely drag on through the election, the cases concluded accomplished none of their goals. If anything, Trump the martyr is stronger as a candidate than ever before. What matters here is the ongoing pattern of dirty tricks and manipulations, not whether they succeed, or, like the impeachments and the trials, fail in their larger political purposes.
The 2020 election between Trump and Biden was close, so close that the appearance of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden which showed both Hunter and Joe tangled up in foreign money could have swung the race. Democrats again responded with a manipulation, another full-on falsehood, with 52 Deep State personnel writing an open letter claiming the laptop was likely Russian disinformation designed to discredit Biden and smear the tail end of the campaign. With MSM help as direct as canceling Twitter accounts which sought to tell the truth, to the usual prime time pundits barking in unison about the false nature of the laptop, what would have been a turning point in the campaign was squashed.
The next Manipulation Grande started in the 2020 campaign, hiding a very old and senile Joe Biden from voters so they did not know what kind of man they were actually voting for. In the 2020 campaign the broad excuse was Covid, relegating Biden to a campaign by TV out of his basement. It was actually a good gimmick for a weary nation, and no one suspected it was all flim-flam to hide Biden’s growing dementia. Once past the victorious 2020 campaign, the MSM was enlisted to hide Biden’s age-related dilemmas from the public through editing, selective camera angles, denials, and just plain old falsehoods. Biden literally tripped down the stairs of Air Force One several times without much comment from the pundits; why should they comment, they were in on the game, ignoring the real Biden unscripted at events all over the country.
In fighting for his political life, Biden cited the “fact” that he won the primaries for the 2024 election. Question is, who did people vote for, a spry, older person or a manipulated image of an unhealthy person? Biden cited many reasons for remaining in the race, placing particular emphasis on the argument that he was the choice of Democratic primary voters, and that it would be wrong to disregard their voice. “The voters of the Democratic Party have voted. They have chosen me to be the nominee of the party. Do we now just say this process didn’t matter? That the voters don’t have a say?” Biden wrote. “It was their decision to make. Not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well intentioned. The voters – and the voters alone – decide the nominee of the Democratic Party.” Driving the point home, Biden painted his stand as critical to his larger defense of American democracy. “How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party?” Then he did because he was told to do so by his master’s voice.
But some have questioned whether Democratic voters truly did place their trust in some version of Biden, or whether the choice was instead made for them. “We never had a real primary process. We never had a real debate in this country,” said one observer. “Everybody decided, for their own political reasons, that the best option was to shut down dissent, shut off choice, and force the public into this choice of an election they never wanted any part of.” That’s called manipulation.
What will happen to Kamala and what will be her cooked up October Surprise? And whither the party, likely to lose in 2024 despite a decade of failed manipulations devoted to winning? Will they play fair next round?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
NBC’s Cultural Revolution (Ronna McDaniel)
For all the talk of a Civil Cold War now underway in America, Red vs. Blue, it is the wrong historical example. The professional death of Ronna McDaniel at NBC earlier this month was an event right out of Mao’s time, not Robert E. Lee’s. McDaniel was fired by the masses at NBC because she wrongthought, because she held political views associated with the right and not the leftist road NBC and its running dog networks follow. The decision comes less than a week after NBC News announced her hiring, prompting an extraordinary public protest from the former host of its flagship Sunday morning show, as well as from popular MSNBC hosts. They fired her, but a public flogging would not have been out of the question if Chuck Todd thought he might get away with it, and he might have.
Fans of the new Netflix series “3 Body Problem” saw it in action: the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Beginning in May 1966, this was a decade-long period of political and social chaos caused by Mao Zedong’s bid to use the Chinese masses to reassert his control over the Communist party. It was almost unfathomable in its brutality, killing as many as two million people for wrongthinking, thoughts that fail the ideological purity test. Wrongthink is an Orwellian word that preceeded the Revolution by decades but described its core spot-on. The word is equally useful today.
“3 Body Problem” opens with a fictionalization of just one death, a university professor who refused to change his beliefs about physics to match Mao-thought, as contained in his so-called Little Red Book. For its complexity, the Cultural Revolution boiled down to one thing: believe what the majority says is right or suffer, to the pain of death, at the hands of the powerful. “Mean Girls” this is not.
McDaniel, who is the niece of Republican Senator Mitt Romney, was first hired to lead the Republican National Committee (RNC) by Trump in 2017 after she served as chair of the Michigan Republican Party. She was then hired by NBC presumably to bring a dot of balance to NBC’s news coverage after her recent Trump-led ouster at the RNC. She was stricken from the news network after only four days on the job because as head of the RNC she in the past voiced support for claims by Trump about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The gist of the burn at NBC was that was a lie, McDaniel thus a liar, and as an NBC analyst she could not be trusted to not lie more.
“Hold my beer” said dozens of people who came from the Democratic National Committee and the Biden White House to work as NBC analysts, chief among them Jen Psaki, who, as the official spokesperson for the Biden White House, lied as a profession to defend Joe Biden (here’s a compendium of her lies.) She jumped from liar-for-hire to hosting a show and constantly being on MSNBC, including “Meet the Press.” NBC frequently calls on the former spooks John Brennan, James Clapper, and once-senior FBI official and associate director Frank Figliuzzi. These are trained liars of the Deep State, men who helped promote Russiagate and sought the overthrow of Trump on fake accusations. Previously Neo-Cons were given hours of airtime on NBC to defend the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses and to later defend torture as a righteous response of a democracy to terrorism. How are they different from McDaniel? Rightthink versus wrongthink. If you are going to tell a lie it had better be in line with what the masses want to believe at NBC.
Truth? In a cultural revolution as we are undergoing now the truth is what the Party tells the masses it is. Remember how vehement Rachael Maddow was about the truth of Russiagate even after it was shown to be an elaborate hoax of the Deep State? No matter; there was no one like Ronna McDaniel around to tell her she was wrong and we now know there never will be.
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski — hosts of Morning Joe, a morning show watched daily by President Biden — said they were being inundated with calls over the decision to hire McDaniel. They vowed never to have her on their show in any capacity. Nicolle Wallace, a former White House communications director for President George W. Bush who is now a host on MSNBC, said on her show Monday having McDaniel on the network would embolden “election deniers.” Rachel Maddow, continuing the group therapy session, likened it all to hiring “a mobster to work at a D.A.’s office.” Chuck Todd, who emerged alongside Maddow as the spokesperson for the masses in the NBC news division, worried especially about “giving Ronna NBC News’ credibility.”
Credibility? Only 32 percent of the population reports having “a great deal” or even “a fair amount” of confidence the media reports the news in a full, fair, and accurate way. The only other time in recent history that trust has fallen to 32 percent was in 2016, with the election. A record-high number of Americans — 39 percent — say they don’t trust the media at all. That number has steadily increased since 2018. Much of the change is driven by Democrats and Independents, presumably NBC’s target audience, whose collective trust in media plummeted 18 and 13 percentage points, respectively, from their 2018 peaks. What could you expect when the people who create the news are such blatant hypocrites? NBC news should not worry too much; its reputation for honestly ranks somewhere near “American Idol” anyway. The latest partisan jousting is just one of the many reasons why so many Americans roll their eyes when asked about the media.
This is in no way to grant Ronna McDaniel status as some magnificent journalist, someone who can be seen as speaking for a generation of Republicans. Nor is it to say she would have spoken much truth to power at NBC anyway; chances are she would have barked out what those who fed her wanted to hear, perhaps as a Washington Generals-like foil to some hero like Chuck Todd. And what happened at NBC could have just as easily taken place at CBS, CNN or NPR. As my colleague writes “greater injustices have been perpetrated in the media world than the premature conclusion to Ronna McDaniel’s punditry career at NBC News.”
The news is not there to make anyone feel safe. It exists so we can learn from it, and for us to learn from it we have to at times be offended and uncomfortable with it, to bathe in it, to taste it bitter or sweet. When you wash your hands of an idea you also lose all the ideas which grew to challenge it. Think antibodies fighting a disease. What happens when a body forgets how to fight an illness? What happens when places like NBC forget how to challenge a safe idea with an opposing one?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
This Year’s Best Christmas Gifts, 2023 (Satirical)
It is almost Christmas, and, like most of us, you are probably behind on buying gifts for loved ones, co-workers, and others close to you. Skip the stores and the crowds this season, and choose from our satirical selection of the very best Christmas gifts for 2023.Black Lives Matter Gift Set: discontinued and nearly forgotten; receipt needed for returns ’cause we know you lifted this. Also sold under the brand name “Confederate Statues You’ve Never Heard of But are Now Freaked Out Over.”Gaza Ant Farm: Watch these industrious Gazan ants dig tunnels and smuggle sand particles in and out for hours and hours of fun! Then destroy the tunnels, feed the ants, or both!Joe Biden White House Playset: Joe doll comes with Dribble Action (c) speech module. Connect him to the Jill doll (purchase separately; 1200 D batteries not included) to see him walk, maintain inflation, enter proxy wars, and be bewildered about declining poll numbers. Win! 2020 add-on set still available as you wait for the possible 2024 edition.Middle East Lego Playset: The set retails for five trillion dollars. Included are enough Legos to build replicas of Iraq and all of Syria, allowing a child to refight those battles over and over. Figures, all with removable heads, include Sunni militias, Islamic State fighters, Shia militias, American Special Forces, Iranians, Yemenis, Kurds, Russians, Syrians (moderate and radical, though they look alike), Israelis, Saudi financiers, Hezbollah fighters, Hamas fighters, al Qaeda, more Iranians, miscellaneous unmarked drones, and a starter pack of refugees. Don’t forget even more adventures can be played with the Turkish Expansion Pack. Parents, please note, even with the best of intentions, the playset tends to simply fall apart after awhile and everyone gets bored with it. Not included: any weapons of mass destruction. Get it now at 50 percent off with the Israel v. Hamas Gaza add-on. A Best Seller and list leader for many years!Trump Rally: Playset comes complete with plastic ground sheet, ten thousand figures, and MAGA signage. Order at exactly midnight and get a free VHS copy of Triumph of the Will.
The Ukraine Game: Retail price $500 billion. Includes an empty box you’re supported to fill with money and send off for another empty box to fill.The Republican Primary Game: Just an empty box.The Democratic Primary Game: Another empty box.Third Party Candidate Action Figure: Chances of winning sold separately.The Mike Johnson Game: For the whole family! Roll the dice to travel around the board for days at a time. There’s actually no way to win the game and all the other players will soon hate you.Cuddle Me Gaza Doll: Returned item, may be labeled Cuddle Me Ukraine. Sensitivity warning, doll may resemble Sean Penn when seen in the harsh light of day.American Girl Doll: Deal with it, it’s a boy underneath. Asian and Black models available if trans alone no longer shocks you leftists enough.George Santos: Not a doll, the real George Santos. He needs someplace to stay and a hot meal over the holidays.Your Own GoFundMe: GoFundMe is now America’s largest health insurer, so give the gift of an account to a loved one!Putin Chia Pet: Comes right out of the box looking like a shaved-head Vladimir Putin but water it daily and it will soon resemble Weird Al Yankovic! Continue to water the doll and it will take over your kitchen, den, and drive you from your own garage even as it causes other houseplants to “accidentally” fall to their deaths off high shelves.
New Alexa Programmed to Sound Like Your Kid: Saying “Hello, Alexa” is met with a sullen glance and if repeated, a request for money and the car. “Alexa, turn on the lights” triggers a lecture about global warming in the actual AI-simulated voice of Greta the Climate Change girl. Purchasing items on Amazon via this modified Alexa results in sarcastic accusations that you are a racist and fascist for no apparent reason. The device automatically announces it has turned transgender before New Year’s and won’t work, accusing you of misgendering it by failing to reverse the + and – ends of the batteries.Christmas Eve Don’t Talk Politics Game: Players take turns drawing red and blue cards to stick on to their foreheads. They then have to argue the provocative topic shown to bored and anxious relatives who just don’t want to hear it. Winner is the one who draws the “Joker,” a special card marked “Can’t we talk about anything else?!?” Note: the cards “Throw cranberry sauce at a fascist across the table” and “Your mother is not a feminist for gawds’ sake, leave her out of this” are no longer included in the standard game but available as free downloads.Immigration, The Home Version: Play as “Home” or “Venezuelan.” The Home player starts the game by throwing out all immigration laws and erecting a fence around part of his property, leaving large gaps at key locations. The real action shifts to the Venezuelan player(s) who then walk in and take whatever they want just like Great Grandad Chaim Abramowitz did decades ago on the Lower East Side, sure. The Venezuelan to run up the most taxpayer-paid medical bills wins the game. The Home player wins if he lands a second job at Walmart before his taxes rise.Trump, The Game: This one’s real. “It’s not about if you win or lose. As long as you win.”
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Never Again? DeSantis and Torture
During a press conference at the Museum of Tolerance in West Jerusalem in April, Ron DeSantis was questioned about a former detainee’s claim that as a naval attorney at Guantanamo DeSantis watched as the prisoner was force fed, something the UN regards as torture. “Do you honestly believe that’s credible? It’s 2006, I’m a junior officer, do you honestly think that they would’ve remembered me?” DeSantis responded angrily.
Mansoor Adayfi, a Yemeni citizen, was held at Guantanamo Bay for 14 years, and has told news outlets that DeSantis witnessed him being force fed during a hunger strike in 2006. Adayfi in an op-ed for Al Jazeera said “As I tried to break free, I noticed DeSantis’ handsome face among the crowd at the other side of the chain link. He was watching me struggle. He was smiling and laughing with other officers as I screamed in pain.” Two former detainees, as well as defense lawyers and base officials, have told The Washington Post DeSantis had a “close up views” of disturbing incidents at the camp during his time there.
What might DeSantis have seen? In addition to Adayfi’s account, we have Imad Abdullah Hassan’s more detailed rendition, from a man who spent twelve years in Guantanamo in a cage without ever being charged with anything. A judge cleared Hassan for release, finding there was not enough incriminating evidence to justify keeping him imprisoned (779 men were held at Guantanamo since it opened in 2002, with 12 ever charged with crimes. Only two have been convicted.) Hassan’s clearance came, yet he remained at America’s off-shore penal colony without explanation or hope of release. He went on a hunger strike in 2009 in protest (the U.S. military refers to it as a “long-term non-religious fast”), and was force-fed.
Hassan unsuccessfully sued the president of the United States, claiming the conditions under which he is being force-fed at Guantanamo are torture. The lawsuit Hassan filed describes his treatment. His description matches Adayfi’s on key details. See if you’d remember things like this:
Prisoners are strapped to a hospital bed or special restraint chair for feeding.
A funnel or bag was used to channel large amounts of liquid into the tube to feed him faster. So much liquid was forced through that the second time Hassan underwent this procedure, he lost consciousness and spent two days in critical condition.
Prisoners were simultaneously force-fed laxatives causing them to defecate on themselves as they sat in the chair being fed. “People with hemorrhoids would leave blood on the chair and the linens would not always be changed before the next feeding,” said Hassan in the lawsuit. Prisoners would be be strapped down on top of others’ stool and blood for up to two hours at a time.
Hassan was at times forcibly sedated so he could be force-fed more easily. If Hassan vomited on himself at any time during the procedure, the force-feeding would restart from the beginning.
Air-conditioning was sometimes turned up and detainees were deprived of a blanket. This was particularly difficult for the hunger strikers, as they felt the cold more than someone who was eating.
Guards would bang hunger-striking prisoners’ cells every five minutes day and night to prevent sleep. Another detainee reported when he was brought back to his cell, the guards laid him on his stomach and cause him to vomit by pressing forcefully on his back.
It was all something a young naval officer would not easily forget seeing.
But bringing up the possibility that a young Ron DeSantis witnessed some of this is disingenuous. Whether DeSantis was present or not is only of interest given his likelihood of running for president. But if he was not present, he would have heard about the torture while at Gitmo, and issued legal opinions in line with it. But whether or not DeSantis wrote such opinions is of little consequence, given the number of military and civilian personnel who certainly not only witnessed torture but performed it. Their numbers stand shallow next to their bosses who created the torture regimes, legalized them, and promulgated them, men like Bush, Obama, Cheney, and Biden. If DeSantis supported torture in his role as naval attorney at Gitmo, he was among the smallest of wheels in a very large machine to do so.
Not a single American has been punished for what happened at Guantanamo, and the first should not be Ron DeSantis.
But DeSantis is not just anyone, he is one man out of hundreds of millions in the U.S. who says he wants to be president and has a decent chance of achieving just that. So instead of speculating on what DeSantis saw, let’s instead demand from him as a candidate a statement on torture itself. Knowing what he knows now, was torture the right thing post-9/11? As president, would he support torture in the future? As president, would he seek to close Guantanamo and set the thirty prisoners still there free? We know what Trump thinks about torture, know Biden as president has made no real efforts to close Gitmo or reduce its headcount. We know what a young naval officer named DeSantis did, more or less, when faced with torture by the United States of America in the name of justice for the Republic.
Later, at various points in his career DeSantis repeatedly argued that the United States was correct in imprisoning detainees outside the legal system, and after joining Congress in 2013, he became a leading voice to keep the prison open, even though few of the detainees there were ever charged and most have been released. He has described the hunger strikes as part of a jihad against the United States, and characterized claims of abuse from detainees and their lawyers as attempts to work the system. Asked about the hunger strikes, DeSantis said in an interview in 2018 that “what I learned from that… is they are using things like detainee abuse offensively against us. It was a tactic, technique, and procedure.”
DeSantis saw what he saw; with the passing of time does he still believe in what happened in Guantanamo? Vying to be Commander-in-Chief, “I was only following orders” will not be enough. In the name of never again, we need to know what would President DeSantis do.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
What Do You Do With the Past?
That’s me in back row of the photo of the old junior high school football team, with the dorky glasses. In an age of apologies and reparations it begs an answer: what do you do about the past?
It starts easy. The adult close to me is Mr. Hammer, the wood shop teacher. Yes, Mr. Hammer. His giggly name somehow still remains amusing to me, some 50 years later. He was a good teacher and coach, fair, even tempered, thought all the stuff we were doing mattered but not too much. I just learned from Google he was a Korean War vet (he never mentioned it) and passed away a few years ago after 24 years of teaching. I have no idea who the other coach is.
My obsession isn’t with the names anyway, it is with what happened to these people and our past. We have not kept in touch, and the last time I spoke with any of them would have been in 1978 when most of us graduated from high school. How many “did well” with life? How many are dead, or in jail, or homeless, or alcoholic? Any of them do something good for the world, maybe as a doctor or teacher? Do any of them ever wonder what happened to me?
Two boys in the front row were star players. They literally had star decals on their helmets so everyone knew, this being in an age before participation trophies. Google says one of them still lives in town but offers no clues as to what happened to him along the way, nothing on the other one. There’s another boy in the photo near the back I learned from Facebook is gay. I didn’t know him well in junior high school, but I wonder now how many of the other boys were gay. No one “came out” back then. We as a team would today be considered completely homophobic based on the language we used. Anyone who made a bad play or fumbled the ball or was even late to the huddle was a f*ggot. If you’re anywhere nearby our age group you also said that word. Everybody did.
But despite the language I am not sure we were homophobic, as we had as little idea what being gay was all about as we had then about heterosexual stuff, absent self-entertainment which likely worked the same way for everyone. This is probably the biggest change the internet brought to society. Kids stop being naive at age two now. I’m as certain the gay kid was hurt by what we all said as I am certain that he said those same words along with us. In 7th grade anything that made you stand out made you someone’s target.
After junior high, trying out for football at my high school meant being bullied by the varsity. If you were lucky they only stole your lunch and made you embarrass yourself singing to the group. Sometimes they took away our water on hot days (water during practice was rationed in this era, to toughen us up.) For others, it was caustic muscle creams smeared in your jock before practice. It went on after the coaches would mysteriously disappear during certain breaks. Adult teachers with clear responsibility to stop it, but who did nothing but encourage it, calling it initiation. I have no idea, some 50 years later, why I voluntarily participated in all this. I believe I was temporarily insane.
Very few guys quit the team, most just endured, some sought empty relief bullying others. I was in that last group, mercilessly teasing a poor kid weaker than me. I was cruel in a way I wish I hated then the way I hate it now. He was an easy target who I thought years ago was a way for me to feel better. I couldn’t beat up the varsity football team who humiliated me, so that kid was their surrogate. Nothing I have done before or after makes me more ashamed.
He’s in that picture, the kid who became the target of my bullying. It’s easier to write this if he has a name, so Ron, though of course that is not his real name which I do remember and cannot forget. We got along OK in junior high, friendly if not friends. But the high school football we went on to was struggle, not fun. The upperclassmen players bullied the younger kids like me endlessly, brutally at times.
I have not been again on that playing field in more than four decades yet I can point now to the exact spot on Google Maps where it all happened. The worst initiation the older kids had was making us fight each other. This usually took the form of whacking each other with tackling dummies, heavy canvas bags. If the big kids did not think we were fighting enthusiastically enough they would step in and continue the assault themselves. It was worse when the bags were wet.
One pointlessly humid Ohio day I was told to stand up and choose my opponent. Usually you picked a buddy with the unspoken understanding the two of you would take it easy on each other. I chose instead to fight Ron. Ron had stopped growing sooner than most of us, Ron had a good heart but wasn’t much of a fighter, Ron thought I was enough of his friend to take it easy. But I did not. Something broke inside me like a summer thunderstorm. When Ron went down I kept hitting him, right in the face with the bag, with the blood from his nose splattering to the point where even the upper class animals running the initiation stopped me. I was never made to fight again. Ron quit the team.
I didn’t stop. I said, with great encouragement from teammates, terrible things to Ron everyday at lunch. I made his life dark. He must have felt his stomach twist in horrible anticipation every day heading into the cafeteria. He tried to make peace with me despite I am sure not having a clue as to why I had become his predator but I refused to back down. The semester ended in exhaustion and I never played a team sport or trusted an authority figure again, my apolitical red pill moment. Ron sat somewhere else for lunch after Christmas break. I’ve had no contact with him since until I found him in that photo last night.
Google found him, too, I think. It looks like he’s a lawyer, made partner in his firm. He’s married. Seems to like to fish. The firm’s website lists a phone number that even now stares at me.
What do you do with the past? Do I call him, apologize, offer some sort of reparation, donate money to some anti-bullying group? Would he want that, would he accept that? Does he remember me, or was I just another forgettable part of high school that got discarded when he went on to his good college and his good law school? Does he live with what he can’t get past? Facebook says he has sons.
He must remember me, the efforts I made to hurt him had to have left some mark. What would he say to an apology? Would he, falsely but graciously accept whatever I said and get off the phone to tell his wife “Honey, you’ll never guess the odd call I had today…” over dinner? Would he listen to me a moment and then uncork decades of anger and resentment, telling me how I hurt him not only that day but forever, that these things don’t go away? Am I one of his ghosts as he is one of mine?
I talked to a psychiatrist friend, who explained the concept of amends used by Alcoholics Anonymous. Making amends is one of the last steps toward recovery, and is premised as “we may stop causing any more harm but that is not the same as repairing the damage we have already caused. We feel a man is unthinking when he says sobriety is enough.” I may have become a better man than I was on that damn football team, but I have done nothing to repair the damage I did.
You start amends by asking permission of the person you harmed. You acknowledge this is to help yourself, that you alone bear responsibility. My excuse – I bullied because I was bullied – is too easy for this task. Some things are always wrong and I should have known that, whether my society or my coaches said it was OK. It is as weak as my tormentors claiming the initiations were all part of toughening us up for the football season, and about building comradery as they too had once been humiliated as freshmen.
Amends demands I not elicit sympathy or make any excuses. I should ask for forgiveness, but not say I am sorry, no remorseful mumbling. If Ron is unable to forgive me, it is my burden. Some debts like that take a long, long time to repay, maybe until forever. You can’t rewrite the past.
The point of amends is asking my victim to help me. It is not about disguising my guilt as an apology. That is what separates amends from something like reparations, where it is the victim who benefits, often monetarily. There may be a place for that, but that place is not part of this old picture and the question about what do you do with the past that it screams at me.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Jack Teixeira and Security Clearances
Air National Guard leaker Jack Teixeira had one of the highest levels of security clearance. Over five million Americans, more than the population of Costa Rica, Ireland or New Zealand, hold some type of security clearance. Can we trust them? Is Teixeira an exception, or is the process never expected to work 100 percent of the time?
A security clearance is issued by a part of the U.S. Government (Department of Defense, CIA, the State Department…) and says the holder can be trusted to handle sensitive documents and duties. At the low end this may mean a contractor can enter the Navy Yard without a body search, or at the extreme means a person will assume a completely new identity, live abroad, and conduct clandestine actions on behalf of the U.S.
Government-wide there are three basic levels of clearance: Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. There are formal definitions, but the basic idea is that the higher you go up the ladder, the more harm and damage disclosure would create. Added to this three-tiered system are many subcategories, including Sensitive But Unclassified, for well, unclassified things that are still sensitive, such as an applicant’s social security number, Law Enforcement Sensitive and the like. Top Secret is supplemented by Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI), often used to denote information obtained from intelligence sources. There are also many, many flavors of Special Access Programs (SAP) that require both a very high level clearance and specific permission to access just that single project, such as a clandestine operation against Iran, or the identities of spies in Syria. The military has its own lexicon of classifications.
The clearance process is largely a variation on a single note: let’s look into what this person has done in his life prior to seeking a clearance, and then try to extrapolate that into what he will do once cleared. But because, like your mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future success, the process is inherently flawed.
Despite the wide variety of clearances available, the process of obtaining one is similar across the board. What changes is less the process of looking into someone’s life than the granularity of the look. Most everyone seeking a clearance begins at the same place, filling out Standard Form 86, Questionnaire for National Security Positions, form SF-86. The SF-86 is mainly a very detailed autobiography, the raw material that fuels the rest of the process. Young people filling out their first SF-86 invariably end up on the phone to mom, gathering old addresses they lived at as kids, birthdays of disconnected relatives, foreign countries visited on family trips and more, a lot more: the SF-86 runs some 129 pages. Some interesting perjury bait is near the end, almost silly questions such as “Have you ever engaged in an act of terrorism?” and a follow-up requiring you to describe, in one line, “The nature and reason for the terror activity.”
After a hundred pages of names and dates the SF-86 dips into the deal breakers, the questions that weed out quickly those who are unlikely to get very far in the clearance process. Applicants are asked to self-describe financial problems, debts, drug use, gambling, drinking, mental health issues, legal troubles, job firings, and more. Whether out of duty and honor, or more likely a thought process that the agency will find out anyway and lying is an automatic disqualification, most applicants do tell the truth and disqualify themselves.
Everyone who gets past the SF-86 has some standard checks run on them. Since U.S. Citizenship is the most basic and unwavering requirement for a clearance, every applicant’s claim to being an American is verified. Every applicant then gets a run through whatever databases and electronic records can be found. The goal is to verify quickly as much of the self-provided data and to skim off the low-hanging fruit. A serious arrest record, neck-deep financial problems, and the like will be easily found. Checks are also run through the various intelligence files (a National Agency Check) to make sure while you’re applying for a job at the State Department you are not on some secret list of bad guys over at CIA. For some low-level or short-term clearances, the process can stop here and a decision is made. The time period varies, but usually is a couple of months for a background-only clearance.
For higher level clearances, including Top Secret, a full spectrum investigation is required. An investigator will visit an applicant’s home town school teachers, his second-to-last-boss, his neighbors, his parents, and almost certainly the local police force and ask questions in person. As part of the clearance process, an applicant will sign the Mother of All Waivers, basically giving the government permission to do all this as intrusively as the government cares to do. This is old fashioned shoe leather police work, knocking on doors, eye balling people who say they knew the applicant, turning the skepticism meter up to 11. The investigator will ask each interviewee to keep quiet about the interview, but typically the applicant will get a hushed phone call or email from some old acquaintance saying the Feds just knocked. Many of the contract investigators at this level are retired FBI or Secret Service people and often will present their old ID to add some gravitas to the procedure. If an applicant lived abroad, the process is tasked out to the nearest U.S. Embassy. All this on-the-street work does not come cheap. A full background investigation can run $15-20,000.
For many agencies, including the CIA and NSA and likely for a guy like Teixeira, an additional step in the clearance process is the polygraph, the lie detector, the box. The federal government polygraphs about 70,000 people a year in connection with security clearances. What portion of the polygraph process that isn’t shrouded in movie drama is classified, but the basics are simple; even Mythbusters looked into it. The process is based on the belief that when one fibs one’s body involuntarily expresses stress in the form of higher blood pressure, changes in pulse, breathing, and perspiration rate. Those things can be precisely monitored. Did you ever steal anything? No? That’s a lie — see here, your heart rate went up X percent when you answered.
Some say that the presence of the polygraph machine itself may be mostly for show, and the real nuts and bolts of the process are actually just clever manipulation and interrogation techniques as old as dirt. An awful lot of information obtained via a polygraph has nothing to do with the needles and dials per se, but the applicant’s fear of them and belief that they “work.” Polygraphers are allowed considerable freedom in style, and some get more into role-playing than others. Often the applicant will self-incriminate.
Up to this point the clearance process has been mostly the aggregation of information. Along the way some applicants might be picked off, but most applicants for a clearance end up in adjudication. And in adjudication lies the core problem in the clearance process: it relies on human judgment.
The basics of an adjudication look at vulnerabilities, and at past examples of trusts kept or violated.
Vulnerabilities are easier to determine. People betray their country’s trust for money, sex/compromise, ego or ideology. People with loads of debt or a gambling problem are more susceptible to bribes. People with records of infidelity or a pattern of poor judgment might be lured into sexual encounters that could be used to compromise them. In the bad old days when most LGBT applicants were deeply closeted, this was used as a one-size-fits-all pseudo-reason to deny them employment. Ego is a tougher one to pin down, but persons who lack self-esteem or who want to play at being a “real spy” might be tempted to become “heroes” for the other side. Ideology is a growing issue as more and more hyphenated Americans seek government work and, needing qualified language employees, more and more are recruited by the government. Will a Chinese-American’s loyalty fall to her new home or to the old country where grandma still resides?
Back in the good old days, when qualification for high level positions required one to be male, pale and Yale, these things were less of concern. Fathers recruited sons, professors noted promising students, and no one thought much about the messy range of people now sought for government work. Need fluent Farsi speakers or a surge of network engineers? You’re going to have to recruit farther afield than the country club. Agencies who used to toss back into the pond pretty much anyone without a pristine background now face unfilled critical positions. So, standards change, always have changed, and will continue to change. Security clearances just work that way.
If vulnerabilities seem sometimes ambiguous to adjudicate, the next category, trust, is actually much harder. Persons who have kept trusts extended to them, not been fired, not broken laws, paid their bills, saw to their responsibilities, are in the Nice category. Those who didn’t end up over in Naughty. The adjudication part becomes important because very few people are perfect, and very few are really bad. Most everyone falls in the middle, and so agencies must make judgment calls. The goal is to come up with a picture of the person, and then project that picture forward into what they might be like on the job. Like any human-powered process that attempts to predict the future, it is flawed. That’s how Jack Teixeira (Ed Snowden, Chelsea Manning, et al) ended up with a Top Secret security clearance.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Four Tips for My New Undergrad Classmates
I am now officially old, at least old enough to take advantage of a program at my local public university that allows me, an old person, to audit a class alongside undergrads gratis. In theory I’m supposed to add my life experiences to their learning, and they are to see in me the pleasure of learning for its own sake. I am supposed to benefit from being around their youthful vigor and all. We’ll see about all that. But I do now have a plausible explanation for the police as to why I am shirtless at a foam party alongside “adults” more than four decades my junior — I need to give back. Cross-generational communication being what it is I am treading lightly on passing out life advice (“Foam is really slippery and you lose flexibility as you age”) and felt it better to write down what I wish I could say to them between classes.
1. Go to class. Whether or not your professor takes attendance, go to class. You got out of the habit during your Zoom School days, I know. But professors have the habit of saying interesting and useful things in class, so go listen to them. If you’re concerned about grades, listening to what a professor choses to emphasize out of the reading (and do the reading) will be a big hint as to what will be emphasized on the test. Especially go to the first class and write down everything the professor says. Much of it won’t make sense, because it is about a subject you have not yet studied but months from now when you’re staring down the barrel of a final exam those ideas important enough to mention on day one will likely be a part of it. Sit up front, show some interest, ask an intelligent question or two (never “Is this gonna be on the test?” or “why do we have to study this stuff?”) and you may even develop an intellectual bond with the instructor.
2. Leave the computer in your dorm. Sitting in the back of the classroom, I look out on to a sea of Insta and other social media, Amazon pages, and the like, with sometimes (for the good students) half the small screen devoted to a Word document for notes. It is unfair to place a catalog screen designed by award-winning psychologists to attract you in competition with a Teaching Assistant in front of a class for the first time since 6th grade book reports. Unless you need to actually compute things, leave the devices back in the dorm. Take notes by hand, on paper. You’ll retain more and stay connected with the material better.
3. Learn to take notes. This is a life skill, not a college skill, so best to learn it. Notes help you remember what was said, to reconstruct the argument the professor made, to mark down what was important, to compare what showed up both in the reading and in class (it’s going to matter if it is in both places) and to help you pay attention if yes, it sometimes gets boring. Ideally your notes should resemble a term paper (and yes you can learn to write better term papers by learning to take better notes) with some sort of topic sentence followed by examples followed by a conclusion. Most times the professor will help you with this, laying out an outline of sorts on slides or on the board. Unless you’ve got a good reason not to, your notes should at the end of class look a lot like what the prof wrote — I. Causes of WWII followed by a, b, and c, listing causes such as c) Japan’s need for resources, esp. oil and rubber, followed by the conclusions the war was caused by runaway capitalism or whatever. If your notes are incomplete — “something about Germany” — you need more details. If you are always racing to keep up you may need less detail on paper and to spend more time just listening; you’re not a stenographer. Notes are not transcripts of the lecture, they are something akin to an x-ray view of the lecture. If all else fails, make an appointment to see the prof, explain your note taking problem, and ask (very politely, profs can be possessive) to see his lecture notes if possible. Compare yours to his and adjust accordingly.
4. Learn to manage time. This is also life skill, not a college skill, so best to learn it. Most high school teachers managed your time for you. They broke things down into class-size packages, lightened up a bit for Homecoming Weekend, and incessantly counted down for you to the next test. If you had to write a paper, many times they’d break that process down, demanding a reading list one Monday, an outline the next week, a rough draft by week four, etc. Rarely so in college. The syllabus issued on day one might mention a 10 page paper is due at week 14 and leave it at that. Same for reading; that fat stack of books in front of you has to be read between August and Christmas break, so you have plenty of time. You actually do not. Learn to work backwards from deadlines to day one of class, maybe even make a little calendar for yourself so you know by week three you should have some idea of a reading list for your paper, etc. This is your guide, so if by week four you do not have an outline that should answer your question about whether you can afford to stay up all night for Homecoming raves or not. Think of it partly as a bank. If you have enough hours in and are on schedule you can afford to spend a little more time away. But if you are in to deficit spending on time… think “clean as you go.” Anybody who has worked at a restaurant knows you can’t go home at night until everything is cleaned for the next day. If you clean as you go throughout the night, it is easier than starting at 2 am. It is even better to not make a mess in the first place.
Everything else: Don’t talk to the police without a lawyer present. Don’t cheat. Think before you speak. Sometimes don’t speak. Be generous if you have resources your classmates do not have. Drugs are not for stupid people. And the guy who usually sits in seat 13E, I think you’re wasting your time. And I saw the girl in front of you waiting after class for someone else, sorry, man. Maybe see you two at the foam party?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Japan in the Slow Lane
If you are one of the handful of people who really miss 2020, you’d do well to head to Japan as I did, a land where time stood still.
Everyone here (and by that I mean every single person and most children) wears a mask against the seemingly omnivorous threat of Covid. Yes, it is still here, or so we are told even before arrival where to obtain an e-visa one has to upload proof of vaccination and answer a strict list of questions, any one of which could end your trip plans should you answer “yes.”
The law (or is it social pressure? No one needed to do much to encourage Japanese people to be somehow even cleaner, and there are no Karen-sans here, they’d have nothing to yell about) requires masks everywhere all the time indoors, but almost everyone wears one inside and outside. Businesses are prepared to lend you a paper version should you have forgotten yours (no one has yet) and character-decorated cloth types go for about $10 in drug stores and the kind of random products stores Japan’s current economy seems based on.
In addition to masking, signs everywhere admonish you to keep social distance in public places. It makes sense in waiting areas where every other seat is blocked off with a sign but less so on the trains and subways where a full-body rub seems to come with the ticket. That it makes no sense makes no sense, except when you realize sensical change is not what Japan is about.
The joke is in 1985 Japan looked like the year 2000, the future. Today, on a visit in 2023, Japan still looks like the year 2000. Not much changed along the journey. If someone remakes Bladerunner the future it would seem is based on a proliferation of escalators and expansive seating/waiting areas in bank lobbies. Those building-sized video screens the L.A. of the future featured in Bladerunner no longer serve up hot geisha girl images but a silver haired couple video chatting with their stock advisor about holding instead of selling for another month.
Japan is getting too old. The child crisis which began in the go-go 1980s when having kids would have interfered with making money and taking expensive foreign trips has come to fruition, or rather anti-fruition: Japan is on the path to extinction. A third of Japanese people are over 60, making Japan home to the oldest population in the world, after somehow Monaco. It is seeing fewer births than ever before. By 2050, it could lose a fifth of its current population. That figure is closer to a reality than an estimate.
You would think such a dire situation would provoke change and in almost any other nation on earth you’d be right. But Japan does not like change and so there are no campaigns (as in Singapore) to encourage marriage, and follow-on campaigns to encourage having children. Day care is still as expensive as it is to come by, and “having someone else raise your kids” is still a stigma. Working mothers are seen as desperate (their husbands obviously a failure) or selfish.
The most obvious answer, immigration, is shunned. The fear of foreigners runs deep in Japan. “Why not admit some foreign IT people? Some senior care nurses from the Philippines?” I asked one educated Japanese. “Well, they’d stay here and this would slowly not be Japan anymore.” Barely three percent of the country’s population is foreign-born, compared to over a quarter of Americans. Thoughts on race are common enough you’d hate to label some gigantic portion of the country racists. It is the way it is, most would say, shikatta ga nai, nothing can be done. Japan does not care for change.
Covid is in a way a made-for-Japan disease, a solid excuse to slam the doors to the country shut without heaps of international scorn. At the height of the Covid mania, even foreigners with permanent residence in Japan (home, car, job, etc.) who were unlucky enough to be caught outside the country were barred from reentry for weeks. Pressure finally caused the Japanese government to reluctantly yield to reality.
So what is being done about the childless society problem? Japan is making old people more comfortable in their isolation. Where it once resisted necessary accommodations for handicapped people, escalators and elevators are now being retrofitted. Handicapped people are “others” in Japanese society and despite international pressures there was little drive to open the country up for them. The elderly, Japanese through and through, are different in a place where age is revered, even if there are fewer around to do the revering. Maybe robots will fill that gap.
You want accomodation in the meantime? In Tokyo street crossings have countdown lights so you know how much time you have to get across, plus beeping sounds and timers. There are more public toilets and benches. All the buses kneel and the new type taxis can easily accommodate walkers and wheelchairs.
To keep old people busy, there are all manner of make-work jobs waving traffic through an intersection or pointing out empty parking spots. It is in the end such a Japanese way of dealing with a problem, making massive yet superficial changes while ignoring the fundamental end-of-days scenario unfolding. If the band playing as the Titanic sunk wasn’t Japanese they should have been.
But what about _____? Fill in the blank with any current American problem and Japan seems like heaven. Homelessness? You see a few sad winos in train stations but they are silent and neat with their belongings. Crime? As close to zero as possible given 12 million people live in tight proximity to one another. Drugs? See crime, above. You can never write Japan off, but you do need to look below the surface to understand her.
The thing is people seem to like it this way. Japan has had almost no social unrest in modern times, and it has as close to a one party system in national politics as you can get without looking at that of its neighbor in North Korea.
A writer for the BBC in an otherwise thoughtful article on Japan explained that the party in power is known as the “concrete” party not only for their basic political strengths but because of their ability to devolve make-work construction projects out to the smallest voting districts, dropping in from Tokyo jobs and money accordingly.
With Japan’s non-proportional representational system, those small districts carry as much punch at the voting booth as do areas many times their population in major cities. Concrete buys votes, you see it everywhere with unnecessary bridges and tunnels, and riverbanks lined with sturdy walls that would hold back a deluge if one were suddenly to appear in the middle of nowhere. Concrete is a visible symbol of power and as it dries solid, a symbol of unchange. This is going nowhere, it’s big and heavy say the retaining walls.
But perhaps the symbology is wrong, and the solidity of concrete largess from the central party is not the right interpretation. What if we see the concrete as nothing more than superficial? Most of it poured is designed to hold back water, to keep nature in its place. But concrete works on one time scale and nature another. What if the concrete was just there to mask over a more fundamental problem, like providing extra seating areas instead of addressing the child problem?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Fixing the Security Clearance Process
How do you fix the security clearance process?
The security clearance process is not a real-time, ongoing endeavor. Instead, someone applies for a government or contractor job that requires a clearance, some sort of background check is done, and a clearance decision is adjudicated. Next case, please. Most clearances are only reviewed every five years and then investigators lean heavily on anything new or changed, and especially on the subject’s performance those five years. Even agencies that use the polygraph employ an abbreviated version of the test when renewing a security clearance. There is no 365/24/7 continuous reevaluation process. Of course records checks are done, a felony arrest properly documented might pop up, and many agencies yearly run standard credit checks and conduct random drug tests. But overall, absent something self-reported or too obvious to ignore, a clearance rides for five years, sometimes literally with no questions asked. How could it be otherwise with over five million active cleared Americans strung across the globe?
It doesn’t always work out. As happened following the process’ failure with people like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, now with Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, much noise will be generated about “doing something” to fix the clearance process. But what?
Dramatically increasing the number and scope of on-the-street investigations as part of background checks will spiral wildly into crazy expenses and even longer waiting periods to complete clearances. It could bring the hiring process to its knees, and spawn more and more “temporary clearances,” a self-defeating act. This all with no assurance of better results due to both limitations on the whole concept (past behavior in a wholly different environment like high school may not be indicative of future intent under real-world pressures, as in the Teixeira and Manning cases) or simply human judgment errors. If done properly, such changes might even catch a few of the Teixeira’s out there, but to be honest, there are few Teixeira’s out there to begin with and most of them will be sending up obvious danger signals at work for a long time if anyone would pay attention before a clearance review catches up.
In the interest of never letting a good crisis go to waste, the Biden Administration is now reportedly planning to increase its surveillance of social media and online chatrooms, as if not understanding the internet is a very big place. It is certain that many more in government will call for more aggressive “monitoring” of employees, having them sign away basically all of their civil rights in return for a job. The government will turn its vast intelligence gathering tools further inward and end up pointlessly compiling CIA officers’ credit card receipts from Applebee’s, the web browsing habits of diplomats’ children, and so forth. In truth, a lot of that is probably already going on now anyway (the CIA and other intel agencies have had for years robust counterintelligence operations designed specifically to spy on their own spies.) But you just can’t see into a person’s head, or his heart, via his bank account.
In addition to a huge waste of money and resources, these measures will inevitably lead to more mistrust and paranoia inside government. Lack of sharing (the CIA believes things it shares with State get leaked, the Army won’t give things away to the Navy, the FBI hoards info so as to not let another part of the Department of Justice get credit for a bust, the NSA doesn’t trust anyone, and so forth) is already an issue among agencies, and even inside of agencies, and helped pave the way for 9/11.
In addition, handing even more power to security teams will also not work well in the long run. Hyper-scrutiny will no doubt discourage more decent people from seeking government work, unwilling to throw their lives open for a job if they have prospects elsewhere. The Red Scare of the 1950s, and the less-known Lavender Scares, when labeling someone gay inside government would see him fired, show what happens when security holds too many cards. James Jesus Angleton’s paranoid mole hunting at CIA, which ruined many careers, is still a sore point at Langley. No, unleashing the bullies won’t help.
As a wise man once said, cut through all the lies and there it is, right in front of you. The only answer to the clearance problem is to simply require fewer cleared people inside government.
This will require the tsunami of document classification to be dammed. In FY2009 alone, 54 million U.S. Government documents were classified. Every one of those required cleared authors and editors, system administrators and database technicians, security personnel, and electronic repair persons. Even the cafeteria personnel who fed them lunch needed some sort of vetting.
With fewer people to clear because there is less classified material to begin with, always-limited resources can be better focused. Better background checks can be done. Corners need not be cut, and unqualified people would not be issued clearances out of necessity. Processing time would be reduced. Human judgment, always the weak link, could be applied more slowly and more deliberately, with more checks and balances involved.
More monitoring won’t help and will very likely hurt. In a challenge as inherently flawed as the clearance process, the only way forward is less, not more.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Clarence Thomas Takes One for the Court
Did Clarence Thomas do anything wrong in accepting gifts from a wealthy Republican, or is Thomas the victim of years of pent-up anger at the Supreme Court by Democrats? Yes.
According to an investigation by ProPublica, for more than 20 years Justice Thomas received lavish and expensive gifts, including trips on a private yacht and a private jet, from Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire and real estate developer with a long record of support for Republican politicians. Under the ethic regulations which guide Supreme Court justices, it is not clear that Thomas had to report any of this (Thomas says the guidance he received affirmed he did not need to report any of the gifts as his angel, Crow, had no business before the Court and the trips were “personal hospitality,” a gift from a friend.)
ProPublica asserts that the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 required Thomas to report these gifts. This is most probably untrue. People do not report generally “personal hospitality,” such as Thomas’s vacations. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that the Judicial Conference issued new guidelines saying free trips and air travel must now be reported. This was announced as a change in policy, meaning disclosure was not required in the past but would be in the future. It is as simple as that: The rules did not require reporting of trips in the past, but going forward they do.
So it appears while Thomas did not break the letter of these regulations, he certainly skirted the edge of what we’ll call propriety, the appearance of being on Harlan Crow’s extended payroll. For a guy who has lived so long in Democratic crosshairs it seemed an unwise thing for Thomas to do, even if legal. One theme of government ethics classes is you don’t have to demonstrate actual impropriety, you must avoid even the possible appearance of impropriety. Accepting lavish travel perks? Operating you own email server? Just not what regular Feds do, whether legal or not.
Thomas’ long war with the Left started with his confirmation hearings in 1991 after his nomination by President George H.W. Bush. Anita Hill, who worked for Thomas at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Thomas sexually harassed her during that time. Her testimony ignited a national conversation about sexual harassment in the workplace and the treatment of women in the legal profession. It introduced many Americans to the vocabulary of pornography long before Bill Clinton soiled the waters (small world: Senator Joe Biden was the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversaw the confirmation process. Biden has faced criticism for his sexist handling of Hill’s testimony and for not allowing three other female witnesses to testify during the hearings.)
As a jurist criticism of Thomas has focused on three points. Many liberals disagree with Justice Thomas’s conservative judicial philosophy, which emphasizes originalism and strict interpretation of the Constitution. They argue that this approach leads to narrow interpretations of individual rights and protections, particularly for marginalized groups. Similarly, liberals criticize Justice Thomas for his opposition to affirmative action and other civil rights policies. They argue that his views on these issues are harmful to communities of color. Lastly, Thomas is known for being one of the least vocal members of the Supreme Court, rarely asking questions during oral arguments or engaging in public discourse about his opinions. Some liberals argue that this lack of engagement is problematic and makes it difficult to understand his reasoning on key issues. There are accusations he often has made up his mind along ideological lines before even hearing a case.
Thomas has more recently become a lightening rod for everything Democrats have come to hate about the Supreme Court, as the Court shifted rightward and decisions like Roe v. Wade went against standard liberal thinking. They see Thomas’ “corruption” as emblematic of the Court’s outsize power due to lifetime appointments, isolation from traditional Constitutional checks and balances, and virtual immunity from public pressure, making it a magnet for corruption and influence-peddling. They see Harlan Crow as having purchased direct access to one of the most influential and powerful men in America and argue that while Crow may not have a specific issue in front of the Court, he holds a generic interest in right wing causes and thus has bought himself a sympathetic judge for his broader Conservative agenda.
Things only got worse when it was discovered that Thomas’ spouse Ginni donated to Republican causes and sent texts cheering on the protests of January 6. A woman with political thoughts of her own! Nonetheless, Thomas is a man with a target on his back.
The only real check and balance on Supreme Court justices is formal impeachment and removal from the bench, so it not surprising at the first sign of impropriety Democrats like AOC have immediately called for Thomas to be impeached. It won’t happen; the standards for impeachment are high, whether what Thomas did actually qualifies is far from clear, and a partisan Congress will never go along. Only one Supreme Court justice has ever been impeached, Samuel Chase, in 1804 for alleged political bias in his judicial conduct. The Senate held a trial, but ultimately acquitted Chase of all charges. No other Supreme Court justice has been impeached since then. Justice Abe Fortas did resign over 50 years ago over money issues, ahead of a likely try at impeachment.
Some have already gone further than the expected calls for hearings and investigations. The New Republic writes “The Democrats need to destroy Clarence Thomas’s reputation. They’ll never successfully impeach him. But so what? Make him a metaphor for every insidious thing the far right has done to this country.” The magazine went on to call him the “single worst Supreme Court justice of all time. Clarence Thomas is an embarrassment to the Supreme Court and the country, and the worship of this man on the right is one of the greatest symbols of their contempt for standards, the law, precedent, and democracy.”
The hyperbole gives it away — all of this is another tempest to fill in the dead space between Orange Man Bad stories. Thomas should not be proud of his actions, but nor should he face impeachment, never mind some sort of public drawing and quartering of his reputation, over what he did. Clarence Thomas is taking one for the Court.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Thoughts and Prayers Because The Kids Are Not Alright
Americans ages 18 to 20 account for only four percent of the population but 17 percent of murders. The problem is not just the guns. It is the young (almost always) men who wield them. Any possible starter solution rests with the shooter, not the firearm.
There’s a pattern inside those sordid statistics, with some 70 percent of school shootings since 1999 having been carried out by people under 18. The median age of school shooters is 16. It’s our kids shooting other kids, whether because they are left out, bullied, teased, or angry at some slight or offense, it is kids killing kids. Since these killings tend to be “local,” typically the shooter and the dead share a racial and/or social-economic background, leaving “white supremacy” as a cause in the dustbin alongside blaming heavy metal records and Satanism. There have been at least 554 school shooting victims, with at least 311,000 children exposed to gun violence at school in the U.S. since the Y-in-the-road game changing Columbine High School massacre, all spread across 376 schools. The frequency of shootings has increased, with a surge of 46 incidents in 2022, the highest in any year since 1999. The safest year was 2020, when most schools were closed and parents needed only worry about Covid taking their kids.
Since it’s not the guns per se but young men who are to blame, more traditional gun control is unlikely to make much of a difference. Already under the Federal Gun Control Act (GCA), shotguns and rifles, and ammunition for shotguns or rifles may be sold only to individuals 18 years of age or older. All other firearms can be sold only to individuals 21 years of age or older. Licensed sellers are bound by the minimum age requirements established by the GCA regardless of state or local law. However, if state law or local ordinances establish a higher minimum age, the gun seller must observe the higher age requirement.
Background checks vary in quality from state to state but generally seek to prohibit sales for reasons such as a history of domestic abuse or violent felony convictions, crimes unlikely to snare the shooters just out of middle school. No background check is going to catch someone seething with rage. Checks also are at the time of purchase and gun ownership can be forever. There is the private transfer loophole that bypasses most background checks, though no evidence budding mass killers seek out this method of gun acquisition.There is also the Columbine divide that somehow factors in to kids killing kids. Pre-Columbine America saw school shootings number only approximately 300 instances in 150 years. Post-Columbine shootings number 331 in only 24 years. Something big is very wrong in America and our kids are not alright. Add in teen suicides (many involving guns; suicide is the third leading cause of teen death, with homicide in the number two position, add those together and guns are Number One), and you have more than a crisis, you have a nightmare.In the absence of Federal statistics, the Washington Post has kept records of all child-related shootings. It found school shootings disproportionately affect black children; black students make up 16.6 percent of the school population but experience school shootings at twice that rate. At schools with majority black student bodies, shooters typically target a specific person, limiting the number of people shot — and the subsequent media exposure. Mass shootings (four or more people) tend to be a white kid’s domain.But as we approach the “what should we do” portion of the discussion about guns, here is perhaps the most important statistic: in cases where the source of the gun could be determined, 86 percent of the weapons were found in the homes of friends, relatives or parents. Where else could an elementary school student get a gun after all? Federal and many state laws limit long gun sales to 18-year-olds, many setting the bar at 21. There is no evidence that gun shows are where children get their guns. They get them at home.There are two kinds of parents in these cases, those who fail to treat their guns responsibly and those who fail their children. One avenue of exploration would be much tougher penalties for adults who fail to secure their guns and ammunition, in line with penalties for selling drugs to minors or child neglect. States could consider trigger-lock or other safety oriented giveaways, and make purchasing such tools a requirement for buying a gun. Of course some people will fail to use the safety tools, either on purpose or by accident, but the process of protecting ourselves needs a long term solution in spite of short term failures.A second avenue of exploration is to expand red flag laws (Extreme Risk Protection Orders) for parents who suspect their children are headed down the wrong road to call on which would place one more hurdle in the way of acquiring weapons. Red flag laws enlist parents, gun salespeople, teachers, and peers in spotting students who should not have ready access to firearms. A red flag law allows people to petition a state court for the temporary removal of firearms from a person who may present a danger themselves or others. A judge makes the final determination.Such laws exist in 19 states and D.C. at present (14 states of those states adopted red flag gun laws after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida) with considerable variation. One of the most significant variations is who may petition a court to take someone’s guns away. Every state currently allows law enforcement to do so, but California is the only one which includes family members. None of the laws in place allow teachers, clergy, doctors, coworkers, or school peers, people who may well know a young man’s intent best, to petition. A Federal law which standardizes such criteria is badly needed. Basic red flag laws are judicially sound, and have, for example, been used in Florida nearly 6,000 times since 2018 and survived a state Supreme Court challenge. And Florida has had no mass school shootings since the law went into effect.Unlike laws banning whole classes of weapons (i.e., “assault rifles”) new laws focused on the shooter may be one possible path forward, at least concerning kids shooting kids at school. Advantages include:— Red flag laws allow for early intervention before an individual with mental health or behavioral issues can cause harm to themselves or others.— Red flag laws can help reduce the number of firearms in the hands of individuals who are at high risk of harming themselves or others.
— By temporarily removing firearms from individuals who are considered a danger to themselves or others, red flag laws can help increase safety for both the individual and the general public.
— Red flag laws can be effective in preventing suicides, as individuals who are at high risk of self-harm can have their firearms temporarily removed.
— Red flag laws typically require a court hearing before firearms can be temporarily removed, ensuring that individuals have the opportunity to defend themselves and that their due process rights are protected.
And so a day after a typical mass shooting, schools remain closed or on some heightened state of alert. Flags fly at half staff. People leave flowers, notes, and toys at the door. Red flag laws would seek to take guns away from kids before all that, and have been legally tested. As a potential national-level solution they do not restrict gun ownership among most adults, and barely open the Pandora’s Box of the Second Amendment. They are as apolitical as anything to do with guns in America can be and are supported by 72 percent of Americans. Protecting our kids from our kids has to start somewhere.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Lack of Oversight at Wuhan Lab Raises Five Questions to Ask NIH
The United States paid for the work that may have created the Covid virus. That research, a virus genetically engineered for the highest possible infectivity for human cells, was subcontracted to the Chinese at Wuhan by an American organization named EcoHealth. And now a new Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report says the National Institute of Health, the originator of the grant, failed to exercise its oversight over EcoHealth, and EconHealth over Wuhan. It’s not a smoking gun but it is pretty damn close. Senator Rand Paul will take up the contents of the OIG report soon in hearings. Here are 5 questions he may want to focus on.
Question 1: Though the new OIG report does not mention Covid specifically, it is scathing in its denunciation of EcoHealth and the NIH in failing to properly oversee the gain-of-function research it paid for at the Wuhan National Lab in China. Not touched on at all is the question of why bioweapon engineering-type research was subbed out to China, an ostensible adversary of the U.S. So why? Did NIH not know the editorial board of the lead researcher’s virology journal included members of the Chinese military?
Question 2: OIG stated “Despite identifying potential risks associated with research being performed under the EcoHealth awards, we found that NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth’s compliance with some requirements. Although NIH and EcoHealth had established monitoring procedures, we found deficiencies in complying with those procedures limited NIH and EcoHealth’s ability to effectively monitor Federal grant awards and subawards to understand the nature of the research conducted, identify potential problem areas, and take corrective action. Using its discretion, NIH did not refer the research to HHS for an outside review for enhanced potential pandemic pathogens… With improved oversight, NIH may have been able to take more timely corrective actions to mitigate the inherent risks associated with this type of research.” One timely corrective action missed was not insisting EcoHealth produce a required progress report about its subgrants in the summer of 2019, just months before the advent of the coronavirus.
What may have been missed?
Though gain-of-function research does not leave a physical marker to prove origin, to date, there is no evidence Covid was of a natural origin (this is surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses [related to Covid] had left copious traces in the environment.) There is much to show it was not. We do know Wuhan conducted gain-of-function research aimed at doing what Covid does, making a virus originally not dangerous to humans into a super-infector designed to spread quickly while resisting then-existing cures and vaccines. We know the first cases of the virus were in Wuhan, and include researchers at the virology lab who were infected in November 2019. We know precautions at the lab were insufficient to contain the virus. In a murder case this would be enough to show means and method beyond a reasonable doubt.
Question 3: And it is not as if there wasn’t enough bad stuff already out there that NIH and EconHealth might have had their guard up instead of exercising slack oversight. The Wuhan lab was already a nexus of attention pre-pandemic. Following a controversial September 2019 corona lecture the lead researcher gave in Mozambique, Wuhan pulled their virus database offline. The Chinese government still refuses to provide any of its raw data, safety logs, or lab records (the OIG report criticized EcoHealth’s inability to obtain scientific documentation from Wuhan despite having paid for it with U.S. tax dollars.) Another Wuhan scientist was forced to leave a Canadian university for shipping deadly viruses, including ebola, back to China. The lab also tried to steal intellectual property regarding remdesivir, a class of antiviral medications used to treat Covid prior to the vaccine.
As early as 2018, Wuhan alarmed visiting U.S. State Department safety inspectors. “The new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” the inspectors wrote. They warned the lab’s work on “bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.” The Chinese worked under mostly BSL2-level safety conditions far too lax to contain a virus like Covid.
So a key question for Senator Paul to ask is, given this background, why did the NIH fund a place like Wuhan at all?
Question 4: What was the role of EcoHealth and others in promoting the as yet-to-be-proved natural origin theory?
Now years after the pandemic began, Chinese researchers have failed to find the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which Covid might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to late 2019. The search in China for the natural origin of the virus, the zoonotic animal-to-human spillover, included testing more than 80,000 different animals from across dozens of provinces. Not a single case of Covid in animals in nature was found (according to a study published in the journal “Nature Medicine” in March 2020, the Covid virus has genetic elements that are not commonly found in naturally occurring zoonotic viruses, suggesting that it may have been engineered or manipulated in a laboratory.) Chinese researchers did find primordial cases in people from Wuhan near the laboratory with no link to that infamous wet market China claims sold an infected bat eaten by Patient One.
So why does the natural origin theory persist? One of the strongest shows of support was a letter from dozens of scientists published in early 2020 in the British medical journal Lancet. The letter had actually been written not by the scientists, but by Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth, the grantee who subcontracted with Wuhan. If the virus had indeed escaped from research they funded, EcoHealth would be potentially liable, as of course would the American government. EcoHealth went on to plant never-challenged stories in the MSM labeling anyone who thought Wuhan was to blame a conspiracy crank. Then, when the pandemic began, EcoHealth president Peter Daszak argued that criticizing the zoonotic hypothesis would only stoke xenophobia toward China.
Meanwhile, a Chinese-affiliated scientific journal at the University of Massachusetts Medical School commissioned commentary to refute that Covid originated in the Wuhan lab, the same position held by the Chinese government. Mirroring the American media, the journal called anything to the contrary “speculations, rumors, and conspiracy theories.” Chinese officials also objected elsewhere to any name, such as the Wuhan Flu, linking the virus to China.
Question 5: Did Dr. Anthony Fauci participate in a cover-up and/or did he perjure himself before Congress? In answer to Senator Rand Paul at a hearing in the midst of the pandemic, Fauci stated “you are entirely and completely incorrect—that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” He appears to have committed perjury, as Fauci later admited “there’s no way of guaranteeing” American taxpayer money routed to Wuhan didn’t fund gain-of-function research, and the recent OIG report confirms it in fact did. Fauci also reversed himself completely in saying he is no longer convinced Covid developed naturally. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of complicity in gain-of-function experiments and called for his firing as the nation’s top infectious disease expert. Fauci has since retired.
Optional Question 6, should Senator Paul call any member of the MSM to his hearings. “Do you now have any regrets over your coverage of the origins of Covid given all of this information, some which existed when you mocked laboratory origin as a conspiracy theory? Anything you’d do differently, such as tell the American public the truth?”
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
ChatGPT: AI versus Me in Writing an Opinion Column
ChatGPT is an online tool created by the Open AI people that generates text. You prompt the software and out pours decent prose. Someday it is going to replace all of us, starting with people like me, we are told. So how good is it? Let’s see if the software can recreate a recent column from TAC. In the original hand-written column I presented four global memes with commentary. Let’s include the memes below in italics and see what CHatGPT has to say about each.The internet promotes democracy globally. I called the idea a grift and offered Twitter’s demise as a platform for free speech as an example. Here’s what our future overlords at ChatGPT had to say: “The internet has the potential to promote democracy and increase access to information around the world. By allowing people to connect and share ideas with others, the internet can facilitate the exchange of diverse viewpoints and facilitate the free flow of information. In this way, the internet can help to create more informed and engaged citizens, who are better equipped to participate in the democratic process. However, it is important to note that the internet also has its limits and can be used to spread misinformation and propaganda, which can undermine democracy. It is also important for individuals to use the internet responsibly and critically evaluate the information they come across online.”Points = 0 for sounding like a weak Tom Friedman column, and – 567 points for the fear-mongering bit about undermining democracy like a Democratic Party talking point. But at the same time it sure sounded pretty didn’t it? But I’m not worried about my job at this point.Countries with a McDonald’s don’t make war on one another. It was in fact that ever-so-journalistic New York Times columnist Tom Friedman who coined the phrase. He wrote the benefits of economic integration reduce the policy choices open to governments, making war—which disrupts that integration—so unattractive as to be practically unthinkable, part of all that end of history stuff that was once the vogue for the hive mind. The concept was built around everyone wanting to be more like us. It failed miserably. ChatGPT said “This statement, known as the ‘McDonald’s peace theory,’ suggests that countries that have McDonald’s restaurants are less likely to go to war with each other. However, this theory is not supported by empirical evidence. While it is true that McDonald’s and other international fast food chains are often seen as symbols of globalization and may be viewed as promoting international cooperation, the presence of these restaurants does not guarantee peace between nations. There are many other complex social, economic, and political factors that contribute to the likelihood of a country going to war. Additionally, the presence of McDonald’s restaurants in a country does not necessarily reflect the overall level of economic development or political stability of that country.”Here’s 567 points for laying out the theory more clearly than I did, and noting the complexity Friedman and I try to hide behind in our self-mocking/mocking. Clear advantage for ChatGPT.You have to be at war to be at war. I was going for the sarcasm in writing how U.S. weapons animate the conflicts with Ukraine, Yemen, and Syria, and U.S. assistance runs like code in the background of the Israeli-Iran power struggle across the Gulf. Sure sounds like war. ChatGPT misses the boat entirely by getting hung up in semantics and missing the specific examples, especially Ukraine: “This statement is not entirely accurate. War is generally understood to be a conflict between two or more countries or groups, often involving the use of military force. However, a country or group does not necessarily have to be in a state of formal war in order to be considered to be at war. There are many other types of conflicts and hostilities that can exist between countries or groups that do not meet the definition of war. For example, there may be ongoing disputes or tensions between countries that do not rise to the level of armed conflict, but which could still be considered to be ‘at war’ in a metaphorical sense. Similarly, countries or groups may engage in acts of sabotage, espionage, or other covert operations that are intended to disrupt or harm the interests of another country or group, even if these actions do not meet the formal legal definition of war.No points to either side for being predictable, albeit in opposite directions. Advantage me only because the Matrix bit expands my argument where ChatGPT is still checking Webster’s.U.S. leadership is near dead. That sarcasm thing again. I use examples from Covid, China, climate change, and NATO/Ukraine to make the point few nations are looking to the U.S. for global leadership on these global issues. ChatGPT, which appears to be programmed to avoid hard opinions, an unfair disadvantage in this contest, comes off weak: “This is a subjective statement that is open to interpretation. Different people may have different opinions about the strength and effectiveness of U.S. leadership in various contexts. It is important to note that the United States is a complex and diverse country, and its leadership and influence are expressed in many different ways. The United States is a major global economic and military power, and it plays a significant role in international affairs. However, it also faces challenges and criticisms from within and outside its borders, and its actions and policies are not always supported or welcomed by other countries and groups.”No points awarded once again because it appears ChatGPT is programmed to present a wishy-washy both sides argument. And who can argue with that? Advantage again to me because I am the one judging this.So while my original column eked out a one-on-one win here, it is obvious ChatGPT is a powerful tool. Imagine if the assignment was some simple blog text, or a high school level term paper on the “Causes of the Civil War” (I just tried it — ChatGPT nailed it, listing slavery and states’ rights are the main causes, with a neat paragraph on other economic and cultural factors. B+ or better level paper, probably would pass at the undergrad level with some footnotes and additional examples.)As to the value of ChatGPT itself for opinion writing, it works best when instead of trying to trick it into goofing up you work within its limits to pry out its best. Just like knowing a grammar and spell checker are there to help the human editor, who still makes stylistic choices, cuts for length, and calls for additional information, ChatGPT is a helper for a writer at present, not a way to produce a finished product.Actually, it is best to allow the software to speak for itself: “AI in writing opinion columns can potentially save time and improve efficiency by automating certain tasks or providing assistance with writing and editing. However, it is important to note that AI systems are not able to fully replace human judgement and creativity, and it is still necessary for humans to review and approve the final product before it is published. AI can be a useful tool for writers and editors, but it is not a substitute for human expertise and insight.”
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Five Rules to Solve Everything
Raising kids we tried to keep things simple, boiling down the basics into five rules which apply to everything from surviving high school to regime change in Syria. As the kids get older and the U.S. remains on the ground in Syria and Iraq (true, look it up!) here are five rules to help everything work out better.
Drugs are not for stupid people.
Our kids like everyone else’s were exposed to drugs at an early age. And unlike when I was in school and drugs meant 3.2 percent pseudo-alcohol beer and maybe some gnarly weed, today a full range of chemicals is available, cheap, to everyone.
So the rule was meant to understand the temptation and suggest a way to deal with it without denying the issue existed. Don’t be stupid. Don’t take drugs you do not understand, even if some guy in Starbucks who seems really jumpy says it’s cool. Don’t take quantities you don’t understand. Don’t try it the first time in the wrong place. Don’t be stupid about driving under the influence. Don’t try something new the night before the SAT. If you are going to take risks, legal and healthwise, assess your risk and mitigate it when you can.
This advice scales well. Geopolitically, one might not want to embark on a 20-year-long war bender in Afghanistan without thinking through two decades of unintended consequences and with no idea of how to get home.
Talk to a lawyer first.
I had pretty good kids who as far as I know never got into any serious trouble, and no arrests. But the rule in case things went sideways was always “Be polite and respectful to the police but request a lawyer before you say anything.” Show you are informed about your rights without challenging/confronting the cops. You have no value in angering them. The cops are just doing their job, which is the gather information for the prosecutor to use to find you guilty. It says so right on the label, “anything you say can and will be used against you.” Note the words “will be.”
People think they are clever, but the cops know certain factors mean the difference between misconduct, harassment, minor assault, felony assault, and self-defense. If following a scuffle you do not know the case law in your state differentiating those things and the cops do, you need help from a lawyer. The first thing a lawyer will do is ask “what have you already told the police?” It is easier to start off the right way then to fix something already goofed up before the pros arrive. Law enforcement is allowed to lie to you, mislead you (“let’s just talk off the record”) or persuade you to voluntarily talk saying things like “Lawyers are expensive and a hassle. We can wrap this up in a few minutes between us.” They might say “it’s not about you, we just want to learn more about this other thing.” You are not smarter than they are. You cannot game them. Simply assert your right to remain silent until they have a court order to force you to testify or your lawyer is present. That is your only advantage in this kind of situation.
You can hear this same advice from the ACLU, or a real lawyer.
Another version of this might be “call an electrician” first. Of course the YouTube video on how to rewire the dimmer and three way switch is clear. Of course you remember watching Grandpa do it in 1965. Of course the smoke coming out of the socket and the firefighter saying you are lucky they got there so fast is normal.
The larger concept here is multi-headed. Think before you speak. Sometimes don’t speak. If you find yourself stuck in a hole, step one is to stop digging deeper. Know your intellectual limits and get help from experts. Being uninformed has real consequences. Ignorance is expensive and not bliss. In a real world context, for example, if the entire Cabinet does not know the difference between Sunnis and Shias, check with someone who does.
Clean as you go.
My kids never worked in a restaurant so they needed to learn this at home. Anybody who has worked at a restaurant knows you can’t go home at night until everything is cleaned for the next day. If you clean as you go throughout the night, it is easier than starting at 2 am. It is even better to not make a mess in the first place.
So the rule was to think ahead. Term paper due in a month means start researching next week, with a first draft in two weeks, that sort of thing. Proof the paper as you go along and you do not need to stay until 2 am the night before it is due.
In the real world, this means picking up beer bottles a couple of times during the night is easier than doing it hung over Sunday. If you happen to be president, think about the consequences of say creating an off shore penal colony at Guantanamo and do something with the prisoners as you go along, instead of leaving the next guy and the next guy and the next next guy a real mess. Or when you realize your organization has lied to the FISA court to launch a fraudulent investigation into the president’s ties to Russia, shut it down instead of dragging it out onto thinner and thinner ice.
Work, Save, Invest.
It turns out it is really hard to become rich. The deck is stacked by the already rich, who make their money primarily by owning things (capital) and passively watching their wealth grow while the rest of us have jobs to “earn” a living. Capital grows faster than wages ever will (because the rich control your wages as paid out of their wealth) and is taxed at a lower rate.
So your only chance is to work, save, and invest. Work is the big one. It is about getting money, as much as you can within the law. It is not primarily about having fun, giving back, community, or making a difference, although it is great if you can combine those things with making money. You can also do them on your own time by volunteering. But you work to earn a living. Earn means it is not always easy or free.
Save means not spending money you don’t have or buying things you don’t need. That way you avoid giving money you earned to people who have not earned it by way of interest on the money you borrowed. It’s kind of obvious, right – to get that flat screen TV I’m going to work extra hours so I can pay Best Buy for the TV and then pay VISA 22 percent of the purchase price in addition.
Invest is your only chance of making money like rich people. It is literally free money, which should be clearly seen as a good thing. You put some money into something like a mutual fund with low costs at a reliable place and over time it becomes more money. Note the word time. Investment growth takes and needs time, but historically given that time it does grow. If you’d have invested $10,000 in a general stock fund in 2011, you’d have over $30,000 today. By doing nothing. This is what rich people do, er, don’t do instead of working for wages, and it is magic. Historically, from 1926 to today, stocks have grown about 10 percent a year on average, counting the Great Depression and the 2008 Crisis.
In the larger lesson, as you get free money, you will also start to understand how the world really works, why we have the One Percent controlling everything, and why those people plan to stick with capitalism. The even larger political lesson has something to do with accruing massive government debt but I can’t quite get it clear in my head.
Call for a ride and use birth control.
It’s hard to imagine Dad won’t be a little grumpy about coming out in the middle of the night to give you a safe ride home, but imagine how angry he’ll be at the emergency room an hour later after you demonstrate why drunk driving is such a bad idea. Same for a parent finding those condoms in your underwear drawer. An awkward talk and some tears beats the heck out of picking out a baby’s name during World History class.
So maybe before deciding to bomb Syria again to look tough think about how it might squash larger plans for some sort of peace in the greater Middle East. Sure, Dad and the media will be angry at first you did not display American leadership with a 500 pound cluster munition, but after they calm down they will see it was the right thing to (not) do. Also applies to killing American Citizens with drones and lying on FISA applications.
Another larger lesson might be seen, for example, in when George Bush found himself mired in Iraq too drunk on hubris to win, and instead of calling for a ride out he decided he could drive home drunk and on the way crashed America’s foreign policy. That sort of thing.
Alongside the smart precautions and knowing when to suffer the short term pain for long term gain, try to avoid a single point of failure situation. When planning something (a vacation, getting up on time for an important job interview, regime change in Syria) avoid creating a situation where one thing can derail the whole thing. So print out the document as well as have it on your phone. Set a second alarm. Have an alternate plan if the Russians intervene. Sometimes this translates into additional cost or hassle but ask the question this way: if standing at the airline counter having a printed document in hand saves your whole trip, wasn’t the trip to Fedex to print it out worth it?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Time for Some Linguistic Housekeeping, America
With the year 2022 soon behind us, it is time for some linguistic housecleaning, America.I’d like everyone to please stop using the term side hustle. Call it a part time job or a small business. Either way, it rarely works out despite the incessant flow of trash from the media about how it is some sort of new thing. Historic data on small businesses shows a remarkable record: no matter how long you look back or what the economic climate is, around 90% of all start-ups, new small businesses, and the like fail. Those are terrible odds. The primary reasons for failure are money running out, being in the wrong market, a lack of research, and not being an expert in the industry. I’d like to add “showing scorn for people who are experts in the industry” by imaging you are being disruptive or innovative when you are just naive.
Keep in mind if your side hustle is mainly making money for other people who do nothing but provide a platform while you do all the work (TaskRabbit, Uber, Doordash, Fivvr, any delivery service.) You are their side hustle.
So can we stop with the Etsy people who get profiled on their second week and never heard of again with their breakthrough idea to knit sweaters for bunnies? Can we stop hearing about people who think they can run a global vegan cookie business out of their apartment? Please, no more commercials showing some small business thriving because of the post office or colorful flyers? And do they always have to be cute coffee shops or flower stores or worse, ambiguous open offices where frighteningly beautiful people holds meetings and point earnestly at screens before raising fists in triumph at the end?
And if we somehow have to hear about these people, can the stories include something about profits instead of just telling us gross sales which mean nothing if no profit is made? And as an aside, are all these people the same people? Females are strong, fierce, little political meme generators selling empowered crafts. The men all look alike, about 35 with neat beards, big watches, and all-cotton clothing draped over V-shaped bodies. They always have time to chat with equally-pure customers. We never see them firing the minimum wage worker for making a Tik-Tok in the back room while the juicer overflows out front, or on their phone with their lawyer being sued for sexual harassment by someone they chose not to hire because of the needle tracks down his forearms. Just stop.
Also, influencer, YouTuber, and podcaster are not real jobs.
In that same line, let’s stop misusing the word “research” as in “Well, I did my research before going to Orlando.” Nothing that starts and stops with Google searches can be research, especially broad searches like “Hey Google, what do I need to know about starting a business.” That’s not research, that’s flipping through a magazine on the plane. Research involves multiple layers of questions in search of actual rudimentary facts, creating some sort of hypothesis-core idea that facts can prove or reject. “Research” is not the same as education. Anyone can look up a list of symptoms but actual medical school is helpful in a real diagnosis that accounts for all the variables you don’t even know exist. Also, maybe a working knowledge of biology and chemistry.
This also applies to all the people whose “research” is predetermined to reach a conclusion, such as “racism is everywhere.” Collections of cherry picked eventoids do not automatically add up to a valid conclusion. That requires an understanding of context, of what was going on around those events, and especially the knowledge of history that allows you to judge events as they would have been in their time. That’s why people should not lose their mind every time a new Gen X person discovers the Constitution uses only male pronouns. Persons who believe a particular religious book is the literal word of the deity should learn a bit of how translations work, especially those from ancient to modern languages.
Experience is important; it broadens us and can bring into a conversation new ideas. This is good. But beginning your screed with the words “As a…” and then alerting us that as a lesbian, or a native Jamaican, you have rare insights sets the bar pretty high. If you invoke it second or eighth hand, you sound like an idiot. For example, no one who has any experience with war thinks preferencing your comment with “As the great grandson of a guy who fought real fascists in Nazi Germany…” improves your argument.
Stop with the firsts. The first black president was noteworthy. The first woman CEO at a S&P 500 company was important. It’s 2022 and the first disabled left-handed Asperberger’s transwoman bank clerk is not. Stop.
Same goes for those who insist personal experience is the only way to know things and thus in one swipe eliminate the point of poetry, history, painting, fiction, and the rest of scholarship and the arts. Yes, I in fact can know something of what it is like to be a ____. That is in fact the whole point of the arts, never mind history and academia in general.
And special mention to the ragged few who actually do disregard good scholarship, the sum of many personal experiences, for a single, biased lived version nearby. As in “Well, professor — Robert — you say the civil war was about ending slavery, but my great great grandma still was poor even a few years ago.” In addition to its use in the budding field of uninformed racism, this idea is all through conversations about immigration. Sorry but not everyone’s grandfather came to America with only one dollar, had his name forcibly changed to Biff at Ellis Island, but then went on to found IBM. So leave the Central Americans clanging at our southern border out of this, or invite them to your house for dinner and tell them your fanfic version of family history.
Nobody outside your peer group and some people in Human Resources who have found a new monetarized niche in life care about your pronouns. The chances you did not get promoted are much more likely to have had something to do with your work than your gender, race, religion, or which orifices you prefer to sexually engage with. Once you grasp that you are likely to do better work.
We all see through passive-aggressive language, so just say “Please take your seat” and not “Um, people, I like really need you to sit down, OK, um, thanks.”
Before you use a stainless steel reusable straw to drink an iced herbal gluten free tea consider the amount of resources it takes to produce and ship steel straws and how many thousands of times someone would have to use them to equal the “waste” of one paper straw made from recycled paper. And whenever lose your reusable straw, it will basically exist in the environment for much, much longer than something paper.
Never spend more than $1.99 on coffee. Don’t buy a family of pads and pod devices that all do basically the same thing except in different sizes. Don’t take out student loans for majors that will never earn you a living (that’s called a hobby.) You don’t need whatever it is you saw online. It is weird you have so many photos of yourself on your phone. Ten years ago it would have been seen as a symptom of some psychiatric event. Life should not be about endless self-marketing. Smash the subscribe button, like me, follow me, swipe right on me, review me. We are people. We are not products. We live lives. We are not meant to execute marketing campaigns from birth forward.
Stop being so easily offended by words. That was all supposed to be fixed anyway after we were ordered to use Ms. and say African-American in the 1970s. If it didn’t change much then new versions of things (including statues) aren’t going to change much now. English has many good words so stop over-using bonkers, unhinged, mocked, burned, let that sink in, period, full stop.
Any “event” that begins and takes place online, such as outrage over something, is not real and is certainly not news. Determining the success of something by likes, follows, or ratios means nothing outside of the closed loop hive mind of social media. You understand the only point of social media is advertising, right, except you do most of the work? Woke acts by companies are also just advertising. Understanding both sides of an issue is not an “ism” to be mocked. It instead suggests an open mind, and can lead to deeply held beliefs well-supported. “News” based on sources or reports is gossip and/or propaganda. The more you agree with the politics of an article the more you should questions its bias.
It may be me, or things really have fallen apart. The great Talking Heads doc, Stop Making Sense, seems like a motto I should have in Latin on my chest. If you have helped create a society based on narcissism, constant advertising and media manipulation, grinding consumerism and the debt is creates, and permanent existence in a state of offense, don’t be surprised when one day you wake up and realize it stinks.
And fine, yes, the best music was the stuff recorded when I was in high school, and now get off my lawn.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Whither Ukraine
From the moment Russian troops crossed into Ukraine, there were only two possible outcomes: Ukraine reaches a diplomatic solution which resets its physical eastern border (i.e., Russia annexes much of eastern Ukraine to the Dnieper River, and establishes a land bridge to Crimea) and firmly reestablishes its geopolitical role as buffer state between NATO and Russia; or, via battlefield losses and diplomacy Russia retreats to its original February starting point (albeit inside the Ukraine in areas like Donbas) and Ukraine firmly reestablishes its geopolitical role as buffer state between NATO and Russia.
As of Day 237 (October 17) despite much noise about nuclear war and regime change, those are still the only realistic outcomes. Diplomacy is necessary and diplomacy is sufficient to resolve the crisis in Ukraine. Until all parties realize that and sit down, the increasingly bloody and efficient meatgrinder will continue. The current status of the war — WWII style 20th century conquering of territory by creeping land advances with 21st century weaponry — cannot continue indefinitely.
Vladimir Putin’s goal in his invasion has never been something quick and has never included Kiev. It has always been to widen the speed bump Ukraine is between Russia and NATO. This problem for Putin is ever more acute as NATO builds up strength in Poland. While powerless to negotiate for itself at the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia was promised NATO would not expand eastward, a lie, and now Poland is sacrosanct NATO territory, as blessed as Paris, Berlin, or London as untouchable by foreign invasion.
The Russian countermove (and there is always a countermove, these guys play chess, remember) is to widen the border with Ukraine and make it strategically impossible for NATO to cross in force. The war would be fought with NATO on Ukrainian territory. The idea that the Soviet Union was tricked in 1989-90 is at the heart of Russia’s confrontation with the west in Ukraine and no conclusion to that fight will take place without acknowledgment on the ground. That’s why any plan to drive Russia back to pre-February 2022 borders would be a fight to the end and an impossible victory for Ukraine no matter how much U.S. weaponry they are gifted.
So Russia wants the eastern portion of Ukraine (east of the Dnieper River) as buffer ground. It wants Crimea and maybe Odessa as staging grounds to drive northward into NATO’s invading flank if things ever come to that. The invasion of Ukraine is survival-level action in Putin’s mind, and a settling of an old score from 1989, and it is impossible to imagine him having taken the inevitable step of starting the invasion that he would back off without achieving results. It is not a matter of “face” as portrayed in the Western press but one of literal life-or-death in the ongoing struggle with NATO. There is no trust after 1989 in Putin’s calculus. Imagine North Korea asking to renegotiate the location of the DMZ southward at this point.
A quick word about the non-use of nuclear weapons. Putin’s plan depends on fighting Ukraine, and thus the U.S. by proxy, not direct conflict with the militarily superior United States and whole of NATO. Despite all the tough talk, Ukraine is not a member of NATO and is unlikely to be a member in the near future, and so the only way to assuredly bring America into the fight on the ground or tactically, air strikes, is a nuclear weapon. That opens the door for anything; until that mushroom cloud, Russia and the U.S. are a married couple having an argument, saying anything but limiting themselves to angry words and the occasional thrown dish. Set off that nuke and it is like one partner escalated from late nights out with the boys to a full-on affair and at that point all the rules are thrown away. Anything can happen, and Putin’s plan cannot withstand “anything” in the form of U.S. direct intervention. Hence, no nukes. And Biden should tell Kiev to stop bombing the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to try and force the nuclear card. Absent something like that, Putin’ll fight conventionally.
Sanctions don’t matter, they never have. From Day One U.S.-imposed energy sanctions have played to Russia’s favor economically as oil prices rise. Things may come to a head in a month or two as winter sets in in Germany and that natural gas from Russia is missed but that is a domestic German problem the U.S. is likely to simply poo-poo away (once economic powerhouse and U.S. competitor Germany showed its first negative foreign trade imbalance since 1991, a nice bonus for America.) Things got so loose that someone needed to blow up the Nordstrom 2 pipeline to make the point with Germany that it may have to do without Russian energy to maintain the fiction sanctions will bring an end to this war. Sanctions are a Potemkin mirage for the American public, not a restraint on Russia. There is no regime change coming in Moscow as there is no one with the power to pull it off who would want anything to change.
Putin’s call for diplomacy will occur only if the costs continue to mount on his side under his form of warfare. Here Putin faces a weakness, his chosen style of warfare. WWI was essentially a play on 18th century warfare where the two sides lined up across a field and shot at each other until one side call it quits. But WWI saw armies face off across those fields but with 20th century artillery, machine guns, and other tools of killing far more effective than an 18th century musket. It was unsustainable, literally chewing up men and eventually simply wore out both sides. Fresh troops from the U.S. gave the advantage to the British/French side at the crucial end game of WWI, but if the U.S. had stayed home in 1917 the war would have been militarily a ghastly tie.
See the plan yet? Putin knows nothing short of a NATO strike can dislodge him from eastern Ukraine and thus has no incentive to leave. Putin has from the first shots calibrated his invasion not to give the U.S. a reason to join in. That’s why the tit-for-tat on weaponry used is so near comical; Russian fires missiles on Ukrainian cities, Ukraine demands anti-missile weapons from the U.S. America can salvage its self-proclaimed role as defender of the Ukraine simply with these arms fulfillment packages, along with a few special forces and the CIA paramilitaries. Where is are the Russian strategic bombers? Where is the global war on Ukrainian shipping? Where are the efforts to close Ukraine’s western border with Poland? Where is the gargantuan Red Army NATO expected to roar into western Europe for 40 years? The conquest of Ukraine being treated as a small unit exercise tells us much.
None of this is any great secret. The off ramp in Ukraine, one of the two possible outcomes, is clear enough to Washington. The Biden administration seems content, however, shamefully not to call for diplomatic efforts but instead to bleed out the Russians as if this was Afghanistan 1980 all over again, all the while looking tough and soaking up whatever positive biparty electoral feelings are due for “war time” president Joe Biden. As with Afghanistan in 1980, the U.S. seems ready to fight until the last local falls (supplying them just enough weaponry to avoid losing) before facing the inevitable negotiated ending, a shameful position then and a shameful one now. A multipolar, spheres-of-influence world has returned, acknowledge it with diplomacy and stop the killing.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
School Daze in NYC
For most Americans, which high school their children attend is a pretty basic decision. They either go to the school designated by where they live like everyone else (Smallville students from Smallville Middle School move on to Smallville High School) or they attend one of a few private schools in their area, typically religious schools such as Our Lady of Grace of Smallville. Not so in New York City, where a combination of 2022-style fairness and woke politics leaves one wondering how much do we really hate our children.
Up until two years ago, the system in NYC worked like this for high school, with a similar system in place to choose a middle school: at the top, a very few specialty high schools, including Stuyvesant High (STEM), Bronx High School of Science, and LaGuardia High School of Music, Art, and Performing Arts (The FAME! school; grads include Nicki Minaj, Al Pacino, and Timothée Chalamet) allied with the Lincoln Center of the Performing Arts. All had individual and very specific requirements, in the case of the former two an entrance exam that produced a rank order entrance list irrespective of grades and other factors. The schools were hypercompetitive and ended up racially tilted toward white and Asian students (in a recent year only seven black students got into Stuyvesant, out of 895 spots.) There are expensive consultants and prep programs, themselves competitive, available to maybe get the odds in a student’s favor.
For everyone else, absent private schools, the city gave eighth graders the option of applying to 160 public high schools, each with their own criteria and “Applicant-to-Seat” ratio to help divine academically rigorous from easy. Typically entry meant evaluation by a combination of grades, various test scores, essays, portfolios, and other work. Schools made their choices, expressed preferences really, and students made their own preferential list on a scale of one to 12. The whole mash of grades, etc., and preferences was then run through a “deferred acceptance algorithm.” The algorithm matched applicants to schools based on their highest mutual preference, all similar to how medical students are matched with residency programs. NYC high school students received a list of 12 schools they had been accepted to, and made their choice. The thing is everyone “knew” which schools were better and which were to be avoided out of the 160 on offer, and the “good” schools were hypercompetitive and ended up racially tilted toward white and Asian students. There are expensive consultants and prep programs, themselves competitive, available to maybe get the odds in a student’s favor. It was a lot of work to stay semi-woke, but not enough for some.
While never a system without controversary, it was a system that acknowledged certain realities: some kids are smarter and work harder than others. Attendance counted; you can’t learn if you are not present. The testing at the core of the system asked math, science, and history questions, not queries somehow only a white or Asian child would know. A poor kid really good at math stood the same chance as a rich kid really good at math. But the black and Hispanic students who make up nearly 70 percent of the school system were not moving on up. You know what came next.
Under former Democratic Mayor Bill De Blasio the first attack was against the specialty high schools, particularly Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, and their do-or-die entrance exams. The predominance of white and Asian students matriculating into those schools after excelling at those tests could mean only one thing to the mayor’s woke supporters: the tests had to be unfair to black and brown students. Earlier attempts to even the admission rates by providing free after school tutoring (the Discovery Program) to black and brown students (and excluding many poor Asian students) had not succeeded. So the next obvious step was simply to eliminate the entrance exams in favor of grades as assigned by the home school teachers. That way a student from a “bad” school could have a teacher who issued A’s for effort and compete his straight-A’s against a child from a rigorous school where an A represented successful college level work in 8th grade. It was just like Smallville, where Coach Johnson gave all the football players A’s in U.S. history and Health classes!
Under New York state’s system, dropping the STEM schools’ entrance exam actually required an act of the state Congress, who under extraordinary pressure from Asian families and lawmakers shunned the change (AOC studiously avoided a public stance on the matter.) The bill in fact never even made it to a full floor vote, with one opponent accusing the mayor of creating a “nasty narrative” that pitted Asian families against black and Hispanic parents. Another likened De Blasio’s plan to the Chinese Exclusion Act, a 19th century law restricting Asian immigration to cut back on economic competition with whites. The STEM entrance exam remains in place today.
Of course there is more, those 160 other high schools in New York not subject to single entrance exams and which were part of the “algorithm” system. Using the pandemic as an excuse and not requiring state-level approval, De Blasio was able to remove attendance as a criteria for admission. Same excuse to eliminate standardized test scores. Instead, middle schoolers were placed in one of four tiers based on their highest grades over two years — that A for effort from a friendly teacher standing proudly alongside that A for calculus success from a tough one. A lottery was then held for each group, with the highest numbered lottery winners free to chose their preferred high school. This was deemed fair somehow, though an eighth-grader with an academically stellar record but a poor lottery number could easily lose out to a merely good-enough student with a great lottery assignation.
The results were as expected and intended: 90 percent of black students got into one of their top five schools, same as Hispanics. For Asians, the number was only 70 percent.
As can be imagined, there were a lot of unhappy parents, and so the school assignment process is far from over even as it increased the number of black matriculating students at the most wanted schools. Some white parents talk about private schools, others of moving to the suburbs. Manhattan has already lost 9.5 percent of its under-five population over the last two years.
Still others plans rallies and lawsuits under the banner “Merit Matters,” and, with De Blasio out of office, political pressure. The New York Times, still clinging to the idea that random choice is the woke answer, plans on blaming the system for the system, stating “It will take a long time to know whether these tweaks in the system will effect the desired change, something contingent, in part, on the kind of support students who might be new to intensely rigorous curriculums receive in order to succeed.” Nothing much will be said about the larger lessons such a system teaches, specifically that diversity only means measuring the numbers of black kids, and not understanding that “Asian” can mean Chinese, Japanese, Korea, Cambodian, Indian, Thai, etc., never mind rich, poor, immigrant, non-native speaker, etc.
New York’s current mayor, Eric Adams, couldn’t avoid adding to the woke chaos. After one admissions round, he just recently eliminated the lottery for junior high schools in favor of malleable grades. At the city’s competitive high schools, priority for seats will be given to top students whose grades are an A average, or the top 15 percent of students in each school. Criteria for admissions anywhere will not include state test scores, now basically irrelevant. The new plan seems to lessen the impact of the random lottery drawing, and crank up the value of individual grades which can be adjusted on a per-student and per-school basis to achieve the desired racial outcomes. The immediate goal will be for these changes to increase access for “communities who have been historically locked out of screened schools,” while still rewarding students who work hard academically. The broader goal seems to be how to create more racially balanced top schools while trying to prevent middle-class families fed up with the lottery from abandoning the system. NYC is bleeding students; roughly 120,000 families have left traditional public schools over the past five years.
You know what to expect: lower standards at once-rigorous schools as the only practical way of manhandling unprepared students out of the way so the others may learn at top levels, Student A struggling to add round numbers sitting next to Student B nailing advanced trig. After all, fair is fair, they both got A’s from their teachers. Sorry kids.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Elon, Time to Kill Twitter
Nothing would be better than for Elon Musk to buy Twitter and then kill it. Take it off line. Delete it. Make it go away.
What is the point anymore? Like some aged European monarchy, the service has become too inbred to say anything useful. It consists now as a giant push survey, claiming the appearance of action equals action. Even the poltergeist of Twitter, cancelation of people, is like a magic spell that you have to believe in for it to work. Live outside the Twitter demographic and it does not matter. Listening to people talk, you’d think Twitter had the power to raise the dead, or more often, the opposite. Twitter is the physical embodiment of what Glenn Greenwald describes as Democrats criminalizing opposition to their party and ideology. Dissenting ideas are “disinformation” and must be censored. Trump voters are inherently criminal (“insurrectionists”) and should be imprisoned or at least banished for thought crimes.
Recently rewatching Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9, it is obvious the 2018 film is mainly a screed about all the bad things Trump was going to do as president. Time is a cold witch of a mistress: basically nothing Moore predicted four years ago about what was going to happen actually happened. Moore was wrong about Trump’s ties to Russia, Moore was wrong about Trump being the last elected president because he would seize total power, and Moore was wrong about the lasting impact of the progressive Twitter heroes of the year, the Parkland High School survivors.
You do remember the mass shooting in a Parkland, Florida high school, right? A handful of “survivors” were insta-made into social media sensations by presenting their views on gun control unopposed and uncommented on. In his film Moore portrayed the kids were examples of an anti-Trump force sent by the universe to Tweet as a balancing mechanism, and that the power of their online activism was America’s only chance to remain a democracy free of daily massacres. You can’t do justice to the hyperbole of Moore’s narration in print; you would think by listening these kids had the power to change something simply by amassing RTs on Twitter. A good chunk of the movie is just Moore staring at the kids changing everything fascistic in the world by being online, the filmmaker’s expression somewhere between pedophile on the playground fence and a proud dad.
One can imagine Moore’s reaction if he was still relevant enough to quote to Musk’s impending takeover of Twitter as a twist on the absurd: Musk will have too much power to make Twitter into anything he wants, even a full-on bastion of unfettered speech. Instead of relaying on the Terms of Service to ensure people like the Parkland Kids face no opposition online, Moore might worry just the opposite, that the opposition, left to its own point making, might overwhelm the dumbass ideas that tend to come from 16-year-olds handed a very big microphone with no supervision. For those new here, that is the point, to allow better ideas to overwhelm poor ideas.
Have a look at what Twitter had done in the name of “free speech” and ending “misinformation,” the rallying cries now of so-called progressives. Twitter took an entire subject of critical interest, Hunter Biden, off the media menu and thus out of public viewing just prior to the last presidential election. Twitter silenced the loudest voices of opposition to the Democrats, people like Donald Trump himself and others like Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Call them what you want to, the idea in a free country is you’d have the opportunity to hear what they had to say if you wished to or maybe encounter speech that made you rethink your own views by accident (protip: that’s a cornerstone of Jeffersonian democracy, oh wait, Jefferson is on the outs now, too, sorry.)
Twitter also found cause to black out the satire site Babylon Bee and Libs of TikTok. The Bee’s violation? Naming transperson Rachel Levine its “Man of the Year.” Libs of TikTok only reposted clips from left-wing users on social media, including from drag queens and gay and transgender activists but that too was too much. Things got so stupid that Trump Derangement Post Child Robert Reich in his role as the Rob Reiner of faux-intellectuals tweeted, “When multi-billionaires take control of our most vital platforms for communication, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for oligarchy.”
“We are calling for careful content moderation that balances the important ideals of democracy, free expression, and public health and safety,” said Jessica González, co-CEO of Free Press, a media advocacy organization. Imagine that, a group which says its supports a free press demanding censorship. But why pull punches — Politico wonders “If Musk sticks with his word and removes most of the content moderation rules in place, which could include those that ban hate speech, extremism and vaccine and election misinformation — it may turn into a platform that poses a threat to democracy.”
Irony aside, look what they are afraid of: unfettered free speech brought to you by one of the few men rich enough to pay for it for us.
And that’s why Musk should instead kill off Twitter, and any other social media he can acquire. His legacy would not be to be the oligarch who gave us a smatter of free speech but the oligarch that helped break the grip oligarchs, whether progressive or otherwise, now have on our speech. Burn Twitter to the ground to save it, er, us, from any attempts to adjudicate further what we can read and listen to. If a social media outlet can’t present a democratic platform in a democratic way (i.e., without a rich guy paying our way to freedom like an abolitionists buying slaves only to set them loose) then we should not want it. We’ve gone too far in turning “content moderation” into crude censorship and viewpoint discrimination.
Public forums need to just that, public. You do not achieve free speech via censorship no matter who wields the red pencil. Musk can’t change that we’ve reached a point in democracy’s evolution where some half of us fear free speech, but there it is. His contribution is to kill the beast that Twitter has become, and hope something more democratic rises in its place.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Second Verse, Same as the First: NY’s Civil Suit Against Trump
New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against former President Donald Trump, three of his adult children, and other senior members of the Trump Organization alleging business and insurance fraud as well as conspiracy for the same, marking the end of a three-year investigation into Trump and his business. The civil suit is basically a version of the criminal indictments the Southern District of New York (SDNY) and the Manhattan and New York State Attorneys General have failed to generate at the federal and state levels. The suit claims in a nut shell what the criminal cases claimed; Trump over-valued the worth of his properties to use them as collateral for new loans, and then undervalued those same properties come tax time to pay lower taxes.
The criminal cases have fallen flat because of the need to prove actual criminal intent, that Trump lied intending to commit a crime. This proved impossible when the Trump family would not confess (Trump took the Fifth some 440 times during recent questioning) and when no one could be found to Fredo him by turning states’ evidence in return for some lower sentence himself. What’s left in what has clearly become a prosecution driven by the political need to do something ahead of 2024 is this civil suit. Basically same accusations, same weak evidence, but lower standards of proof with lower penalties.
Enemies of Trump hope this works out better than previous attempts in New York to prosecute him by the Southern District of New York (SDNY) and failing that, the New York State Attorney General Letitia James. The former already failed in 2012 to indict Trump’s children after they were accused of misleading investors, and faced judicial rebukes in the past for sloppy work and political motivations.
The narrative runs like this: both offices had been compiling nasty stuff against Trump for years, held back only by custom which prevented them from indicting him as long as he was the president. As of January 20, 2021 he became open game. But since then both offices failed to indict Trump. The New York state system is no such kangaroo court, and affords defendants far more protections than federal courts. There are strict rules governing evidence that can be presented to a grand jury, and even minor procedural errors can result in indictments being thrown out. “If you’re a white-collar defendant, you’d rather be in New York State court than in federal court any day of the week,” said SDNY’s former top deputy.
The current try is kinda of pathetic, just a lawsuit, which carries no potential criminal jeopardy, so no formal indictment, no possibility of jail time. The suit holds Trump misvalued some New York real estate from 2011-2021 to obtain loans and pay lower taxes, a civil offense at worst usually settled with new assessments or a fine.Yet even this case against Trump could be difficult to prove. Property valuations are subjective, and most all financial statements include a disclaimer stating that they have not been audited. Now underline this part: Deutsche Bank and Trump’s other lenders were hardly victims; all of his loans are either current or were paid off, some early. Trump does not use email, so any instructions he might have given his employees about the company’s financial statements are unlikely to be in writing. The lack of a damning email, or a witness inside his company willing to testify against him, will complicate efforts to show Trump intentionally used his financial statements to defraud lenders and insurers.For people not named Trump (a key giveaway that this is all political) the city of New York assesses a value to each property for tax purposes. Nearly every property owner in NYC believes his or her assessed value is too high and pushes back, to the point where these disputes are not even handled by a court, instead through a tax commission grievance process. Owners want a lower value to pay less tax, except when they approach a bank for the equivalent of a refi loan, when they want their property to seem more expensive to secure a bigger loan at a better rate. It is the bank who then decides what a property is worth to them as collateral, via their own due diligence.It is always complicated, as much art as science; beyond the usual valuation factors of location, location, location, some buildings in New York are iconic, or famous for their brand name (cough, cough, “Trump”), what history they represent, etc. Some just have nice views. Sometimes the bank is generous because in return for the loan they’ll secure some other business of value to them. Over-valuing/under-valuing real estate in New York City is sport, but as a crime is so much not ado about nothing it is not going to send anyone to jail. Imagine the yawns as a jury listens to forensic accountants explain Trump’s tiered exemptions, and how their value is subtracted from the DOF assessed value to calculate a taxable value which is then multiplied by the current tax rate for the specific assigned property class. Next session we’ll talk about somewhat sketchy easements Trump obtained going back to when Mayor Koch was in charge.The jury will quickly discover the regulations governing how one values a NY property are dense. Built into the law is an automatic fudge allowing the same property to have both a high market value and a lower asset value. Problems are sorted out as civil matters and usually settled with the city sending out a bill, especially if the bank is not claiming fraud, only the DA, as in Trump’s case.And in the end, what? The lawsuit seeks to permanently bar the Trump family members named from serving in officer or director positions in any corporation or business licensed in New York State. The attorney general also seeks to bar the former president and the Trump Organization from entering into any New York real estate acquisitions for five years, and to take back all financial benefits obtained through the allegedly fraudulent practices, estimated to total $250 million. None of those things, even if the suit if fully successful, is likely to have an effect on Candidate Trump and none would prevent him from running for president. Business-wise, Trump merely needs to re-incorporate in another state, maybe business-friendly Florida, to re-start operations.The Democrats’ plan to find Trump guilty of something, anything, seems to be coming to its own sad ending, the lawsuit beyond a whimper, not a bang. They have tried to turn belief Trump is evil into crime over the last five years — Emoluments Clause, Russiagate, impeachments I and II, Stormy Daniels, obstruction of justice, and incitement. On the sidelines were extra-judicial attempts connected with the 25th Amendment, having doctors who never examined the man declaring Trump mentally ill, and even accusations of incest. The Southern District of New York previously failed to indict Trump’s children and failed to prosecute Paul Manafort. E. Jean Carroll’s rape-cum-defamation case was so egregiously lousy even the Biden DOJ took Trump’s side. The convictions of Trump associates lawyer Michael Cohen and accountant Allen Weisselberg did not touch the principal himself.The SDNY brought no charges. Early this year, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, instructed prosecutors to halt their effort to seek an indictment of Trump. It looks like Letitia James is all who is left to make the last flaccid move and then turn off the lights on her way out.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
BLM License Plate Rocks Hawaii
If politics makes strange bedfellows, defending free speech sends one down some equally odd paths. The 1A and laws protecting speech exist for every thing that can be said, but end up being tested at the margins of what society tolerates in the name of free speech. A recent case in Hawaii, involving a car license plate, is a perfect example.
Like most states, Hawaii issues specialty/vanity license plates where the owner can chose his own letters or numbers. The only restrictions are the letters/numbers not be “misleading” or “publicly objectionable.” Otherwise pick your combination, pay the fee, and you have your unique license plate, such as LUV YOU. That was the plan of Edward Odquina, who runs a web site named www.fckblm.org in support of his media business that shares those same initials, Film Consulting Krav Maga BLooMberg. Odquina also elsewhere on his site claims the initials stand for Fight Communism & Knuckleheads Bitch Liberal Marxists. He also does not care much for the Black Lives Matter movement. He applied for, and was issued in 2021, a FCKBLM car license plate which he displays on his vehicle alongside a Trump 2024 placard and other patriotic insignia.
At some point the state of Hawaii claims it received unspecified “complaints,” and Odquina was ordered to surrender the plate. He refused. Until he does give in, he cannot renew his car registration and is subject to citation and seizure of his vehicle. Odquina filed a lawsuit against the county and its attorney general, claiming they infringed on his First Amendment right to free expression.
Specifically, the 23 page lawsuit claims Hawaiian authorities failed to define the terms “misleading” or “publicly objectionable.” He further holds that his application for FCKBLM was approved and the plate was issued, and that the law includes nothing in it to allow that decision to be re-reviewed if “complaints” are received even though a complaint phone line exists.
The core of the suit focuses on the Hawaii statute restricting messages allowed on personalized plates as being overly broad (a “void for vagueness” says the filing), and that the state, city, and county have all failed to adopt administrative rules to define such terms and create a process for making determinations. Instead, the suit says, the city and state have created a process allowing bureaucrats to make the determinations based on their individual and personal opinions with no recourse or remedy. The suit asks the court for an order to prevent the government officials from enforcing a ban on “misleading or publicly objectionable” license plates until new rules and procedures can be created.
“He wants to be able to express himself, which is what the statute allows, the statute allows that you can pick any six letters, up to six letters, and any combination that you want to convey a message,” said Odquina’s attorney Kevin O’Grady. O’Grady says his client disagrees with Black Lives Matter’s positions and is also using the license plate to promote his business. At issue is viewpoint (content) discrimination, when a state offers a venue, such as specialty license plates, for some groups to convey their messages, but does not permit others like Odquina to express their views. Presumably Hawaii would not object to YEA BLM.
Odquina has precedent on his side when it comes to courts striking down state and local government restrictions on laws banning offensive license plates. In 2020, a federal judge struck down a similar law to Hawaii’s in California after it was challenged by people who had been denied requests for plates.
The California case shows that that state has a much more extensive and well defined list of things that it considers misleading or objectionable compared to Hawaii, including terms with sexual connotations, of lust or depravity, or vulgar terms, a term of contempt, prejudice, or hostility, an insulting or degrading term, a racially or ethnically degrading term or is a swear word or term considered profane, obscene, or repulsive, or has a negative connotation to a specific group, misrepresents a law enforcement entity or is a vulgar foreign or slang word. The California law goes on to specify procedures for adjudicating all that, including use of the Urban Dictionary and lists of gang symbols, and for how a plate may be taken back after issuance.
Yet despite its bureaucratic thoroughness compared to Hawaii’s almost haiku-like rendering of the same intent, California lost its case. In ruling against the state, the District Court judge wrote the Supreme Court has repeatedly held “the public expression of ideas may not be prohibited merely because the ideas are themselves offensive to some of their hearers.” The plaintiffs were allowed to keep their plates OGWOOLF, SLAAYRR and QUEER. BO11LUX was still rejected because the configuration “has a discernable sexual connotation or may be construed to be of a sexual nature.”
The issue is ripe for another pass by the Supreme Court. A New Hampshire court ruled in 2014 that the state couldn’t ban a plate that read COPS LIE. A Rhode Island judge ruled that a motorist had the right to display a license plate that read FKGAS. But Texas was able to bar FU COVID, NOPENIS, and CNN LIES from its vanity license plates. Then again, Maine allowed KISMYAS.
The critical finding in the California case is that license plates are to be consider private speech, a statement by the user protected by the 1A, and not an expression of government, even though they are technically government property. The court held that the government by making vanity plates available for sale gave citizens the right to consider what they say as private expression of opinion or support. The court said any restrictions on that expression must be both viewpoint neutral and reasonable. This is in contrast to the Supreme Court, which held specialty license plates are government speech, immune from First Amendment challenges, thus setting up one of the principle legal tussles Hawaii and Odquina will enjoin — whose speech is it, his or the government’s? Odquina meanwhile continues to drive around town expressing himself.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
China vs. U.S.: Privacy for Whom?
The New York Times ran an article on the use of surveillance tech in China. One wishes they would do the same for the U.S.
The NYT article came to some scary conclusions about autocratic China. Chinese authorities implement facial recognition tech everywhere they can, the police seek to connect electronic activity (making a call) to physical location, biometric information such as fingerprint and DNA is collected on a mass scale, and the government wants to tie together all of this data to build comprehensive profiles on troublesome citizens. The latter is the Holy Grail of surveillance, a single source to know all there is known about a person.
Should the Times (or China) wish to expand its review of invasive government surveillance technology, particularly those technologies which integrate multiple systems, it need look no further than its hometown police force, the NYPD, and data aggregated into the little-known Consular Consolidated Database (CCD) by the U.S. State Department.
Prior to 2021, when the New York City Council passed the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, citizens were left to piece together the various technologies used to surveil them based on scattered media reports. We know now the NYPD deploys facial recognition surveillance (and can retroactively employ facial recognition against video saved from one of 20,000 cameras), x-ray vans, Stingrays, ShotSpotters, and drones, among others, equipment all originally deployed in the Iraq and Afghan wars. But we still don’t know how many of these technologies are used in coordination with each other, and, as in China, that is the key to understanding their real effectiveness.
POST reporting and other sources offer some clues. The NYPD uses the smartphone-based Domain Awareness System (DAS), “one of the world’s largest networks of cameras, license plate readers, and radiological censors,” all created by Microsoft with video analytics by IBM. DAS also utilizes automated license plate reader (ALPRs) devices attached to police cars or fixed on poles to capture the license plates of all cars passing by. ALPRs can also capture photographs of cars, along with photos of the driver and passengers. This information is uploaded to a database where it can be analyzed to study movements, associations, and relationships. Facial Identification can then run photos, including from databases of arrest photos, juvenile arrest photos of children as young as 11, and photos connected to handgun permits. The system analyzes an image against those databases and generates potential matches in real-time.
Included in DAS is a translator application which helps officers communicate with community members who do not speak English, while of course also recording and storing their remarks. DAS ties in to ShotSpotter, a technology developed for the Iraq War which pinpoints the sound of gunfire with real-time locations, even when no one calls 911. This technology triangulates where a shooting occurred and alerts police officers to the scene, letting them know relevant information, including the number of shots fired, if the shooter was moving at the time of the incident (e.g., in a vehicle), and the direction of the shooter’s movement. DNA data can also be accessed, so wide-spread collection is a must. One area of activity outlined in Chief of Detectives Memo #17 instructs on how to collect “abandoned” DNA samples from objects such as water bottles, gum, and apple cores. For example, police officers are taught to wait for the suspect to take a drink or smoke, and collect the sample once a suspect throws the cup or butt away.
What is deployed in New York to aggregate sensor and bio data (including social media monitoring and cell phone locator services, which when tied to facial recognition can identify individuals, say who attend a protest, visit an AIDs clinic, etc.) will no doubt be coming soon to your town as the weapons of war all come home. The next step would be to tie together cities into regional and then state-wide networks. The extent to which information obtained from DAS is shared with federal agencies, such as immigration authorities, remains unknown. What we do know is the phrase “reasonable expectation of privacy” needs some updating.
Perhaps the largest known data aggregator within the Federal government is the innocent-sounding Consular Consolidated Database (CCD) administered by the U.S. Department of State. Originally a simple database created in the 1990s to track visa and passport issuances, the CCD is now one of the largest global databases of personal information, growing at a rate of some 35,000 records a day. The system collects data from both foreign visa applicants and American citizens to include but not limited to imagery for use with facial recognition, biometric data such as ten-fingerprint samples, home/business addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, financial information, race, gender, social security and alien registration numbers, passport information, certain Federal benefits, medical information, legal information, education information, family information, travel history, arrests and convictions, and social media indicators.
The CCD is especially valuable in that it is a database of databases, pulling together information collected elsewhere including abroad, as well as from some commercial databases and public records, and making the aggregate available both for individual search by identifiers like name, social security number or facial recognition, but also for very large scale analytic searches to identify patterns and trends. This massive pool of data is then made accessible to the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Justice, Office of Personnel Management, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and “other interagency partners” to include potentially intelligence services. In addition to the State Department, information is regularly input into the CCD by the FBI, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, DEA, ICE, IRS, DOD, Treasury, Health and Human Services (HHS), DHS, Interpol, and U.S. Marshal Service (USMS.)
Numbers of records held by CCD are not available, with the last public tallies documented in 2016 showing 290 million passport records on American citizens, 25 million records pertaining to American citizens living abroad, 184 million visa records of foreigners, and over 75 million photographs. Some 35,000 records are added to the CCD daily, so do the math given the existing tallies are up to 13 years old. As a point of comparison, Google’s database of landmark photos holds only five million records. The Library of Congress database lists 29 million books.
The New York Times article about surveillance in China is scary, showing what a vast, interconnected system is capable of doing in exposing a person’s life to scrutiny. The Chinese authorities are, however, realistic about their technological limitations. According to one bidding document, the Ministry of Public Security, China’s top police agency, believed one of their biggest problems was data had not been centralized. That Chinese problem appears well on its way to resolution inside the United States, and that is also quite scary.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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