WELL, GOOD: Tim Scott Revives Police Body Camera Legislation.. “Our nation has experienced too much pain and heartache from tragedies that could have been more clearly explained.”
Archive for 2017
May 19, 2017
THE SMARTEST HUMAN TRICK: Why the Future Is Always on Your Mind. The founder of positive psychology, Penn’s Martin Seligman, has joined with colleagues to start another field, prospective psychology. He and I argue in the NYT that Homo sapiens is a misnomer, because calling ourselves the “wise man” is more of a boast than a description. What makes us wise? What sets us apart? Other animals live in the moment, but we can’t stop thinking about tomorrow.
A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise. Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain, as psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered — rather belatedly, because for the past century most researchers have assumed that we’re prisoners of the past and the present.
Read the whole thing. Or check out the book-length version, Homo Prospectus.
WOULDN’T THAT BE THE WORST? After Mueller, Trump Critics Worry: Maybe There’s No Scandal.
OH NOES: After Mueller, Trump Critics Worry: Maybe There’s No Scandal.
Eli Lake is right: The DOJ’s appointment of widely-respected former prosecutor Robert Mueller to lead the special inquiry into the Trump campaign’s potential collusion with Russia is a reprieve for a Trump Administration in crisis—a reprieve that it will almost certainly squander, but a reprieve nonetheless.
How do we know? Because the responses from Trump’s most dogged critics on the Russia question betray a kind of anxiety about the Mueller appointment—an anxiety that the no-nonsense law enforcement wise man will lower the temperature in Washington without actually uncovering enough damaging material to bring down the President.
Take, for example, Josh Marshall declaring that while he has confidence in Mueller to identify and expose any criminal activities undertaken by Trump or his associates, he won’t be able to prosecute the real Trump-Russia wrongdoing: a labyrinthian “conspiracy” which may not even involve any illegal behavior. . . .
Since the summer before the election, Trump’s critics have been suggesting or sometimes stating outright that Russia is involved with a criminal conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of Trump’s inner circle. But now that an unimpeachable bulldog prosecutor has been named to probe these very allegations, the critics seem to be trying to move the goalposts.
Well, we know from the book Shattered that the Trump/Russia thing was cooked up to explain Hillary’s loss to the true believers. “Hillary declined to take responsibility for her own loss. Hillary kept pointing her finger at Comey and Russia. That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. For a couple of hours [Hillary and her aides] went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”
But will the Clinton Foundation’s dealings with the Russians — and with Saudi Arabia, and with the Gulf States — get similar attention? Why not?
WELL, YES: Beauty Isn’t Only in the Eyes of the Beholder — You Can Smell and Hear It Too.
“Most people might know what their type is — in terms of physical attractiveness — but they might not know what kinds of odors or voices they like,” said Groyecka. “It is that feeling when you find someone attractive, but you’re not really sure why you do.”
In the absence of visual cues, researchers found that an attractive voice or body odor elicited “prosocial behavior” and positive impressions among subjects. Actually, these elements can independently predict differences in reproductive and socioeconomic success.
Another important finding was that when sight, smell, sound were evaluated simultaneously, the effect was synergistic — combined, they provided more information than any single element could individually. Combining an attractive face, for example, with an attractive voice or scent, resulted in a higher overall judgment of attractiveness than a single aspect could predict.
The science is interesting, but the findings are hardly news to anyone who has ever dated, married, or even just hoped to do either one.
HAVE YOU HUGGED A FRACKER TODAY? Full tanks and tankers: a stubborn oil glut despite OPEC cuts.
After the first OPEC oil production cut in eight years took effect in January, oil traders from Houston to Singapore started emptying millions of barrels of crude from storage tanks.
Investors hailed the drawdowns as the beginning of the end of a two-year supply glut – raising hopes for steadily rising per-barrel prices.
It hasn’t worked out that way.
Now, many of those same storage tanks are filling back up or draining more slowly than investors and oil firms had expected, according to global inventory estimates and more than a dozen oil traders and shipping sources who told Reuters about storage in facilities that do not make their oil volumes public.
The stalled drawdowns shed light on the broader challenge facing OPEC – the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries – as it struggles to steer the industry out of the downturn caused by oversupply. With U.S. shale oil production surging, inventories remain stubbornly high and prices appear stuck in the low-$50s per-barrel range.
The market has not strengthened enough to drain many major storage facilities around the globe – which OPEC oil ministers had hoped would be a first step toward rebalancing what has been a buyer’s market since late 2014.
Don’t you just love a buyer’s market?
THE THING IS, TRUMP SUPPORTERS LOVE HIM MORE THE MORE THE USUAL SUSPECTS HATE HIM: The Case for Dumping Trump Rests With His Supporters.
If a few hundred — well, a few thousand, anyway — members of our political class were willing to commit seppuku, Trump’s supporters might be willing to talk.
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THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP WERE ELECTED, OPEN RACISM AND SEXISM WOULD BECOME COMMON. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Are you a ‘white cis man’ on a college faculty? Prof says to ‘resign from your position of power.’
Related: Yale Dean On Leave After “White Trash” Comments.
Also: UCLA paying students to fight ‘whiteness,’ ‘patriarchy.’
HMM: Senate Demands White House Tapes, Comey Memos On Just About Everyone. “Interesting that they also demand all the ‘Hillary’ related memos too… If Comey ‘memorialized’ all his interactions – like he said he did for the Trump memo – then he must have the ones discussed with Obama, Lynch, Yates etc… regarding the Clinton case?”
HARD PROOF THAT CHINESE COMPANIES ASSISTED NORTH KOREA’S BALLISTIC MISSILE PROGRAM: In February 2016 North Korea conducted a missile test. The missile malfunctioned and South Korea recovered pieces of the missile. Then the detective work began.
A team of UN technical experts and sanctions investigators issued a report in early 2017 agreeing with South Korean allegations that North Korea was not only obtaining key components and manufacturing equipment via China but also prohibited raw materials and cooperation from Chinese banks and companies to pay suppliers and hide these activities from outside scrutiny. The Chinese government still denies knowledge of these activities but the latest evidence was so detailed and well documented that China did admit it must be acted on.
More:
The Chinese government was forced to admit that certain Chinese firms were defying Chinese sanctions and smuggling the technology and some of the needed software and raw materials to North Korea.
Read the whole thing.
HYBRID WARFARE: How Russia Weaponized Social Media in Crimea.
During the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the Russian government spent more than $19 million to fund 600 people to constantly comment on news articles, write blogs, and operate throughout social media.[4] They intended to sway public and international opinion, overwhelm the voices of dissidents online, and create an image of a population supportive of the annexation. To accomplish this, social cyber attackers appealed to the pro-Russian population of Crimea by spreading rumors of hate and fear. One such rumor involved the crucifixion of a three-year-old child in the public square of Slovyansk by Ukrainian soldiers, but independent sources quickly debunked this story as false.[5]
Despite the falsehood of this story, people believed it as it spread among the population. The supporters of annexation accepted this story as truth because it appealed to their bias against the Ukrainian forces in the area. Pro-Russian cyber-attackers released several similar stories in an attempt to further polarize the population in Crimea. An example of this involved the story of an alleged emergency physician named Igor Rosovsky at the epicenter of the May 2014 Odessa violence who asserted that Ukrainian supporters attacked Crimean nationalists and burned them alive. When “Igor” attempted to treat the nationalists, the Ukrainian fighters stopped him and made disparaging anti-Semitic comments towards him.[6] This Facebook post spread rapidly among Russian social media sites such as Vkontakte, where users shared the story 5,000 times within 24 hours. Again, Western analysts debunked this story, like the Slovyansk crucifixion of a child.[7]
Despite the invalidity of such stories, social media platforms allow a message to reach millions of people faster than ever before. The rate of interactions on these platforms vary from two to 70 interactions per post per 1,000 users.[8] For those attempting to shape a narrative, this platform is one of the fastest ways to spread rumors and generate fear or hatred against their opposition. Teams of social cyber attackers such as those involved in the Russian annexation of Crimea target demographics already sympathetic to their cause and stoke that flame to inspire them to take action.
Read the whole thing.
The takeaway? A relatively tiny $19 million investment in social media played a major part in Russia’s lightning campaign to invade and annex a strategically vital peninsula. That’s a valuable lesson, and one Moscow won’t forget.
SEEMS LIKE IT WOULD OFFER INSUFFICIENT OPPORTUNITY FOR GRAFT: Could the military buy its guns online in the future?
The Defense Department may start doing a whole lot more online shopping in 2018, if Republican Rep. Mac Thornberry has his way.
The Texas chairman of the Armed Services Committee unveiled new legislation Thursday that aims to cut costly bureaucratic red tape at the Pentagon by allowing the military to buy everything from pens to treadmills from business-to-business sites such as Staples and Amazon.
That would free the federal government’s biggest bureaucracy from using its current “expensive” and “onerous” contracting and scheduling process to buy its commercial goods, according to Thornberry.
But could it also work for firearms?
“I may get myself in trouble here,” said Thornberry, easing into the topic during a press conference Thursday.
Military handguns are a prime — and somewhat notorious — example of the delays and waste of acquisition that the Republican chairman has been working to root out for the past two years, according to a panel of experts who testified to Armed Services earlier this week.
Well, they should at least buy their ammo from my former students at LuckyGunner.com.
HILLARY WON’T LIKE THIS: Elizabeth Warren Tests the Waters for 2020.
KURT SCHLICHTER: This Is A Coup Against Our Right To Govern Ourselves. “The blizzard of lies and distraction blowing through Washington is not just any routine stuffstorm, but a calculated attempt to bring down a president – our president, not the establishment’s president. And more than that, it’s an attempt to ensure that we never again have the ability to disrupt the bipartisan D.C. cabal’s permanent supremacy by inserting a chief executive who refuses to kiss their collective Reid. This is a coup against us. It’s a coordinated campaign by liberals and their allies in the bureaucracy and media to once and for all ensure their perpetual rule over us. We need to fight it, here and now, so we don’t have to fight it down at the bottom of this slippery slope.”
LET THEM EAT NUKES?: Ten million people are starving in Kim Jong Un’s North Korea.
F.H. BUCKLEY: Comey’s actions don’t show any Trump ‘obstruction’
The best evidence that that’s what Trump meant and how Comey understood it is what happened next: Nothing. Comey didn’t say anything about shutting down the investigation. And he didn’t resign.
If Comey had been ordered to stand down, I expect he would’ve quit. He didn’t — which suggests he didn’t think he had to abandon the investigation. Nor did he, it seems. Testifying before the Senate last week, acting FBI Director Andrew G. McCabe, a Comey loyalist and Democrat, said, “There has been no effort to impede our investigation to date.”
Before we rush to judgment, therefore, recall that false rumors have been squelched before. For example, based on anonymous sources, The New York Times has reported that Trump held up funding for the Russian investigation. However, this was debunked by McCabe. McCabe also rejected the idea that a special prosecutor was needed, as the FBI hadn’t been interfered with and would carry out the investigation scrupulously and thoroughly.
Squelching false rumors is supposed to be one of the functions of the press, but alas.
DEMOCRATS: Trump’s leaks are outrageous and treasonous. Hey, look how good Chelsea Manning looks in her new publicity photo!
WHAT? Uh-Oh: The House May Need to Vote on Health Care (Again!).
Republicans are using the budget “reconciliation” process to pass their health care bill, which allows them to push legislation through the Senate with a simple majority. But that depends on the bill meeting certain requirements — and one of them is that it reduces the deficit by at least $2 billion over the next decade.
The trouble is that Republicans voted on their House bill without waiting for the Congressional Budget Office, the federal agency that evaluates legislation, to finish its projections, which are expected next week.
Bloomberg News reported Thursday and NBC News has confirmed that House leaders have not formally sent their bill to the Senate on the chance that it fails to meet the deficit requirements.
The “repeal” effort has been handled… poorly.
GOOD MORNING: Liz Sheld’s has your TGIF morning brief.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “So far all the political violence associated with the election of Trump, from Inauguration to the latest campus rioting, has been on the Left. No pro-Trump crowds don masks, break windows or shut down traffic. The crudity in contemporary politics—from the constant sick jokes referring to First Family incest, smears against the First Lady, low attacks on the Trump children, boycotts of the Inauguration, talk and dreams of killing the president—is on the liberal/progressive side. The entertainment industry’s obscenity and coarseness have been picked up by mainstream Democratic officials, who now routinely resort to profanities like s–t and f–k to attack the president. Almost every ethical code—television journalists do not report on air private conservations with their guests during breaks, opposition congressional representatives do attend the Inauguration, Senators do not use obscenities—have been abandoned in efforts to delegitimize Trump. When Hillary Clinton assumed the mantle of the ‘Resistance,’ she was deliberately using a metaphor to convey the idea that she is analogous to a French patriot under occupation and Trump is a veritable foreign Nazi belligerent.”
AN IDEA SOOOO CRAZY:Swallow a single balloon, lose 34 pounds.