When it all began

Because I am seeing all over the place claims that the FBI opened l'affaire Trump on the basis of the Steele dossier, I thought I'd link to this story that documents that it began before there was a Steele dossier.

UPDATE

Although the Times report was unsourced, Australia is confirming its accuracy:

The Australian government has not taken any opportunity to deny the reports citing Downer’s involvement, instead pointing to the investigation that is under way. Labor has also declined to comment.

Shut the Overton Window

I'd never heard of this Overton Window, so I looked it up. Wikipedia sez this about it:

"According to Overton's description, his window includes a range of
policies considered politically acceptable in the current climate of
public opinion, which a politician can recommend without being
considered too extreme to gain or keep public office."

So the election of Trump pretty much proves Overton was spouting nonsense, no?

Meta-fake news

Recall all those rightwing hoaxes about voter fraud? Then the president appointed the vice resident and serial liar Kris Kobach to lead an inquiry into voter fraud.

Turns out that is fake, too.

Kobach and Pence and WBD know the allegations of voter fraud were faked from the get-go. Kobach especially. So it make sense that they would not want a real inquiry. But you might guess that they could have maintained the sham a bit more carefully.

UPDATE

Roy Moore brings it on. This is what passes for voter fraud in the rightwing echo chamber.

Perhaps Roy Moore is a creation of Hillary Clinton to make rightwingers look stupid?

Just a thought.

ANOTHER UPDATE

Too busy to meet or something

AND A LAST UPDATE

'Substantial evidence' means none at all.  Some people know no shame

Do not be Florida man

Florida is not the most populous state but it leads the nation in ridiculous mishaps, usually attributed by headline writers to "Florida man."

For example, on Christmas Eve the Gainesville Sun reported:

FLORIDA MAN FIGHTING FOR HIS
LIFE AFTER CHASING MONKEY

"DESTIN -- A Florida man now living in Bali is fighting for his life after he fell from a roof while chasing a monkey that had stolen his favorite Pittsburgh Steelers cap."

Typically for a Florida man report, there is the unexplained reference to something like "now living in Bali."

Also unanswered is the question, would he have chased the monkey for his second-favorite Steelers cap? How many Steelers caps does he own?

My favorite Florida man story was about a burglar who was being chased by police. He jumped into a lake to escape where an alligator ate him.

Merry Christmas

Figgy pudding and a buche de Noel (in progress)

Last year I didn't have opportunities to bake for Christmas, so I bought a rather expensive Christmas pudding. Mistake. It was no good.

Figgy pudding is one of those foods that just won't submit to industrialization. This year I did a little baking. The figgy pudding is easy and I don't know why more people don't have them.

The most troublesome part is finding and chopping suet, now that most grocers trim their meat in distant mega-butcheries and ship the meat in chilled. But a few places still accept requests.

Figgy pudding doesn't usually have figs in it, though I have made it that way. This year, I saw a British baking show that presented a figgy pudding made with fresh tangerine. So I guess you can do what you want.

The buche de Noel has worms helping to decompose the fallen log. That was for my youngest grandchild, Dakota, who helped me decorate, though he ate more worms than he got on the cake.

The shallow state

Private citizens are not supposed to conduct foreign policy in the name of the United States, although this has never been prosecuted.

Perhaps because in nearly every instance except one, the private citizen was attempting, however ineptly, to support the policy of the government. That was the case, for example, when Bishop Walsh attempted to negotiate with the government of Japan for an end to hostilities in Asia.That was Roosevelt's policy, too, and Walsh was not prosecuted.

The one case we all know of when a private citizen attempted to torpedo the policy of the government was when Flynn, acting for private citizen Trump, advised the government of Russia not to pay any attention to sanctions designed by the government of the United States to influence Russian policy in third countries (Ukraine).

Not treason, according to the very narrow definition in the Constitution, but treachery.

Open and shut case, really, and now we know, via Foreign Policy magazine, that that is just what happened and that the guilty parties knew they were guilty and the other Trump advisers knew, too, and worked to cover it up.

Obstruction? Yes. Collusion? yes.

Kind of stupid, when you think about it. You could call it the shallow state.

And it goes far back and involves  advisers to Trump who were also family.

A further point.  The initial attempts to destroy the effectiveness of government policy need not have been successful in order to be criminous. People go to prison for long terms all the time for attempting to break the law without ever committing the violation they were attempting.

It's called conspiracy.

Eschew foreign entanglements

If you read this story carefully, you will learn that foreigners are not allowed to buy beer at baseball games in New Jersey. USA! USA! USA!

More fake news

Sometimes it's hard to keep up.

Waiting for howls of outrage

There is no question a lot of national legislation is too complex. One of my first business stories, over 40 years ago, was about ERISA -- the Employees Retirement Income Security Act. Even its admirers said it was so complex that no one understood all of it.

It was designed to protect pensions from managers, a very good idea. Its big idea was to force the president and financial officer of a corporation to sign personally on income statements and be personally liable for their accuracy.

That was thought to be a very big stick indeed. Too big, really. What would it mean to be personally liable for the pension benefits of a declining giant like United States Steel?

ERISA was not a failure but only a modest success. The pension scandals of the '60s were curtailed but not eliminated.

(In some sectors, newspapers for example, pension funds were usually topped up. Even overfunded. In the '90s,with a hot stock market -- and forgetting that economies reverse course from time to time -- businesses petitioned for legislation that allowed them to pull excess savings out of plans. The company I worked for took back a million dollars. Time marches on. Newspapers declined. Last year, that fund [actually a new one, but for illustrative purposed it can be considered the same one] had to borrow nearly a million to keep within the 90% actuarial guideline to avoid a tax penalty.

(That is a very small fund. Some big ones were plundered to the tune of billions. This happened in both public and private funds. The State of Hawaii fund was well-provisioned until the Legislature began harvesting the excess in good years -- sort of like taking a surplus kidney from a healthy person -- until now it is tens of billions in the hole. Donating a kidney is a nice thing, so long as the remaining kidney remains healthy.)

My point is not so much about pensions (though perhaps I should write more about them) but about complex legislation and, in particular, how politically active citizens react to it.

About 8 years ago, several rightist to libertarian posters at this blog and another I used to infest were howling daily about the rush to pass Obamacare without having time to read through it. A point well taken. I am listening attentively for similar howls from the same people about the Trumpcare Tax Act (as it ought to be called because it sure takes care of Trump).

So far nada. Nil. Nothing. Not any.

Most Americans are said to deplore Trumpcare, which is a prudent assumption given the immorality of the people voting for it, but how have they arrived at their opinions? We don't know what sort of pig is in that poke.

I don't know how the tax changes will affect me and don't much care personally. Americans pay very low taxes. My income taxes last year were something on the order of 13 or 14% of my income, and even adding Medicare, excise and property taxes I doubt the total got as high as 25%.

In exchange I got good roads, good health care etc. A bargain really.

Tricia and I will not be driven out of the middle class. But many millions have been since the inauguration of Reaganomics and it looks as if the Trumpcare Tax Act will accelerate that program. There is no doubt it is the deliberate intent of the rightwing.

I identify famous 'flying' 'object'

Except it wasn't an object and it wasn't flying.

It was a foo fighter, a reflection off the plane of the navy aviator who saw it. His description is unmistakable:

The object created no rotor wash — the visible air turbulence left by the blades of a helicopter — he said, and began to mirror the pilots as they pursued it, before it vanished.

“As I get closer, as my nose is starting to pull back up, it accelerates and it’s gone,” he said. “Faster than I’d ever seen anything in my life. We turn around, say let’s go see what’s in the water and there’s nothing. Just blue water.”

Foofighters were first identified during World War II, over the cloudy skies of wintertime northwest Europe. They went away when the Air Force painted its shiny bombers.

They are not as commonly seen on clear bright days, but the ocean is reflective.

Several things seem worth remarking on concerning this story:

1. The Washington Post report should have mentioned foo fighters. At this late stage in the UFO nonsense, any large paper should have an editor somewhere in its team who know something about the silly history of this crap. And another editor will the guts to get the whole story out.

2. The video was made using Raytheon tracking instruments, presumably among the best we have. They failed completely. Longtime readers of RtO (with good memories) wil recall that RtO has often cautioned that target acquisition is the most problematic aspect of aerial warfare.

(I didn't mention that in the previous post, about bombing in Iraq, but the issue never, ever goes away. It is a rare bomb that lands anywhere near its target, if the target even exists.)

3. Foo fighters are seen very often around Korea, which has weather similar to northwest Europe's.

You might want to reflect on "3" for some time, considering the association of truculent military organizations North and South; an ignorant, impulsive and stupid American president with childish ideas about weaponry and idiotic advisers; defective technology; incompetent military leadership at least on the U.S. side.

The only bright spot -- aside from Fravor's UFO -- is that his Navy superiors paid no attention to his report.

Mad bombers

It should come as no surprise that Iraqi conscripts who declined to fight for a corrupt Saddam government also decline to fight for a corrupt Abadi government. That was the lesson of the very slow capture of Mosul and Raqqa.

It will not do to belittle the difficulty of reducing a stubbornly defended city, even if the defenders are only a small, poorly armed and hopeless force. It almost always requires the complete destruction of the place. Such was the case in Warsaw, Manila, Hue and many other places. But you cannot obliterate a city without killing its inhabitants.

And so it happened, again, in Iraq. The American press has done little to report the consequences, but European sources have claimed that something on the order of 60,000 non-combatants were killed. Many by coalition bombing, as the Iraqi infantry declined -- they are not fools -- to assault defended positions, preferring to have pilots blow them up.

If anyone was taking "shelter," so much the worse for them. A rare American report on the consequences is in today's Los Angeles Times. Nut grafs:

When Ali Thanoon lost more than 50 members of his family in a U.S. airstrike during the battle against Islamic State in Mosul in the spring, he turned to the Iraqi government for compensation.

But officials required Thanoon to prove his loved ones had been killed: He could get the necessary death certificates only by digging up their bodies from a mass grave.

That would take time. Thanoon had been trapped for five days under the rubble, then hospitalized for weeks. By the time a cousin was able to take Iraqi officials to unearth Thanoon's two wives, seven children and other relatives, all they found were "meat and bones," Thanoon said.

"What's this?" said one of the officials. "We need to see faces."

* * *

Yet payments under the U.S. program plummeted after America ended its initial combat role in Iraq in 2010 — and did not pick up again when the U.S.-led coalition launched a violent new phase of the war with its assault on the militant group Islamic State.

The U.S. acknowledges that it has killed at least 801 civilians in Iraq and Syria since the campaign began in 2014. Independent monitors insist the toll is much higher: at least 5,975, according to the London-based monitoring group Airwars.

Congress has set aside at least $5 million through the end of 2018 for payments to civilians under the condolence program. But a review of Pentagon data shows that just three such payments have been offered to families in Iraq over the last three years — and none were offered in Syria.

Although very few Americans have any notion of the immense destruction and savagery we are responsible for -- just as few know, even today, how much insane killing we did in Southeast Asia -- you can be sure that the Iraqis know, and the version they will hear will be even more lurid and disgraceful than the facts, however bad those are.

The rest of the Arab societies will hear, too; and other Muslims; and even, in diminishing ripples of knowledge and propaganda, many others.

I am reminded of a Fascist poster depicting their view of the bombing of Italy:

It means "Here are the Liberators!"

That old-time religion

I grew up surrounded by evangelical Christians. They were an unsavory bunch. If I had a dollar for every time some evangelical who knew nothing about me -- other than that I attended Catholic mass, as I used to do -- told me I was doomed to everlasting torment in hell for not accepting Jesus as my personal savior, I'd have over $500.00.

If I had a dollar for every time an evangelical asked me, what is it exactly that Catholics believe about Jesus, I'd have $0.00.

There were liberal evangelicals in the South in the old days. One, anyway, a preacher in Tennessee, who was rather famous for siding with civil rights marchers back when I was marching myself.

You know how many of what we might call common or garden variety evangelicals supported civil rights equality for Americans of all colors and creeds there were? Zero. Nil. Nada. Not any.

I bring this up because of late there has been a barrage of writing by liberal evangelicals.  Some, like Randall Balmer, grew up outside the South in evangelical traditions that were derived largely from German sources and had almost no similarities with Southern Baptist evangelicalism, which was the kind I grew up with. (By liberal I mean the 19th century traditions of individual autonomy, political equality, and social reform, all concepts unknown in Southern churches.)

But of late a few have emerged from the holy roller traditions I grew up with.

Today, for example, Politico has a long piece about Jen Hatmaker, a Texas preacher's wife who had an enormous following until she questioned Trumpism. That's when the death threats began.

That's the evangelicalism I know: violent, bigoted, ignorant.

And, almost as if it's a plot, the N.Y. Times has a personal statement today by its evangelical reporter (I will bet not one critic of MSM "fake news" knows -- or will believe -- that the Times has such a reporter) denouncing the irreligiosity of what she calls "Fox evangelicalism." 

There have been similar pieces in other papers, and I doubt not, in the church press. I found these two especially well thought-out.

These outliers are still outnumbered many times by the old-line evangelicals.

What are Bitcoins worth?

Nothing, in my opinion, but if you believe in markets then they are worth -- dollars.

That's what the Bitcoin futures market settles in. Shouldn't the settlements be fractions of Bitcoins?

Unless it's all shibai.

Political clarity

The Tea Party/Trump wing of politics wanted honesty -- no more prevaricating, shillyshallying talk. Funny how they cannot tell even a simple truth. However, it's clear enough what they are saying.

During World War II, a German linguist living in Dresden, Victor Klemperer, devised a "National Socialist Lexicon." Although he considered himself to be a German and a Christian, the Nazis rated Klemperer a Jew, so he lived in a "Jews' House" and was tightly restricted. Nevertheless, he thought, correctly, that he could assess the temper of the German public by carefully following linguistic cues. For example, early in the war with Russia, death notices from soldiers' families usually used the phrase "in proud sorrow." By early 1942, the pride was vanishing from the obituaries.

Rightwing watchers, such as RtO, can do the same with our nazi politicians.

For example, in defeat Roy Moore said, "there's not a dime's worth of difference" between the Democrats and the establishment Republicans.

Now, where have we heard that before? Oh yeah, George Wallace in 1968, the last time a big name candidate ran for president as an open racist.

I was wrong about Moore's chances, but not by that much. He's not an open racist like Wallace but he's a racist, he knows it and everybody who voted for him knows it.

He still got nearly 49%.

And if there hadn't been 22,000 write-ins , almost all probably protest votes against Moore's pedophilia from racists who coud not bring themselves to vote for antiracist Doug Jines, he'd have won.

I wonder what it's like to go through life telling yourself: "If I'd been a racist but not a pedophile or a pedophile but not a racist, I could have been elected to the United States Senate."

Ain't that the truth?

E.J. Dionne in the Post, demonstrating more knowledge of American history than the entire Republican Party put together:

When Republicans are FBI haters who are sidetracking probes into Russian subversion, the world truly is turned upside down.

Book Review 406:The End of the Imperial Japanese Navy

THE END OF THE IMPERIAL JAPANESE NAVY, by Masanori Ito. 192 pages. Macfadden-Bartell paperback

As we wonder what moves China or North Korea might be willing to make on the international stage, it is worth remembering how badly Americans understood what Japan would be willing to do 75 years ago.

The Japanese view of how it unfolded is very different from ours, even if the Japanese thinker agrees with most American historians that Japan had no chance of submitting its national goals to the test of war successfully with the United States and Gret Britin.


“The End of the Imperial Japanese Navy” is an old book, published in the early ‘50s, first as a series of newspaper articles by  highly-placed reporter who had covered naval affairs since the ‘20s.

Some takeaways:

For the Japanese, god, specifically the War God, was an active agent in warfare. Americans (like MacArthur) might prate about God’s being on their side, but even as psychotic a general as MacArthur did not write god into operational plans. The Japanese navy did.

Even as well-informed a reporter as Ito made some odd mistakes. He got the armament of HMS Prince of Wales incorrect. (Americans fixate on Pearl Harbor, but from the Japanese point of view — specially of a big gun guy like Ito), the sinking of the Prince of Wales was an even greater victory.)

Ito also still fell completely for the claims of the kaiten (suicide submarine) faction, even into the ‘50s. He credits these nasty weapons with major successes. In fact, they scored only a destroyer escort and a tanker. (I have a personal interest in kaiten, since the largest warship one ever attacked was the USS Case at Ulithi. Accounts of that attack vary — either that Case ran down and sank the kaiten or that the kaiten hit the Case but the warhead broke off and sank without exploding. My father was the gunnery officer aboard Case and if the kaiten had succeeded you would not be reading this.)

All military people make mistakes in reporting battle outcomes, usually claiming more destruction than was accomplished, but the Japanese were especially flagrant. In the case of kaiten, the only way they had of assessing results was what the big submarine that launched the little one could see, which was not much. At Ulithi, for example, several kaiten penetrated the atoll. The launch sub saw the results of explosions and concluded that the kaiten must have succeeded in sinking at least a battleship and several aircraft carriers, since the pilots would pick out the most impressive targets and could not fail. In fact, all but one of the explosions were of kaiten running onto the reef.

The antagonism of the headquarters of the imperial army and navy are well-known (and only somewhat more vicious than the antagonism between the US army and navy), but Ito proclaims that at the local level army and navy cooperated wholeheartedly. This is not the way Amercians saw it.
To take an example, although shipping was the main problem of the Japanese war effort, the army and and the navy each grabbed as much for their exclusive use as each could and would not share.

As a result, sometimes precious freighters were sent on empty voyages just because one service or the other would not let the other use its tonnage.

The most interesting section of the book — and one of the longest — is Ito’s defense of Admiral Kurita’s retreat at Leyte Gulf, always presented by American historians as lack of nerve or confusion. Ito, who knew and admired Kurita, has a very different view.

He says Kurita, first, was opposed to useless sacrifice of sailors’ lives if no military purpose was likely to be served; and second, understood that his valuable ships were best used against equally valuable enemy warships, and concluded that the sinking of empty transports — even many of them — would not have justified any substantial risk.

As in the United States in 2017, in Japan in the ‘30s and ‘40s, military officers vastly overrated both their own abilities and the capabilities of their arsenal. And they lied to each other and to their governments.

Genuine voter fraud discovered

As always, the fraudster is a rightwinger. A chairman of the Colorado Republican Party no less.

Did he man up and admit his dirty deed? Of course not. He's a Republican.

Hat tip to Juanita Jean, your internet source for rightwing shenanigans.

Where is Israel's foreign ministry?

According to Wikipedia, it is in Givrat Ram, a district of Jerusalem.
 

The Israeli version of Foggy Bottom

I was surprised to learn this, I would have guessed it was in Tel Aviv. Even more surprised not to have learned it through any of the many reports about WBD's decision to move our embassy.

It seems like a relevant fact.

Cutting ties with Wells

For a while, Tricia and I had accounts with Wells Fargo. It was not a business either of us would have dealt with if we had had a choice, even before the news reports about pervasive criminality and dishonesty -- not the main characteristic you want in a bank.

However, the administrator of an estate we were involved in used Wells, so we opened an account.

The estate was wound up, so I wrote -- real letter, on paper -- the branch where we had opened the account, instructing the manager to close the accounts.

I didn't hear anything back, so I assumed the accounts were closed. Today I got an email informing me I could view the latest statement.

Imagine  my surprise to see that the accounts were not closed and that Wells Fargo was assessing me fees on them. I had a negative balance.

So I called and got a nice lady who blandly informed me that at Wells you cannot close an account where you opened it. You do that online. Or, in my case, after some strong words, right on the spot over the phone.

Me: Are you telling me that the branch manager just threw my letter away?
Nice Lady: I cannot answer that.

So, not only is Wells Fargo criminal and dishonest, it is stupid.

But big. 

My prediction in the Aabama election

The special Senate election is a week away. I have not been in Alabama for a long time, but my grandfather was from the area where Roy Moore operated and I grew up (across the state line not far away.

People do not change rapidly, especially when their religious and deep cultural ideas are involved.

So I have a  prediction: Moore will win and it will not be especially close. Not a landslide but a comfortable victory.

The spy in the palm of your hand

The New York Times has an impressive report on the likelihood that Trump's claim that a Patriot missile shot down a Houthi Scud at Riyadh was mistaken.

The report relies on something called the Middlebury Institute, which I'd never heard of, and the institute, in turn, assembled its information from Google satellite images, social media posts of videos and similar open sources.

This is a good news/bad news revelation for military intelligence analysts. For one thing, now it's comparatively easy for savvy people to determine the actual results of an attack using stand-off weapons. For another thing, now it's comparatively easy for savvy people to determine the actual results of an attack using stand-off weapons.

I am reminded of the "Battle of the Beams" during the German bombing of England. The Germans used a radio-triggered bombing release, the first ever GPS technique. The British developed a countermeasure that "bent" the trigger beam, inducing the planes to drop their bombs in the countryside instead of on London.

The Germans, with no sources on the ground to report where the bombs fell, never realized their system had been spoofed.

It is easy to think of later examples of offensive efforts that were ruined by lack of targeting data: the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail is an obvious one.

Now, at least in some cases, results are discoverable.

Of course, you have to be smart enough to assess the evidence. WBD isn't that smart.

Are American military officers? Past experience suggests they are not.

A party of aspirations

There used to be a trick question on the Virginia bar exam: Is there an absolute defense against a charge of attempted statutory rape?

The answer is, yes, ignorance of the target's age is an absolute defense, although that is not, in Virginia, a defense against a charge of statutory rape.

(Off my topic here, but curiously pertinent to current concerns is that attempted statutory rape is the charge being made against Roy Moore, the Alabama moralist. He is vehemently suspect but that is not a charge that prosecutors ever bring.)

So, did the Trump campaign collude with the Russians to turn the 2016 election?

Trump says no. The evidence is not public that it did so successfully.

On the other hand, it is beyond dispute that the Trump campaign attempted collusion.