Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

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The isolated and unpredictable strongman in the Kremlin is not shy when it comes to reminding the world of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. If anyone “tries to stand in our way,” Putin warned on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, they would face “consequences with such as you have never seen in your entire history.” The returning possibility of nuclear war may be just one of the ways in which Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought our holiday from history to an abrupt end. But it’s the most alarming.


Into this tense standoff steps Joe Biden, seemingly convinced that he is the man for this fraught moment even as he demonstrates otherwise with nearly every public utterance. On a recent trip to Europe, the most important diplomatic mission of his presidency, he could barely open his mouth without issuing a foolhardy provocation. He threatened regime change in Moscow, implied that American troops were about to be sent into Ukraine and suggested the United States would respond “in kind” to a Russian use of chemical weapons.

These statements were widely labeled “gaffes.” To be sure, they were the misstatements of an aging politician not known for his rhetorical dexterity. But they also revealed hotheadedness, ill-discipline and self-righteousness: traits that were identifiable even in a younger, more alert Biden — and traits that now make the world a more dangerous place.

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“The adults are in charge again,” bragged Biden’s advisors when they entered the White House. This claim of competence was soon disproved by events, but it also obscured a tension in Biden’s foreign policy. The president elected on a promise to restore America’s alliances has also shown a clear determination to pare back America’s global role. The withdrawal from Afghanistan highlighted that contradiction: a move built on a serious conviction of the need to acknowledge the limits of American power — that enraged our closest allies.

At the time, many foreign policy restrainers and realists welcomed a president who appeared to see the world the same way as they. But in Ukraine, the administration has stumbled into a strategy that pleases no one. The camp that saw the logic of the Afghanistan withdrawal, however botched its execution, may have welcomed Biden’s explicit ruling out of escalatory steps like a no-fly zone and his willingness to let Europeans take the lead in assisting Ukraine. But they cannot be comfortable with the administration’s drift toward regime change in Moscow as a US objective.

Biden’s public declaration that Putin “cannot remain in power” may have been a gaffe that was quickly walked back, but the policy steps the US president has taken suggest that the removal of his Russian counterpart is his ultimate goal. From ratcheting up sanctions to admonishing Putin as a “war criminal” and a “thug,” these are not the steps of an administration putting de-escalation first.

Those who favor a bolder approach might agree with some of Biden’s rhetoric but find worryingly little action to back up the talk. That hazardous gap between rhetoric and policy isn’t limited to Ukraine. At a dangerous moment in history, Biden seemingly refuses to acknowledge the difficult choices and tough tradeoffs that lie ahead. This administration appears to think that Putin will be gone, Ukraine will be free, China will be contained, a deal will be reached with Iran that doesn’t give another regime a nuclear weapon and the US economy will fend off “Putin’s price rises.” Everything, in other words, will be just fine. And all without a meaningful change of course in US policy.

A few weeks ago I spotted this quote:

” “Climate change” is just a mental tattoo — a phrase we invoke with an air of scientific sophistication to give some sense of knowledgeability about the unknowable.”

That statement pretty much sums up the whole thing. Climate ‘science’ has become boring, mostly dotting i’s and crossing t’s (or worse yet, crossing i’s and dotting t’s). Even if we assume the science is ‘settled’, the policy discussion is even more boring – infeasible solutions that even if successfully implemented would very possibly leave us worse off than doing nothing (such has having inadequate electricity and fuel for heating during the winter).

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FBI Releases Documents on Investigation Into Death of Democrat National Committee Worker Seth Rich
The FBI has produced 68 pages relating to a Democrat National Committee (DNC) worker who was shot dead in 2016 in Washington, including an investigative summary that appears to suggest someone could have paid for his death.

Seth Rich, the worker, was shot dead in the early morning hours on July 16, 2016, near his home in the nation’s capital.

The murder, which is unsolved to this day, fueled widespread media coverage, especially after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange suggested that Rich was the person who provided internal DNC emails to WikiLeaks. Rich’s family has called the notion that Rich leaked documents to WikiLeaks a conspiracy theory.

The newly released files show top Department of Justice officials met in 2018 and discussed Rich’s murder. They reviewed Rich’s financial records and did not identify any unusual deposits or withdrawals.

Additionally, none of the witnesses interviewed during the investigation reported to authorities anything unusual about Rich’s life prior to the homicide.

One witness saw an individual walking away from the location where Rich was killed but thought Rich was merely drunk so did not alert authorities. They realized something bad had happened when they saw a bloodstain on the ground in the same place the following day, as well as police tape surrounding the scene.

A person whose name was redacted took Rich’s personal laptop to his house, according to one of the newly released documents. The page also indicates that authorities were not aware if the person deleted or changed anything on Rich’s personal laptop.

The FBI came into possession of Rich’s work laptop, the bureau previously revealed.

On another page, it was said that “given [redacted] it is conceivable that an individual or group would want to pay for his death.”

“That doesn’t sound like a random street robbery,” Ty Clevenger, a lawyer, told The Epoch Times.

Law enforcement officials have suggested Rich was the victim of an attempted robbery, according to news reports, though none of his belongings were stolen. They have said no evidence links the shooting to Rich’s employment by the Democratic National Committee.

The files were released this week in a lawsuit filed on behalf of Texas resident Brian Huddleston, who Clevenger represents.

Epoch Times Photo
Seth Rich, the voter expansion data director for the Democratic National Committee, in a file photograph. (LinkedIn)
Huddleston sued the FBI after it told him it would take 8 to 10 months in June 2020 to respond to his Freedom of Information Act request. Huddleston asked the FBI to produce all data, documents, records, or communications that reference Seth Rich or his brother, Aaron Rich.

A federal judge earlier this year ordered the FBI to produce documents concerning Rich by April 23. The FBI identified 576 relevant documents but only produced 68 of them to Huddleston.

The FBI has declined to speak about the lawsuit. Attorneys for Rich’s parents did not respond to requests for comment.

Clevenger said he found concerning how the government apparently does not know whether anything was deleted from Rich’s personal laptop.

The documents were largely redacted but the information that did get through “shows that their whole narrative is falling apart,” he added. “It’s a step in the right direction.”

The attorney plans to ask U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant, an Obama nominee, to produce unredacted copies for his perusal. The judge could rule that some redactions were improper.

Defendants could also face repercussions for not producing all of the documents they have concerning Rich, including fines.

U.S. Attorney Andrea Parker, who is representing the FBI, told the judge in a court filing this week that the bureau can only process 500 pages per month for each Freedom of Information Act request. She asked the court to give the bureau additional time to produce all of the relevant records.

Clevenger told the judge in a court filing this week that the private sector routinely processes 500 pages or more per day and that the government should be afforded no more than two weeks to produce the remaining 1,063 pages.

Follow Zachary on Twitter: @zackstieber
Follow Zachary on Parler: @zackstieber

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A coming update to Apple's iOS will let you know if an app wants to track you. Facebook isn't a fan.

A privacy change coming to the software that powers Apple's popular iPhone has prompted a war of words in Silicon Valley.

The iPhone maker will in the coming months roll out an update to its iOS 14 operating system that prompts you to give apps permission to track their activity across other apps and the web. That change may seem small. Lots of apps already track our web activity through default settings we accept when we install them.

Facebook, however, has been fuming about the change, which threatens the source of its $86 billion in annual revenue: targeted ads. The social network has waged a months-long campaign against Apple, running full-page ads in national newspapers and testing pop-ups inside the Facebook app to encourage users to accept its tracking. It's also alleged that Apple's changes are designed to help the iPhone maker's own business, rather than protect consumer privacy.

"Apple may say that they're doing this to help people, but the moves clearly track their competitive interests," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in January during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call. Apple CEO Tim Cook says the change is rooted in the company's belief that "users should have the choice over the data that is being collected about them and how it's used."

The dispute underscores a fundamental difference between the tech giants: how they make money. Apple sells smartphones and laptops and takes a cut of fees charged to app developers. Facebook sells ads that it can target precisely based on the trove of data it collects on its 2.8 billion monthly users. Those business models inform their approach to privacy.

Here's what you need to know about the fight between Apple and Facebook:

Is it not possible that we in our societies have duped tens of millions of young people into believing that the prolongation of their formal education would lead them inexorably into the sunny uplands of power, importance, wealth, and influence, when in fact many a PhD finds himself obliged to do work that he could have done when he was 16? No one likes to think that he has been duped, however (it takes two for fraud to be committed, after all), so he looks around for some other cause of his bitter disappointment. It isn’t ignoramuses who are pulling down the statues, but ignoramuses who think that they have been educated.

I'd make three points...
Prefatory, the case of so-called "hate crime" is instructive. Motive is not generally an element of an indictable crime. It is seldom -if ever- a proper part of the prosecution's or the defense's brief. It does have a cogent and obvious place in the penalty phase of a trial, after a conviction -- either as mitigation or enhancement of punishment.
(True, both prosecutors and defense consul often use such when making their case to a jury... that's not important: The judge's discretion limits their excesses! Well, that's the expectation...)

Codifying motive as a separable offence smacks of "thought-crime"!

1. The trope of "disparate impact" is defective, in logic and in law. Statistical reasoning -as practiced- is too weak to support a charge on its own, and as such contravenes the ancient right of a defendant to know what precisely the charges are, against him!

(To see how pernicious the rule of "disparate impact"  can be, see Massachusetts v. EPA. It countenances the importation of the Precautionary Principle into American law!)

2. The conflation of sex and gender is uncalled for. "Sex" means physical, biological determinants, not moods or (mis)conceptions, in Title VII... Nor does it subsume "sex acts" or proclivities.

3. The precidential status of dicta, properly called, needn't (I'd say shouldn't...) be elevated by judges to suit their own (or the supposed public's) understanding of changing mores: Writing law is the job of Congress.
Title VII can (and perhaps should) be amended... But not by judges, who then make it the job of Congress to correct misapplication of their laws!

So: Bostock was wrongly decided.

What else has to happen — how close does war, with all its horrors, have to come — before Congress closes the hatch on sequestration, before it eliminates the caps, whatever political compromises are necessary to eliminate them, and begins, in earnest, to rebuild the tools of power? (source)

After more than a century mining the unconscious, psychoanalysis is really showing its age.

Only 15 percent of members in the American Psychoanalytic Association are under 50. And traditional Freudian analysis — lying on a couch, talking about your childhood, day after day for years — is widely seen as a musty relic, far too expensive and intensive to fit into modern life.

But analysts aren’t ready to give up on Sigmund yet.
(source, and continuation)

Too lazy to create a new thread, after earlier (IIRC) pointing out this thread has expired?

The election of smaller parties gives rise to the principal objection to PR systems, that they almost always result in coalition governments.

Supporters of PR see coalitions as an advantage, forcing compromise between parties to form a coalition at the centre of the political spectrum, and so leading to continuity and stability. Opponents counter that with many policies compromise is not possible (for example funding a new stealth bomber, or leaving the EU). Neither can many policies be easily positioned on the left-right spectrum (for example, the environment). So policies are horse-traded during coalition formation, with the consequence that voters have no way of knowing which policies will be pursued by the government they elect; voters have less influence on governments. Also, coalitions do not necessarily form at the centre, and small parties can have excessive influence, supplying a coalition with a majority only on condition that a policy or policies favoured by few voters is adopted. Most importantly, the ability of voters to vote a party in disfavour out of power is curtailed.

All these disadvantages, the PR opponents contend, are avoided by two-party plurality systems. Coalitions are rare; the two dominant parties necessarily compete at the centre for votes, so that governments are more reliably moderate; the strong opposition necessary for proper scrutiny of government is assured; and governments remain sensitive to public sentiment because they can be, and are, regularly voted out of power. However, the US experience shows that this is not necessarily so, and that a two-party system can result in a "drift to extremes", hollowing out the centre, or, at least, in one party drifting to an extreme.

Nevertheless, on average, compared to countries using plurality systems, governments elected with PR accord more closely with the median voter and the citizens are more content with democracy.
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The only significant thing I ever did on ARPA NET was to get GPS funded. Of course that is too strong a statement; actually it was a lot more complicated than that.

What happened was that Francis X. Kane, the silent co-author of Possony and Pournelle THE STRATEGY OF TECHNOLOGY, had invented Global Positioning System while Director of Plans at USAF Systems Command, and had managed to get USAF to request and get funding. Then in the 70's Congress zeroed GPS out of the budget. Kane called me in hopes I had some resources to get it revived. I broadcast a message about that on ARPANET, and Lowell Wood, Livermore physicist and one of Teller's inner circle, saw it, sent me email to get details, got in touch with Kane, and went to Washington where he lobbied among his Congressional contacts to get it restored. It was restored and I think it would not have been done without Wood, who would not have heard about it were it not for ARPANET. GPS turns out to be important, but then we all knew it would be; the trick was convincing Congress.

That done, I had books to write and work to do. Commercial net accounts were coming, Loudon was inventing what became CompuServe after several evolutions and transformations and acquisitions, and BYTE was inventing BIX; I still held a clearance through having been President of Pepperdine Research and I still did some policy briefings for Air Force Plans and Doctrines, and so had all the communications I needed. Stallman, one of my friends from the MIT ARPANET, was done with most of his work there (I was an early beta tester of emacs, and some of my naïve observations found their way into the final product), and I found I spent most of my time on ARPANET playing ZORK, an activity for which I had no time; it was a gift of time to find that account closed. I resented the way it was done, but not enough to speak to anyone in the Pentagon about it. I see that the story still reverberates after twenty years (it all happened in CP/M S-100 days, mostly at 300 baud; 1200 was a godsend). Peace.
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While on campus, we noticed something different about the Oldenburg Sculpture.
A safety pin has been added by art student Jeremy Jirsa.
"I thought it would be a good opportunity to use the safety pin as a representation to bring our city together," said Jirsa, Penn student.
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The Rolling Stones have asked presumptive Republican US presidential nominee Donald Trump to stop playing their songs at his campaign events.
After effectively sealing the Republican nomination on Tuesday night, Mr Trump played the Stones hit Start Me Up as he left the stage following a victory speech.
However, the British rock band said in a statement on Wednesday: “The Rolling Stones have never given permission to the Trump campaign to use their songs and have requested that they cease all use immediately.”

The opening bass riff from this song "was something that Tony Butler used to play just as a warm-up," said Steve Churchyard, the engineer for the record. It has been used as the opening theme 'bumper' for Rush Limbaugh's popular American talk radio program since 1984, during his days at KFBK in Sacramento, California. He didn't use the lyrics, but Limbaugh said in 2011 that he chose it because of the irony of a conservative using such an anti-conservative song, though he mainly liked its "unmistakable, totally recognizable bass line." In 1999, Rolling Stone magazine reported that, according to Hynde's manager, Limbaugh had neither licensed the song nor asked permission to use it. According to Rolling Stone, EMI took action after Limbaugh told a pair of reporters in 1997 that "it was icing on the cake that it was [written by] an environmentalist, animal rights wacko and was an anti-conservative song. It is anti-development, anti-capitalist and here I am going to take a liberal song and make fun of [liberals] at the same time." EMI issued a cease and desist request that Limbaugh stop using the song, which he did. When Hynde found out during a radio interview, she said that her parents loved and listened to Limbaugh and she did not mind its use. A usage payment was agreed upon which she donated to PETA. She later wrote to the organization saying, "In light of Rush Limbaugh's vocal support of PETA's campaign against the Environmental Protection Agency's foolish plan to test some 3,000 chemicals on animals, I have decided to allow him to keep my song, 'My City Was Gone', as his signature tune..."