More on that Sussman trial

This was written back in September, when the indictment was first brought:

While lying to the FBI is a serious crime, deserving of attention and in many cases prosecution, this charge looks dicey. The entire case comes down to Baker’s recollection. But Baker himself testified to Congress in October 2018 that he did not recall whether or not Sussman had represented himself as representing Clinton or the Democratic Party. The entire case turns on the allegation that Sussman lied to Baker. Yet Baker — essentially the only direct witness to the purported lie — testified three years ago that he could not remember what Sussman said about the key issue in the case.

As troubling as that is, it’s not even the biggest problem for the prosecution. The indictment discloses that, when Baker spoke to an FBI assistant director about the meeting with Sussman, the assistant director’s notes state that Sussman “Represents DNC, Clinton Foundation, etc.” So the crux of the indictment is that Sussman didn’t disclose to the FBI that he represented Clinton — but the FBI knew he represented Clinton anyway. That, folks, is what we prosecutors call a problem.

You should read the whole article.

Oh, and Bill Barr calling the Russiagate investigation "seditious" - he is going down in history as the worst Attorney General the nation has ever had, no doubt about it.  

Update: 

AR-15s discussed

Here's Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent talking about AR-15s in the Washington Post (and I'll gift link again, so you should be able to read it all):

Indeed, among some Republicans, the rationale for doing little to restrict access to AR-15-style weapons seems untethered from any real-world considerations. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) recently opined that people need AR-15s to prepare for a future doomsday in which law and order breaks down entirely and police protection essentially vanishes.

Meanwhile, as The Post’s Colby Itkowitz reports, AR-15 variants have appeared in numerous GOP ads of late, and they are often brandished as little more than cultural signifiers. Assault-style weapons have taken on a kind of “own the libs” cultural life of their own: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) website recently enthused that such weaponry “TRIGGERS the Fake News Media and Democrats all across the country.”

Federal law seems decades behind this cultural shift. “The concept of what a long gun is in American culture has changed a lot in recent decades,” Mark Follman, the author of “Trigger Points,” a new book on mass shootings, told us.

Follman noted that the long gun was once understood as being primarily about hunting. But now, he said, rifles are increasingly marketed as a weapon of aggression and an “object of masculinity,” with a deliberate eye toward encouraging the “militarization” of gun culture.

In this sense, federal law is trapped in something of an anachronism. “The law may need to catch up with the way these weapons are perceived by 18-year-olds,” Follman said, citing massacres in Texas and Upstate New York.

There’s still another layer of perversity here. As Follman notes, mass shootings were historically carried out by semiautomatic handguns. “But that’s begun to shift in recent years,” he said. “More and more of these attacks are being carried out with AR-15s.”....

Ryan Busse, a former gun company executive who has emerged as a fierce critic of the industry, notes another absurdity: The age was set at 21 for handguns, Busse says, in part precisely because they were deemed more likely to be used by criminals against human victims than rifles would be.

“Now we have the AR-15,” Busse told us, which is the “most lethal, offensive thing out there.” Yet it isn’t treated as on a par with handguns, Busse notes, adding: “This demonstrates how behind-the-times our gun laws really are.”

The article is too softly worded, really:  I would prefer if it more directly said that Right wing political paranoia and culture warring, encouraged by money grubbing Right wing pundits and the gun industry itself, is what stops reasonable gun control measures in the USA. 

 

Yes, this does worry me a bit

Institute full of Right wing kook influencers

Ross Douthat had an interesting column recently about the Claremont Institute, the conservative think tank which (I had forgotten) published the absurd Flight 95 Election essay in 2016, that tried to argue the country was on a catastrophic course unless loon Trump took over.  

Today, I see that one of its publications has an article by Jim Troupis in which he makes mad claims that the 400 2000 Mules movie shows that the courts failed in not taking the election fraud cases seriously.  Jim Troupis is discussed in this article.   

The problem is, of course, that the internet so easily spreads such material into a Right wing disinformation echo chamber audience that finds it convincing.   I mean, these guys sound serious:  they are "influencers" who the gullible see no reason to question.    (And when other Right wing influencers think they are wrong - Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro have refused to endorse the 400 2000 Mules theory - they don't want to actually spend time telling their audience that one of their Tribe is wrong and misleading them.)      

PS:  don't know 400 got stuck in my mind as the number of Mules.   Just like how I keep thinking "Coorey" is spelt "Cooroy" I guess!  I do write most posts pretty quickly these days, so sue me...:)

 

So much for the Durham investigation

Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine has a clear, concise take on the failed Sussman prosecution, well worth clearing cookies to read:  

John Durham Tried to Prove Trump’s Russiagate Theory. Instead He Debunked It.

Trump’s prosecutor face-plants.

From a conservative site point of view, even  Ed Morrissey seems to acknowledge there was always reason to suspect the prosecution would fail.  

Update:   Here, I will gift link to Greg Sargent in the Washington Post:  John Durham's flop is only the latest of many Trump cover-up failures.   Let's extract some of it too:

To appreciate the significance of this moment, you have to remember that Trump and Republicans have spent years working to show that there was never any serious cause for concern about the idea that Russia went to extraordinary lengths to try to swing the 2016 election to Trump.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III did not find evidence that Trump criminally colluded with Russia. But he found that Russia interfered “in sweeping and systematic fashion” and that Trump’s campaign expected to “benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” Mueller also refrained from explicitly exonerating Trump of criminal obstruction of justice....

 

“The Durham probe has turned into what conservatives always accused the Mueller probe of being: a politically premised fishing expedition that has failed to discredit its original target, namely the Russia investigation,” prominent national security lawyer Bradley Moss told us.

None of these efforts have been able to disappear a fundamental truth: The stubborn facts show that Russiagate actually was an extraordinarily grave and disturbing scandal.

Among them: the well-documented Kremlin effort to gin up support for Trump and opposition to Clinton on American social media. Their hacking of Democratic Party systems, resulting in data dumps by WikiLeaks to aid the Trump campaign. The copious contacts between Trump, his family and his advisers with Russian officials. The fact that his own campaign chairman was secretly sharing confidential campaign information with a Russian intelligence officer. And so much more.

Sargent then lists the other ways in which the Trump team has tried to undermine "Russiagate" as a scandal.   But go read the whole thing.

Hurry up and retire, Chris

 

Voting systems and their effect on policy

Forgot to post this yesterday, but it was great to see on the weekend that Michael Mann (with the help of Malcolm Turnbull) pointing out that the features of the Australian electoral system - independently set electorate boundaries, compulsory voting ensuring none of the ridiculous US effort just to get people to vote, and a preferential voting system - are a key reason why you can get a significant centrist cross bench that is likely to be very significant in forcing faster action on climate change.  

The harm in first past the post voting seems really underappreciated - and I don't buy that James Allan argument in an article I linked to last week:

The least conservative Liberal (and National) government in Australia’s history lost last weekend.

There was no enthusiastic move to Labor. In fact, both major parties scored woefully low first preference counts. In any country with a first-past-the-post voting system both big parties would be reeling. There’s a reason why only Australia and one small South Pacific nation uses preferential voting; it’s because it works as a protection racket for the two big parties.

Which is why, I suppose, James, we see such influence of independent members of Congress (and Presidential candidates) in the USA?

Children in America - some remarkable figures

From an eye opening NPR article "The US is uniquely terrible at protecting children from gun violence", this table:

What are the equivalent figures in Australia, I wondered.  I can't find a site that lumps all children up to 19 together, but there is this:

You would have to suspect that an awful lot of the third column is made up of 20 to 24 year olds.   I strongly suspect that the Australian death rate for up to 19 year olds might be around 3 to 4 per 100,000, and therefore below that of the US.  But how substantially below - I don't know.

PS:  on another positive note (for Australia, at least), it's surprising to read of the reduction in youth deaths overall in the period 1999 to 2019:

Between 1999 and 2019, among young people aged 15–24:

• the death rate fell by 44%, from 72 deaths per 100,000 young people in 1999 to 41 deaths per 100,000 in 2019
• the rate fell for both males (down 46%, from 105 to 57 per 100,000) and females (down 39%, from 38 to 23)
• the rate fell by 45% across both age groups: for those aged 15–19, from 59 to 32 deaths per 100,000; for those aged 20–24, 86 to 48 deaths per 100,000

 I don't know the explanation for that.... 

Update:   I just thought to look up the rate of children killed by firearms in Australia.  Haven't found it yet, but there is a study showing the rate of childhood injuries from firearms (not deaths) in NSW in a recent period is .8 per 100,000 population.   The rate of actual death from those injuries would, of course, be substantially lower.

Things I learnt on the weekend

1.    Someone had told me in January that the Harris Farm Markets shop in West End was terrific, and my wife and I finally got there on Saturday.   It is great, and I wondered if this was a new company.  But Googling it, I see that it has been down south for a long time, although I don't know whether every store is as big and impressive as the outlet at West End.   I particularly liked the somewhat steam punky contraption you could use to select your sourdough loaf from -  well, actually, it is excessive, but shows a certain dedication to fancy shop fit out you don't often see.   The West End markets down the road are still better for cheap fruit and vegetables, but parking is usually impossible unless you pay $4.

2.    I knew that some ancient Greek dude had used shadows in wells and trigonometry to work out the size of the Earth, but I don't recall knowing before that they had even used it to work out the distance between the Earth and Moon.   Dr Becky explained, as well as showing how you can do it yourself:

3.  Something I didn't learn:  how humans get used to this sort of motion without getting dizzy or sick:

 

I have mixed feelings about a woman making a living this way: doing dangerous and silly things is something the more expendable male of the species is more suited to do, no?

Thinking about influencers

Gee, there's a real lack of stories that make me feel happier today. 

Even before the terrible event this week in Texas, I have been thinking about how the wingnut Right maintains its beliefs in America.   

It seems impossible to overestimate the effect of hyperpartisan Right wing media in this.   Ted Cruz ludicrously decides to run with "too many doors" as the main thing to be addressed to reduce school shootings (oh, and mental health, while his Republican governor cuts funding for mental health services), and he can be assured that his "ideas" will be run for hours Fox News with no scepticism at all - with full endorsement, in fact.

When independent news challenges him, he accuses the media of "hating America" and retreats, and he will be fully supported on Newsmax, Fox, and the scores of Right wing podcasts which are devoted to selling a story of everything the Democrats say is part of an evil conspiracy to kill freedom and institute socialism.   Tucker Carlson gets to encourage paranoia that "they're coming to take your guns" again - a line that, by no co-incidence at all, was ramped up to the max when there was a black president - and gets to mutter about "civil war" if they try it.

Basically, the country has been ruined by "influencers":  media and media personalities that make a living by promoting one, politically hyperpartisan, view, and the way Right wing supporters cocoon themselves in that information environment.   

It's awful, and so hard to see how it is going to change.... 

Astounding lack of common sense

So, from this BBC report, it looks like there is going to be a blame laying argument over whether a school door was locked or not:

After crashing his truck into a ditch near the school, the gunman emerged and began firing an AR-style rifle at two people who were exiting as funeral home.

The suspect then jumped a fence and began firing "multiple, numerous rounds" at the building, Mr Escalon said.

As he approached the entrance to the school he "was not confronted by anybody", the ranger said.

According to Uvalde County Independent School District Officers protocol, campuses are required to have staff "who patrol door entrances, parking lots and perimeters". Teachers are told to keep doors locked at all times.

"We will find out as much as we can why it was unlocked," Mr Escalon said. "Or maybe it was locked. But right now, it appears it was unlocked."

 Yet the media has been full of photos of the school, like this:

I mean, seriously:  do they think a door is the only way into a ground floor classroom with windows?

The new government vibe: flim flam has been replaced with quiet substance

This is humour, of course:

But really, I'm sure much of the public much be sharing the feeling that it really does look like a serious government of substance after a lost decade of Coalition time wasting.   Morrison's big thing was meant to be marketing, except that he was pretty woeful about it with foreign nations.

PS:  Phil Cooroy, in a column in which he sounds glum about the election result, says it has a very Kevin Rudd vibe, where he and Wong rushed to a climate conference within day of his election.

The difference, the way I see it, is that Rudd was always into self promotion in a way that suggested more style over substance (in a Morrison-esque sort of way.)   I always thought he was a bit of a poseur.  The thing that I find appealing about Albonese is that he has done the minimum in terms of that kind of self promoting PR. 

Police tactics questionned

A lot of people are now questioning whether the police effectively allowed the killer time to kill, while holding back parents on the street.

But to be fair, it is not yet entirely clear as to whether the police really could do something else to prevent the deaths (you would have to first know how quickly he killed after locking the class room door, and whether access through windows was possible) but nonetheless, it is true that the incident makes a mockery of the wingnut argument that all you need is more and more security at schools and this is readily stopped:

 

And this:

Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District had doubled its security budget in recent years, according to public documents, in part to comply with state legislation passed in the wake of a 2018 school shooting in which eight students and two teachers were killed. The district adopted an array of security measures that included its own police force, threat assessment teams at each school, a threat reporting system, social media monitoring software, fences around schools and a requirement that teachers lock their classroom doors, according to the security plan posted on the district’s website. 

It happened anyway.

I have also seen it said on twitter that shooter drills have gone on so long now in the US that a student who wants to shoot the place up knows exactly what to expect, and can work around it.

 

Profound or banal can be a fine line

From a couple of reviews of a new book out about Wittgenstein (a translation of some of his "diary" entries made during WW1).  First, in the Guardian:

The Tractatus is written as a series of numbered propositions, closer in form to modernist poetry than philosophical treatise. Its central ideas can be traced back to the notebooks Wittgenstein kept during the early years of the conflict. The right-hand side of each spread was used to set out his evolving thoughts on logic and language. The left-hand side was saved for his personal notes, written in a simple code in which the letters of the alphabet were reversed (Z = A, and so on).

It is these private remarks that are published in English here for the first time, edited and translated by Marjorie Perloff. They range from complaints about the other soldiers – “a bunch of swine! No enthusiasm for anything, unbelievable crudity, stupidity & malice!” – to the number of times he masturbates (“Yesterday, for the first time in 3 weeks”). He recounts his depression – “like a stone it presses on my chest. Every duty turns into an unbearable burden” – and his living conditions. These are accompanied by constant updates on how his work is going. And by “work”, he always means philosophy. “Remember how great the blessing of work is!” he writes. This work is the focus; the war, a backdrop....

...in the material on the left-hand pages Wittgenstein first begins to reflect on the inner self, on God’s presence in the world, on what is required for life to make sense. It can sometimes seem irrelevant to the discussion of logic taking place on the right-hand side. “Have thought a great deal about all sorts of things,” he writes, “but curiously enough cannot establish their connection to my mathematical train of thought.”

And then in 1916, facing death on the frontline, the connection is forged. Paradox in logic arises when you try to say those things that can only be shown. But that applies equally to God, the self and meaning. As he writes on a left-hand page, “What cannot be said, cannot be said”. The purview of ethics, like the purview of logic, lies outside the realm of what can be stated in language. And thus we get to the seventh and final statement of the Tractatus: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

An odd thing to say about a philosopher here:

Even the masturbation is hard to separate from the philosophy: it happens when work is going well. For Wittgenstein, it seems, masturbation and philosophy are both expressions of living in the face of death.

 And in The New Yorker, the bit about Carmen Miranda makes me laugh:

The American philosopher Norman Malcolm, who was a student of Wittgenstein’s, writes of the “frequent and prolonged periods of silence” in his classes, of how sometimes, “when he was trying to draw a thought out of himself, he would prohibit, with a peremptory motion of the hand, any questions or remarks.” Malcolm goes on, “His gaze was concentrated; his face was alive; his hands made arresting movements; his expression was stern. One knew that one was in the presence of extreme seriousness, absorption, and force of intellect. . . . Wittgenstein was a frightening person at these classes. He was very impatient and easily angered.”

Many things angered him: someone failing to tend to one of his houseplants, a student unable to formulate a thought. (“I might as well talk to this stove!”) But he could sustain the intensity for only so long. A couple of hours of that, and he would be ready for an excursion to the “flicks.”

He loathed British films and generally insisted on American ones, being a particular fan of Carmen Miranda. (He was also a devotee of the pulpy murder mysteries served up in the magazine Detective Story.) He would sit in the front row so that he could see nothing but the screen—perhaps fearing memories of the draining lecture. Woe betide any companion who tried to talk to him. There was only the movie on the screen, and Wittgenstein, rapt in his seat, munching on a cold pork pie.

Anyway, as to the question in the title of the post:

Clever students can eventually make sense of the logic and turn out elegant little essays about the “picture theory of meaning,” “logical atomism,” and “the saying/showing distinction.” But cleverness seems the wrong virtue to employ for understanding a man who tells us, mysteriously, that the “world of the happy man is quite another than that of the unhappy man” (6.43). Or that “he lives eternally who lives in the present” (6.4311). Taken out of context, the seeming mysticism comes perilously close to kitsch. Some clever people (starting with Russell) have concluded that we’d do well not to bother with it.

But others see in those remarks a call to a virtue rarer than cleverness.

And:

Sometimes there are philosophical remarks that are familiar from “Culture and Value,” a volume of miscellaneous observations which drew from the verso pages of these notebooks. “When we hear a Chinese man talking, we are inclined to take his speech as so much inarticulate gurgling,” he writes. “But someone who knows Chinese will be able to recognize the language inside the sound. Just so, I often cannot recognize the human being inside the human being.” As is the case with many of Wittgenstein’s aphorisms, it is a real question whether the observation is profound or banal.

Finally:

His tendency to turn every human encounter into a confrontation, a reckoning, sounds an awful lot like moralism. But he was not moralistic in the sense of imposing on people the demands of a received body of rules. Compulsory seriousness might be closer to the mark, although his seriousness was compatible with a deep strain of silliness: he was capable of writing campy letters, of joining his friends at the local fairground, of playing the demanding part of the moon in an impromptu reënactment of celestial movements. An intensely rational man—he had, after all, started off as a logician—he loathed mere reasonableness, a squalid ideal for squalid people.

PS:  I've left out the other bits about his sexuality (primarily homosexuality, but it seems he was uncomfortable with sexuality generally speaking.)   This bit was dryly funny:

Briefly, there was talk of marriage to a Swiss woman, Marguerite Respinger, a relationship that appears to have involved a considerable amount of kissing. But he made it clear, during a prenuptial vacation that he decided should be dedicated to solitary Bible study, that the marriage was to be chaste and childless. (She demurred.)

 

He is a genuine moron

 As note in the thread following:

Update:

One very small, tiny, but kind of pathetic, thing to apparently be grateful for after the Texas shooting

I've had a look at the Alex Jones Inforwar site a couple of times since yesterday, to see whether his (and his companies) being successfully sued by the parents of Sandy Hook has stopped him from spruiking this latest appalling event as a conspiracy that didn't really happen.

And yes, as far as I can tell, he and his site is not going down that path again.  [He is, however, suggesting that it is "convenient" that it is happening in an election year, as if there is still some Leftist conspiracy involved.  It's just that he is not doing the awful damage to the families when his conspiracy nut followers believe they were involved in a politically staged fake event.]

But isn't it shocking and pathetic that the only way he has been forced into that is by parents taking tortuous and expensive legal actions (which still have not reached finality - damages are yet to be worked out) instead of Jones being called out and punished by politicians.

There is also a column by someone other than him that further demonstrates that it is the special brand of American paranoia and money, utilised cynically by the Right, that prevents any serious action on gun control.   It's the line that only it's widespread gun ownership that prevents American becoming an authoritarian socialist/communist hellhole, and that the true motive of all and any suggestion of gun control measures is actually to disarm the entire nation so that the evil Left can have its way.

Update:  interesting column by a guy who used to be in the gun industry, and now works for gun control. 

Man, I'm glad Uhlmann is retiring

Dare I say it (sorry, Tim! - and Jason if you visit here) but the opening of Chris Uhlmann's commentary on the election helps confirm my allergy to high brow poetry as an artform.   I'm just not enough of a pretentious wanker for it, I think!:

After the concession and victory speeches were made in the sleepless small hours of Sunday morning, a line from The Journey of the Magi worried away in my head: “Were we led all that way for birth or death?”

T.S. Eliot continues: “I had seen birth and death but thought that they were different; this birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death.”

I have no idea what that means.   And when does Uhlmann retire - can't be long now, surely.

A pretty remarkable result

I've seen a similar graph before, but never shared it here.   This version is from the New York Times, and I'm posting because of the Australian result:

And so is this:
 

Everyone knows there's nothing new to be said, but I will say this...

The clearest sign of the American Right being absolutely nuts is when the response to an Elementary school mass shooting is this:

Ken Paxton, the attorney general for Texas, told Fox News that more teachers should carry guns.....'Nothing is going to work perfectly, but that, in my opinion it's the best answer to this problem.'

Yeah, because when Mrs Smith signed up to be a teacher of 6 year olds 30 years ago, she went into it for the excitement of learning to become a crack shot so she could take out the nutter with a semi automatic with no risk of accidentally shooting one of her own kids.  

Update:  the bitter reality - 

 

Very mixed feelings

I fit broadly into a "trans sceptic" category - in that I usually agree with most things that are said on the "TERF" side of the argument, and think there are some ridiculous extremes on the pro-trans side, and really cannot stand their attempt to shut down all argument about the difficult margins of the issue (such as the appropriate level of medical treatment to give a under 18 year old) by calling all questions "trans phobia" or such like.

But I really wish there were comedians that I actually liked who are prepared to take on the issue as a subject of comedy.  The thing is, I already found Bill Maher, Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais not very appealing in their comedy style - it's hard to put my finger on it, but they all share some sort of smart alecky air which I don't find very likeable.   (Mind you, as readers would recall, I am pretty resistant to all stand up comedy as an art form.)

So it's with very mixed feelings that these three are the ones who have decided to take on the subject, and cop a mountain of criticism for doing so.

Part of the problem is no doubt that it is very, very difficult to deal with this as a subject in comedy at all without risking genuine upset to families that do have a traumatic time with the issue.   I mean, I can understand parents of a depressed, apparently trans, teen really not wanting to read about any attempted jokes on the subject at all.   On the other hand, it's pretty clear that all of these comedians are trying to attack some of the extremes of the pro-trans movement, and no doubt would not want to wish ill on an adult who has gone through the trans process. 

So it all leaves me with very, very mixed feelings.

Overall, I think it probably is safest to give up attempts at comedy on the subject.  But is that conceding too much to the pro-trans attitude that everything that is ever said in disagreement is an "attack" and "phobia" and "hate speech"?

A difficult issue...