Author Archives: Paul Woodward

How fake bomb detectors made their way from South Carolina to Baghdad

The Washington Post reports: After more than 200 people were killed in a devastating Islamic State bomb attack in the Iraqi capital, Iraqis turned their anger toward a symbol of government corruption and the state’s failure to protect them: fake bomb detectors.

The wand-like devices, little more than an aerial attached to a plastic handle, are still widely in use at security checkpoints around the country even years after the British con man who sold them was arrested for fraud and the U.K. banned their export.

They are used at the entrances to embassies, compounds and government ministries. They are used by security forces at checkpoints such as those on the shopping street at Karrada that was hit in the suicide bombing in the early hours of Sunday morning, and has been targeted numerous times in the past.

As infernos set off by the blast engulfed shopping centers, suffocating and burning to death those inside, Iraqis took to social media to vent about the fake detectors.

An Arabic hashtag began trending for “soup detectors,” mocking the absurdity that these handheld devices can detect explosives. The Ministry of Interior’s website was hacked and a picture of a bloodied baby was posted along with a bomb detector bearing the Islamic State’s markings — making the point that the fake wands aid only those intent on killing civilians. “I don’t know how you sleep at night,” the hacked site read. “Your conscience is dead.”

As anger grew, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced Sunday night that all the country’s security forces should remove the handheld devices from checkpoints and that the Ministry of Interior should reopen its investigation into the corrupt deals for the devices.

But they were still in use in Baghdad the following morning, and it’s unclear when the move will be implemented.

“We haven’t received an order yet,” said Muqdad al-Timimi, a police officer at a checkpoint in northern Baghdad who was still using one of the devices. “We know it doesn’t work, everybody knows it doesn’t work and the man who made it is in prison now. But I don’t have any other choice.”

The device, known as the ADE 651, was sold to Iraq by James McCormick, a British man who was sentenced to 10 years in prison by a U.K. court in 2014 for fraud. He had been arrested in 2010 when export of the device was banned by the British government. [Continue reading…]

In 2013, Bloomberg Businessweek reported: The ADE 651, and similar devices sold by McCormick over the decade or so he spent in the explosives-detection business, owe their existence to Wade Quattlebaum, president of Quadro in Harleyville, S.C. At the beginning of the 1990s, Quattlebaum — a sometime car dealer, commercial diver, and treasure hunter whose formal education ended in high school — began promoting a new detection technology he called the Quadro Tracker Positive Molecular Locator, which he claimed could help law enforcement agencies find everything from contraband to missing persons. Quattlebaum said he originally invented the device to find lost balls on the golf course but had since refined it to locate marijuana, cocaine, heroin, gunpowder, and dynamite by detecting the individual “molecular frequency” of each substance.

The Tracker consisted of a handheld unit, with an antenna mounted on a plastic handgrip, and a belt-mounted box slightly smaller than a VHS cassette, built to contain “carbo-crystallized” software cards programmed, Quattlebaum said, with the specific frequency of whatever the user wished to find. No batteries were necessary. The Tracker was powered by the static electricity created by the operator’s own body; when it found what it was looking for, the antenna automatically turned to point at its quarry. Prices for the device varied from $395 for a basic model to $8,000 for one capable of locating individual human beings, which required a Polaroid photograph of the person to be loaded into the programming box. Quadro’s golf ball-finding variant, the Gopher, was available by mail order for just $69.

That Quattlebaum’s gizmo operated independently of any known scientific principles didn’t hurt sales. By the end of 1995, distributors across the U.S. had sold about 1,000 Quadro Trackers to customers including police departments in Georgia and Illinois and school districts in Kansas and Florida. When Ronald Kelly, the agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s office in Beaumont, Tex., learned that a local narcotics task force had bought one, he attended a demonstration in which a Tracker was used to find a brick of cocaine. He wasn’t impressed. “I paid reasonable attention in eighth grade science,” Kelly says now. “I pronounced this bullshit.”

Kelly instructed his agents to bring in an example of the device, ran it through the X-ray machine at the Beaumont courthouse to see what was inside it, and sent it to the FBI labs in Washington. “They said, ‘This is a car antenna and a plastic handle. It doesn’t do anything.’ ”

Further analysis by the FBI and Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico established that Quadro’s programming cards were small squares of photocopy paper sandwiched between pieces of plastic. Dale Murray, who examined the device at Sandia, discovered that the Quadro programming method was to take a Polaroid photograph of the desired target — gunpowder, cocaine, or on one occasion, an elephantblow — up the image on a Xerox machine, cut up the copy into fragments, and use these to provide the card with its “molecular signature.” “They had a very naive explanation of how it worked,” Murray says. “They were fascinated by Polaroid photographs.”

Although Kelly is unequivocal about the Quadro principals’ fraudulent intent — “They were con artists,” he says — Murray feels that Quattlebaum, at least, genuinely had faith in it. “I think he did believe in it — it was his invention,” he says. Quattlebaum could have fallen victim to the ideomotor effect, the same psychological phenomenon that convinces users of dowsing rods and Ouija boards that they are witnessing the results of a powerful yet inexplicable force. In response to suggestion or expectation, the body can produce unconscious movements, causing a sensitive, free-swinging mechanism to respond in sympathy. “It’s very compelling, if you’re not aware of what’s causing it,” Murray says. [Continue reading…]

In 1996, a Federal Court imposed a permanent injunction banning the marketing, sale, and distribution of the tracker “and devices of a similar design marketed under a different name.”

The court order noted:

Use of the Quadro Tracker in locating guns or explosives poses a danger to anyone relying on the device for safety. Dangerous weapons or explosives could go undetected and enter schools, airports, office buildings, or any other location where safety is a concern.

Nevertheless, the following year the makers of the tracker were acquitted of fraud. The Associated Press reported:

A jury found Wade Quattlebaum, 63, former president of Quadro Corp., Raymond Fisk, 53, former vice president of the company, and William Long, 57, a distributor of the device, not guilty after deliberating about 11 1/2 hours over three days. The three men — each charged with three counts of mail fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud — were accused of deceiving customers into buying the Quadro Tracker between March 1993 and January 1996.
[…]
U.S. Attorney Michael Bradford said he did not know why the jury rejected prosecutors’ claims that the three men committed fraud.

“We felt that we proved that this was a worthless device,” he said. “In fraud you have to prove intent, and perhaps they did not see clear intent to defraud.”

Defense attorneys said even though scientists who testified could not explain how the tracker works, prosecutors did not prove that it was not functional.

In addition, it’s possible that jurors — like potential buyers of the device — were swayed in their judgment by the fact that its use had been endorsed by individuals such as these: William Koopman, Val-Comm Inc., Albuquerque, NM; Steve Lassiter, Drug Task Force, Albuquerque, NM; Larry DeWees, Principal, Farmington High School, NM; Clifford Weber, School Supt., Bloomfield, NM; Nancy Radford, Vice-Principal, Bloomfield H.S., NM; Troy Daniels, Resource Officer, Bloomfield H.S., NM; Ralph Navarre, Principal, Mesa Alta H.S., Bloomfield, NM; Capt. Ben Boozer, Dept. of Corrections, Crozier, VA; Raymond Gomes, Inspector General, Richmond, VA; Sgt. Marilyn Chambers, National Guard, Richmond, VA; Jim Morrison, National Guard, Richmond, VA; Brian Clements, Dir.of Security, Galena Park, Houston TX; Lt. Bill Munk, Police Department, Austin, TX; Don Plybon, US Customs, Charleston, SC; Cpl. Billie Johnson, North Charleston PD, SC; Bruce Parent, FL Dept. of Trans., West Palm Beach, FL; Pip Reaver, Adlerhorst Training School, Riverside, CA; Pete Blauvelt, Nat. Alliance for Safe Schools, Lanham, MD; Michael Ferdinand, Interquest Group, Inc., Houston, TX.

As one observer wrote, the device “turns out to be good only at detecting suckers.”

In 2011, the year after McCormick’s arrest, BBC Newsnight broadcast the following report:

 

Facebooktwittermail

Donald Trump: The pied piper of American bigotry takes a shot at ‘Jewish money’

 

Apologists for the Trump campaign, such as former campaign manager, Cory Lewandowski, are trying deflect criticism of the campaign’s use of blatantly anti-Semitic imagery by claiming that the star used in the now infamous “history made” tweet is the same as the star used by American law enforcement.

Let’s see if I understand. When Trump uses imagery that’s meant to reinforce his message that Hillary Clinton is deeply corrupt, he wants to imply she’s as corrupt as what he views as that other widely recognized symbol of corruption… the American sheriff?

That’s strange. I thought Trump was a big fan of the police.

Lewandowski says the reaction to the tweet is ‘political correctness run amok.’

If so, why did the Trump campaign kowtow to their critics by altering the tweet to remove an innocent “sheriff’s star”?

And how come the first place this image is known to have been used before it was co-opted by Trump was a neo-Nazi message board?

What’s really going on inside the campaign?

Does Trump actually feel like he needs to strengthen and expand the coalition of support he already has among neo-Nazis, white supremacists, anti-Semites and every other stripe of bigotry woven into the tapestry of American politics?

Although I think it’s dangerous to underestimate how large a place bigotry holds in American culture, I don’t actually believe that a realistic presidential campaign — even one led by a quintessentially ugly racist American — can conceivably win by appealing to this diseased fragment of the American psyche.

And given that Twitter has had such an important role in Trump’s media strategy, it’s highly implausible that the latest “unforced error” was really that.

Firstly, it seems much more likely that, in part, this is the latest example of what Trump has been doing all along: baiting the media in order to get free publicity.

A campaign that’s already financially stretched is likely to become increasingly desperate in its use of stunts designed to grab headlines.

But wait a minute, some people may be thinking: Why would Trump risk alienating some extremely wealthy Jewish donors — especially Sheldon Adelson — just for a couple of days free but politically costly media attention?

Back in May, Adelson was reported to be “poised” to donate $100 million or more to the Trump campaign at a time that Trump estimated he might need to raise $1 billion.

The money never came through.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Many [inside the Trump campaign] were hoping casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who spent nearly $100 million in the 2012 presidential race, would save the day by starting his own pro-Trump super PAC to provide a trusted safe haven for donors.

But after Trump’s polling numbers tanked with his race-based criticism of a federal judge and response to the Orlando shooting, Adelson has put his plans on hold. The Las Vegas billionaire is “not actually starting a PAC despite what has been reported,” his spokesman said.

So, perhaps Trump’s anti-Semitic tweet might be better understood not as dog whistle to bigots whose loyalty he’s already won, but instead as a counterpunch aimed at Jewish donors like Adelson who now find it impossible to deny Trump’s inherent toxicity.

Trump’s biggest lie was that he would never need anyone else’s money, so nothing now eats his heart out more with bitterness and envy than the sight of his competitor sitting on piles of cash while he has close to none.

As much as Trump may have appeared to possess an extraordinary capacity to avoid being penalized for his irrepressible racism, the reality seems to be that it is driving his campaign to bankruptcy.

Facebooktwittermail

The 75%: Young voters in the UK want to remain in the EU

“We are the 48,” protesters on the March for Europe chanted in London yesterday.

I guess it’s possible this slogan was meant as a warning against the tyranny of the majority, but it seems more likely it was intended as a way of saying, “we are too many to be ignored.”

Either way, and given the preponderance of young people marching, “We are the 75%,” might have sent a stronger message.


Even so, no sooner had this emphatic support among young voters for remaining in the EU been noted a week ago, then another number started circulating widely — this one from Sky News who reported that among 18-24 year olds, the turnout had only been 36%.


Rather than viewing older voters as having betrayed the interests of their children and grandchildren, it looked like voter apathy among the young was as much to blame for the victory of the Leave camp.

But at the time, Barbara Speed at the New Statesman noted:

Sky isn’t claiming this is collected data – it’s projected, and a subsequent tweet said it was based on “9+/10 certainty to vote, usually/always votes, voted/ineligible at GE2015”. I’ve asked for more information on what this means, but for now it’s enough to say it’s nothing more than a guess.

Francesca Barber, who describes herself as British, European, and American, says “my generation failed to turn up… If we want our world to reflect our values and beliefs, we are going to have to engage and vote.”

But maybe before making strong judgments about generational failure, it’s worth having some renewed skepticism about the numbers in the Sky News tweet.

Michael Bruter, professor of political science and European politics at the LSE, and his colleague, Dr Sarah Harrison, have been analyzing responses from 2,113 British adults questioned between 24 and 30 June.

The Guardian reports:

Bruter and Harrison said they found turnout among young people to be far higher than data has so far suggested. “Young people cared and voted in very large numbers. We found turnout was very close to the national average, and much higher than in general and local elections.

“After correcting for over-reporting [people always say they vote more than they do], we found that the likely turnout of 18- to 24-year-olds was 70% – just 2.5% below the national average – and 67% for 25- to 29-year-olds.

This suggests that even if turnout among young voters had matched the national average, the outcome of the referendum would still have been the same.

For this reason, it’s perhaps worth restating: the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum was conclusive.

Nevertheless, there’s a strong argument to be made that a second referendum will still be necessary at the conclusion of Brexit negotiations, bearing in mind that no one even knows when or if that conclusion will be reached.

The EU has a serious credibility problem when it comes to its perceived lack of commitment to democratic processes. Many EU leaders are currently preoccupied with the fear that favorable terms for Brexit will have a domino effect across the Union. At the same time, some are calling for a “new vision for Europe.”

If the EU gets serious about this and goes beyond measures that are merely forms of damage control, then by the time the UK has finalized its withdrawal terms, the EU the UK will then be about to leave should be quite different from the one to which it now belongs.

This point will be reached in 2019 at the earliest or quite likely some years later. A referendum of British voters at that time would provide the basis for an informed decision.

This is not much different from having an opportunity and the time to read the small print before signing a contract. As things stand right now, British voters bought into a proposition whose terms are completely unknown.

Given that the Council of the European Union, through the Treaty of Nice, employs the use of a form of qualified majority voting which requires support representing 62% of the EU population, the UK could reasonably adopt the same principle in requiring that a second referendum seeking informed consent would need to cross the same threshold.

The EU and the UK have a common interest in showing that Brexit, as it unfolds, demonstrates a mutual commitment to the democratic process whatever the outcome.

Facebooktwittermail

Why Brexit means Brexit

As regular readers here will have noticed, over the last week I have given a lot of coverage to the debate on whether Brexit can be dodged, reversed, blocked or somehow avoided by legal and/or political means. I’ve also engaged in that debate myself in several posts.

The careful examination of this issue by experts in constitutional and international law has undoubtedly contributed to a widening sense that it might just be possible that, as John Kerry put it, Brexit can be “walked back.”

Over the weekend, a European diplomat in Brussels said: “If they treat their referendum as a non-event, we will also treat their referendum as a non-event.”

With so many doubts and questions ricocheting back and forth along with the fact that no one knows when the British government will actually formally pull the trigger on Brexit by invoking Article 50, it hasn’t been difficult to get the sense that Britain’s withdrawal from the EU might never happen — that a worse disaster than the immediate one might still be avoided.

As happens all too often, when one gets engrossed in details, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture.

What seems to me to be the most salient way of clarifying this issue is to pose a different question.

Suppose last Thursday the outcome of the EU referendum had been what pollsters predicted: 52% for Remain, and 48% for Leave.

Given that outcome, if the disgruntled Leave camp had then spent the following week arguing about why there should be another referendum, why the question had not been settled, and so forth, who outside their camp would have taken these protests seriously? How many legal opinions would have been crafted? How much serious discussion would have ensued?

Virtually none.

In Westminster, Brussels and throughout the financial markets, in the media and across academia, the prevailing sentiment would be that the issue had been settled, the will of the British people determined, and it was time to move forward.

Even though the real outcome of the vote looks to so many of us as an act of self-inflicted harm of historic proportions, what actually matters more than being in or out of the EU, is democracy itself.

The evidence that democracy is working as it should comes exactly at times when the political establishment gets challenged. This isn’t because there’s some inherent virtue in rocking the system. On the contrary, it’s because it is at a time such as this that those people who insist the system is rigged are demonstrably proven wrong.

Everyone’s vote was indeed counted and we should be glad of the fact.

And in the Brexit aftermath, anyone who might be thinking democracy is overrated should pay more attention to those parts of the world where ordinary people must risk their lives if they want to be heard.

The rights we too easily take for granted are rights we risk losing.

Facebooktwittermail

Theresa May: ‘Brexit means Brexit’

Following Boris Johnson’s decision to exit the contest to become Britain’s next prime minister, the front-runner is Home Secretary Theresa May.

May’s chief opponent, Michael Gove, when asked last month whether he was interested in being prime minister, said: “No, I’m not. There… I don’t want to do it and there are people who are far better equipped than me to do it.” In 2012, he said: “I could not be prime minister. I’m not equipped to be prime minister. I don’t want to be prime minister.”

Here are some clips from the launch of May’s Conservative leadership bid:

 

The principal role of whoever becomes Britain’s next prime minister will be negotiating with the EU.

The Guardian notes about May:

After 10 years she is now the most experienced interior minister in Europe and has proved highly influential in justice and home affairs policies. She has recently secured agreement for a new Europe-wide database logging passenger information for all flights in and out of Europe. Although a professed Eurosceptic it was little surprise when she announced she was backing the remain in Europe campaign. In an earlier life she was a Brussels lobbyist for the Association for Payment Clearing Services for six years and is very much at home trying to secure what she wants in Europe.

While argument among legal experts persists on whether Brexit must indeed move forward, May, although having campaigned against withdrawal, now insists there is no alternative.

In line with positioning herself as the candidate of stability, she has made it clear that it is the UK, not Brussels, which will determine the time to invoke Article 50 and that if she is prime minister, this will not happen before the end of the year.

Oxford University’s Professor Richard Ekins writes:

Parliament having decided to hold the referendum, and the public having participated fully in it, the result should be respected and not undone.

Political fairness and democratic principle require one to respect the outcome of the referendum even if one is persuaded that Brexit would be a very bad idea. One might think it wrong to hold the referendum, but it was held – and Parliament invited the people to decide this question. There was a lengthy, wide-ranging, high-powered campaign that culminated in high public turnout and a clear outcome. The remain camp had a fair hearing: it was led by the PM and most of cabinet, with the support of most MPs with much business and international support. In short, the important constitutional question of whether Britain should remain in the EU was fairly settled by public vote.

The proposal to ignore or undo the vote is unjust. It bears noting that the relatively powerless in our polity – the poor – overwhelmingly supported exit. Ignoring the referendum would be particularly unfair to them. It would not be consistent with treating them as free and equal persons entitled by the law and constitution of their land to a share in self-government, not least since the rationale for ignoring the process in which they participated has so often been framed in terms of outright contempt for them. Any failure to act on the decision made in the referendum that the UK should leave the EU would be a profound betrayal. It would be no mere failure to recognize the perspective of the dispossessed, but would be the betrayal of holding out to them, as to others, a question for decision and then ignoring their decision because one does not like it.

The fact that May sees no reason for there to be a general election until 2020, could provide the Labour Party with an opportunity to reconstruct itself rather than continue digging its own grave.

John Harris writes:

Labour is in the midst of a longstanding and possibly terminal malaise, and now finds itself facing two equally unviable options.

On one side is the current leader and a small band of leftist diehards, backed by an energetic, well-drilled movement but devoid of any coherent project and out of touch with the voters who have just defied the party in their droves. On the other is a counter-revolution led by MPs who mostly failed to see this crisis coming, have very few worthwhile ideas themselves, and are a big part of the reason the Brexit revolt happened in the first place. As the activist Neal Lawson says, the choice is essentially between different captains of the Titanic, and therefore is no choice at all.

As with the centre-left parties across Europe in the same predicament, Labour is a 20th-century party adrift in a new reality. Its social foundations – the unions, heavy industry, the nonconformist church, a deference to the big state that has long evaporated – are either in deep retreat or have vanished completely. Its name embodies an attachment to the supposed glories of work that no longer chimes with insecure employment and insurgent automation.

Its culture is still far too macho, and didactic; it has a lifelong aversion to analysis and ideas that has hobbled it throughout its existence, and now leaves it lacking any real sense of what is happening. I am a lifelong party member who was raised in a Labour family – my grandfather was a south Wales coal miner, my father a Labour activist – for whom the party was a kind of secular church. But if we do not confront the crisis now, then when? Look at any number of what we still laughably call “core” Labour areas, and you will find the same things: a vote share that has been steadily declining since 2001, an MP more often parachuted in from a different world, and voters who either vote for the party thanks to fading familial loyalties (“I vote Labour because my granddad did”) or have no idea what the party stands for.

Facebooktwittermail

Leading Brexiter fears outcome in which ‘we will be worse off than when we were in the EU’

The Guardian reports: The British public have voted to leave the EU in an advisory referendum – but there have been voices in business, diplomacy, politics and European polities desperately asking if the issue can be revisited. Is that feasible?

The short answer is yes, just about, but many forces would have to align.

The referendum, for instance, has thrown up big constitutional questions for Britain.

Oliver Letwin, who was appointed by David Cameron, the outgoing prime minister, to oversee the process of withdrawal, is now at the helm of an expanded European secretariat at the Cabinet Office. But it is clear that very little preparatory work has been done. One of the first questions he will face is the future role of the British parliament in Brexit.

The British government has not yet said how parliament should implement the decision to leave. It is not clear, for instance, if and what laws would have to be passed to put the referendum decision to leave the EU into effect. [Continue reading…]

Echoing this discussion, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says there are a number of ways Thursday’s vote could be “walked back.”

But in the eyes of many — on both sides of the issue — the fact that this conversation is even taking place is widely viewed as an expression of contempt for democracy. It is seen as a cynical effort to accomplish by questionable means what couldn’t be achieved through a free and fair vote. The argument for rejecting these kinds of political machinations is that the will of the people must be respected.

Setting aside the question of whether there is such a thing as the will of the British people — sacrosanct as that notion is — if we simply accept the fact that the Leave campaign won (a result that no one disputes), then respecting the will of the people in that sense would surely have to mean delivering the outcome Leave voters supported. That is to say: respecting the popular expectations built around the meaning of withdrawal — a return of sovereignty, control over immigration, and so forth.

If leaving the EU leaves the UK in a position where it retains full access to the single European market — the so-called Norway option — on condition of maintaining the “four freedoms” (the free movement of goods, capital, services, and people) then in the words of Richard North, a leading proponent of Brexit, “we will be worse off than when we were in the EU.”

Let’s repeat that: We will be worse off than when we were in the EU!

Wasn’t that the central argument for voting Remain? That Britain would be worse off outside the EU than it is inside? And now Brexiters are warning about the danger of that very outcome!

Today, North writes:

We’ve been fighting the “war” for so many decades, with so little expectation of winning, that we’ve not devoted anything like enough time to winning the “peace”.
[…]
Yesterday, I was in London at a Leave Alliance meeting and there it dawned on me how ill-prepared we are to fight the coming battle. It is absolutely true that Whitehall didn’t have a plan, and Vote Leave certainly doesn’t have one. And, of course, neither does Farage. We are, therefore, at risk of losing the battle before many of us even realise what is at stake.

So here’s the irony for Brexit voters who naively imagine they just “got their country back”:

On one side are opponents of Brexit strategizing on how to stop it in its tracks, and on the other side are opponents of Brexit strategizing on how to minimize its effects. In between, the champions of Brexit haven’t a clue what to do next.

This is what happens when you passionately advocate for a goal, but expend very little effort figuring out how it can be accomplished.

Facebooktwittermail

Who gets democracy?

Champion of the working-class and editor of the National Review, Rich Lowry, writes:

Democracy is too important to be left to the people.

That is the global elite’s collective reaction to Britain’s vote to exit the European Union, which is being portrayed as the work of ill-informed xenophobes who never should have been entrusted with a decision of such world-historical importance.

Judging by their dismissive tone, critics of Brexit believe that the European Union’s lack of basic democratic accountability is one of its institutional advantages — the better to insulate consequential decisions from backward and short-sighted voters.

To respond to Lowry briefly: bullshit.

To elaborate, let’s first bear in mind that given his reaction to the outcome of the referendum, there’s every indication that the leader of the Leave camp, the Eton-schooled Boris Johnson, promoted an exit from the EU on the assumption it wouldn’t happen but that he would be able to leap frog from the campaign into Downing Street. The latter part of his plan appears destined to succeed but soon he will find himself charting a course he had no plan or prior intention to actually navigate.

Given the stream of lies to which Brexit leaders have confessed since Thursday, there’s every reason to believe that in a rerun of the referendum, large numbers of Leave voters, having seen they were duped, would probably not even vote a second time around. It’s patronizing to Leave voters themselves, to think they would robotically make the same choice even after having seen they were being guided by false promises.

At the same time, the Remain vote would be driven up not necessarily by a significant swing of Regrexit voters but instead by a massive increase in young voters. Even though 75% of 18-24 year-olds voted Remain, 64% of that age group didn’t vote. Having just been given a shocking lesson about the importance of voting, I suspect — given a second chance — they’d demonstrate they have as much interest in exercising their democratic rights as do their grandparents. Moreover, given that the decision at hand would have ramifications for the rest of a lifetime, it would be reasonable to follow the precedent set in Scotland and lower the voting age to 16 — which likewise would provide an additional boost to Remain.

So, this isn’t an argument about who has greater or less respect for the will of the people. It’s about who is or isn’t serious about determining what the will of the people really is, which is to say, discerning the popular will when honest choices are on offer.

Two years ago, Scottish voters were told that if they voted for independence from the UK, they risked thereby casting themselves out of the EU. In those circumstances 55% rejected independence.

That situation has now been reversed and given that an overwhelming majority of voters in Scotland want to remain in the EU, if independence is the only way of staying in the EU, it’s very likely that a second independence referendum will have the opposite result from the one in 2014.

Moreover, for observers with a keen interest in upholding democratic principles, the 2014 vote is of additional relevance here because, unlike the vote last week, the determining factor in voter eligibility was legal residence, not citizenship. On that basis, the power of decision-making was placed in the hands of the people who would be directly impacted by the outcome of the vote, irrespective of whether they identified themselves as Scots.

Last Thursday, 2.7 million people who have made Britain their home were not allowed to vote because although they are EU citizens resident in an EU country, they are not British citizens.

These people are now being told by Johnson and others that they need have no fear about the protection of their rights, yet those reassurances would be a lot more credible if their right to vote in a referendum having such a huge impact on their future had been respected last week. It goes without saying that among that bloc of would-be voters support for Remain would have been close to unanimous and Remain’s victory thus a near certainty.

There are legitimate reasons for arguing that a second referendum cannot soon take place, but it’s disingenuous for people like Lowry to present this as an argument between those who those who value democracy and those who don’t.

Another referendum will indeed be necessary but this one should pose what is becoming the central question: Do you want the UK to remain together or would you prefer to see it break apart?

The Little Englanders who want to leave the EU and destroy the UK are probably are rather small minority of British citizens. They have a right to be heard but not to claim ownership of a country that belongs to many others.

Facebooktwittermail

Protest votes count too

In an age of loud dissent where polemicists, activists, and many others like to proclaim, “enough’s enough,” the irony of much of these strident demands for change is that they are driven by the expectation that in fact, nothing will change.

After 9/11, George Bush insulated himself from protesters by having them/us penned inside “free-speech zones” — the message was: shout as much as you want, but the government will ignore you.

Even though this was perceived as an affront to People Power and an insult to the democratic spirit, at the same time it was a patronizing accommodation that dovetailed with the fact that a great deal of dissent has as its goal nothing more than speaking out. It’s a cathartic exercise in which sending a message matters more than where it’s going, whether it will be delivered, or to what effect.

There’s no doubt that last Thursday, a lot of votes were cast in Britain by people who believed that once they dropped their ballot paper in the ballot box, they’d made their point. Indeed, some made doubly sure by making their point in pen. They didn’t actually believe that every vote counts because they were convinced they were taking a symbolic stand against a rigged system and pushing hard against an unmovable establishment.

Quite forgivably, people whose daily experience tells them they have virtually no power have a hard time shedding that notion as they cast a vote.

Emily Tierney describes what happens when you discover that protest votes count too:

That evening, I headed to a friend’s house to watch the result. We’d all voted Leave as a protest. We stocked up on jam, scones and tea, and ironically decked out the room with Union Jack bunting.

As the first results came in from Sunderland, we all cheered. We were winning, we were right. People had had enough.

Then as more results came in, the reality started to bite. Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, Scotland and London had decided they wanted to remain. This wasn’t funny any more, the Union was at stake, and the economic powerhouse of our country thought it was a terrible idea.

At around 4am, the BBC declared it a win for Leave. Panic set in.

The slightly more sensible Vote Leave campaigners disappeared from the TV screens, awaiting David Cameron’s official speech. For about three hours, we were left with re-runs of Farage making that moronic victory speech about no bullets being fired, despite a Labour MP being tragically killed the week before. I started to feel sick.

The pound went in to freefall. The FTSE dropped. David Cameron resigned, and he’s set to be replaced by a far more right-wing alternative. Donald Trump arrived in the UK to declare this a “great victory”.

What have we done? If I could take my vote back now, I would. I’m ashamed of myself, and I want my country back.

Facebooktwittermail

Brexit and the anti-Western-establishment armchair revolutionaries

What does one need to understand about the EU or the implication’s of the UK’s withdrawal if this can be characterized as a hammer blow to the Western establishment. The power of Western elites is crumbling — what’s not to celebrate?

In such a spirit, Glenn Greenwald (who while on billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s payroll is, I assume, comfortably insulated from the crisis rocking Brazil right now) writes:

Revolts against corrupt elite institutions can usher in reform and progress, but they can also create a space for the ugliest tribal impulses: xenophobia, authoritarianism, racism, fascism. One sees all of that, both good and bad, manifesting in the anti-establishment movements throughout the U.S., Europe, and the UK: including Brexit. All of this can be invigorating, or promising, or destabilizing, or dangerous: most likely a combination of all that.

The solution is not to subserviently cling to corrupt elite institutions out of fear of the alternatives. It is, instead, to help bury those institutions and their elite mavens and then fight for superior replacements. [My emphasis]
…

Corrupt elites always try to persuade people to continue to submit to their dominance in exchange for protection from forces that are even worse. That’s their game. But at some point, they themselves, and their prevailing order, become so destructive, so deceitful, so toxic, that their victims are willing to gamble that the alternatives will not be worse, or at least, they decide to embrace the satisfaction of spitting in the faces of those who have displayed nothing but contempt and condescension for them.

One of the many problems with this perspective that the old order must be destroyed before a “superior replacement” can be created, is that the champions of such destruction tend to be, in significant ways, privileged themselves.

To have sympathy with the legitimacy of popular grievances yet willing to overlook the disastrous consequences of the chosen solutions to those grievances is like having a complacent attitude towards alcoholism or other forms of self-destructive behavior simply because you understand what took someone down that path.

It’s a strange kind of sympathy that feels one source of pain while discounting another.

At the same time, it’s ironic that the cheerleaders of the destruction of the Western establishment — proponents of their own vision of regime change — have mostly had such short-lived sympathy for popular uprisings in the Middle East.

At this point, there’s surely good reason to jettison all the slogans about revolutionary change and start thinking more seriously about the mechanics of change. It’s always easier to talk about where you want to go, than figure out exactly how to get there. Who wants to get mired in boring details when they can instead indulge in fantasies about burying institutions?

If an overwhelming majority of British voters had opted for Brexit then it would be impossible to argue against the will of the people. But the vote was divided almost exactly in half — evidence I would suggest that support for the EU runs much deeper than might be expected if this is nothing more than an instrument serving the interests of the corrupt Western elite. Indeed, the narrative that casts this as primarily a struggle between elites and the disadvantaged, glosses over the fact that support for Brexit came from older people, while younger Britons have grown up with fewer reasons to regard Europe and the EU as other.

This is a generational betrayal and an ominous turning point in history.

If there’s one class of people who have reason to be pleased about Brexit, it is the lawyers who will henceforth be employed helping untangle a decade’s worth of legal disputes.

Those who imagine that since the UK has now made its choice, withdrawal from the EU can be expedited and happen as swiftly as the remaining EU members hope, here’s piece of history that puts this issue in perspective.

In 1982, Greenland held a referendum which resulted in its choice to leave the EEC (precursor of the EU which then had ten members). Negotiations for its withdrawal took over two years to complete. Greenland looks big on a world map but it has a population of just 55,000.

So, two years of negotiations between on one side a European Community a third of its current size and on the other a state which is basically a fishing town on the edge of an ice-sheet. And keep in mind that Greenland (as part of Denmark) had been part of the community for less than a decade and had not played a central role in shaping Europe’s institutions.

As much as the EU can be cast as some external, overbearing bureaucratic entity, it is an entity in which the UK has spent the last four decades as one of its leading members. Many of the laws from which Brexiters imagine they are soon to be unshackled are laws that Britain helped draft, wanted in place, and served British interests.

This will be like so many other divorces where so many things once shared, now have to be replaced. The absurdity of the fantasy about liberation from red tape is that the UK has now brought on its own head the worst imaginable bureaucratic nightmare.

Finally, on a personal note, even though I have lived in the United States for almost thirty years and am a U.S. citizen, I am also a British citizen, the country of my birth where I grew up. I’m surprised my how often I hear Americans refer to “British subjects” as though we remain under the control of a monarch, but I assure you “citizen” is the term in our passports.

Until I moved to America, I never referred to myself as “British” — a phrase loaded with so much ugly historical baggage; an identity which among members of my generation conjures up images of Alf Garnett and small-minded rightwing bigots who cling to memories of empire and who like to wave the Union Jack.

I liked instead the idea of being European, not as distinct from non-European but as distinct from an identity defined and limited by an island’s shoreline.

For the same reason, I like Barry Cunliffe’s topographical description of Europe as “the westerly excrescence of the continent of Asia.”

The basic point is that I think it’s good for all people to feel that they are part of something larger — that we don’t confine ourselves by boundaries but have an interest in what lies beyond them.

This is what makes Brexit so depressing, because aside from the economic repercussions, it represents a psychological process of withdrawal in which everyone will be diminished.

Facebooktwittermail

Parliamentary fightback against Brexit on cards

The Guardian reports: The prospect of a parliamentary fightback against the result of the EU referendum gathered pace on Sunday, with pro-remain figures saying they would not “roll over and give up”.

Some are urging a second referendum after Brexit negotiations have taken place.

Lord Heseltine has pointed to the practicalities of an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons against leaving the EU. “There is a majority of something like 350 in the House of Commons broadly in favour of the European relationship,” he said.

“There is no way you are going to get those people to say black is white and change their minds unless a) they know what the deal is and b) it has been supported either by an election or by another referendum,” Heseltine told Sky News. “So there’s a dramatic urgency to get on with the negotiations.”

He called for a cross-party group of MPs to look at the options and “articulate the case for Britain rethinking the result of the referendum”. [Continue reading…]

When David Cameron announced his resignation he concluded his remarks by saying, “I love this country, and I feel honored to have served it, and I will do everything I can do in future to help this great country succeed.”

I’m neither a fan of Cameron’s nor a sucker for patriotic declarations, yet I haven’t the slightest doubt that his declaration of love for this country was completely sincere. Neither am I in any doubt about which country he was referring to: the United Kingdom.

No one can be in any doubt that withdrawal from the EU will set the UK on a path to further fragmentation as Scotland seeks independence and Northern Ireland struggles with the consequences of a tightly controlled border.

Cameron said:

We must now prepare for a negotiation with the European Union. This will need to involve the full engagement of the Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Ireland governments to ensure that the interests of all parts of our United Kingdom are protected and advanced.

In making this point he was perhaps intimating that while refusing to question the choice of the British people, neither he nor anyone else can question the fact that Britain did not speak with one voice on Thursday.

Even in the English regions where Leave won, none of them reached 60%. The most emphatic results came from Scotland with 62% and London with 59.9% with each choosing Remain.

Unlike the 1975 referendum where, with 67.2% favoring continued membership of the European Community, British voters sent their government a clear message, the instruction coming from the British people in 2016 is riddled with ambiguity.

Cameron nevertheless said “there can be no doubt about the result” and “the will of the British people is an instruction that must be delivered” but he hedged on the timing of that process — he says that’s a decision for his successor.

There is now a mood in which few in the political establishment are eager to rush forward — including the leaders of the Leave camp.

As much as this period of hesitation might frustrate those in the EU whose patience with the UK has already expired, a time for reflection is a good thing. It creates a space in which new possibilities can be explored.

Having stepped back from the cliff’s edge there is perhaps a growing recognition that there is in fact no irresistible force compelling anyone to jump.

Maybe Cameron will never make a public mea culpa, but perhaps behind closed doors in Brussels he can admit he made the greatest political blunder of his career.

It’s already cost him his job, but if he wants to help his country succeed, he first has to prevent it falling apart. The only way of doing that is to navigate a reversal.

As much as the EU wants to mitigate the harm incurred by the UK’s decision to withdraw, rather than trying to get this process started and finished as fast as possible, it would be in everyone’s interests if the process doesn’t even begin.

That should not mean entering into a period of prolonged uncertainty. What it requires is a massive course correction.

Cynics will say this is what politicians do all the time — promise one thing and then end up doing the opposite. But in a representative democracy, leaders of good conscience know there are times when to do the right thing means to risk facing public anger.

Having recognized his failure, Cameron may be in a better position than anyone else to put the future of the UK first without allowing his judgement to get swayed by considerations of personal advantage.

Facebooktwittermail

Liberal Democrats pledge to keep Britain in the EU after next election

The Independent reports: The Liberal Democrats will stand at the next general election on a platform of derailing Brexit and keeping Britain in the European Union, the party has announced.

Leader Tim Farron said on Saturday night that he would be “clear and unequivocal” with voters that if elected it would set aside the referendum result and keep Britain in the EU.

He said the referendum result amounted to a “howl of anger” at politicians and that the election of a liberal government would be a way of registering a change of heart by the electorate

Though the next general election is scheduled for 2020 under the Fixed Term Parliament Act (FTPA), David Cameron’s resignation and major loopholes in the legislation mean it could come as early as the autumn or early next year. [Continue reading…]

In the 2015 general election, the Liberal Democrats got hammered — down from 57 seats in parliament to just 8. If staying in the EU depends on the Liberal Democrats winning an election, it’s not going to happen.

Still, why shouldn’t all those MPs in the current parliament who supported Remain — which is to say, the majority — also renew that commitment in the next election? Anyone who gets elected on a “pledged to stay” slogan can’t be accused of deceiving the voters if they then act on that pledge in parliament.

Instead of there being any need for another referendum, the election of an even more vocally pro-EU parliament, would surely send a strong enough signal that Britain, having been led up to the edge of a chasm, looked down and made the judicious decision not to jump.

Facebooktwittermail

Britain’s young: Betrayed by their elders — and by themselves

The decision to exit the EU will impact the UK’s younger generation most of all and among 18-24 year-olds who voted, 75% voted Remain.

Yet that preponderance of support for Remain turned out to be of little consequence — 64% didn’t bother voting.

If the turnout among the young had been as high as it was among the old, Remain would have won.

Facebooktwittermail

Britain’s voyage to a destination unknown led by a captain unfound

The EU Consumer Rights Directive — one among a plethora of rights that millions of British voters blithely threw away on Thursday — affords European citizens the right to change their minds after the rather unmomentous action of, for instance, buying some Tupperware. The assumption is that consumers deserve protection from deceptive sales practices. In transactions that involve false promises, the buyer has a right to determine she made a mistake and get her money back.

Why should British voters not now have some analogous way of rectifying a choice that some — perhaps many — now view as having been made in error?

“I was very disappointed about the results [of the EU referendum]. Even though I voted to leave, this morning I woke up and the reality did actually hit me. But if I had the opportunity to vote again, it would be to stay,” a British voter humbly admitted when interviewed at Manchester Airport on Friday.

How many other voters share her “buyer’s remorse”?

And how many people voted Leave as a symbolic protest, confident that as pollsters, bookkeepers, the financial markets, and the media told them, Remain would win? In other words, how many votes were cast for Leave on the assumption it wouldn’t happen?

Never mind. Britain has spoken. What has been done can’t now be undone — at least that’s the consensus voiced by the political establishment. Indeed, some European leaders were quick to reinforce that conclusion by declaring, “leave means leave.”

But is there really no way to reverse Brexit?

Is the notion of a reversal an affront to democracy? Would it dangerously compound the existing instability? Or might it instead reflect a basic human understanding that people individually and collectively on occasions make terrible mistakes and that mistakes can often be rectified.

What inviolable political principle is it that says 65 million people need to suffer the consequences of the ill-considered choices of a minority?

The promise offered by Leave was for “independence,” “sovereignty,” and “taking our country back.” It sounded wonderfully straightforward. The reality of complex, messy, and protracted withdrawal negotiations will reveal, however, that the destination towards which Britain is now headed is actually unknown.

The ballot paper looked simple: Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

But after the voting had finished, the top two questions being asked on Google in the UK were, “What does it mean to leave the EU?” and “What is the EU?”

While making its recommendations on the exact wording of the referendum last September, Britain’s Electoral Commission noted:

Referendum campaigners have a key role to play in informing people what the issues are in a referendum. The campaigns are the main source for highlighting to potential voters the implications of each potential outcome, encouraging people to vote and influencing how they vote. [My emphasis]

Yet as a BBC report in April pointed out:

Just about everything in the EU referendum debate is contestable, as soon as one side produces a “fact”, the other side challenges it with a contradictory “fact”.

At the end of the 16-page leaflet the British government circulated around the UK in April, it said:

This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide.

Following David Cameron’s decision to step down as prime minister and before the process of EU withdrawal begins, the British people are boarding a ship taking them to a destination unknown led by a captain who has yet to be found.

The European Council says:

We now expect the United Kingdom government to give effect to this decision of the British people as soon as possible, however painful that process may be.

At the same time, it underlines the fact that the:

United Kingdom remains a member of the European Union, with all the rights and obligations that derive from this. According to the Treaties which the United Kingdom has ratified, EU law continues to apply to the full to and in the United Kingdom until it is no longer a Member.

The process doesn’t begin until Britain’s prime minister invokes Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union and who that prime minister is, given that we know it won’t be David Cameron, is a choice that should in fact be determined neither by Conservative Members of Parliament, nor the Conservative Party Conference.

It’s time for a general election.

Whoever then ends up as Britain’s next prime minister will, by the electorate, have explicitly been assigned the task of taking the UK out of the EU.

If it turns out, however, that British voters, through the parliamentary system, end up placing in office another prime minister who unequivocally favors continued membership of the UK in the EU, then it seems perfectly reasonable to conclude that Britain will have spoken once again but this time exercised its right to say, we made a mistake.

Divorce papers once served, don’t have to be signed. They can be torn up.

Whether through a general election or by an undemocratic process, Boris Johnson is likely to become Britain’s next prime minister.

But before that happens, the British public should be in little doubt that by leading Brexit, Johnson was simply trying to hoodwink his way into Downing Street.

This is what fellow Conservative MP and government minister, Anna Soubry, now says:

You look at all the newspaper columns he’s ever written — he’s never said, “I’m for Out.” And he positively told people — people like Nicholas Soames — “I’m no Outer.” And when I confronted Boris with all of this, all he will ever say to me is, “It’ll be alright, it’ll all be alright.” And you know what I think? I think he didn’t think that they would win. That’s why it was going to be alright. But for his own interests, wanting to be Prime Minister, he went for Leave, because it would serve him.

 

Facebooktwittermail

How dangerous is a gunless gunman?

“Why isn’t the assassination attempt on Donald Trump bigger news?,” asks Callum Borchers at the Washington Post.

The No. 1 trending question related to Donald Trump on Google right now is “Who tried to shoot Trump?” Which means a lot of people don’t know the answer. Which is probably because the assassination attempt on the presumptive Republican presidential nominee hasn’t been covered as a major news story.

The reason so many people wanted to know who tried to shoot Trump was because it was widely reported that a man did indeed try to shoot Trump.

The thing is, the young man in question — Michael Steven Sandford — didn’t actually try to shoot Trump.

By his own testimony, he certainly wanted to shoot Trump, but there’s a significant difference between wanting and trying.

For Sandford to try and shoot Trump he would have needed to possess a loaded gun — but he didn’t have one. What he actually tried to do was grab a police officer’s gun.

I know next to nothing about police training, but I’m confident that one of the basics in firearms use is on the need to retain control of ones own weapon. The officer in question seems to have passed that test.

The larger question here is not about the identity of the hapless would-be assassin but instead it is this: Why is it that Donald Trump and fellow gun rights supporters aren’t willing to demonstrate their confidence in the principles they claim they believe in, by speaking out in gun-permissive venues?

In other words, why wasn’t Sandford entitled to bring a gun to the rally?

The argument the gun lobby keeps on making is that people like Sandford, even if armed, would pose less threat if everyone else was also armed.

So why doesn’t Trump dispense with his Secret Service detail (which requires no one other than law enforcement officials can carry guns) and allow attendees to bring their own guns to his rallies? Of course, each would be required to produce a gun permit as they carry their handguns or assault rifles into the venue.

The more guns there are, the safer Trump should feel, right? Or maybe not…

Facebooktwittermail

Jo Cox murder suspect tells court his name is ‘death to traitors, freedom for Britain’; new indications of Britain First ties

A photo of anti-Muslim protesters in Dewsbury which includes a man resembling Thomas Mair was posted on the Britain First Facebook page in October 2015. The man's identity has yet to be established.

A photo of anti-Muslim protesters in Dewsbury including a man resembling Thomas Mair was posted on the Britain First Facebook page in October 2015. The man’s identity has yet to be established.


The anti-Muslim, extreme right-wing, Britain First party, has disavowed any connection to Thomas Mair, the man who has been charged with murdering British MP Jo Cox.

When Mair appeared in Westminster magistrates court in London today, he answered the judge’s request to confirm his name by saying: “My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain.”

The Guardian also reports:

The prosecution told the court that Mair told police he was “a political activist” as he was being arrested moments after the fatal attack. This assertion was repeated in a summary of crime released by the prosecution.

Mair also allegedly said “this is for Britain” and “keep Britain independent” as he stabbed and shot the MP for Batley and Spen, prosecutors said both in court and in their printed outline of the case.

Police searching Mair’s property found newspaper articles related to Cox, as well as far-right and white supremacist literature, they claimed.

Whatever assessment is made of Mair’s mental health, there seems to be no question that this was a politically motivated murder.

Witnesses to the murder reported that Mair shouted “Britain first” while attacking Cox.

The photograph above (which is circulating on social media) shows members of Britain First’s Northern Brigade in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, just three miles away from Birstall where Cox was murdered. Whether the man in the baseball cap is indeed Mair remains unknown. But there is mounting evidence of Mair’s long-standing ties to right-wing extremism in the form of Nazi regalia found in his home along with literature on how to construct homemade guns and explosives.

Britain First recently organized an “activist training camp” in North Wales where its members “learned things including self-defence, martial arts, knife defence,” according to a report at WalesOnline.

In March, Britain First made clear its deadly hostility to EU supporters:

Deputy leader, Jayda Fransen, admonished their “pro-EU, Islamist-loving opponents” for “ruining our country”.

She added: “They think they can get away with ruining our country, turning us into a Third World country, giving away our homes, jobs and heritage, but they will face the wrath of the Britain First movement, make no mistake about it!

“We will not rest until every traitor is punished for their crimes against our country.

“And by punished, I mean good old fashioned British justice at the end of a rope!”

Facebooktwittermail

Trump’s plan for winning if he loses

Politico reports: In 2016’s race to the bottom, Donald Trump is going to find out if you can become president when two-thirds of Americans don’t like you — and a majority can’t stand you.

Recent polls have showed Trump’s unfavorable rating spiking again, after a brief improvement last month. That’s also coincided with a slide in national horse-race polls, which now unanimously show Hillary Clinton leading the presumptive Republican nominee. Clinton is also more unpopular than past nominees, but her negatives are neither as wide nor as deep as the broadly detested Trump.

Trump is setting modern records for political toxicity — at least for a major-party candidate this far out from an election. Seventy percent of Americans surveyed in an ABC News/Washington Post poll out this week had an unfavorable opinion of Trump, up 10 points over the past month. The poll showed Trump’s favorable rating cratering at 29 percent, down from 37 percent last month.

The numbers were similar in a Bloomberg Politics poll: Trump’s favorable rating is just 31 percent, with 66 percent viewing him unfavorably. That’s only marginally better than in March, when 29 percent viewed Trump favorably, and 68 percent had an unfavorable opinion. [Continue reading…]

Americans like winners and at the core of the Trump brand is the claim that he’s Mr Successful. As a yugely successful businessman with unparalleled talent, he has the unique capacity to make America great again — or so he’d like most voters to believe. But Trump’s support can easily collapse and right now he seems to be steering a course towards spectacular failure.

As a man who has built his life around his unquestioned conviction in his own greatness, Trump is likely to be the last person who can acknowledge his flaws. He’s not only setting himself up for spectacular failure but also spectacular humiliation.

But maybe his conviction is unshakable and he’s already crafting a plan to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat — not by winning the election but by turning his campaign experience into the launchpad for his next commercial venture.

Vanity Fair reports: Every election cycle has its own breakout media star. In 1992, it was CNN. A few years later, it would be an e-mail blast called the Drudge Report. By 2000, the country had more or less been neatly delineated between MSNBC and Fox News households. The 2008 election introduced Politico and the Huffington Post to the adults’ table. BuzzFeed joined in 2012.

The breakout media star of 2016 is, inarguably, Donald Trump, who has masterfully — and horrifyingly — demonstrated an aptitude for manipulating the news cycle, gaining billions of dollars worth of free airtime, and dominating coverage on every screen. Now, several people around him are looking for a way to leverage his supporters into a new media platform and cable channel.

Trump is indeed considering creating his own media business, built on the audience that has supported him thus far in his bid to become the next president of the United States. According to several people briefed on the discussions, the presumptive Republican nominee is examining the opportunity presented by the “audience” currently supporting him. He has also discussed the possibility of launching a “mini-media conglomerate” outside of his existing TV-production business, Trump Productions LLC. He has, according to one of these people, enlisted the consultation of his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who owns the The New York Observer. Trump’s rationale, according to this person, is that, “win or lose, we are onto something here. We’ve triggered a base of the population that hasn’t had a voice in a long time.” For his part, Kushner was heard at a New York dinner party saying that “the people here don’t understand what I’m seeing. You go to these arenas and people go crazy for him.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

51 U.S. diplomats urge strikes against Assad in Syria

The New York Times reports: More than 50 State Department diplomats have signed an internal memo sharply critical of the Obama administration’s policy in Syria, urging the United States to carry out military strikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad to stop its persistent violations of a cease-fire in the country’s five-year-old civil war.

The memo, a draft of which was provided to The New York Times by a State Department official, says American policy has been “overwhelmed” by the unrelenting violence in Syria. It calls for “a judicious use of stand-off and air weapons, which would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process.”

Such a step would represent a radical shift in the administration’s approach to the civil war in Syria, and there is little evidence that President Obama has plans to change course. Mr. Obama has emphasized the military campaign against the Islamic State over efforts to dislodge Mr. Assad. Diplomatic efforts to end the conflict, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, have all but collapsed.

But the memo, filed in the State Department’s “dissent channel,” underscores the deep rifts and lingering frustration within the administration over how to deal with a war that has killed more than 400,000 people.

The State Department set up the channel during the Vietnam War as a way for employees who had disagreements with policies to register their protest with the secretary of state and other top officials, without fear of reprisal. While dissent cables are not that unusual, the number of signatures on this document, 51, is extremely large, if not unprecedented.

The names on the memo are almost all midlevel officials — many of them career diplomats — who have been involved in the administration’s Syria policy over the last five years, at home or abroad. They range from a Syria desk officer in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to a former deputy to the American ambassador in Damascus. [Continue reading…]

For Obama to change course at this juncture would require that he acknowledge America’s role in enabling the collapse of Syria, yet he and his staff have been guided by the self-serving conviction: that direct intervention can only make the conflict worse.

If Obama is going to have some great epiphany about the errors of his presidency, don’t expect that to come until after he’s left office and perhaps spent a decade reflecting on what he could have done differently.

What we know already and have known since day one, however, is that this is a president who doesn’t believe in looking back.

Facebooktwittermail

Looking for ISIS where the light is

The New York Times reports: After Orlando and San Bernardino and Paris, there is new urgency to understand the signs that can precede acts of terrorism. And with the Islamic State’s prolific use of social media, terrorism experts and government agencies continually search for clues in posts and Twitter messages that appear to promote the militants’ cause.

A physicist may not seem like an obvious person to study such activity. But for months, Neil Johnson, a physicist at the University of Miami, led a team that created a mathematical model to sift order from the chaotic pro-terrorism online universe.

In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, Dr. Johnson and Miami colleagues searched for pro-Islamic State posts each day from mid-2014 until August 2015, mining mentions of beheadings and blood baths in multiple languages on Vkontakte, a Russia-based social media service that is the largest European equivalent to Facebook. Ultimately, they devised an equation that tries to explain the activity of Islamic State sympathizers online and might, they say, eventually help predict attacks that are about to happen. [Continue reading…]

This is a classic example of the ‘streetlight effect.’

To anticipate acts of terrorism being initiated by ISIS, other terrorist groups or individuals, you’d need access to all forms of communication and planning. That means gathering information from a field much wider than social media and even wider than digital communications. What it requires is omniscience. Currently — and anytime in the foreseeable future — omniscience is unavailable, unlike grandiose propositions which pop up all the time.

When it comes to the art of the possible, too often the question that researchers seem to be preoccupied with is not whether they can accomplish their research goals but whether they can secure their funding needs.

Facebooktwittermail