The Elders have authorized me to make the following reply to Levenson’s bucket list desire to hike a very long way:
We’re watching you Professor Levenson…
Finally, I am not authorized at this time to disclose whether this post is paid for with Sorosbucks!
Open Thread!
Tom Levenson
Many members of my family concur.
Lapassionara
This was fun to watch, but I have read Exodus, and I think that was an exception to the 11th Commandment.
Adam L Silverman
@Tom Levenson: They are wise.
Adam L Silverman
@Lapassionara: The Deity had not yet created indoor plumbing, so no harm/no foul.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
they’re doubling down on their war on the brass… brilliant!
Adam L Silverman
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Ensign Nepotism has reported for duty!
Ohio Mom
Okay Adam, what’s this I read that Ivanka and Christopher Steele were pals for a while? What was +that* about? You always seem to be up on all sorts of gossip.
Adam L Silverman
@Ohio Mom: Was reported shortly after the Steele Dossier became public. Apparently they met at some function and she was quite taken with him leading some to speculate she might have tried to seduce him. Apparently this was before she married the shayna punim.
Lapassionara
@Adam L Silverman: really? Indoor toilets were in Eden. My thought, anyway.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Adam L Silverman: I had to google shayna punim, and when I did I had two thoughts:
Adam L Silverman
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Ohio Mom
Just a weird coincidence that several years after socializing with Ivanka, Steele went on to write the dossier on Trump’s relationship with Russia? I realize I am late to this story, having just come upon it today while bouncing around the internet.
I hate spy movies and am extremely irritated that I (along with the rest of us) have been forced to be an extra in one.
Ken
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: If only there were some civilian government official who could get us out of Afghanistan.
Speaking (indirectly) of that, how goes the logistics planning for the withdrawal of US troops from Germany? Pentagon still rounding up the manual typewriters and carbon paper to start typing up the orders?
Ken
Makes perfect sense to me. The commandments tell you where to site the latrine, the commandments weren’t needed in Eden, therefore…
(Other than the first two commandments, that is: Take care of the garden, and name all the animals. Environmentalists and biologists are being obedient.)
Ruckus
Adam
Ok I obviously needed that laugh, and I enjoyed it rather a lot.
RaflW
Based on this song, my Humanist UU minister partner may be part Jewish! ;)
joel hanes
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
their war on the brass
Trump tried to suborn the military for his little Lafayette Park fascism festival and Bible holding-aloft. They quietly refused, and a few days later, issued a muted statement that the military will not be used for political purposes. By anyone.
Trump is of course the world’s champion grudgeholder, and petty beyond belief, so he’s going to have it in for the generals for the rest of his life.
Lapassionara
@Ken: works for me. If eden is really edenic, then there would be no need for Adam and Eve to eliminate bodily waste.
The Moar You Know
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: The contractor community is not small and is rabidly pro-Trump. Do these people not even know who voted for them? Who sent them LOTS of money? Did the Trumps read and believe all the Cletus Safari stories in the NYT? Jesus these people are stupid. We’d better not lose to these fuckers in November because they’re doing their level best to lose it all.
Ken
@Lapassionara: You’re reminding me of a short story (author and title forgotten) set in pre-neolithic times, where the main character was listing the seven pleasures of life. “Sh*t” and “p*ss” were on the list. The last and greatest was “play”.
Amir Khalid
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Unless you’ve had a disfiguring illness/injury, in your thirties is much too soon for cosmetic surgery. What work could Jared have needed at that age?
Pete Downunder
My late father said that his idea of camping was staying at a hotel that lacked room service. I am my father’s child.
Frankensteinbeck
@joel hanes:
If you’ve been watching Trump, it’s obvious that personal control of the military (like all his dictator pals have) was something he expected, feels is his due, wants more than anything else, and of course he’s royally fucking pissed that when push came to shove they said “Hell, no.” That he wants/expected to stage a military coup is pure speculation, but he’s been open and consistent that he expected the military to leap to his bidding for stuff like parades and gunning down protestors.
FlyingToaster
WarriorGirl and I agree. Our allergies rule us; living two blocks from the ragweed-infested Charles River is in no way inspiring.
We’re bracing ourselves for school; virtual this week, then in-person mornings starting next week. WG is more terrified than I am (and I refused to enter the lobby today to pick up her Chromebook). Fortunately, her school is in good shape; the windows all open, the HVAC is about 2 years old, their are exchanger/filters in each room.
Music School starts tomorrow evening, and is expected to be virtual through at least first semester.
There’s no word if the Aikikai will open this year, but we assume not. Alas.
Frankensteinbeck
@joel hanes:
I’ll add, I get the strong impression that Trump took for granted that the troops wanted to shoot civilians. He thinks shooting civilians is cool and demonstrates real strength, and if they’re brown is being responsible and restoring the natural order. He figured naturally everyone else would think so, too. He’s still going “Come on, it must just be the generals in the way and the troops have to agree with me.”
Another Scott
@Amir Khalid: He apparently thought he needed his eyelids done.
He looks weird, but especially so when you compare the before and after…
People are strange.
Cheers,
Scott.
Adam L Silverman
@Amir Khalid: Look at the pictures of Ivanka at age 16 versus 18 versus 20 versus 24 versus 28 versus 30. She’s constantly having work done.
Adam L Silverman
@joel hanes: @Frankensteinbeck: Actually, if you read Milley’s statement from two week’s ago, it is clear that the President broke him. GEN Milley isn’t so much stating that the military will remain faithful to being under civilian control and apolitical, but that no matter what happens in November, the military will do nothing, as far as Milley is able to control these things, which, to be honest, is limited as he really isn’t so much as in control of the military as he is the President’s senior military advisor. Milley’s statement basically says that if the President declares himself President for life the military, as far as he’s concerned, will do nothing.
Ken
@Amir Khalid: @Adam L Silverman: Some tribes do ritual scarification, others have nose jobs.
Adam L Silverman
@FlyingToaster: Is that Kanai Sensei? I can’t imagine he’ll reopen any time soon.
Amir Khalid
@Another Scott:
@Adam L Silverman:
Oh, i see: you guys mean surgery for frivolous reasons. It had slipped my mind that these people have money for such things.
Adam L Silverman
@Amir Khalid: More money than brains.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: @Ken: @Amir Khalid:
Ivanka Trump before and after plastic surgery
JaySinWA
I got the stink eye from my wife when I played the video without headphones. I had to try and explain it was just Jew on Jew (non)violence. She was half convinced I was becoming anti-semite. Will nobody consider the goyim?
Kay
@Pete Downunder:
My daughter and her husband went camping quite a bit when they were dating and then after they married, but I noticed they stopped. I asked them and they said “oh, we realized we don’t like camping”
I sort of love that they tried it so many times before realizing it’s not mandatory and – how perfect that they gave up at the same time! :)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Maureen Dowd reading Emily Jane Fox’s book on the trump family. I didn’t read the book but i remember when Fox was going on TV selling it, you could tell she was skeeved out by her own story.
Cheryl Rofer
As the thread opens up, here’s something to make you feel good.
Have you ever seen a vice-presidential candidate like this?
Frankensteinbeck
@Adam L Silverman:
Yes, and without the military, Trump has nothing. But he seriously expected the military would be totally, personally loyal to him, and would happily gun down civilians for him when he got an excuse to order it.
Ken
@Cheryl Rofer: I dunno, she’s lacking a certain
penisgravitas.Adam L Silverman
@JaySinWA: Do you need me to send her an email?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: General Milley’s right, that’s the proper role for the military. If Joe Biden is certified by the House as the President-elect, he becomes President at noon on January 20th. Trump can declare himself whatever he damn well pleases, if he’s not certified as the President-elect by the House he won’t be President after noon on the 20th. He can stay in the Oval and issue orders, but no one will care. If he doesn’t want to leave, we have trespassing laws.
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: Somebody get her some sneakers that have arch support in them. Or get her some orthotics. Those Converse Chuck Taylor lows are going to kill her feet.
FlyingToaster
@Adam L Silverman: Yep. And no, I cannot imagine he’d take that chance.
We’re basically losing about a year and a half of learning, and WarriorGirl’d be moving to the adult classes this month, in the “Before” time.
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
That might have been the first surgery, thought process removed.
Building useless twits, on brain surgery at a time.
Monty Python may have had this useless twit thing down pat quite a while ago.
JaySinWA
@Adam L Silverman: Getting her to check her email is a burden unto itself. Thanks but no, thank you.
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I’m glad that everything is wonderful in Happy Gum Drop Fairy Tale Land.
JaySinWA
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Hear, Hear. It does not matter what Donny declares as long as there is not sufficient support for it. Donny does not have to do anything to relinquish power, he has to be able to assert it and the assumption should be that that will not happen
ETA not that he won’t try to assert holding power, but that there will be sufficient support for him to hold it.
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
Some people don’t need arch supports to the degree that others do. She may be one of the lucky ones. I have no idea what that’s like but still I’ve known others that do. Bastards.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: For the record, I don’t like gum drops.
Adam L Silverman
@FlyingToaster: I haven’t seen Kanai in years. He still dressing like Huggy Bear?
Adam L Silverman
@JaySinWA: Actually, the assumption should be that he will. That way we can be pleasantly surprised, rather than unpleasantly surprised.
frosty
@Cheryl Rofer: It’s the Converse sneakers!
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I will update your dossier.
Kay
@Cheryl Rofer:
I like her for saying that she doesn’t trust the Trump people with a vaccine. Come on. These people have lied to us over and over every day for 3 and 1/2 years. It is INSANE to take their word on anything and we shouldn’t be forced to pretend they are credible. They’re not.
Something like 65% of the country thinks they lie all the time for a very good reason- they do lie all the time. This has to be said and their lack of credibility has to be admitted and dealt with. I know it’s a problem with a vaccine. That’s not my fault. It’s their fault. If they wanted to be believed on a vaccine they shouldn’t have spent their whole term lying to us.
Pharmaceutical companies know the Trump Administration isn’t credible on a vaccine, which is why those companies felt they had to come out and reassure the country that the companies would ensure a rigorous trial process. The elephant in the room is that the US President and the people he hires cannot be trusted. Ignoring it won’t help.
There’s a price to paid for all this lying- this is the price. We’ll be paying for their lying for years.
Cheryl Rofer
@Adam L Silverman:
Clearly you have never worn the alternatives previously expected of women.
JaySinWA
@Adam L Silverman: We may have cross posted with my edits. My point is that we need to set expectations that no matter what he says he will not get enough backing to make it stick. Not exactly affirmations but not pretending that he has any real say in the matter.
Ruckus
@Cheryl Rofer:
OK that’s worth 10 points.
Adam L Silverman
@Kay: Now you know the real reason that McConnell immediately began pushing for changes to liability law to indemnify companies in regard to anything having to do with COVID-19. It wasn’t just to force people back to work, it was to ensure that if they force a rushed and not properly vetted vaccine out that has not been shown to be both safe and effective, that the company can’t be held liable. This late October/early November surprise has been planned since March.
Pete Downunder
@Kay: I saw a funny thing on the Net (can’t recall where). A woman tells a friend that she thinks her husband wants a divorce. What makes you think that asks the friend. He wants to buy a caravan (camper) and spend a year touring the country.
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: I have not.
Cheryl Rofer
@Kay: Yes. Now Trump is trying to make Harris and Biden (who said something similar) out as vaccine deniers.
He’s in an interesting position – he has earlier sided with the real vaccine deniers and will come out with saline solution or something worse around October 20 and insist all the rest of us take it. I’m wondering how the vaccine denial part of his base is responding to that.
Good for the pharmaceutical companies, although I’m not sure I believe them either.
I don’t see any way a vaccine can be ready by October. They haven’t even recruited all the people needed for the Phase 3 trials. I don’t see a vaccine being ready until the middle of next year, and that will be only in small amounts.
The Russian government has more or less admitted that it is, in effect, doing its Phase 3 trials on the population and meeting increasing resistance.
Kay
When the President and the people he hires LIE ALL THE TIME, Liz, that comes with consequences. The consequences are that no one trusts or believes them. They’re right not to trust or believe them! That’s rational.
They really thought having a President who lies every day, multiple times a day would have no consequences at all? That the government he leads would be exactly as credible as it was before he was President?
That’s a fantasy. He has damaged the credibility of the whole enterprise. Everyone who works there will pay for his dishonesty, even if they are not liars. That’s how organizations work. When you add a big bunch of low quality dishonest people at the top the entity itself is damaged. All it is is people. If the people are worse the thing itself is worse- it can’t be otherwise.
JaySinWA
@Adam L Silverman: So we are all going to have to do the https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/walk+a+mile+in+my+shoes thing now. Nice work.
JaySinWA
@Cheryl Rofer: There may well be some desperate company that has a Kodak moment. So I wouldn’t be shocked if there is a vaccine offered, and it may even end up being safe and relatively effective. I don’t know what the Phase 3 failure rate is so a roll of the die may make or break a failing company.
Adam L Silverman
@JaySinWA: The issue is going to be what Barr will do. Barr has been publicly setting a predicate, even if it is an anti-constitutional one, to intervene in the election by questioning the legitimacy of mail in ballots on national security grounds. He did it during his interview with Blitzer and he’s done it several times before that. And since he’s basically decided that his job isn’t to be the attorney general, but to be the US’s first Interior Minister in the sense of authoritarian regimes who is also dual hatted as the President’s personal attorney, he’s the person I’m watching. Chad Wolf’s statement two weeks ago was nice, but it’s worthless. If Wolf is ordered to interfere and he refuses, then he’ll be immediately fired and replaced by someone who will. Most likely Cuccinelli.
That’s the problem right now. No matter how fanciful or far fetched based on how the US worked prior to 2016 a suggestion about what these people might do or try to do seems, given their behavior over the past 3 and 1/2 years in office and 5 years going back to the start of the 2016 campaign, none of it is really fanciful or far fetched.
Kay
@Cheryl Rofer:
I am tired of pretending that the Trump Administration has some institutional credibility apart from the people who work there. They pissed that away LONG ago. I know it is comforting to political media to pretend this isn’t true, but it is true. They damaged that institution and pretending they didn’t is gaslighting.
A credibility crisis for Donald Trump’s goverment? No shit. How could it be otherwise? They LIE all the time!
I want a stamp of approval from ethical, qualified people who show me they are independent from this pack of crooks and liars, and that’s a reasonable demand. To compare that to “anti vaccers” is insulting.
Adam L Silverman
@Kay: Liz Mair was born and raised in Seattle, WA. She spent less than three years doing a masters degree at St. Andrews – she started about a year or so after I’d finished and come back to the US. While there she married a guy from England and stayed on living in Britain for a couple of more years before moving back to the US. On that basis she claims to be British. And a Mancunian. She’s bugfuck nuts batshit insane.
Adam L Silverman
@JaySinWA:
JaySinWA
@Adam L Silverman: I don’t disagree, but setting expectations is important. We all need to expect people to do their jobs while recognizing that some will be wilfully trying to circumvent the elections. Billy Barr can say what he wants and can wield a good deal of power, but that power has to be supported to work.
Adam L Silverman
@JaySinWA: There’s still trying to get all 30,000 people enrolled in most of them and have enough demographic diversity of age cohort, sex, and ethnicity to actually have valid results.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Adam L Silverman: she had some moments as a pundit on MSNBC in the run up to the 2016 election. I’m very glad they didn’t keep her long term. That girl ain’t right.
opiejeanne
@JaySinWA: Why not? My girls’ ballet instructor made the boys wear toe shoes for part of a few lessons, so they would understand what the girls were dealing with. He wore them also.
Frankensteinbeck
@Ruckus:
In one oddity, I had a girlfriend who told me she was only really comfortable in moderately high heels. She said years of ballet as a child had exaggerated her arches and they were no longer designed for flat shoes.
JaySinWA
@opiejeanne: Some of us can have empathy without corporal abuse. And why the toe shoes in the first place
ETA or what @Frankensteinbeck: said
I am pretty sure I knew early on that Chinese foot binding was wrong.
opiejeanne
@Frankensteinbeck: Yikes! My girls didn’t have that problem, but there are other issues created by years of ballet training, such as developing the ability to slightly dislocate one’s hip in order to point a toe straight up. Some women develop that elasticity without much trouble, others develop joint issues after they retire. Most retire before they’re 25.
Cheryl Rofer
@Frankensteinbeck: That happens. I haven’t heard of it in connection with ballet, but that makes sense.
The continued extension of muscles and ligaments and contraction of other muscles and ligaments can make it difficult to go back to a normal foot position. Women have had to deform their feet and legs for that conception of beauty.
Frankensteinbeck
@JaySinWA:
This. Republicans have challenged elections before. Just like Trump, Barr can screech the election is rigged and mail-in ballots should not be counted and file a million law suits and yadda yadda. As has happened many times, unless the results are razor thin, the courts will throw the suits out and the bureaucracy will ignore that they even happened. The military and law enforcement will ignore all requests for a coup. If Biden wins the vote, which is looking DAMNED likely, Trump is out. Period. There is absolutely nothing he can do.
Thor Heyerdahl
@Amir Khalid: Jared needed his testicles lowered
opiejeanne
@JaySinWA: Because the handful of boys, who were all there on scholarship (because they were boys), were being dicks to the girls learning to balance en pointe. He shut them up but good. These were fairly young girls, 12-14.
There’s almost nothing worse than a partner you can’t trust not to drop you, and those male dancers get a bad reputation. He was trying to prevent the damage they might do.
JaySinWA
@Adam L Silverman: Valid kickbacks are more effective than test results.
Adam L Silverman
@JaySinWA: I’m not saying don’t do it, I’m just saying that we are not in a conventional time, the President and his trusted agents like Barr and his surrogates in Congress and at Fox News and the rest of conservative news and digital and social media and his supporters are not behaving conventionally either.
In JUL 2016, HRC was up 16 points over Trump in national polls. She was up over him in almost all the swing state polls as well. And by AUG Nate Silver had her with a 2/3 chance to win and Trump with a 1/3 chance to win. This JUL, Biden was up on Trump by around 10%, he’s up in all the swing state polls as well, and by AUG Nate Silver had him with a 2/3 chance to win and Trump with a 1/3 chance to win. Sound familiar?
The only data informed assessment that we have right now that is of any value is the statement, by tweet, that Silver made last week explaining how large, as a percentage, Biden’s national popular vote win would need to be for him to even have a 50% or greater chance of defeating Trump. In order to barely get into that better than 50% chance, and it’s just barely by a couple of percentage points, Biden has to win the popular vote by NO LESS than 6%. Is that possible? Yes. Is it probable? Maybe.
Perhaps the best model from the 2018 mid-term elections could help? That Dr. Bitecofer seems like real nice and good people and she’s advising Rick Wilson and Reed Galen and they know their business. The answer is it might be helpful. Bitecofer’s model, which is largely proprietary meaning the rest of us who have used these types of models or been trained on them can’t actually see all of how she does what she does – and it’s proprietary because if it wasn’t someone else would steal it, copyright it, plagiarize her work, and she’d be hosed* – has only ever worked ONCE. Because it was only ever used once. That’s right, it has only ever correctly worked once, predicting the outcomes of the 2018 mid-term elections because that was the first time she used it for anything national. But mid-term elections, even in the time of Trump, are not presidential elections or elections where the president is on the ballot. We have no idea if her model, which was excellently fitted for a mid-term election halfway through a first presidential term, is excellently fitted for a presidential election. Let alone a presidential election in the midst of a pandemic, which has created a depression level economy, and in the midst of an almost national response and counter-response to how the US does policing and criminal justice. And with significant interference by Russia in an attempt to create as much chaos to weaken the US as possible in general and get the President reelected in specific. Is her model accurate? Maybe…
And none of this, none of it, is accounting for active attempts to subvert and steal the election before it ever happens by domestic actors in and out of government aligned with the President and the GOP and foreign actors seeking to do the same thing. The Russians, the Iranians, the Israelis, the Saudis, the Emiratis, the North Koreans, and the Chinese are all actively, though in very different ways, seeking to ensure a second Trump term. Because Trump leveling America for them is cheaper and easier than having to do it themselves. And yes, I’m including the Chinese here because, quite frankly, the DHS assessment is bullshit. We have multiple, confirmed open source reports of Xi making it very clear that while he finds Trump and the chaos he causes distasteful, he also recognizes it is good for China and that he wants to see Trump reelected for that reason. Because a second Trump presidency would make it impossible for the US to actually counter what China is doing both domestically, regionally, and globally. Xi has accurately assessed that Trump and his senior advisor regarding China – Peter Navarro – are incapable of actually being effective. But they are very, very, very, very capable at creating chaos that damages the US rather than China. DHS’s assessment that the PRC is trying to undermine the US election is actually rooted in purposefully misreporting what the PRC does every day using its diplomatic, information, economic, financial, and legal power to steal corporate and economic capabilities – from intellectual properties to the actual wealth of high value individuals to actual corporations out from under them – using a variety of legal and illegal activities. While this does weaken the US, it is not election interference. The heavy hitter in election interference, of course, is still Russia.
No one is really grappling with the reality that FL, WI, MI, IL, RI, and one or two other states have allowed election officials to purchase election machines that have integral wifi modems or allowed them to be installed in these machines and that the intention is to use those wifi modems to transmit voting returns to the computers doing the master tabulations that also have wifi modems and which are also going to be connected to the Internet this November. This is a HUGE FUCKING problem! But the lone attorney working this issue, until she’s blue in the face, has gotten no traction whatsoever from anyone that has any ability to do anything about it. Frankly, we have no idea what the Russians actually did within the voting systems they hacked into in over 39 states in 2016. And we have no idea what they’re doing now.
What we do know is that the Federal government, specifically the executive branch as the operational arm of the Federal government, is doing nothing. I will not go into details, but I can honestly tell you that nothing is actually being done to prevent Russia or anyone else from interfering in the election. And that this has been going on since at least late 2018. And by doing nothing, let me use a Star Trek analogy: not only are our shields down, but the shield generators were turned off by the political appointees because they are afraid they’ll either anger the President and the people that enforce loyalty for him among the political appointees or because they, like the President, are sure it is all a hoax. The career people have been told to look busy, to make it look like stuff is being done, but to not actually do anything.
I CANNOT express enough to you all just how dangerous and precarious a place we are in. I try not to write about it here because I don’t want to freak anyone out too much or make people feel so discouraged they don’t vote or try to encourage others to vote. Quite simply, as someone who knew there was a 1/3 chance Trump could win in 2016 because I was paying attention and who was the first nat-sec person in the US to publicly state that Putin was waging a cyberwar and active measures campaign against us to interfere in the election – all on the front page of Balloon Juice – and despite that getting picked up, referenced, and linked back to in a WaPo op-ed by Bruce Schneir, I expected, because I’d been taught and trained to expect it as a political scientist that the 2/3 chance HRC would win would carry the day. I let my political science training and education outweigh the training, education, and experience I received from the SOF community in how to think unconventionally about unconventional threats. I knew what all the signs were, I’d seen them in other places, hell, I wrote the damn strategic assessment of what was going on in Ukraine in the winter and spring of 2014, what the oligarchs aligned with Putin were doing, and what Putin was likely to do after the olympics ended in 2014 and submitted to the Commanding General of US Army Europe in March of 2014. I’d written the strategic assessment for CENTCOM’s Command Group on the politicization of Iraqi identities and sectarian violence in April 2014. So I even discounted my own first person experience with this stuff because I “knew how American elections, including presidential elections” worked. I was wrong. For all that I was beating the drum that we were under attack on the front page in 2016, I discounted that it would make a difference because of how American politics and elections work.
I was wrong then, I would very much like to be wrong now. But every bit of my professional expertise, experience, education, and training is screaming at me that I’m not. And hope is not at a strategy, which is why I’m writing this. Instead of posting pollyanish fantasy land feel good stuff, we need to be preparing, as much as it is possible, ourselves for what is happening, going to continue to happen, and will happen between now and election day and from election day forward. AG Barr has begun to publicly establish a predicate he can refer to, no matter how much it is bullshit, to interfere in the election on national-security grounds. I don’t care what Chad Wolf tells people in an interview, if Barr, who is currently functioning as the Interior Minister of the US, not the Attorney General, decides he will move to ensure Trump’s reelection, Wolf will either go along or they’ll replace him with someone who will, most likely Cuccinelli. I’ve been gaming these scenarios for a high level contact, who is also a friend, in DC for months. But don’t take my word for it, just read what the Transition Integrity Project came up with. In my professional opinion they’ve done a great job, with the exception that I don’t think they paid enough attention to what the President, Barr, his state level allies, Mnuchin working through the USPS BOG and DeJoy, Trump’s other surrogates including law enforcement unions, are willing to do and will do, both in a coordinated and uncoordinated manner, to steal the election before a single ballot is counted. Their focus was on what happens from election day onward, not what happens and is being done before election day.
* I’m the father of the social behavioral study of terrorism in Criminology and Political Science as academic disciplines. I adapted the first empirical theory out of Ron Akers’ (my criminology dissertation advisor) social learning theory and Ken Wald’s (my polisci dissertation advisor) socio-political theories of religion and identity politics, built the first empirical model, and tested it successfully. I even paid for the copyright on it when I submitted my doctoral dissertation to the University of Michigan’s Michigan Microforms (another scam). But no one in Criminology or Political Science knows this anymore because a now past president of the American Society of Criminology plagiarized from my doctoral dissertation as part of a funding scheme to scam DHS into giving him all the Federal government’s social science funding pertaining to terrorism. And he used that to found the Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Responses to Terrorism, what was originally called the Social Behavioral Center for the Study of Terrorism, at the University of Maryland. That now past president of the American Society of Criminology is not a social behaviorist and even now he knows nothing about terrorism. His actual research specialty, which he spent more than 20 years on as he worked his way up in academia, is the comparative study of intimate partner homicides. Basically cuckold murders. So I know of what I speak. This is one of the reasons I left academia and went to work for the military.
Adam L Silverman
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’m aware.
James E Powell
@Frankensteinbeck:
He doesn’t ask for much. “Can you remind me what I pay you people for?”
JaySinWA
@opiejeanne: You have my permission to advocate for treating bullies badly. Not that you need or want my permission.
FlyingToaster
@Adam L Silverman: I’ve never seen him; my shift for taking WG to lessons is Sunday noonish.
But he’d have no reason to change, not in Cambridge.
JaySinWA
@Adam L Silverman: Okay, thank you for your considered response. I accept that the scenario mapped out is likely, but I hope for a response that does not end in disaster.
I want to believe that if we prepare expectations that most state and nonstate actors will behave properly that enough actors will not be just go along, get along and will keep us from being a failed state.
I do believe pessimism will end up killing us.
Adam L Silverman
@JaySinWA: I’m trying not to be discouraging. It may not be working…
Adam L Silverman
And with that, I’m to bed.
eddie blake
@Adam L Silverman:
how is it that the democratic governors and the democratic secretaries of state in WI, MI and IL allow such vulnerable voting machines?
wait- the election theft plan might not be working, or your attempt at not being discouraging?
Dave Wallace
@Adam L Silverman:
Nate Silver’s analysis showed that Trump does have an electoral college advantage this year, but it’s not as big as you said. Biden winning the popular vote by 3% makes the EC close to a tossup. At a 5-6% margin, he’s at 98% to win the EC. https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1301190941110341632?s=20
Adam L Silverman
@Dave Wallace: You are correct, I misremembered the breakdown between percentage of popular vote and the odds of winning. Thank you for catching that and pointing it out.