Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

I’m going back to the respite thread.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Infrastructure week. at last.

We still have time to mess this up!

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Cillizza, who will never be asked to bring the noodle salad to the mensa picnic…

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

This really is a full service blog.

You are here: Home / Archives for Cheryl Rofer

Cheryl Rofer wrote at Balloon Juice from 2017-21.

Cheryl is a retired chemist who has has been particularly active with nuclear policy. Cheryl has her own blog, Nuclear Diner, and she also posts at Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Twitter: @CherylRofer

Moving On

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WordPress tells me that I have posted 820 posts, starting in April 2017, in Balloon Juice’s total of almost 70,000. That’s about 200 a year. I’ve tried to explain the science of current events and commented politically when I felt I had something to add to the general noise.

And now it’s time to move on.

I need to write and think some new things, and that means I need to be in a new space too. Many things were broken or going in the wrong direction before the pandemic, and the pandemic has uncovered more and sometimes shown us alternatives. I hope to point out where we need to go, or at least what isn’t working.

Why couldn’t I do that at Balloon Juice? I’ve felt like I’m in a rut and need new virtual surroundings. Lawyers, Guns & Money feels congenial.

I’ll lurk here from time to time – hard to say if I’ll comment. And of course I’ll continue on Twitter – @CherylRofer.

I’ve appreciated the constructive feedback and having a place to try out ideas. Many thanks to John in particular.

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If NATO Hadn’t Expanded

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A Swedish fighter-bomber that never was. Source

There’s an ongoing argument about NATO expansion after the fall of the Soviet Union. Within the western political science community, there have been a number of sub-arguments, including whether Russia was promised that NATO would not expand. That has more or less been settled: Although some statements were made to that effect, they were not official commitments.

More broadly, arguments about NATO expansion tend to assume that if NATO hadn’t expanded, Europe would look about the same as it does now, but Russia would be less aggressive, and more accommodations would be possible.

Having co-chaired a NATO Advanced Research Workshop in Estonia and spent some time working with Estonians on a major environmental cleanup, I’ve recognized that there were many paths that could have been taken by the many actors involved, which could lead to quite different outcomes.

Would the newly independent countries trust Mother Russia? Could Mother Russia keep her hands off them? It would not be a single big decision, but a series of small ones.

At the Duck of Minerva, I’ve written a counterfactual in which NATO doesn’t expand. I’ve based it on events that have actually happened, although in different historical order. The outcome is different than has been assumed. It was fun to write and I think will be enjoyable to read.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

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Trump Buddy Tom Barrack Indicted As Foreign Agent

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Tom Barrack was the chair of Donald Trump’s inaugural committee. He had been a Trump confidant and financial backer for some time, and thus not surprising he would get a job like that. Today he was arrested for acting as an agent of the United Arab Emirates and trying to influence the President in their favor.

From the Department of Justice press release:

According to court documents, between April and November 2016, Barrack served as an informal advisor to the campaign of the candidate in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Between November 2016 and January 2017, Barrack served as Chairman of the Presidential Inaugural Committee. Beginning in January 2017, Barrack informally advised senior U.S. government officials on issues related to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Barrack also sought appointment to a senior role in the U.S. government, including the role of Special Envoy to the Middle East. Barrack served as the Executive Chairman of a global investment management firm headquartered in Los Angeles, and Grimes was employed at the firm and reported directly to Barrack. During the relevant time period, Alshahhi worked as an agent of the UAE and was in frequent contact with Barrack and Grimes, including numerous in-person meetings in the United States and the UAE.

As alleged in the indictment, the defendants used Barrack’s status as a senior outside advisor to the campaign and, subsequently, to senior U.S. government officials, to advance the interests of and provide intelligence to the UAE while simultaneously failing to notify the Attorney General that their actions were taken at the direction of senior UAE officials. Barrack – directly and through Alshahhi and Grimes – was regularly and repeatedly in contact with the senior leadership of the UAE government. On multiple occasions, Barrack referred to Alshahhi as the UAE’s “secret weapon” to advance its foreign policy agenda in the United States.

Alshahhi and Grimes were also indicted. Grimes was also arrested, and Alshahhi remains at large. Barrack also made a big mistake:

On June 20, 2019, Barrack voluntarily met with FBI special agents. During the interview, Barrack allegedly made numerous false statements, including falsely denying that Alshahhi had ever requested that he take any actions on behalf of the UAE.

Barrack’s company, Colony Northstar, laid out plans to influence the government in a document. They expected to make a lot of money.

Back when Barrack was trying to influence Trump in favor of the UAE before and after the 2016 election, a lot was going on. Mike Flynn was working for Turkey and trying to set up something with Russia. Flynn was also working with Barrack on other deals. We are likely to see more come out about that as Barrack’s prosecution proceeds.

This is a big deal.

Coverage:

Daily Beast

CNN

CNBC

NPR

New York Times

Washington Post

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

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The Pandemic Will End

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Sometimes I think the pandemic will never end, but I remind myself that it will.

Numbers are headed up again in the US and skyrocketing in other countries. A Yankee – Red Sox game was postponed because of 19 positive tests within the Yankee organization. One wonders what the vaccination status is of the Yankee organization.

This is how the pandemic will end.

People who are not vaccinated will become sick and die. Those who recover will be immune to the disease. Either way, they will be removed from the susceptible pool. People are being vaccinated every day. They are removed from the susceptible pool after the appropriate number of shots and waiting period. The numbers of the susceptible decrease every day.

The alarmist takes that immunity will wear off and that variants will get around immunity are wildly overblown. I have seen no evidence for either of those and good arguments that our multiple-barrier immune systems react well to the vaccines and infection, except for small numbers of people with weakened immune systems. Every day that passes argues that immunity is not wearing off. If we eventually find a decrease, we can deal with it from a base of immunized people.

As the numbers of susceptible people decrease, we can concentrate attention and vaccines on hot spots or boosters if we learn that they are necessary. At some point, we will even quench the hot spots.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s not clear when we’ll get there. My estimate is that it will be five years before the world is back to something close to pre-pandemic normal. It will be uneven for different places, as the pandemic has been all along.

We recently passed four million recorded deaths from COVID across the world. The total is undoubtedly higher and will go higher still.

We must speed up vaccinating people. The longer the pandemic goes, the higher will be the death count. And pretending we are back to normal now delays the end.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

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Caution On The Guardian Scoop

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The Guardian today has a document that may be from the uppermost reaches of the Russian government and purports to describe a meeting of Vladimir Putin’s security council in closed session.

The meeting was on January 22, 2016, and in it, Putin gave instructions to his spy agencies to support Donald Trump’s run for the presidency of the US.

Caution is due to these claims. The Guardian article itself is cautious, although it notes that Guardian reporters have validated the document to a limited degree. A meeting of the security council took place on that day. Experts have looked at the document and find it not obviously fraudulent.

There is a brief psychological assessment of Trump, who is described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”.

There is also apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat, or potentially compromising material, on the future president, collected – the document says – from Trump’s earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory”.

The paper refers to “certain events” that happened during Trump’s trips to Moscow. Security council members are invited to find details in appendix five, at paragraph five, the document states. It is unclear what the appendix contains.

“It is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate his [Trump’s] election to the post of US president,” the paper says.

This document fits quite snugly into a narrative about Russian interference in the 2016 election. That could mean that, whether or not the material in it is true, it is part of a Russian disinformation operation.

Others on Twitter are urging caution.

That last thread doesn’t necessarily prove it’s a forgery. People mess up their writing in all languages.

There’s nothing definitive about the authenticity of the documents or whether they’re fakes. The Guardian might make more information available about how they got them, which could point to disinformation motives.

I suspect this one never will be fully clear by itself. It will be another case of people believing what they want to.

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Sharing Vaccine

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Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman is the person to follow on Twitter if you want to know where the United States is sending vaccine.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken also tweets about sending vaccines out, as you can see above, but it seems to be mostly Deputy Secretary Sherman’s job.

Open thread!

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