A great deal of what goes on with a blog is unseen by the reader. For example, I’ve talked about the amount of spam comments I get, almost all of them blocked by my spam filter. A while back there was a period of a couple of years when spam came in at the rate of about 10,000 a day. Then for some unknown reason it suddenly went down to about 500 a day. That’s quite a jump.
Then it started creeping back up to about 1500 a day. Again, I have no idea why, although I believe there are several layers of filters that operate. Next, I installed a security system that was supposed to improve things, but the main thing it seemed to do was to inform me on a regular basis of the number of attacks the blog had sustained.
“Attacks” are not the same as spam. They’re not necessarily attempts to take over the entire blog by hacking into it, although I’m pretty sure those occur on a regular basis, too. The attacks I’m talking about are another type of behind-the-scenes war, the details of which I’ll skip except to say they’re an attempt by bots (or the people who design bots) to get into part of the blog’s information sources and use them.
Bots are indefatigable—as you might imagine, since they’re not alive. Every now and then I’ll block one through that same security system (I’m being purposely vague here) if I get a notice that it’s been attacking particularly relentlessly. Most of these bots are from places in China and Russia or Ukraine, although there are some from the US (not sure whether they’re really from the US or whether it’s a proxy IP number and location they’re using).
I blocked one a few days ago. Three days later the service reported that in those three days that bot had made approximately 6000 attempts to attack that were blocked. By my hasty calculations, that turns out to be one every one and a half minutes or so, round the clock.
Not all the attack bots are that busy. And I wonder if at a certain point, they are programmed to give up.
[NOTE: I’ll add that, simultaneously with my blocking some of these bots, my spam-comment-per-day rate has gone down to about 50, which is extraordinarily and unprecedentedly low. So, although my goal was not to block spam, it turns out that spam and the attack bots seem to be related.]
Ever since I first saw the play “Noises Off” on Broadway around 1984 I’ve been deeply impressed by Michael Frayn, its author.
I’d read about the play before I attended it. It was said to be very funny and very clever. But it was exponentially funnier and more clever than I’d imagined, probably the funniest and most clever play I’d ever seen, then or later. It was also crazily complex in terms of its “business” and its staging, requiring split-second perfection in its timing, as well as prodigious memories in its actors.
I recently got a look at the script for “Noises Off,” something I’d always wondered about. How does a playwright even write the directions for that sort of thing? The script is just as complicated as I’d thought, a sort of fugue of action and words that’s hard to puzzle out when reading but works perfectly onstage, like a very intricate orchestral score.
And so I’ve long wondered about Frayn, who has also written other plays I’ve seen, of a very different type. What kind of a protean mind does he have?
MF: I never write with any audience in mind. I never think that anyone’s going to do the plays. People often ask if you think about an audience or if you think about which actors are going to perform them. Well, you can’t, or my brain is simply not big enough to do this. Every channel is, has to be dedicated to thinking about what you are writing. You really don’t have any, or I don’t have any spare space to spare to think about are people going to like this or whatever, or is this suitable for this kind of theatre or that kind of theatre. And certainly with Noises Off and with Copenhagen and with Democracy I didn’t think that anyone would perform them at all, I thought I was just writing them for my own amusement.
Astounding. He sounds sincere, too. Come to think of it, one of the joys of “Noises Off” may be just that: that it was a form of play in the nontheatrical meaning of the word, an activity “engaged in for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose.”
“Noises Off” is not only the funniest play I’ve ever seen, bar none, but unlike many comedies its humor bears repeating. I believe I’ve seen it four or five times, the first three times within a couple of years of each other, and I continued to find it very funny each time. A lot of the humor is of the slapstick farcical variety, which is not ordinarily my cup of tea. But somehow it’s pulled off at such a brisk pace that it works phenomenally well.
I’ve seen Frayn’s play “Copenhagan” (also referenced in that quote of his) too, many years later. It’s thoughtful and intellectual and hardly a barrel of laughs. After I saw it, I had to go back and check to make sure the same person had written them both.
More from the interview:
UC: Could you give an example of one of your plays where you remember exactly how you got together the general idea and the specific topic?
MF: Well, I can remember with Noises Off, that – I told you that my first show was four short plays The Two of Us, and one of them was a farce and the point of the evening was, it was played by just two actors, one actor and an actress. And the farce had five characters in it, who were discovering each
other in embarrassing positions or whatever. So the two actors had to do a lot of fast, quick changing and running through one door and to another backstage putting on a different coat or so and one night I watched it from backstage and I thought this is funnier than what’s going on at the front and I must one day write a farce seen from behind.
It was a very easy thought to have and it took me a very, very long time to do.
I bet it did.
If you haven’t seen the play, I’ll mention that it has one of those play-within-a-play structures. But none of the action takes place outside the theater at all. The first act is a rehearsal of a supposed play that’s a second-rate farce. The second act is a performance of the same play as seen from backstage. The third act is a performance seen from the front but occurring much later in a grinding tour in which all the relationships between the actors (not so great to begin with) have disintegrated in various ways.
That explanation of “Noises Off” and its genesis is immediately followed by this one from Frayn, about his play “Copenhagen”:
Copenhagen is again, problems I’ve been thinking about for a long time, about quantum mechanics and indeterminacy. And then I happened to read a book by Thomas Powers called Heisenberg’s War which told the story of Heisenberg’s trip to Copenhagen in 1941, much written about then, but I had
never come across it, and since I’d read it, I thought: this suggests, this seems to encapsulate something about the difficulty of knowing why people do what they do and there is a parallel between that and the impossibility that Heisenberg established in physics, about ever knowing everything about
the behaviour of physical objects. So that idea sort of came quite quickly and it took a very, very long time then to work out how to do it. An appallingly long time.
That’s quite a wide-ranging mind Frayn has.
By the way, Frayn has also had a great deal of success as a translator of Russian:
He is now considered to be Britain’s finest translator of Anton Chekhov (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard) as well as an early untitled work, which he titled Wild Honey (other translations of the work have called it Platonov or Don Juan in the Russian Manner) and a number of Chekhov’s smaller plays for an evening called The Sneeze (originally performed on the West End by Rowan Atkinson).
He also translated Yuri Trifonov’s play Exchange, Leo Tolstoy’s The Fruits of Enlightenment, and Jean Anouilh’s Number One.
One more thing about “Noises Off.” Although it was made into a film, I advise you to stay far far away from that version. The play only works onstage. This is one of the few times I agree with Frank Rich, who “called “Noises Off” ‘the funniest play written in my lifetime’, [but] wrote that the film is ‘one of the worst ever made.'”
In a dramatic turnaround, Senate Democrats voted to reopen the government on Monday after receiving a commitment from Republicans to hold a vote on immigration legislation ”” paving the way to end the three-day shutdown.
The Senate voted 81-18 to move forward on a bill to fund the government through Feb. 8 after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) agreed to end the shutdown and continue to negotiate on immigration and spending matters. If a broader deal is not reached by Feb. 8, the Senate would take up legislation to protect hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants who are losing legal protections, as long as the government remains open…
Democrats had been deeply skeptical of McConnell’s commitment, but indicated after a party strategizing session that they’re willing to trust the majority leader.
I have a different—or perhaps I should say “additional—take on it. I think that the story, “The Republicans are to blame when Republicans shut down the government and the Republicans are to blame when Democrats shut down the government” didn’t play all that well in Peoria, and didn’t even play so very well in the Democratic equivalent of Peoria. The government shutdown was always theater anyway, and if the audience isn’t clapping it’s time to book another play in the same theater.
The Democrats are thinking that their next show will be more of a success:
In agreeing to break the impasse after a three-day shutdown, Democrats are banking that they have successfully pigeonholed Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell into opening an immigration debate in the coming weeks and that an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote for an immigration bill would put pressure on the House and White House. They are already warning that if their demands aren’t met, another government shutdown could happen on February 8, when the three-week short-term funding bill runs out. And next time they won’t have Republicans dangling a six-year funding extension for the Children’s Health Insurance Program over their heads.
The FBI is either abysmally incompetent (“fools”) or in full-fledged CYA mode in order to hide its own wrongdoing (“knaves”). I vote “aye” on the latter. But either way, we’re in trouble.
Investigators in both House and Senate were stunned late Friday when, receiving a batch of newly-released texts between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, they also received notice from the bureau that the FBI “failed to preserve” Strzok-Page messages from December 14, 2016 through May 17, 2017.
Given the amount of texting that went on between Strzok and Page, who were having an extramarital affair, that probably meant thousands of missing documents.
A number of critical events in the Trump-Russia affair occurred between December 2016 and May 2017, including:
Conversations between Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
The completion and publication of the intelligence community assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The briefing in which FBI director James Comey told President-elect Donald Trump about the Trump dossier.
The president’s inauguration.
The nomination and confirmation of new Justice Department leadership.
Flynn’s interview with the FBI (conducted by Strzok).
Comey’s assurances to Trump that he, Trump, was not under investigation.
A variety of revelations, mostly in the Washington Post and New York Times, about various Trump figures under investigation.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal from the Russia probe.
The firing of top Obama Justice Department holdover Sally Yates.
Trump’s tweet alleging he was wiretapped.
Trump’s firing of Comey.
And, finally, on May 17, 2017 ”” the final day of the missing texts ”” the appointment of Trump-Russia special prosecutor Robert Mueller.
Strzok and Page had a lot to talk about.
Please read the whole thing.
Even without the pages that have mysteriously gone missing, there’s plenty to mull over in the communications the FBI did supply:
In the newly-released texts, Strzok and Page discussed Trump winning the Republican presidential nomination, which they said would create “pressure” on the FBI to quickly finish up the Hillary Clinton email investigation, known inside the bureau as the “midyear exam,” or MYE…
…[There are] instances in the texts in which Strzok and Page told each other that they were switching to iMessage for further conversation, suggesting they might have moved their discussion of sensitive topics from their government-issued Samsung devices to private Apple devices.
One exchange between Strzok and Page, dated July 1, 2016, referenced then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s decision to accept the FBI’s conclusion in the Clinton investigation. Lynch’s announcement came days after it was revealed that the attorney general and former President Bill Clinton had an impromptu meeting aboard her plane in Phoenix.
“Timing looks like hell,” Strzok texted Page.
“Yeah, that is awful timing,” Page agreed. In a later message, she added: “It’s a real profile in couragw [sic], since she knows no charges will be brought.”
It may be long past the time to ask what Loretta Lynch knew and when she knew it.
My post on Jordan Peterson’s interview with Cathy Newman was much longer—so much longer—that now that I’ve disgorged it I’m going out to enjoy what’s left of the daylight.
I might post a dance post tonight, because they’re fun.
Over and out, for now.
UPDATE 1/21 3:52 PM:
Well, I guess I never got that dance post up there, did I? Tomorrow is another day.
Isn’t there some sort of big football game today? Patriots? Tom Brady and his cut hand? I may watch a bit of it later, if it’s close. I can’t say I deeply care, though.
There’s been a lot of delighted buzz on the right about a new video of Jordan Peterson being interviewed by a British journalist named Cathy Newman. The gist of that buzz is that he demolished her in spectacular fashion—in the rhetorical and ideological sense, that is.
I’m a pretty good arguer myself. But I sure wouldn’t want to be on the other side of a Peterson debate (or maybe I would like it—just to get close, because I admit to a bit of a crush on the guy). But I think that most people are simplifying what happened in the Newman interview. I believe that what Peterson did vis a vis Newman was much more than just win the argument or make his points or embarrass or “crush” or demolish her, or whatever destructive verb you want to use to describe it.
If you’d like to watch the interview now, here it is. But you might want to read the rest of what I say about it first, and then watch it:
What Peterson does in that interview isn’t just on the order of what someone like Thomas Sowell (whom I also admire greatly) habitually does in argument, which is to counter the adversary on the cognitive and logical points, and to apply the results of research to the discussion. Peterson certainly does do that, and that’s what most people see when they watch that interview. But he adds certain techniques of the therapist and particularly of the family therapist (although I really don’t know if he’s done any family therapy; Peterson’s a psychologist and used to have a private practice as a therapist, however).
If you’re mostly familiar with the supportive touchy-feely type of therapy, that’s not what I’m talking about here. I can’t give you a crash course in therapeutic techniques or in particular in the way family therapists work, but I can tell you that it’s complicated, thoughtful, and strategic.
At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Whether most therapists live up to that description is a very different question, and I suspect the answer is “no.” But we’re talking about an ideal here.
Note that quite early on Peterson says to Newman, “I’m very very very careful with my words.” During training to be a family therapist (or an individual therapist, for that matter), students learn to be ultra-careful with words—so careful that it can lead to a headache every session, which is what I often experienced when I was in training and worked in a clinical program. Every word has meaning and every word can affect clients, because therapists often have a great deal of power over clients whether they (therapists or clients) want it or not.
In the Newman interview, Peterson is highly aware that each word shapes the argument and that a misstep on his part can and will give grist to the mill of his opponents. He’s also interested in communicating clearly so that his thoughts can be more easily understood. So you can feel the intensity of his effort to be 100% careful with his words, and I think he succeeds in that endeavor to an extraordinary extent.
He also listens hyper-intently, another hallmark of a good therapist. His interviewer Newman is not only inferior to him in that regard, she barely listens at all but just barrels ahead with questions that for the most part are hostile (and perhaps prepared in advance rather than made up on the spot). So this ability to listen gives him an enormous advantage—one that the best therapists generally have, as well.
Peterson is highly aware of the problem Newman has with listening. In fact, it would be hard for him not to be aware, because her failure to listen is so blatant. He must correct her again and again and again on her misinterpretation of what he’s said. But another thing he does in response to her is very therapist-like (although it may not sound that way to most people)—he calls her on it by saying at one point, “That’s because you’re actually not listening.” This is a case of going from content to process, another favorite technique of the therapist. And it’s done in an observational manner rather than a purely combative one.
The interview also reveals Peterson’s extreme patience. He must be annoyed with Newman—wouldn’t anyone in his position be? But he remains polite and explains himself to her time and again.
I’m not familiar with Newman’s previous work, but she’s a very experienced journalist, so we’re not talking about a tyro here. My guess is that, until now, Newman has displayed the trappings of being articulate and hard-hitting and relentless despite the fact that she’s approaching the topic (this one, anyway) with an appeal to emotion. That doesn’t mean she’s dumb (even if she may seem so here); it means that the appeal to emotion usually works. It’s probably usually rattled her subjects, if she’s trying to rattle them.
She’s certainly trying to rattle Peterson. But she’s chosen the wrong guy, because Peterson is not a person who gets rattled (in public, anyway, which is all we see of him). He can get firm, assertive, and/or almost angry, but only when he decides for strategic reasons to display those particular emotions. And yet he also seems—and I believe actually is—sincere even in anger. It’s an interesting and unusual juggling act. Like Peterson or hate him (and I like him very much), there’s no mistaking the fact that he comes across as speaking from the heart and the mind combined, and weighing his words about as carefully as words can be weighed.
Peterson has the ability to do two highly unusual things simultaneously: continue mostly unruffled in the face of a verbal onslaught, while intently tracking the conversation and hacking through the weeds of the back-and-forth exchange in order to remember and to clearly restate what he actually said (and what the other person said) rather than what the other person claims either of them said. These two things are exactly what therapists are trained to do, and something good therapists are able to do. Peterson is astoundingly good at both.
But that’s not all. Yes, Peterson is trying to state the factual and cognitive case in a clear manner. Yes, he’s also trying to remain calm and yet show appropriate assertiveness. Yes, he’s trying to track the conversation and not get caught in the interviewer’s misstatements about his statements. But he’s also trying (I believe) to encourage a transformation within his interviewer, and not just a cognitive transformation, either.
Again, that’s what good therapists do. And I believe a lot of people missed that part of it when watching this interview.
Peterson does this in a number of ways, but one of them is by surprising Newman and behaving in a way that runs counter to her expectations, not just about what he’s saying and what he stands for (basically, liberty and responsible adulthood are what he stands for), but about who he is as a human being. Peterson’s sincerity and brilliance are part of this—no ideology-spouting boilerplate demagogue is he—and so is his calmness. But he just might be at his most effective when he disarms Newman with statements such as, “I suspect you’re not very agreeable”—which on paper might look like an angry insult, but in person is said not in hostile criticism but as amiable praise for her assertiveness in her climb to the top and for her tenaciousness in the interview.
These are traits about which Peterson is pretty sure Newman takes pride: her assertiveness and tenaciousness as a reporter and interviewer. These are also traits some of her interviewees (and other people) might have found off-putting, or even unfeminine. So Peterson has accomplished a kind of verbal jujutsu. He has turned what starts out sounding like criticism into praise for qualities in herself that Newman values. And it’s a type of criticism she is likely to have heard before and thinks is a sexist sort of criticism. But here, Peterson (someone she’s thought might be an anti-woman troglodyte) is saying she’s to be praised for it!
That accomplishes two things. The first is that it probably creates a bit of doubt in her mind about the idea that Peterson has a disempowering attitude towards women. The second is that praising her for something she values is an example of something that has a name in the therapy business: it’s called joining. Joining helps to get a previously hostile person on your side, if only for a moment and hopefully even longer.
But the more striking turning point is Peterson’s response when Newman asks him what gives him the right to be offensive to a transgender person (I’m doing this from memory and my original notes on first listening, because the video is so long I haven’t taken the time to listen to it again). He turns the tables on her and observes that she has been offending him during the interview—but with the goal of getting at the truth. Again we have the same method of saying something that initially sounds like it will be an insult, but then praising and joining her for it. Both exchanges are also examples of something known in therapy as a reframe, in this case reframing “offensive speech” as “truth-seeking speech.”
It’s another powerful moment. Peterson’s observation is completely unexpected and takes Newman by surprise. Newman is so taken aback that she becomes virtually speechless for a while. She now knows (on both the cognitive and the emotional level) several things she didn’t know before—about herself and about liberty and about Peterson. It’s a lot for her to take in. In response, at one point I thought I could see a fleeting little smile of respect and enjoyment on her face.
And then to top it all off, Paterson says “Ha! Gotcha!” in the most playful way. It’s another table-turning moment, because it’s done with good humor and charm rather than nastiness. “Gotcha” can be said in a hostile and nasty tone, but here Peterson’s tone is anything but. This in effect becomes another process observation on Peterson’s part, drawing attention to the game-playing aspect of the entire interview. It’s an element of interviews that’s usually ignored and not talked about during the interview itself, in which both people usually stick to content rather than process.
Peterson’s also correct with that playful “Gotcha!”—he has stumped her, and she knows it. And although she must feel somewhat humiliated, I think Newman also perceives the spirit in which Peterson said it. We’re in this game together, he seems to be saying. We’re sometimes willing to offend and not always be greeable, but we’re truth-seekers, playing for high stakes in the world of ideas but bobbing and weaving in a gamelike fashion as we spar about them.
I don’t know for sure whether that’s what she sees, but that’s what I see happening there.
It’s a tour de force on Peterson’s part. I don’t know whether I’m interpreting Newman’s reaction correctly, and I’m certainly not saying that even if she had that reaction that it would last very long. But man, he’s impressive—as thinker, debater, therapist, and human being. Newman got to experience all four of those things during that interview.
I have no desire to write about it in any detail. If it turns into Something, I’ll write about it. We’ve seen too many similar versions of this play already, although the cast of characters keeps changing.
Some of the characters remain the same, though. It’s their lines that keep changing:
I’d prefer to see him do this portion of a famous soliloquy:
…It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Margaret Atwood, feminist icon, has gotten into trouble. It’s part of what I’ve come to see as a generational war between certain older feminists who still hold to quaint old-fashioned notions such as due process, and certain younger ones who think they can toss it out the window because the only process they’re interested in is the one that says “believe everything women accusers say, if they’re accusing men of wrongdoing.”
Atwood is a well-known writer (she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale) and has always been politically leftist. She certainly has written a spirited defense of herself. She is mostly spot on here [emphasis mine]:
My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviours this entails, including criminal ones. They’re not angels, incapable of wrongdoing. If they were, we wouldn’t need a legal system.
Nor do I believe that women are children, incapable of agency or of making moral decisions…
Furthermore, I believe that in order to have civil and human rights for women there have to be civil and human rights, period, including the right to fundamental justice, just as for women to have the vote, there has to be a vote. Do Good Feminists believe that only women should have such rights? Surely not…
So let us suppose that my Good Feminist accusers, and the Bad Feminist that is me, agree on the above points. Where do we diverge? And how did I get into such hot water with the Good Feminists?…
A fair-minded person would now withhold judgment as to guilt [of an accused male professor whom Atwood believes was denied due process] until the report and the evidence are available for us to see. We are grownups: We can make up our own minds, one way or the other. The signatories of the UBC Accountable letter have always taken this position. My critics have not, because they have already made up their minds. Are these Good Feminists fair-minded people? If not, they are just feeding into the very old narrative that holds women to be incapable of fairness or of considered judgment, and they are giving the opponents of women yet another reason to deny them positions of decision-making in the world.
I bolded that first part—that both Atwood and her feminist accusers “agree on the above points”—because I think she makes a fundamental error with that assumption. However, maybe she’s just being sarcastic and knows that this is the heart of the matter on which the two groups do not agree. It is my distinct impression that the group of young feminists angry at Atwood for defending this man and saying he needs to have a fair hearing (she is not saying he’s innocent; she’s saying we don’t know) are in marked disagreement with her about the importance of human rights. The believe that the word of a woman is as good as a trial or due process—that it replaces and can stand in for due process when a woman is accusing a man.
That second part that I bolded goes like this: “they are just feeding into the very old narrative that holds women to be incapable of fairness or of considered judgment, and they are giving the opponents of women yet another reason to deny them positions of decision-making in the world.” It’s an interesting point, which is that the behavior of these young feminists feeds into traditional criticism of women. And although Atwood doesn’t mention it, part of that “old narrative” is the justice vs. care argument about the difference between men’s and women’s ethics and ethical development.
You may not be familiar with that discussion, which became popular in the 1980s with the publication of Carol Gilligan’s book In a Different Voice. It’s complicated, but the summary version is that Atwood (and I) espouse the supposedly male point of view—justice—and as you might imagine, the young feminists attacking her exhibit the supposedly female one—what matters is feelings, not some abstract principle of justice for all.
Gilligan’s research has been strongly challenged, by the way, so I don’t even know if it’s true that men and women generally exhibit these ways of deciding what’s ethical (if I’m recalling correctly, Gilligan felt they were at equal stages of ethical development, just different from each other). But it’s an interesting framework with which to look at the attacks on Atwood for standing up for simple due process even for accused men.
[NOTE: The Twitter war against Atwood is quite bitter. If you want examples, see this:
If @MargaretAtwood would like to stop warring amongst women, she should stop declaring war against younger, less powerful women and start listening #metoohttps://t.co/Bayf1yALV7
I would say where’ve you been, Matt? This is not sudden; not at all. It’s been brewing for decades. It seems as though it’s only when the Reign of Terror phase comes—feminists fighting a feminist icon like Atwood—that it becomes more noticeable to the left.]
At least seven people who said they worked for a TV crew were arrested at Newark Liberty International Airport Thursday, after they allegedly tried to film themselves going through a security checkpoint with a fake explosive device.
The Transportation Security Administration said Port Authority police arrested the group after officers detected a suspicious item in a carry-on bag…
The group covertly filmed the encounter, the TSA said.
The group did not make it past the checkpoint, because TSA officers caught the item inside the roller bag, the TSA said.
The TSA believes the group wanted to figure out if they could get through the security checkpoint with the item while filming themselves doing so. They did not, and they were arrested on multiple charges and fines by the TSA, the agency said.
Members of the group, supposedly from the aptly-named “Staten Island Hustle,” were probably mighty surprised that their device was caught on what seems to have been the very first pass. I’m a bit surprised at the repercussions for them, since it apparently wasn’t a real bomb. However, I believe that ultimately the charges will be dropped, or there will be a small fine.
Testing of the system is usually done by a government agency, not by private citizens or businesses. The results of government testing have usually been abysmal (from last November):
In recent undercover tests of multiple airport security checkpoints by the Department of Homeland Security, inspectors said screeners, their equipment or their procedures failed more than half the time, according to a source familiar with the classified report.
When ABC News asked the source if the failure rate was 80 percent, the response was, “You are in the ballpark.”…
The news of the failure comes two years after ABC News reported that secret teams from the DHS found that the TSA failed 95 percent of the time to stop inspectors from smuggling weapons or explosive materials through screening.
That report led to major changes ordered at the TSA by then”“Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. The agency opened a training academy for transportation security officers and changed procedures to reduce long lines.
Although lawmakers described the TSA’s performance in this round of testing as poor, it was an improvement from two years ago, according to the source familiar with the report.
An improvement from a 95% failure rate is nothing to crow about.
During Obama’s presidency there was a series of revelations that made the right imagine that someone was going to be indicted or impeached or that the presidency would be declared invalid. It didn’t start with Obama’s presidency and it didn’t start with Republicans, but it certainly was prominent during the Obama administration.
Some reasons given for the impeachments or indictments or invalidations (I’ll leave out birtherism, which was only supported by a minority of the GOP) were Benghazi and the turning of the IRS into a political weapon. But they weren’t the only ones. I recall a succession of revelations (or promised revelations) and sequential hopes, all of which came to naught.
Trump hasn’t been in office nearly as long as Obama, but the anti-Trumpers have been busy with their own hopes, and they’ve been bitterly disappointed so far. But with all the ongoing investigations, hope springs eternal. There is very little doubt in the minds of the entire “Resistance” (in this case, they even give themselves a noble name) that Trump is guilty of many many crimes. And if not crimes, then he’s insane, stupid, or senile, or some combination of the three. At any rate, he must be removed from office for those reasons. Unlike during the Obama administration, the press is now on the “Resistance” side.
The so-called Steele dossier has been the focus of some of those anti-Trump hopes. But at the moment, the dossier appears to be the focus of the right’s hopes to indict someone in the Obama administration and the Democrats, based on a recent report to the House. Here’s a description:
A growing number of Republicans are demanding the release of a classified report that they say reveals political bias at the FBI and Department of Justice in the investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russian election meddling
Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) spearheaded the effort this week to allow lawmakers to view a top-secret report compiled by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).
Scores of Republicans have since viewed the document in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility on Capitol Hill. They left expressing shock, saying the special counsel investigation into whether Trump’s campaign officials had improper contacts with Russia is based on politically motivated actions at the highest level of law enforcement.
House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) called the memo “shocking.”
“I’m here to tell all of a America tonight that I’m shocked to read exactly what has taken place,” Meadows (R-N.C.) said in a speech on the House floor.
“I thought it could never happen in a country that loves freedom and democracy like this country. It is time that we become transparent with all of this, and I’m calling on our leadership to make this available so all Americans can judge for themselves.”
Meadows and his allies asked GOP leaders in the House to declassify the report as part of a short-term spending bill the House passed late Thursday night. Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said he wanted to follow House rules on the matter and deferred to Nunes and the Intelligence Committee.
All over the internet you can read speculation about what the repercussions could be (see this and this, for example). There is also the question of what they should be.
But then there’s the question of what they will be. I admit that, particularly after the relative lack of repercussions for the use of the IRS to harm political opponents during the Obama administration, an abuse of power if there ever was one, I have my doubts that any revelations of wrongdoing by Democrats—even of extreme wrongdoing—will lead to serious punishment or widespread and bipartisan outrage.
Now, if what’s contained in the memo proves to be not all that much, that won’t matter. But that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that no matter what the memo reveals, nothing will come of it.
That’s a pretty jaded position for me to take, but prior experience points to it. Of course, if something about the history of the Steele dossier and how it was used during the election were to end up boomeranging against the Democrats, it would be richly ironic, since it was meant to take down Trump. It just may have been the dirty trick that outdid that of tricky Dick.
And so (you probably knew I was going to say this)—we’ll see.
[NOTE: I am inordinately pleased with the rhyme the dirty trick that outdid that of tricky Dick.]
…which have to do with my plans to redesign things a bit.
Why am I doing this (I often ask myself)? One reason is that my old design is really really old, and it tends to be a little glitchy when faced with all the new gadgetry that’s come into being since I moved to WordPress over ten years ago. Ten years in blog-years is like light-years.
Just as a small example, now that my archives are so lengthy, it would be nice to have a drop-down menu for them instead of that long long list of dates in the right sidebar. I’m not planning a lot of bells and whistles, just ordinary things like that which are impossible with the antiquated design of the blog right now. It not so much that it looks bad (I like the way it looks), it just lacks some functions I’d like to have.
Another thing I’m planning is to drop the “neocon” and just become “neo.” I wrote a post a while back about my reasons for wanting the change, and I’d still like to do it. The idea is to have the old URL redirect to the new site, so if you like “neoneocon” and think of me that way, that name would still work to navigate to the blog.
“Neo” has become a sort of trademark. I’m somewhat limited in choosing a new URL to go with it because the ones that seem obvious (like “neoneo”) are already taken (unless I want to be .org instead of .com, which I think is needlessly confusing).
What’s happening right now is that, for the moment, the URL “neoneocon.com” is linked with a different URL, “thenewneo.com”. Both URLs lead you to the same blog, this one (with different URLs at the top, depending on how you got here).
My original notion was that I could work out some of the design changes at the other site (“thenewneo”), in private, while keeping this one (“neoneocon”) as is. Then when I was ready to unveil the new one, it would be all spiffy and finished. Well, as with so many technical things, that plan ran into some problems. I hope to get things back to normal (just one URL, “neoneocon.com”) in a day or two.
In the meantime, though, you may notice that when you try to comment at neoneocon.com, the page loads as thenewneo.com instead. It looks and functions almost exactly the same, just with a different URL. The only other difference I’ve found is that when you comment, you may have to log in your username and email address. That’s just for a short while, though, till I get this fixed and back to relatively normal.
I apologize for any inconvenience. I hope it will be worth it in the end!
