the left realizes too late that political correctness is a virus...,

nationalreview |  Once upon a time, “political correctness” was little more than a benign left-wing version of old-church-lady tut-tutting. Today, by contrast, the designation is used to describe what has become a sprawling, unhinged, and invariably unfalsifiable conspiracy theory that can be used to dismiss anybody who violates this morning’s edition of the progressive catechism. “Gosh,” one can almost hear DeBoer and Chait asking themselves, “have we unleashed a brigade of poorly educated, parodically self-indulgent, and chronically illiberal morons into our movement, the better to destroy it from within? And, if we have, will we ever be able to rid ourselves of them?”

The answer to the latter question, one suspects, may well be “No,” for as Hollywood has taught us repeatedly over the years, it does not pay to unleash unpredictable viruses into the ecosystem — even if one gains temporarily by doing so. And make no mistake, “political correctness” is a virus — a nasty, cynical, destructive sickness that is akin in both theory and in practice to the sort of irritating malware that pushes endless streams of nonsensical dialogue windows onto your grandmother’s computer and prevents her from e-mailing her friends. In the “politically correct” settings that Chait and DeBoer are describing, no sooner has a freethinking person started to say, “Well, I think” — than a grotty little pop-up box has appeared to interrupt him with a stream of tosh. “Error 349xxf9: Privileges unchecked,” a typical response might read. Or, if we are dealing with a more serious case: “Error 948xxer11: Tolerance Level Low: Fault at LGBT Sector Cis*Trans*Kin: Intersectionality Improperly Allied.” As within computing, the genius is the panic that this provokes. Just as scareware thrives on the elderly’s touching belief that they can “break” the computer by clicking on the wrong buttons, so today’s young are so terrified of politically-correct bullying that they fail to do what is obviously necessary, which is rolling their eyes, clicking quietly on “cancel,” and uninstalling the problem completely. The Left is arguing about the right level of “political correctness”? A plague on all their houses. Want to go to the pub?

good thing melissa was there to save you bra, bet you cried inconsolably in your pillow...,

wkamaubell |  Quickly Melissa gathered herself and our daughter and we left. Much sooner than we would have wanted to in a perfect world… or even in just a kind of okay world. Melissa talked to your employee. Melissa explained that although we had eaten there twice that day and even though she loved the Elmwood Cafe that we would not be back after the racism that we had just experienced.

That’s when your employee told my wife, “I don’t think it was a race thing.”

Ummm… actually a black man being told to leave a restaurant because the restaurant believes that his presence is harassing four white women and their kids, even though there is literally no evidence to support that is TEXT BOOK racism. It is so old school it has a wing in the racism museum, right between the sit-ins at lunch counters and a southern redneck telling a black man on a business trip, “You ain’t from around here, are ya, boy?” My wife told your employee in no uncertain terms that we ABSOLUTELY knew it WAS a race thing, because we live with this shit everyday. Full disclosure, I heard about this exchange after it happened when we were headed home. While my wife was talking to your employee, I was cooing at my daughter in the car, for two reasons. 1) I love my daughter’s fat cheeks and big hazel eyes. And 2) I knew if I stood over my wife with my 6’4”, 250lb frame that it could very easily be spun that I was standing over your employee, and maybe that I was trying to intimidate her, or even worse that I was getting aggressive. I didn’t want to end up a hashtag. Again, we live with this shit everyday.

And look I understand that on College Avenue in “Berserkeley” that you might get some characters coming through your establishment that you might not want to serve. And it is your right to refuse service. For example, when we had breakfast that morning, there was a white guy with dreadlocks sitting directly across from your doorway spare change-ing everyone who went into and out of your restaurant. And I could understand if a business thought he was bothering people and if that business had asked him to leave. But he was there the entire time we had breakfast, at least an hour, and I didn’t see anyone tell him to, “SCRAM!” But when I stood amicably talking to my wife for a few minutes, it was a different story.

scientific authori-tay shouted down by popular skepticism...,

WaPo |  Not surprisingly, many scientists — whether they design climate models or genetically engineer crops — feel they are under assault. In just five years, since the latest survey in 2009, the number of AAAS members who feel that “today is a good time for science” has plummeted from 76 percent to 52 percent. There is increasing skepticism about American global leadership in science and the way science is taught in schools. Scientists are also increasingly dismayed that government regulations — particularly on food safety and environmental management — are influenced more by public sentiment that scientific evidence. It now costs tens of millions of dollars to get a new genetically modified crop variety past cautious government bureaucrats, because of the public’s fears of modified food; whereas new seeds developed using chemical or radiation mutagenesis can go straight to market and even be labeled organic.

There are serious implications for democratic governance when large minorities — or even, in the case of GMOs, majorities — of the general public ignore or disbelieve the scientific consensus. With vaccines the implications can be immediate: witness the recent measles outbreak in California. On climate change, public support for urgent decarbonization measures is being undercut, while food security and agricultural sustainability is under threat by activists aiming to prohibit technological innovation in seeds.

Lobbyists and activists who promote their ideological agendas and financial interests over those of good science and public policy must take much of the blame for this situation. But scientists also have to be better communicators. With social media, everyone has a megaphone, however well- or ill-informed they are. If scientists want the public to understand their research, they have to spend more time sharing and explaining it to the public. This is the goal of the newly launched Cornell Alliance for Science, which aims to bridge the gap between scientists and the rest of society — in particular on genetically modified crops.

Effective governance in a democratic society depends on voters being able to make choices based on accurate information. If the voices of scientific experts continue to be drowned out by those of ideologues, whether from left or right, America risks moving even farther away from the Enlightenment values on which the republic was founded. Such a shift would harm everyone – whether or not they believe the Earth is warming.

can softheaded yahoos and dingalings be scholastically maneuvered through their cognitive bottlenecks?

newrepublic |  Climate is changing and climate has always changed and always will,” Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a recent address to the Senate. “The hoax is that there are some people who are so arrogant to think they are so powerful they can change climate. Man can’t change climate.” Inhofe has been arguing for years that only God and His natural works—not the activities of humankind—can affect the climate. "[M]y point is, God's still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous," he said in a 2012 address given to a Voice of Christian Youth America radio program. And in his theological belief that the environment is outside of humanity’s control, Inhofe is not alone.

For evangelical Protestants, accepting climate change but attributing it to God’s direct or indirect intervention, rather than human activity, appears to be the new party line, despite the efforts of evangelical climate scientists like Katharine Hayhoe. Recent polls suggest evangelicals are more likely than any other religious cohort to chalk worsening natural disasters up to the apocalypse, instead of human impacts on the environment.

once war, famine, energy shortages, depression hit - we'll see what things are politically acceptable to openly state....,

the military understands that civilization, even the most rigid is only six missed primary meals thick...,

royalsocietypublishing |  Impulsivity, the widespread preference for a smaller and more immediate reward over a larger and more delayed reward, is known to vary across species, and the metabolic and social hypotheses present contrasting explanations for this variation. However, this presents a paradox for an animal such as the honeybee, which is highly social, yet has a high metabolic rate. We test between these two competing hypotheses by investigating the effect of hunger on impulsivity in bees isolated from their social environment. Using an olfactory conditioning assay, we trained individuals to associate a small and a large reward with or without a delay, and we tested their choice between the two rewards at different levels of starvation. We found an increase in impulsive behaviour and an associated increase in dopamine levels in the brain with increasing starvation. These results suggest that the energetic state of an individual, even in a eusocial group, is a critical driver of impulsivity, and that the social harmony of a group can be threatened when the energetic states of the group members are in conflict.

you and I are the past c'est la vie, much respect girl - but now you're my ex-girl & I'm out with the next girl...,

WaPo |  So, while congressional Republicans have been much more in harmony with their grass roots constituents on the issue of Israel, congressional Democrats have not. One reason they are able to do this is that for most Democrats, the Israel issue is not especially central in their electoral decisions. 

Now, it’s different: The Israeli issue has become part and parcel of the partisan tension. If Netanyahu hoped to isolate the president by demonstrating bipartisan support in Congress, on which he has usually counted, the current environment puts congressional Democrats in an untenable position: They are facing a grass-roots constituency that’s very much on the president’s side on this issue, and the issue itself is center stage and deeply about American politics. It’s much harder to fudge, which is why earlier reports that Netanyahu received a “bipartisan” invitation from congressional leaders was quickly challenged by Democratic leaders, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

It is of course too early to tell how Congress, Netanyahu and the White House will alter their postures between now and Netanyahu’s scheduled speech on March 3 – or what Netanyahu would exactly say if he were to deliver such a speech. But my guess is that views of him among the American public, especially Democrats, may have become even more polarized. The most important consequence is perhaps that congressional Democrats may now feel they have to look over their shoulders in Democratic primaries on an issue that has not been traditionally front-and-center in U.S. election campaigns.

softheaded checkers-players stay mad and mean-mugging outside chess tournaments...,

guardian |  Incensed by a report Iran would transfer most of it enriched uranium to Russia, conservatives in Tehran have levelled new criticisms against Iranian negotiators for not standing firm against United States’ demands over the nuclear programme.

The Associated Press news agency on 2 January, quoting two anonymous diplomats, claimed Iran had agreed in talks with world powers to send a large portion of its enriched uranium to Russia, presumably for processing into fuel for power generation. The conservative-aligned website Nuclear Iran, which covers the nuclear negotiations including their technical aspects, noted with alarm that exporting fissile material had previously been regarded as one of the country’s “red lines”. 

Critics of talks in Iran were not appeased by a denial of the AP story by Marzieh Afkham, spokeswoman of the foreign ministry, especially as she did not comment on whether the US had suggested such a transfer during the talks.

Two days after the AP report, in an interview with the conservative website Raja News, parliamentary deputy Javad Karimi Ghoddousi claimed the Americans had presented an eight-page set of proposals that the Iranian negotiators considered “the worst yet”. Karimi Ghoddousi said deputies had questioned members of Iran’s negotiation team, and while he did not explicitly say he had been given details by one of the Iranian team, readers of Raja News would know that Karimi Ghoddousi is a member of the parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission, which often has confidential briefings with negotiators, including Mohammad Javad Zarif, the foreign minister.

Among the demands the Americans had made, said Karimi Ghoddousi, backing up the AP story, was the export of Iran’s enriched uranium (which is enriched to under 5%, Iran’s 20% enriched uranium, nearer to weapons grade, has been diluted or converted under the 2013 Geneva interim nuclear agreement) to a third party, which they suggested should be Russia.

turkey’s prime minister compares netanyahu to paris attackers

bibi - hitching your wagon to dumbasses'll get you in trouble every.single.time...,

theatlantic |  Goldberg: Democrats (including, and maybe especially, Jewish Democrats) believe that the prime minister is sometimes disrespectful to the president, and they worry that your government privileges its relations with the Republicans at their expense. Assuming you believe this is wrong, why is this wrong?

Dermer: The prime minister and the president have disagreed on issues, but the prime minister has never intentionally treated the president disrespectfully—and if that is what some people felt, it certainly was not the prime minister’s intention.

In fact, I can tell you, as someone very close to the prime minister, that he has a great deal of respect for the president. He also deeply appreciates the many things that President Obama has done for Israel—from upgraded security cooperation and enhanced intelligence sharing to military assistance and Iron Dome funding to opposing anti-Israel initiatives at the UN.

In an era of intense partisanship here, Israel feels very fortunate that we have tremendous friends on both sides of the aisle. Democrats and Republicans alike are committed to strengthening Israel and to strengthening the U.S.-Israel alliance, and we deeply, deeply appreciate this bipartisan support.

Goldberg: How does an address to Congress, one arranged by the Republican speaker, not convey the appearance that you're lobbying against the president?

Dermer: I know that people are trying to turn this into a personal or a partisan issue, but for Israel, it is neither. It is about an issue that affects the fate of the country.

In the last couple of weeks, people have heard from Prime Minister Cameron [of Great Britain] and other European leaders about the Iran issue. One would hope that people would feel that the opinion of the prime minister of Israel, a staunch ally of the United States threatened by Iran with annihilation, would also be worth hearing.

Ultimately, everyone will make their own decisions, but we think it is important that Israel’s voice be heard clearly in this debate at this critical time.

Goldberg: Do you believe that an address by the prime minister to Congress will serve the purpose of toughening up the deal?

Dermer: Of course, no one can know for sure what effect any speech can and will have. But I do think the prime minister has a moral obligation, as the leader of Israel and in living memory of an attempt to annihilate the Jewish people, to speak up about a deal that could endanger the survival of the one and only Jewish state.

WaPo bluntly stating what I been tryna tell cats for years..., everything else is merely conversation!

WaPo  |  The “thirst for oil” is often put forward as a near self-evident explanation behind military interventions in Libya, for instance, or Sudan. Oil, or the lack of oil, is also said to be behind the absence of intervention in Syria now and in Rwanda in 1994.

This of course clashes with the rhetoric around intervention, or its stated goal. No world leader stands before the U.N. and says they’re sending in the tanks because their country needs more oil. Such interventions are usually portrayed as serving directly non-economic goals such as preserving security, supporting democratic values, or more generally promoting human rights.

But this is often met with skepticism and media claims that economic incentives played a key role. Was Iraq really “all about oil?” It’s worth asking whether this viewpoint has some mileage, or if it is instead purely conspiracy theory.

It’s a question we’ve addressed in our research on the importance of oil production in attracting third party military interventions. In a new paper co-authored with Kristian Gleditsch in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, we model the decision-making process of third-party countries in interfering in civil wars and examine their economic motives.

Our research builds on a near-exhaustive sample of 69 countries which had a civil war between 1945 and 1999. About two-thirds of civil wars during the period saw third party intervention either by another country or outside organization.

All about the oil

We found that the decision to interfere was dominated by the interveners’ need for oil – over and above historical, geographical or ethnic ties.

to top it off, iran controls 240 billion barrels proven reserves of sweet, light, crude..., figure iraq's into the equation

fp |  With President Barack Obama’s welcome and warmly received trip to India this week, commentators have dusted off the well-worn platitudes associated with the administration’s once-vaunted “pivot to Asia.” The week’s other events, however — from the president’s decision to cut his stay in Delhi short to attend King Abdullah’s funeral in Riyadh to the chaos in Yemen, from ongoing nuclear diplomacy with Iran to Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to ensure his relationship with Obama will be seen as the most toxic in the history of Israel and the United States — suggest this administration’s foreign-policy legacy may ultimately center on a different “strategic rebalancing.” This one will benefit, however, in ways once unimaginable in U.S. foreign-policy circles, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It is quite possible that, by the time Obama leaves office, no other country on Earth will have gained quite so much as Iran. Not all of this will be the doing of the United States, of course, and in fact some of it may prove to be the undoing of our interests in the long run. But there is no doubting that some of the remarkable gains that seem to be on the near horizon for Tehran will have come as a result of a policy impulse that was far closer to the heart of the president than is the on-again, off-again Asia initiative (which was really much more the product of the ideas and efforts of a bunch of his first-term aides and cabinet members than it was of his own impulses or those of his innermost circle).

Consider the gains. First, there’s the issue of legacy. With negotiations continuing at a high simmer behind the scenes, the Obama foreign-policy team sees a nuclear deal with Iran as the one remaining brass ring that is there for them to claim. Elsewhere, there is the possibility of some progress on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, but promotional rhetoric surrounding it aside, it’s just not as big a game-changer as its proponents suggest. It’d certainly be a welcome development, but it’s incremental and, of course, doesn’t really improve our relations with Asia’s biggest long-term players, China and India. And beyond that, there’s not much else in the pipeline.

A deal with Iran, if it could be translated into action, would in theory produce a freeze on Iran’s nuclear program. That would certainly be a good thing. But it provides no guarantee that Tehran could not reverse course in the future, break its terms, or do as it has done for the past 30 years — namely, stir up mayhem in the region without the benefit of nuclear weapons. What it would provide — even in the midst of a congressional tug of war over Iran policy, with new sanctions coming from the Hill and presidential vetoes pinging and ponging up and down Pennsylvania Avenue — would be some White House-directed relief for Tehran. Presumably, a nuclear deal would further the thaw in the relations between the United States and Iran, while providing a great incentive for other countries to resume normal trading relations (to the extent they don’t have them already).

israel is already at war with iran...,

economiccollapseblog  |  Israel and Hezbollah are at war.  On top of everything else that is going on in the world, now we have a new war in the Middle East, and nobody is quite certain what is going to happen next.  Israel has been preparing for this moment for more than 8 years.  So has Hezbollah.  According to some reports, Hezbollah has amassed an arsenal of 50,000 rockets since the end of the Hezbollah-Israel war in 2006.  If all-out warfare does erupt, we could potentially see tens of thousands of missiles rain down into an area not too much larger than the state of New Jersey.  And of course the Israeli military is also much more sophisticated and much more powerful than it was back in 2006.  If cooler heads do not prevail, we could be on the verge of witnessing a very bloody war.  But right now nobody seems to be in the mood to back down.  Hezbollah is absolutely fuming over an airstrike earlier this month that killed six fighters and a prominent Iranian general.  And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that Israel is “prepared to act powerfully on all fronts” in response to a Hezbollah ambush that killed two Israeli soldiers and wounded seven.  Just such an incident is what sparked the war between the two sides back in 2006.  But this time, a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah could spark a full-blown regional war.

Earlier this month, Israel launched a surprise assault against a group of Hezbollah fighters that Israel believed was planning to conduct terror attacks inside their borders.

But in addition to killing six Hezbollah fighters, a very important Iranian general was also killed.  Needless to say, Iran is furious…

add that goo-gol aggregate intelligence isht and big-A hives appear to trump little dog packs...,

There are 28 urban areas worldwide with at least 10 million people. By 2030, 12 more are expected to enter the ranks of the planet's megacities.

pheromones and the use of pheromones is the ground level of society. aggregate intelligence REDUX originally posted 11/23/14

radiolab |   What happens when there is no leader? Starlings, bees, and ants manage just fine. In fact, they form staggeringly complicated societies -- all without a Toscanini to conduct them into harmony. This hour of Radiolab, we ask how this happens.

We gaze down at the bottom-up logic of cities, Google, and even our very own brains with fire-flyologists, ant experts, neurologists, a mathematician, and an economist.

up to the task? 'bout to find out...

FayObserver.com | The 82nd Airborne, and more specifically its 3rd Brigade Combat Team, are no strangers to Iraq.

Since 2003, parts of the brigade have deployed in support of U.S. efforts there on at least three occasions.

Now, more than three years after the U.S. military presence in Iraq was thought over, about a quarter of the Panther Brigade will return with a new mission to help train Iraqi forces to fight the Islamic State.

About 1,000 paratroopers from the brigade will deploy this week as part of the Operation Inherent Resolve mission.

The deployment was officially announced in December and is expected to last nine months.
As his paratroopers prepared for the mission, the brigade commander, Col. Curtis A. Buzzard, has watched tensions boil in the Middle East - and Iraq in particular - as forces have fought against the Islamic State group, also known by the acronym DAESH based on the group's Arabic name, ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyah fi al-Iraq wash-Sham.


"We've seen the impact of DAESH over the last year and a half, not just on Iraq, but on the region," Buzzard said. "It's clearly an existential threat.

let's get it started in here...

Newsweek | Dozens of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters have infiltrated a Saudi Arabian border town via Iraq before melting away into the general population, according to claims by the terror group’s supporters on social media.

A famous anti-government Saudi tweeter known as ‘mujtahidd’, not known for ISIS sympathies, posted to his 1.2m followers that an attack was carried out on border guards with the help of a cell inside the Kingdom before they reached the town of Rafha, sparking a search by Saudi intelligence services.

ISIS-affiliated social media accounts started circulating a photo of a border checkpoint they claimed had been captured by the terror group’s militants.

“They claim that they control [the border gate],” says Kovan Direj, a Syrian-Kurdish journalist monitoring the Twitter war. “They [claim they] went to the border gate and after that group melted into the city and now the secret service of the Saudi Arabians are looking for them.”

While analysts have cautioned that no official confirmation of the border infiltration has been released by Saudi Arabia or ISIS, there has been a large-scale propaganda war between ISIS supporters and Saudi citizens using the hashtag #Rafha to claim that the raid either did or did not happen.

cathedral: the coercive system of discourse supported by institutional power now wants to be called empathy culture...,

theatlantic |  For Chait, though, what’s at stake in all this norm-happy rhetoric is American liberalism itself. Political correctness, he writes, “is not a rigorous commitment to social equality so much as a system of left-wing ideological repression. Not only is it not a form of liberalism; it is antithetical to liberalism.”

Here’s a more optimistic—and I also think more realistic—view: We might also think of “p.c. culture” as “empathy culture.” The culture Chait describes, to the extent it can be called a culture at all, doesn’t impede progress. To the contrary, it helps progress along. It is a way of adjusting—fitfully, awkwardly—to an environment, political and otherwise, that gives so many of us newfound exposure to each other.

Some of the mechanics of this adjustment may be overcorrections: We—and the whole point is that there is a "we" at stake here—can care too much, it’s true, about identity as a function of authority. We can be too quick to dismiss otherwise valid arguments as coming from places of privilege. We can be too sensitive. We can be too reliant on categories—white, black, cis, trans—that focus on what we are rather than who. Categories in general can be terrible, brutish things.

But categories, expressed as language, can also be, in their way, expressions of empathy. They are proxies for curiosity, which is itself a proxy for sympathy. Identifying oneself as “cis” rather than “straight,” or offering a trigger warning on a Facebook post, or stepping aside so that someone with a more relevant experience can speak: These are cultural shibboleths. They are awkward, maybe, but they are made in good faith—and that is not a small thing. They say, basically, “we’re trying”—to see things from each other’s viewpoint. And to understand, if not agree with, each other.

sociogenomics...,

thescientist |  Eusocial insects are among the most successful living creatures on Earth. Found in terrestrial ecosystems across the globe (on every continent except Antarctica), the world’s ants alone weigh more than all vertebrates put together. Bees are key pollinators of major crops as well as many other ecologically important plants. Termites construct thermoregulating homes that can dominate the landscape, and that are inspiring new energy-efficient skyscraper designs. The organization and collective decision making of eusocial insects is even yielding new insights into human behavior and what it means to be part of a society. But one of the biggest unanswered questions in our understanding of these complex insect groups is how a single genome can produce such diverse and contrasting physical and behavioral forms, from egg layers, provisioners, and caretakers to soldiers.

In a eusocial colony, reproduction is dominated by one or a few individuals adapted to egg laying, 

while their offspring—colony workers—display physical and behavioral adaptations that help them perform their subordinate roles. These phenotypic adaptations can be extreme. A leafcutter ant queen is 10 times larger than her smallest workers, for example.  (See photograph below.) And some carpenter ant species have evolved a “kamikaze” caste, born with a self-destruct button that causes the insect to explode upon colony attack, killing itself and covering the invading animals in toxic chemicals. Remarkably, differences in the behavior and morphology of insect castes are usually generated through differences in the expression of identical sets of genes. (There are a few cases of genetically determined castes, but this is the exception, not the rule.)

We are now entering a new era of research into eusocial insects. For the first time, scientists are investigating the molecules that underlie eusocial behavior at a depth that was previously unimaginable. New, affordable sequencing technologies enable scientists to examine how genes across the entire genome are regulated to generate different caste phenotypes, the roles of DNA methylation and microRNAs in this differential expression, and what proteins are synthesized as a result. This burgeoning area of research, dubbed “sociogenomics” in 2005 by Gene E. Robinson,¹ is revolutionizing our understanding of the evolution of eusociality from a solitary wasp-like ancestor to the million-strong colonies we see today. New work is yielding insights into how genomes interact dynamically with the physical and social environment to produce highly adapted, specialized castes with remarkable phenotypic innovations. These findings are, in turn, illuminating the importance of gene regulation and epigenetics in controlling behavioral plasticity across the animal kingdom.

rule of law: all your data are belong to us

​Motherboard | Tuesday, the federal government continued its offensive against default consumer encryption enabled by Apple and Google and anonymity tools like Tor, saying that greater privacy and security has created a “zone of lawlessness” that law enforcement is having trouble cracking.

Leslie Caldwell, an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, said that the department is “very concerned” by the Google’s and Apple’s decision to automatically encrypt all data on Android and iOS devices. Her comments aren’t entirely surprising, considering that FBI Director James Comey previously said that the agency would push Congress to make automatic encryption illegal, and President Obama has also expressed concern with the development.

The problem that privacy and security advocates have pointed out is that the US government doesn’t really seem to understand what it’s asking for. Caldwell was being interviewed as a part of the annual State of the Net Conference in Washington, DC. One minute, she was vilifying encryption; the next, she was sending a message to the country’s citizens and companies that they need to be “more conscious of cybersecurity.”

“They need to be assuming they are vulnerable, assuming their data can be taken,” she said.