nbcnews | Brennan is a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC News and served as CIA Director and Homeland Security Adviser under former President Barack Obama as well as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center under former President George W. Bush.
On Sunday, he also asserted that the June, 2016 meeting in Trump Tower involving Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and several Russians, which emails revealed was set up under the guise that the Russians could provide damaging information about Hillary Clinton, was reckless on the part of those close to Trump.
“I find it foolish number one, and also irresponsible,” Brennan said. Senior members of a campaign “need to be aware of what it is that they need to do in order to make sure that they stay on the right side of the law as well as the right side of ethics," he said. "And I find it inexplicable in terms of how that meeting took place and interest in part of individuals, very close to Mr. Trump, who wanted to get dirt on Hillary Clinton from Russians.”
extranewsfeed | As the
feudal power-structures of Europe broke down beneath a wave of
revolutions in the 18th century, governments took a more active role in
law enforcement and the first centralized policing organization was created in France
by King Louis XIV. The duties of the new police were bluntly described
as a mechanism of class-control over workers and peasants:
“ensuring
the peace and quiet of the public and of private individuals, purging
the city of what may cause disturbances, procuring abundance, and having each and everyone live according to their station and their duties”
While France’s Gendarmes were seen as a symbol of oppression in other parts of Europe, the French policing model spread during the early 1800s as Napoleon Bonaparte conquered much of the continent. By the mid-1800s, modern policing institutions — publicly-funded, centralized police organized in a military hierarchy and under the control of the state — had been transplanted everywhere from Tsarist Russia to England and the United States.
Policing became the exclusive right of governments as other law
enforcement groups were absorbed into new and “official” institutions.
The new police were not just tasked with serving the public,
however — they also protected the political power of their new
employers. It was a revolutionary era and the new police were shaped by
rulers facing a particularly mutinous population. The use of police as
the vanguard of state-power was a major development and it was adapted
to repress popular movements all over the world. Early police organizations in the US,
for example, pretty much handed blue uniforms to former slave-patrols
and anti-union mercenaries who had historically protected the interests
of plantation-bosses in the South and industrial capitalists in the
North.
NYTimes | When the F.B.I. knocks on someone’s door or appeals to the public for assistance in solving crime, the willingness of people to help is directly correlated to their opinion of the agency. When an agent working to stop a terrorist plot attempts to recruit an informant, the agent’s success in gathering critical intelligence depends on the informant’s belief that the agent is credible and trustworthy. And, as the former director, James Comey, would frequently say in underscoring the importance of high standards, whether a jury believes an agent’s testimony depends on whether it has faith in the bureau’s honesty and independence. To be effective, the F.B.I. must be believed and must maintain the support of the public it serves.
Do F.B.I. agents make mistakes? You bet. They are human beings. Because they are not infallible, the bureau is subject to a robust system of checks and balances, including its internal affairs division, the Department of Justice inspector general, congressional committees and the courts. These watchdogs ensure that personal opinions regarding politics, causes and candidates do not affect investigations. The system also provides an outlet for any investigator who suspects malfeasance on the part of the agency’s leadership to make those concerns known.
What, then, are we to make of the recent allegations of political bias at the F.B.I., particularly those involving two employees whose cringe-worthy text messages continue to threaten the agency’s reputation? While it would be disingenuous to claim that those two are not at least guilty of exercising incredibly poor judgment, it would be equally disingenuous for anyone who really knows the modern-day bureau to insinuate that the organization is plotting from within.
Furthermore, a congressional memo released on Friday accuses the F.B.I. and the Justice Department of abusing their surveillance powers to spy on a former Trump campaign adviser. But every statement of fact included in an affidavit for foreign intelligence collection must withstand the scrutiny of at least 10 people in the Department of Justice hierarchy before it is reviewed by an independent court.
There is, however, a difference between oversight by those in charge of holding the F.B.I. accountable and criticism by politicians seeking partisan gain. Political operatives are weaponizing their disagreement with a particular investigation in a bid to undermine the credibility of the entire institution. “The system is rigged” is their slogan, and they are now politicizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process used to collect critical intelligence about our adversaries.
The assumption among confused and dismayed F.B.I. employees is that the attacks are meant to soften the blow should the investigation by Mr. Mueller, the special counsel, lead to additional charges. However, these kinds of attacks by powerful people go beyond mere criticism — they could destroy the institution. Although those critics’ revisionist supporters claim their ire is reserved for institutional leadership and not the rank and file, it is the F.B.I. agent on the street who will be most severely affected as public support for federal law enforcement is sacrificed for partisan gain.
These political attacks on the bureau must stop. If those critics of the agency persuade the public that the F.B.I. cannot be trusted, they will also have succeeded in making our nation less safe.
theconservativetreehouse | Democrats, media, and the aggregate DOJ/FBI intelligence community are
finally seeing accountability. With the HPSCI memo now in the rear-view
mirror, and the content in the bloodstream of the U.S. electorate,
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley is next.
Toward the end of December,
the FBI provided the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, with
FBI investigative documents (likely FD-302’s) from their contacts with
Christopher Steele. According to most reasonable timing we can discover
Steele met with FBI officials sometime around October 1st, 2016.
From the U.K. lawsuit against Christopher Steele (pdf here),
Steele admits to having shopped the Clinton-Steele dossier to U.S.
media outlets “in person” in late September (New York Times, WaPo, New
Yorker and CNN), and mid-October, 2016 (New York Times, WaPo, and Yahoo
News), per instructions from Glenn Simpson (Fusion GPS)
Additionally, in late October, 2016, Christopher Steele briefed Mother Jones via Skype.
According to the released HPSCI intelligence memo, the FBI sought a FISA application based on the Steele Dossier on October 21st, 2016. From those UK court records
at least two briefings with reporters, containing five outlets, took
place prior to the FBI using the Clinton-Steele dossier in their FISA
application.
The “late September” briefings with the New York Times, Washington
Post, Yahoo News, New Yorker and CNN took place prior to Christopher
Steele meeting with FBI officials early October. The implication
therein is that the FBI had to know prior to their October 21st, 2016,
court application that the information they were presenting to the FISA
court was being heavily shopped to media outlets. This would be
immediately disqualifying.
The HPSCI memo
notes the FBI relationship with Christopher Steele was terminated after
the FISA application (Oct. 21st, 2016), as a result of the Mother Jones
article from October 30th, 2016. Media contact by an FBI material
witness is immediately disqualifying.
The question is: did the
FBI submit the FISA application under false pretenses? Did the FBI
actually know Christopher Steele was shopping the dossier to the media
prior to their FISA court submission?
The HPSCI memo gives the FBI the benefit of doubt by presuming the FBI were unaware or “lied to“.
The FD-302’s (FBI investigative interview notes), which appear to have
been turned over to Senate Chairman Chuck Grassley, would contain the
evidence to support the FBI being duped – OR – show the FBI knew, and
proceeded in using the dossier despite disqualifying knowledge of media
involvement.
The answers to those important questions appears to be the looming in the FBI classified documents behind the Grassley criminal referral.
thehill | A Tea Party group on Friday announced the launch of an attack ad against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein,
urging him to “do his job, or resign” following the release of a
controversial GOP memo alleging surveillance abuse at the Department of
Justice.
Tea Party Patriots Action uploaded the ad to
YouTube hours after the House Intelligence Committee memo was released
publicly, sparking speculation that President Trump may move to fire Rosenstein.
The
ad’s narrator describes Rosenstein as “a weak careerist at the Justice
Department, protecting liberal Obama holdovers and the Deep State,
instead of following the rule of law.”
“His
incompetence and abuse of power have undermined congressional
investigations, led to stonewalling and tarnished the credibility of the
Department of Justice,” the narrator continues.
“Time for him to stand
up for the rule of law and stand up for the American people. It’s time
for Rod Rosenstein to do his job, or resign.”
disobedientmedia | However, as the Wall Street Journal
reports, it is important to remember that the FBI knows and has known
what is in the memo for a long time, as the Bureau had, “refused to
provide access to those documents until director Christopher Wray and
the Justice Department faced a contempt of Congress vote.”
The Journal further relates
that: “The FBI’s public statement appears to be an act of
insubordination after Mr. Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod
Rosenstein tried and failed to get the White House to block the memo’s
release. Their public protest appears intended to tarnish in advance
whatever information the memo contains. The public is getting to see
amid this brawl how the FBI plays politics, and it isn’t a good look.”
Members of the Democratic Party have also expressed their opposition to the release of the memo.
For example, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep.
Adam Schiff (D-CA), has also come out against the release of the memo
to the public. Last week, Schiff and Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), wrote a
letter to Facebook and Twitter, in which they expressed their fears
that the top trending hashtag “#ReleaseTheMemo” was being pushed by
Russian bots as part of a propaganda effort seeking to “attack our
democracy”.
However, much to their dismay, it was revealed
that the top trending hashtag was not the work of Russian bots, but
originated organically by fellow Americans. This news did not deter a
California duo from penning a second letter
to Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday, in order to raise awareness about
potential abuse of their platforms by “agents of foreign influence”.
Like Schiff and Feinstein, Schumer went on to claim that the Russians were behind the public outcry to release the memo, stating:
“Even more extraordinary is that the actions of Chairman Nunes and his
supporters are being actively parroted by Russian-linked cyber actors on
social media with the intent to discredit U.S. democratic
institutions.”
However, it is critical to note that the Democratic Party is not the
only group opposing the release of the memo to the public. The group who
seems to oppose the release of the memo more than anyone is the very
group of people whose job it is to hold the government accountable and
expose governmental wrongdoing and corruption, the Press.
For example, MSNBC has come out against the release of information to the American public, with Andrea Mitchell tweeting:
“How will they justify releasing this memo? Intelligence community is
on fire about what they say risks 40 years of congressional oversight of
the agencies.”
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow also chimed in, tweeting
Schiff’s statement that: “There is no longer a valid basis for the
White House to review the altered document, since this new version is
not the same document shared with the entire House and on which
Committee Members voted.”
MSNBC’s John Heilemann even went so far as to inquire as to whether or not Rep. Nunes had been compromised:
“Is it possible that the Republican chairman of the House Intel
Committee has been compromised by the Russians? Is it possible that we
actually have a Russian agent running the House Intel Committee on the
Republican side?”
Joe Scarborough of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, also attacked the memo, calling it a “sleazy political purge”, and an attempt to “misinform the public”.
The Washington Free Beacon
reports that CNN’s Brian Karem also attacked the release of the memo,
claiming that it would serve as a “tipping point for our democracy”, and
warned that the document’s release may lead the country to be ruled by
“demagoguery and despotism.”
Karem went on to further state
that the release of the memo is “…simply and nothing else but a power
play, a demagogue pushing back against the Democratic process”,
comparing it to a “mafia boss gone mad.”
CNN’s Phil Mudd also attacked the release of the memo, claiming that it was created through “collusion” between Nunes staffers and the White House.
The Atlantic’s Senior Editor David Frum also came out against government transparency and the release of the memo, tweeting:
“The *full* full transparency argument would be: release all tax
returns, corporate records, campaign emails, and other documents
relevant to Donald Trump’s Russia/WikiLeaks connections.”
theepochtimes | How did a piece of opposition research, described by former FBI
Director James Comey as both “salacious and unverified,” become the
driving force behind the allegations that Trump colluded with Russian
authorities?
Research conducted by The Epoch Times, using public sources, shows a
web of connections related to the dossier reaching the highest levels of
the FBI, CIA, and the Obama administration.
Paid for by the Clinton Campaign and the DNC, and produced by Fusion GPS—whose other clients include the Russian government—the dossier appears to have been the basis for the FBI’s investigation into Donald Trump.
The FBI used the dossier, in part, to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Trump’s team, according
to national security reporter Sarah Carter. Two of President Barack
Obama’s top officials also surveilled the communications of Trump’s
team, both before and after the elections.
The unverified allegations in the dossier were also actively spread to media organizations, both by Fusion GPS as well as other key players involved, to cast a shadow over Trump’s run for president and his presidency.
Text messages obtained by the Department of Justice (DOJ) inspector
general show high ranking FBI officials discussing an “insurance policy”
to prevent Trump from becoming president.
The connections presented raise many questions, including the
following: Why was the FBI so willing to accept the allegations made by
Fusion GPS? And what did Obama obtain in monitoring the communications
of Trump, the opponent of the candidate he supported?
These matters are currently under investigation by the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the DOJ inspector general,
and possibly special counsel Robert Mueller.
qz | Interest in panpsychism has grown in part thanks to the increased
academic focus on consciousness itself following on from Chalmers’ “hard
problem” paper. Philosophers at NYU, home to one of the leading
philosophy-of-mind departments, have made panpsychism a feature of serious study. There have been several credible academic books on the subject in recent years, and populararticles taking panpsychism seriously.
One of the most popular and credible contemporary neuroscience theories on consciousness, Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory, further lends credence to panpsychism.
Tononi argues that something will have a form of “consciousness” if the
information contained within the structure is sufficiently
“integrated,” or unified, and so the whole is more than the sum of its
parts. Because it applies to all structures—not just the human
brain—Integrated Information Theory shares the panpsychist view that physical matter has innate conscious experience.
Goff, who has written an academic book
on consciousness and is working on another that approaches the subject
from a more popular-science perspective, notes that there were credible
theories on the subject dating back to the 1920s. Thinkers including
philosopher Bertrand Russell and physicist Arthur Eddington made a
serious case for panpsychism, but the field lost momentum after World
War II, when philosophy became largely focused on analytic philosophical
questions of language and logic. Interest picked up again in the 2000s,
thanks both to recognition of the “hard problem” and to increased
adoption of the structural-realist approach in physics, explains
Chalmers. This approach views physics as describing structure, and not
the underlying nonstructural elements.
“Physical science tells us a lot less about the nature of matter than
we tend to assume,” says Goff. “Eddington”—the English scientist who
experimentally confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity in the
early 20th century—“argued there’s a gap in our picture of the universe.
We know what matter does but not what it is. We can put consciousness into this gap.” Fist tap Dale.
IQ.MIT | We are setting out to answer two big questions: How does human
intelligence work, in engineering terms? And how can we use that deep
grasp of human intelligence to build wiser and more useful machines, to
the benefit of society?
Drawing on MIT’s deep strengths and
signature values, culture, and history, MIT IQ promises to make
important contributions to understanding the nature of intelligence, and
to harnessing it to make a better world.
This is our quest.
Sixty
years ago, at MIT and elsewhere, big minds lit the fuse on a big
question: What is intelligence, and how does it work? The result was an
explosion of new fields — artificial intelligence, cognitive science,
neuroscience, linguistics, and more. They all took off at MIT and have
produced remarkable offshoots, from computational neuroscience, to
neural nets, to empathetic robots.
And today, by tapping the
united strength of these and other interlocking fields and capitalizing
on what they can teach each other, we seek to answer the deepest
questions about intelligence — and to deliver transformative new gifts
for humankind.
Some of these advances may be foundational in
nature, involving new insight into human intelligence, and new methods
to allow machines to learn effectively. Others may be practical tools
for use in a wide array of research endeavors, such as disease
diagnosis, drug discovery, materials and manufacturing design, automated
systems, synthetic biology, and finance.
Along with developing
and advancing the technologies of intelligence, MIT IQ researchers will
also investigate the societal and ethical implications of advanced
analytical and predictive tools. There are already active projects and
groups at the Institute investigating autonomous systems, media and
information quality, labor markets and the work of the future,
innovation and the digital economy, and the role of AI in the legal
system.
In all its activities, MIT IQ is intended to take
advantage of — and strengthen — the Institute’s culture of
collaboration. MIT IQ will connect and amplify existing excellence
across labs and centers already engaged in intelligence research.
Smithsonian | The Voynich Manuscript has baffled
cryptographers ever since the early 15th-century document was
rediscovered by a Polish book dealer in 1912. The handwritten, 240-page
screed, now housed in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book &
Manuscript Library, is written from left to right in an unknown
language. On top of that, the text itself is likely to have been
scrambled by an unknown code. Despite numerous attempts to crack the
code by some of the world’s best cryptographers, including Alan Turing
and the Bletchley Park team, the contents of the enigmatic book have
long remained a mystery. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying. The
latest to give it a stab? The Artificial Intelligence Lab at the
University of Alberta.
Bob Weber at the Canadian Press reports that natural
language processing expert Greg Kondrak and grad student Bradley Hauer
have attempted to identify the language the manuscript was written in
using AI. According to a press release,
the team originally believed that the manuscript was written in Arabic.
But after feeding it to an AI trained to recognize 380 languages with 97 percent accuracy, its analysis of the letter frequency suggested the text was likely written in Hebrew.
“That was surprising,” Kondrak says. They
then hypothesized that the words were alphagrams, in which the letters
are shuffled and vowels are dropped. When they unscrambled the first
line of text using that method they found that 80 percent of the words
created were found in the Hebrew dictionary. The research appears in the
journal Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics.
Neither of the researchers are schooled in ancient Hebrew, so George Dvorsky at Gizmodo
reports they took their deciphered first line to computer scientist
Moshe Koppel, a colleague and native Hebrew speaker. He said it didn’t
form a coherent sentence. After the team fixed some funky spelling
errors and ran it through Google Translate, they came up with something
readable, even if it doesn’t make much sense: “She made recommendations
to the priest, man of the house and me and people.”
thewrap |Tonight, in this room full of music’s dreamers, we remember that
this country was built by dreamers, for dreamers, chasing the american
dream. I’m here on this stage tonight because just like the dreamers my
parents brought me to this country with nothing in their pockets but
hope. They showed me what it means to work twice as hard and never give
up, and honestly no part of my journey is any different from theirs.
I’m a proud Cuban-Mexican immigrant, born in eastern Havana,
standing in front of you on the Grammy stage in New York City, and all I
know is, just like dreams, these kids can’t be forgotten and are worth
fighting for.
Tonight, it is my great honor to introduce one of the greatest
bands in music history, U2. This band from Ireland first rocked the
Grammy boat when they won their first four awards 30 years ago for “The
Joshua Tree,” an album that explored their own powerful connection with
the American Dream. 46 Grammy nominations and 22 awards later, they
extend their stunning Grammy legacy tonight by celebrating New York City
and the promise that has drawn generations of immigrants here from
around the world.
Here they are performing in front of a beautiful lady who
inspired these timeless words by Emma Lazarus. “Give me your tired, your
poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse
of your teaming shore, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me.”
theatlantic | My first introduction to Jordan B. Peterson, a University of Toronto clinical psychologist, came by way of an interview that began trending on social media last week. Peterson was pressed by the British journalist Cathy Newman to explain several of his controversial views.
But what struck me, far more than any position he took, was the method his interviewer employed. It was the most prominent, striking example I’ve seen yet of an unfortunate trend in modern communication.
First, a person says something. Then, another person restates what they purportedly said so as to make it seem as if their view is as offensive, hostile, or absurd.
Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and various Fox News hosts all feature and reward this rhetorical technique. And the Peterson interview has so many moments of this kind that each successive example calls attention to itself until the attentive viewer can’t help but wonder what drives the interviewer to keep inflating the nature of Peterson’s claims, instead of addressing what he actually said.
This isn’t meant as a global condemnation of this interviewer’s quality or past work. As with her subject, I haven’t seen enough of it to render any overall judgment—and it is sometimes useful to respond to an evasive subject with an unusually blunt restatement of their views to draw them out or to force them to clarify their ideas.
Perhaps she has used that tactic to good effect elsewhere. (And the online attacks to which she’s been subjected are abhorrent assaults on decency by people who are perpetrating misbehavior orders of magnitude worse than hers.)
But in the interview, Newman relies on this technique to a remarkable extent, making it a useful illustration of a much broader pernicious trend. Peterson was not evasive or unwilling to be clear about his meaning. And Newman’s exaggerated restatements of his views mostly led viewers astray, not closer to the truth.
truthdig | In the worlds of politics and nonprofits intersectionality has become
a sneaky substitute for the traditional left notion of solidarity
developed in the process of ongoing collective struggle against the
class enemy. Intersectionality doesn’t deny the existence of class
struggle, it just rhetorically demotes it to something co-equal with the
fights against ableism and ageism and speciesism, against white
supremacy, against gender oppression, and a long elastic list of others.
What’s sneaky about the substitution of intersectionality for
solidarity is that intersectionality allows the unexamined smuggling in
of multiple notions which directly undermine the development and the
operation of solidarity. Intersectionality means everybody is obligated
to put their own special interest, their own oppression first – although
they don’t always say that because the contradiction would be too
obvious. The applicable terms of art are that everybody gets to “center”
their own oppression, and cooperate as “allies” if and when their
interests “intersect.” What this yields is silliness like honchos who
run the pink pussy hat marches telling Cindy Sheehan earlier this month
that their women’s movement can’t be bothered to oppose war and
imperialism “…until all women are free,” and the advocates of this or
that cause demanding constant, elaborate performative rituals of those
who would qualify for “allyship.”
The nonprofit industrial complex, funded as it is by the one percent,
loves, promotes and lavishly rewards intersectionality at every turn
because it buries and negates class struggle. Intersectionality
normalizes the notion that the left is and ought to be a bunch of
impotent constituency groups squabbling about privilege and “allyship”
as they compete for funding and careers, not the the force working to
overthrow the established order and fight for the power to build a new
world. Even Hillary Clintonuses the word now.
Afro-pessimism is a term coined by Dr. Frank Wilderson at UC Irvine,
and a nappy headed stepchild of intersectionality. Afro-pessimism, to
hear Wilderson tell it is the realization that black people have no
natural allies anywhere, that we are born with ankle irons, whip marks
on our backs, bulls eyes on our foreheads and nooses around our necks.
Blackness, he says is “a condition of ontological death,”
and the dead have no allies, at least among the living. Wilderson is at
least honest. He freely admits that afro-pessimism leads nowhere and
offers no answers to any strategic or even tactical questions.
Wilderson’s shtick
is that of an old man throwing word grenades and he seems not to care
much where or how they explode, as long as they do. Whatever works for
him, I guess.
theatlantic | The latest revelations about President Trump have, once again, excited the interest of the public, leading to speculation that Special Counsel Robert Mueller may have amassed sufficient evidence to charge the president with obstruction of justice. Trump’s attempt to fire Mueller (which happened last June, but is only now being publicly reported) is, under this line of thinking, the final straw.
Color me deeply skeptical.
Mueller will not indict Trump for obstruction of justice or for any other crime. Period. Full stop. End of story. Speculations to the contrary are just fantasy.
He won’t do it for the good and sufficient reason that the Department of Justice has a long-standing legal opinion that sitting presidents may not be indicted. First issued in 1973 during the Nixon era, the policy was reaffirmed in 2000, during the Clinton era. These rules bind all Department of Justice employees, and Mueller, in the end, is a Department of Justice employee. More to the point, if we know anything about Mueller, we think we know that he follows the rules—all of them. Even the ones that restrict him in ways he would prefer they not. And if he were to choose not to follow the rules, that, in turn, would be a reasonable justification for firing him. So … the special counsel will not indict the president.
BostonGlobe | The memo, which was made available to all members of the House, is
said to contend that officials from the two agencies were not
forthcoming to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge.
Republicans
accuse the agencies of failing to disclose that the Democratic National
Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign helped finance
research that was used to obtain a warrant for surveillance of Carter
Page, a Trump campaign adviser. The research presented to the judge was
assembled by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele.
The
memo is not limited to actions taken by the Obama administration,
though. The New York Times reported Sunday that the memo reveals that
Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, a top Trump appointee, signed
off an application to extend the surveillance of Page shortly after
taking office last spring.
The renewal shows that the Justice Department under Trump saw reason to believe Page was acting as a Russian agent.
The inclusion of Rosenstein’s action in the memo could expose him to
criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from conservatives in the
media who have seized on the surveillance to argue that the Russia
inquiry may have been tainted from the start.
Rosenstein is
overseeing that investigation because Attorney General Jeff Sessions
recused himself. It was Rosenstein who appointed Robert Mueller as
special counsel.
People familiar with the underlying application
have portrayed the Republican memo as misleading in part because
Steele’s information was insufficient to meet the standard for a FISA
warrant.
They said the application drew on other intelligence
material that the Republican memo selectively omits. That other
information remains highly sensitive, and releasing it would risk
burning other sources and methods of intelligence-gathering about
Russia.
There is no known precedent for the Republicans’ action. Though House
rules allow the Intelligence Committee to vote to disclose classified
information if it is deemed to be in the public interest, the rule is
not thought to have ever been used.
Typically, lawmakers wishing
to make public secretive information classified by the executive branch
spend months, if not years, fighting with the White House and the
intelligence community over what they can release.
NYTimes | Mr.
Trump is right. Black unemployment in the United States reached its
lowest level in December. But, as my colleague Linda Qiu reported two weeks ago, the record is the culmination of a longer trend, and there has been no shift in the larger racial unemployment gap:
The 6.8 percent
unemployment rate for black Americans in December is indeed the lowest
since 1972, according to the latest monthly data that is available from
the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the rate has been in decline for
several years, decreasing steadily from 16.4 percent in August 2011 to
7.8 percent in January 2017.
The December figures also do not reflect a significantly different
racial unemployment gap. The black unemployment rate has consistently
been double that of the white unemployment rate, and remained at that
level in December. Presidents, especially in their first year, generally
do not single-handedly influence the labor markets — as Mr. Trump
suggests.
Further, it’s an open question whether a president can claim credit for economic outputs like unemployment. As my colleague Neil Irwin has explained:
So
does Mr. Trump deserve any credit for solid economic results? If you
think the economy is driven by concrete, specific policies around taxes,
spending, monetary policy and regulation, the answer is no. If you
think that what really matters is the mood in the executive suite, then
just maybe.
Jay-Z is scheduled to appear at the Grammy Awards on Sunday night. He is nominated for eight awards, including record, album and song of the year.
NYTimes | There are 5.3 million Americans who are absolutely poor by global
standards. This is a small number compared with the one for India, for
example, but it is more than in Sierra Leone (3.2 million) or Nepal (2.5
million), about the same as in Senegal (5.3 million) and only one-third
less than in Angola (7.4 million). Pakistan (12.7 million) has twice as
many poor people as the United States, and Ethiopia about four times as
many.
This evidence supports on-the-ground observation in the United States. Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer have documented
the daily horrors of life for the several million people in the United
States who actually do live on $2 a day, in both urban and rural
America. Matthew Desmond’s ethnography of Milwaukee explores the nightmare of finding urban shelter among the American poor.
It
is hard to imagine poverty that is worse than this, anywhere in the
world. Indeed, it is precisely the cost and difficulty of housing that
makes for so much misery for so many Americans, and it is precisely
these costs that are missed in the World Bank’s global counts.
Of
course, people live longer and have healthier lives in rich countries.
With only a few (and usually scandalous) exceptions, water is safe to
drink, food is safe to eat, sanitation is universal, and some sort of
medical care is available to everyone. Yet all these essentials of
health are more likely to be lacking for poorer Americans. Even for the
whole population, life expectancy in the United States is lower than we
would expect given its national income, and there are places — the
Mississippi Delta and much of Appalachia — where life expectancy is
lower than in Bangladesh and Vietnam.
Beyond that, many Americans, especially whites with no more than a high school education, have seen worsening health: As my research with my wife, the Princeton economist Anne Case,
has demonstrated, for this group life expectancy is falling; mortality
rates from drugs, alcohol and suicide are rising; and the long
historical decline in mortality from heart disease has come to a halt.
CounterPunch | Why do we live in a society that thinks that it’s reasonable to ask
someone to shoulder an adult’s responsibility at home, support
themselves and perhaps other family members too, and go to school on top
of that? And then why do we call them failures when that doesn’t work?
Some students receive financial aid to cover their tuition, but that
doesn’t cover their other needs. It doesn’t keep them from working long
hours, sometimes on the night shift, in order to make ends meet at home.
This year, some students have an added challenge.
Some are undocumented immigrants, brought here as children through no
fault of their own. Obama allowed them to pay a fee in order to avoid
deportation and legally work in the U.S. temporarily. Trump ended that
program.
When students’ two year work permits run out, what will happen to
them? Some students have had relatives, parents even, get deported.
Students who try to educate themselves in these conditions are
heroes. We should make it easier, not harder, for them to devote
themselves full time to study.
And we certainly shouldn’t discuss them as if they are human garbage who should be deported.
DailyCaller | A California city councilman and high school history teacher at El
Rancho High School in Pico Rivera, Calif, was caught on video
disparaging the United States military and calling its members
“dumbshits” who are not “high-level thinkers.”
Three profanity-laced videos surfaced on Facebook Friday of Salcido
declaring to his students that members of the military are dumb people
who joined because they were poor students and that they are the “lowest
of our low” of the country.
“They’re the frickin’ lowest of our low,” Salcido can be heard saying.
Three video of Salcido’s comments were posted to Facebook by a family
friend of the student who took it and they quickly went viral. The
student, who wished to remain anonymous, is the son and nephew of
military veterans and told the local paper, “It was so disrespectful to my dad and my uncles and all veterans and those still in the military.”
Throughout the three videos, Salcido can be heard using vulgar
language to describe the military as failed students with no other
options but to serve. “We’ve got a bunch of dumbshits over there. Think
about the people who you know who are over there — your freaking stupid
uncle Louis or whatever, they’re dumbshits. They’re not, like,
high-level thinkers, they’re not academic people, they’re not
intellectual people, they’re the freaking lowest of our low. Not
morally, I’m not saying they make bad moral decisions, they’re not
talented people,”
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
