Comey Reverses Course, Says Emails Not New
FBI Director James Comey sent another letter to Congress stating that the FBI had reviewed all the new emails revealed by its seizing of Anthony Weiner’s electronic devices. The review showed that nothing new had been found to change his conclusion in July that there was no reason to file any charges against Hillary for her handling of government emails.
This seesaw, or whipsaw if you will, suggests that there is nothing to see here and we should all move on. Thirty years of Republican witch hunts have led to no actionable intelligence that could be used to convince any objective person that Hillary Clinton is not eminently qualified to be President of the United States. Just one speech by Donald Drumpf (Trump) proves that he is completely unqualified to be a local dogcatcher.
This letter from the local high school history teacher was printed in the Jacksonville Journal Courier recently. It warns of what could happen if Trump wins the next election: a Hitler-like, Third Reich degeneration of the American government.
Mr. Richard Nelson points out that Adolf Hitler ran for election as president in a relatively free, democratic election in Germany in March 1932 and in a second round on April 10; he won less than a majority, 36.8 percent of the vote. Paul von Hindenburg, the aging president, was re-elected by an absolute majority of 53% (he failed to gain a majority in the first round, only getting 49%.) Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933 by the aging Hindenburg when the Nazis gained a plurality in the Reichstag (analogous to our Congress.) The Communist Party of Germany’s candidate for president won 10.2% of the vote.
Shortly after Hitler was appointed chancellor, on February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building burned down in a mysterious arson. The fire was pinned on a mentally defective man who said he was a Communist; the Nazis quickly capitalized on the incident to frighten the citizens and make them think that the Communists were trying to start a revolution.
Immediately after the fire, a decree was passed which abrogated civil liberties and suspended democratic government. The many Nazis already in the government used this decree to imprison anyone suspected of disloyalty and to stop the printing of any publication that was not considered sufficiently friendly to the Nazis.
All the communist deputies to the Reichstag were immediately imprisoned as well as the rest of the Communist Party officials. With their seats in the Reichstag empty, the Nazis went from a plurality to a majority (with their allied right wing party) and after the next election, held in March, were able to get a two-thirds majority to pass a law that gave Hitler the right to govern by decree.
The fire and Nazi propaganda induced a panic that justified the imprisonment of all members of the German Communist Party as well as many members of the Social Democratic Party and any others who spoke out against the Nazis. In addition, the federal government was authorized to take over all the state governments.
By a process of intimidation, infiltration of government posts, assassination, brazen lies published in mass circulation newspapers and on radio programs, street violence in pitched battles with Socialist, anarchist, and Communist demonstrators, and finally Nazi-sympathetic Reichstag (Congress) representatives, the Nazis were able to gradually take over the government and set the stage for Hitler’s installation as dictator.
The same process could take place here. It has already begun with Republican influence over the news media and the promulgation of shameless lies and conspiracy theories about Democratic representatives. The Republicans have also taken over many state governments and established gerrymandering that allows them to control state Legislatures. They have been able to elect Republican Congressmen to a majority of federal seats by gerrymandering and targeted campaigns of lies and intimidation of Democrats.
So be warned: a Trump victory on November 8 would set the stage for Republican control of the federal government and destruction of our civil liberties and basic human rights. Speak to everyone you know and make sure they vote for someone other than Trump; if they can’t vote for Hillary, there is a third candidate on the ballot in all fifty states.
(Historical information taken from Wikipedia.)
There is an intriguing story in Slate, posted yesterday, relating to Donald and his potential relationship with Russia, specifically the activities of a computer server owned by Trump that communicated with a server run by the Russian bank Alfa. The story details frustratingly vague connections that don’t quite rise to the level of damning information, but are enough to make you very suspicious.
In short, there was a computer server owned by Trump and said to be used by a marketing company called Cendyn, although it was registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue. The server was set to communicate only with a very small number of other servers, two of which belong to the Russian bank Alfa (which was founded by the second-richest man in Russia, who has connections to Putin.) Another server was registered to Spectrum Healthcare in Michigan, but there was little traffic on that connection. There was a peak in communications between Trump’s server and the two Alfa servers in August and early September.
The communications connection was accidentally discovered by a small group of computer specialists whose day job is preventing malware from infecting the Internet and causing chaos. These specialists are variously employed by cybersecurity firms, universities, and government security agencies like NSA and CIA. They were initially concerned with the news that Russian hackers had penetrated the Democratic National Committee and wanted to look for attempts to attack Donald Trump’s campaign’s computers. They located, tracked down, and assembled logs of the connections made between Trump’s computer and the Alfa computers (information called metadata, such as dates, times, lengths of messages, and the like– not the putative actual messages.)
After reviewing the information in these logs, they concluded that there must have been emails exchanged between the entities. Other potential explanations of the exchanges, such as attempts by the Trump-owned computer to send spam and coupons for hotel discounts or the like, were considered to be highly unlikely. The investigators were unable to access the content of the messages.
New York Times reporters became interested in the story and contacted Alfa on September 21; within a few days and before the reporters got in touch with Trump’s representatives, the Trump-owned server was shut down. Three days later, a new connection was established under a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com; this channel was only used for a few days. The Trump organization, while it denied that there was any contact between Trump and Russia, failed to explain the new host or answer follow-up questions.
The details of these computer interactions are quite complex and well beyond my two hundred fifty word limits. Suffice it to say that there is strong suspicion that there was a private communications connection between Trump and an entity in Russia that is connected with the government.
This is one of the angles that the FBI has been investigating. They have come to the conclusion that there is not enough evidence of an illegal connection between Trump and Russia. The possible benign explanations of the series of computer interactions leave room for considerable doubt; they are explored in Slate’s follow-up article.
The connections between Paul Manafort, whom I previously wrote about, and the Russians were also evaluated by the FBI, with no definite results. All of these suspicious connections are frustratingly vague and fail to come to the level of “smoking guns”, much like the connections that Republicans repeatedly try to make between Hillary and top secret emails or the Benghazi attacks. The difference is that Trump has made numerous statements favorable to the Russians, suggesting that he really does owe them something.
Genius and Madness: Steve Pieczenik
This statement in Wikipedia caught my eye. It is at the end of an article about Steve Pieczenik, who by all accounts was a genius and worked in the US government for a long time– although he seems to have been disowned by several agencies.
Here is the note:
On November 1, 2016, Pieczenik announced on his youtube channel that Hillary and Bill Clinton “effected a silent civilian coup through corruption and coaptation. However, people in the intelligence community formally initiated a countercoup through supplying information to Julian Assange and Wikileaks in order to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming the next president of the United States, while also convicting and indicting President Obama, Loretta Lynch, and all others who were implicit in the cover-up of the massive corruption that occurred under the Clinton Foundation.” [34]
That’s a boatload of craziness. How do you distinguish youtube truth, lies, and insanity?
Two policemen in Des Moines, Iowa were shot dead before they could unholster their weapons by a severely disturbed man. The shootings appear to have been prompted by the man’s eviction from his mother’s house, as described in the New York Times:
Just hours before the two officers were killed, a court had ordered the man, Scott M. Greene, 46, to move out of his mother’s house, after she accused him of emotional and physical abuse. A few weeks ago, the Urbandale police had escorted him out of a football game being played by his daughter’s high school, after he waved a Confederate flag in front of black students, leading to restrictions on his ability to set foot on school property.
The disturbed man surrendered to police shortly afterwards.
These shootings are examples of the theme that I have previously emphasized: disturbed people with access to guns are the most dangerous individuals. The best approach to reducing gun violence, given the number of weapons in the possession of private individuals (approximately one firearm for every person in the United States) is to provide vastly increased mental health treatment and housing for disturbed people.
A second source of fatal shootings, inner city youths, must be approached in a different way. The most effective means would likely be to provide jobs, job training, and social activities in a nonjudgemental fashion for poor youths, especially in the inner city. The federal government needs to step in and provide resources.
Neurosurgeon: A Horror Story
According to an article in the Dallas magazine “D”,in its November 2016 issue, Dr. Christopher Duntsch should be known as “Doctor Death.” He is tall, has blue eyes, and before his downfall he was known for his winning manner and extreme confidence. Here is a summary of the long and somewhat meandering article:
Dr. Duntsch received his undergraduate degree from the University of Memphis in 1994 and went to the University of Tennessee Health Science Center for medical school; he also received a doctorate summa cum laude from the St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in 2001. He did his residency at the University of Tennessee, spending a year in surgery and five years in neurosurgery. He was heavily involved in research and was funded by over $3 million in grants as a principal or co-principal investigator. He started two companies based on patents for stem-cell research, one of which companies, Discgenics, is still functioning. The two research scientists who co-founded that company, however, accused him of “taking more credit than he deserves” for their discoveries.
At a birthday party “in 2006 or 2007”, a woman stated (in a later deposition) that Dr. Duntsch ate a blotter of LSD and some prescription painkillers, chased with a quantity of cocaine. After partying all night, it was claimed that he got up to make rounds at the hospital.
Later, a neurosurgeon who was asked to perform corrective surgery on two of Dr. Duntsch’s patients was so disturbed at the results he found that he called his residency program and was told by a Dr. Boop, chairman of the department of neurosurgery at his hospital:
Duntsch had been sent to an impaired physician program when he refused to take a drug test after an anonymous woman called to say she had seen him use cocaine, but he had been allowed to return to finish his residency. Boop also said that Duntsch spent his final year operating as an attending physician, and was not allowed to operate independently.
Dr. Duntsch tried to concentrate on research, but his handling 0f the two companies he created did not assure him of sufficient income to allow him to live in the manner to which he wished to become accustomed (there is a saying which goes: “Cocaine is G-d’s way of telling you that you have too much money.”) Therefore, he decided to go in for clinical work. He sought out employment opportunities, and with the help of a good recommendation from his residency, soon had several offers.
Dr. Duntsch neglected to mention in his resume that there was a small gap in his work at his residency program, which was revealed only much later. One of his patients, Lee Passmore, had been operated on December 30, 2011, very early in the doctor’s career of botched procedures in Dallas. Mr. Passmore was a field agent for the Collin County (Texas) Medical Examiner’s Office. He felt that something was seriously wrong with Dr. Duntsch after he emerged from surgery worse off than when he went in. The article describes what Mr. Passmore discovered:
[He] found a few months that were not accounted for in Duntsch’s educational history. “You don’t get to walk away from two or three years of medical training, in the middle of an internship or a residency, get to take time off and be slotted directly in the position you left in with no questions asked. Maybe that’s how they do it in Tennessee, but according to my training, that’s not how they do it here. Then it just started to all unravel.”
Dr. Duntsch took on employment at Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, TX as a neurosurgeon, at the rate of $600,000 a year; under his physician services agreement with Rimlawi and Won’s Minimally Invasive Spine Institute:
Base compensation was $600,000 a year for two years, beginning on June 14, 2011. Duntsch also received 40 percent of all revenue he generated beyond $800,000 each year.
Neurosurgeons make a lot of money for the hospitals at which they operate:
According to Irving-based physician recruitment firm Merritt Hawkins, a single neurosurgeon produced [for] his or her hospital an average revenue of $2.45 million in 2015.
To make a long story short, Dr. Duntsch proceeded to botch nearly every surgery to which he laid his hands, and was thrown out of one hospital after another. A number of his patients died from preventable complications, including one who bled to death in the intensive care unit. Others suffered complications that virtually never occur in neurosurgery, such as esophageal injuries. While it is not unusual for neurosurgical patients to die or suffer serious complications, Dr. Duntsch’s patients virtually all had bad outcomes. The Texas Medical Board took away his license in June 2013, after complaints that went back to early 2012. It wasn’t until the neurosurgeons who were detailed to clean up after him went to the District Attorneys in Dallas County that he was indicted for aggravated assault during surgery in July 2015.
Dr. Duntsch clearly abused drugs and alcohol, and had serious personality problems even before his substance abuse began. The combination of alcohol and cocaine is particularly dangerous because it produces a novel drug in the body, cocaethylene, which has a much longer half life than either of its parent drugs and tends to produce myocardial arrhythmias. The personality defects that Dr. Duntsch had sound like a combination of narcissism, sociopathy, and drug-induced delusions. Oddly, there was no paranoia after the use of cocaine or LSD, which suggests that Dr. Duntsch was incapable of experiencing guilt. His complete denial of guilt and grandiose behavior suggests gross narcissism and/or sociopathy.
The article is enhanced by an interview with the aforementioned Lee Passmore, who is the only one of the patients who has sued Dr. Duntsch who has not settled his case. All those who have settled are prevented by nondisclosure agreements, which are standard in such cases, from discussing the problems that induced them to sue.
I strongly suggest reading the article, which also describes problems with Texas laws on malpractice. For example, it is impossible to sue hospitals in Texas for failure to supervise their physicians unless actual malice can be shown. In addition, malpractice awards are capped at $250,000, an absurdly low figure when a single hospitalization for neurosurgery can be charged out at over three-quarters of a million dollars. I have railed at length against some of these legal problems, not to mention the systems of recommendations which allow physicians to slip through the cracks when moving from one position to another, so I will not elaborate here.
The only shortcomings of the article are a few errors on medical details and some missing information, such as an exact timeline of what happened when in Dr. Duntsch’s erratic career.
I haven’t endorsed many websites, in fact, I have hardly endorsed any. That is about to change.
The Fallacy Files is a website devoted to fallacies, explaining them, helping the reader to avoid them, and thoroughly documenting them in general. In addition to the main files, which describe almost all of the known fallacies used in logical and illogical argumentation as well as advertising, there is a weblog or “blog.”
Here is a quote from Jeremy Bentham, a justly famous philosopher, dates 1748-1842:
Without a popular assembly taking an effective part in the government and publishing its debates, and without free discussion through the medium of the press, there is no demand for fallacies. Fallacy is fraud; and fraud is useless when everything is done by force.
Source: Jeremy Bentham, Bentham’s Handbook of Political Fallacies (Apollo Editions, 1971), p. 246.
Jeremy Bentham is known as the father of utilitarianism, which can be succinctly described as, “The greatest good for the greatest number” or the philosophy of the Star Trek character Spock. John Stuart Mill (dates 1806-1873) was one of his best-known contemporaries; Mill was known as a philosopher and an early proponent of equal rights for women. Mill is also famous, forever fixed in my mind, as having said,
“That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”
and, most importantly,
“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.”
(All facts and quotes are from Wikipedia)
Go to tumblr to explain the phenomenon of the “odd behavior” I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago. There you will see many blogs that closely resemble the two who started to follow me, that I didn’t understand before, that is: “doggieselfies” and “catslivepics.”
These two blogs, and many others, are simply blogs by people who are mostly speechless. They can’t fill out their “About” pages because, either they have nothing to say, or they can’t say it. Instead, they prefer to post pictures of dogs and cats, respectively.
I am enlightened: there is nothing really odd about this behavior. They are just extreme examples of people who want to blog but don’t have words, only pictures. So I’m happy that they can read and like to read me, or at least they want to look at my occasional pictures/photographs. THereFore, I will post more pictures.
Here’s a subset of the web you’re sure to enjoy: webcomics, comics that are published on the world wide web, popularly known as the internet. XKCD is surely the most interesting and entertaining of these pictures with a few words thrown in. The very most significant of these is xkcd’s timeline of global climate change, which shows basically what we’re up against in climate and weather for the next few years.
Start with “The Mind of Dan”s blog entry for September 12, 2016, which reprints xkcd’s time series for the global climate change story; at the moment this is the next-to-last entry for the mind of dan, who apparently lives in .ca (Canada?) Dan’s motto is “It’s not enough to bash in heads, you have to bash in minds.” Dan’s mind is a good blog to explore if you have the time, but I want to emphasize xkcd, so you can just go straight to this xkcd entry for the hockey stick.
The take-away that I got from this graphic image is that temperatures were almost as warm as they are now during the “Holocene climate optimum” around 8000-2000 BCE (Before Common Era, previously known as Before Christ.) Unfortunately for us, the temperature is now somewhat warmer than it was then, and temps are rapidly rising above that optimum, way above.
For other fascinating and amusing comics, be sure to explore xkcd and “The Mind of Dan” before you continue on to other entertaining things– if you have time.
FBI Director James Comey has sent a letter today to the Select Committee on Intelligence as well as multiple other Committees of Congress disclosing the existence of additional emails that were apparently found on electronic devices belonging to Anthony Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin (who is one of Hillary Clinton’s major advisers.) Other sources say there may be over a thousand such emails.
The letter is quite vague, not to say opaque, and does not indicate whether these emails contain any material of relevance or significance, nor whether any are classified. Mr. Comey states that he does not know how long it will take to evaluate the emails.
This letter is irritatingly vague and inconclusive, but that did not stop Donald and his supporters from seizing on them as prima facie evidence that Hillary somehow committed a crime by not disclosing them previously.
The truth is that these emails may or may not contain anything of any significance. There is little doubt in partisan minds that this letter revealing existence of these emails is intended to harm Hillary’s campaign.
Unfortunately for the Republicans, most people have already made up their minds. To influence the election, such information should have been revealed at least a month or two earlier. It is almost certainly too late.
According to the New York Times, a review of all the public opinion polls has concluded that Hillary has a 92% chance of winning the election. There is little reason to doubt this conclusion, although no-one will be happy until the votes have been counted.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 