The Mueller Report And William Barr Summaries- So Perfectly Calibrated To Keep Us Distracted With “Russiagate” . . . Noticing That The Public Isn’t Served By This (And Noticing Who Exactly Is)

Have you noticed? It’s amazing.  The Mueller Report, especially as it teams up with and plays in tandem off the summaries of it prepared by Attorney General William Barr seems perfectly calibrated to ensure that the so-called Russiagate investigation continues to take center stage in the mainstream corporate media as a huge continuing distraction from other bigger issues.  The Mueller Report/Barr Summary combinations are so perfectly calibrated to ensure fractious debate that it can hardly be imagined that they could be better designed to do so if it were intended.  Mueller and Barr and their families are reportedly good friends, with a relationship going back thirty years.       

Also, there is more to notice.  The Mueller Report is being used as a springboard to feed some very dangerous narratives, which, if not dressed up in anti-Trump garb soliciting cred, would most likely be treated by more of us with skepticism as propaganda.
           
Initially, let me say that there were serious problems with the premise of the Mueller investigation.  If you investigate the wrong questions you are guaranteed to get nonsense.  There are certainly a zillion things to investigate about Trump that are well worth investigating, everything from the Emoluments Clause violations, to the conflicts of interest of virtually all of Trump’s appointments, not to mention probably most of Trump’s real estate career with his income tax returns representing a mere tip of that iceberg.  Nor, would it be surprising to learn that Trump has been involved in money laundering for Russian Oligarchs.

As a less Trump-centric set of concerns, there are also critical things to investigate about the derailment of democracy in the United States, everything from the outsized influence of money and corporate interests in politics, to voter suppression, to unreliable voting machines, a hijacking that can be described as a “hacking” of our democracy.  That includes fossil fuel money hamstringing any action to address climate Armageddon.  But to blame “Russians” for the hijacking of our elections as an explanation is a red herring, a distraction, that leads away from acknowledgment of our real problems or the constructive fixes within our means. . .

Plus, even without throwing “Russiagate” into the mix, Trump is already our Distractor-in-Chief.

Our unproductive maelstrom of continuing distraction produced by the way that the way that Mueller Report/Barr summaries sync up to absorb energy and attention is exquisitely represented by the kind of treatment the NY Times is giving it.  They printed a special section of just the Mueller Report.  The Times is in overdrive figuring every conceivable way to crank out a plethora of stories about it.  One of its editions was essentially cover-to-cover on the subject and no edition hasn't included another story that more less screams “please pay attention to this.”

Certainly the Mueller Report/Barr Summary issuance deserves some coverage.  I think Democracy Now performed a service having Glenn Greenwald and David Cay Johnston debate the import of the whole thing twice now.  It was elucidating (especially in terms of where they agreed) while drawing out relevant facts (vs. non-facts) and generated a certain level of appreciation for nuance missing in most other coverage.  (See: As Mueller Finds No Collusion, Did Press Overhype Russiagate? Glenn Greenwald vs. David Cay Johnston, March 25, 2019, and The Mueller Report: Glenn Greenwald vs. David Cay Johnston on Trump-Russia Ties, Obstruction & More, April 19, 2019.)

Notwithstanding, because the Mueller/Barr products are so suited to keeping debate and discussion of Russiagate on the front burner of the mainsteam corporate media 24/7 news cycle, I think that Greenwald, Aaron Maté and Jimmy Dore have perhaps gone overboard about proclaiming that they were right to say that the Mueller report and investigation are a big `nothing burger,’ or its equivalent.  That’s even though they are still right, big picture, about the overblown distraction of it being a huge disservice to the American Public.

Think of all the ways that the Mueller/Barr titillations beg people to follow multiple trails of `evidence,’ like it’s a good detective story, which it isn't.*

[* Note of warning: As you read through the following bullet points you are likely to find it difficult to stay clear headed.  That is probably the inherent difficulty of trying to summarize things that themselves seem as if they’re intended to foment fuzziness.  One option to maintain a good overview is to skip reading these illustrative bullet points, or, alternatively, to initially skip them, but double back to read them afterward to verify the homework, and to see the specific examples of how things seem like they are calculated not to resolve.]
                                       
    •    Mueller walks coy hairsplitting lines in what he delivers, furnishing nothing decisively understandable by a public whose biases have been fueled to go in different directions.

    •    Mueller is delivering what he does while saying that any indictment of Trump by him is out of the question because he is choosing to follow a policy rule and interpretation of law that sitting presidents should not be indictable.  This assists Mueller in leaving things vague.  (Little is made of the concurrent fact that, if there was some sort of criminal Russiagate conspiracy, vast or otherwise, no other Americans who are, in fact, all susceptible to indictment were indicted- The only  indictments of this nature are of a few “shadowy” currently nondescript Russians safely out of the country and removed from any fact-uncovering interrogation or double checks on accuracy.)

    •    Mueller, however, notes (hint, hint?) that indictments may be possible after a president leaves office.

    •    The report's stated possible reason for the lack of an indictment (of what is thereby implied to be possibly illegal behavior) is complicated further when seized upon by Barr (and Rosenstein?) to assert the probably incorrect, frail and emotionally unsatisfying theory that any attempted cover-up, any “obstruction of justice” can't be a with “crime” if there is no underlying crime.

    •    Mueller in his report, however, says that he (and Rosenstein?) were unable to reach the “judgment” that president didn’t “commit” the “crime” of “obstruction of justice.”  Mueller in his report further cites multiple instances where he says Trump impeded and/or sought to limit his investigation. 

    •    Then Mueller specifically leaves it up to Congress to address whether there was an “obstruction of justice,” which, because impeachment is indeed in Congress’s purview, is not something to complain about from a technical standpoint.  But the standard for what conduct constitutes impeachable offenses “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” under the Constitution, is ultimately politically defined, and doesn’t necessarily track conventional criminal law.  Isn’t this a great thing to foster more division?

    •    What Mueller has laced into his report has allowed, for instance, Thom Hartmann (April 18), arguing that the report is damning for Trump, to say (paraphrasing Mueller, after reading selected quotes) that Mueller “repeatedly” says in the report says he couldn’t reach a conclusion about whether there was criminal conduct or collusion because his investigators were lied to, because information was withheld from the investigators, because information was communicated by Trump people over apps that left no traces, information that’s out of reach and can’t be subpoenaed, plus Hartman can assert that because there were prior threats to do so, the investigation was shut down before it was complete and that he didn’t have enough time (just two years).  Mueller asserts it was because of potential delay that he didn’t issue a subpoena to obtain the President's own testimony.

    •    The report also suggests other possible reasons the investigation perhaps falls short of finding out more that could be of potential relevance: That some witnesses invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination declined to testify, other witnesses testified falsely or incompletely, “numerous witnesses and subjects lived abroad” (Russians?), some evidence was privileged, and some communications were deleted or otherwise unavailable.   

    •    There is the parsed issue of whether there is “collusion” verses whether there is a “crime.”  “Collusion” sounds like a really bad thing, although in this context it is so vague as to have no meaning, not withstanding the fact that Trump likes the fact that it rhymes with “delusion.”  Mueller’s report says that he did not investigate whether individuals were colluding (did not investigate anything “under the rubric of `collusion’”), because “collusion,” doesn’t exist as any sort of defined legal theory.   But then, in his report, Mueller tells a public that has been primed to hate and blame Russians by more than two years of incendiary rhetoric that individuals from the Trump campaign had cooperative chats with Russians about Trump presidential campaign goals.  Handled that way, it still serves, rather dependably, to ignite an emotional response.

    •    That’s where we get to a key point that is not being made clear in the swirl of discussions respecting the Mueller/Barr release of information dance.  It also brings us to the core issue of whether there is anything that signifies anything amidst all the sound and fury.  When constrained to deal with indictable offenses, Mueller could only look for “conspiracy” to commit some sort of actual crime.  The fact that there have been vigorous efforts to make the Russians hateful or to imagine them as having extraordinary powers and influence (much of the stoking of the hate and imagination involves fictional stories we now know didn’t happen) doesn’t mean that conversations between political campaigns and foreign governments who have a willingness to be helpful about politics and election goals are “crimes.”  You can excitedly jump into calling it “treason,” another emotion laden word for which actual definitions are unclear, but it also probably can’t ever be put even into the elusive category of “impeachable offense” under the Constitution, because such communications with foreign governments are commonplace. Noam Chomsky’s observations about Israeli influence of our elections are therefore important.  Similarly important is Glenn Greenwald pointing out how the Democratic National Committee workers on Hillary Clinton’s campaign collaborated, coordinated and worked with the Ukrainian government, to dig up dirt on Donald Trump’s finances and Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

This is not to say that Nixon’s negotiations as a presidential candidate (running against Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968) asking the South Vietnamese to prolong the war (a wartime "ally," not "enemy") wasn’t perhaps a treasonable offense. Similarly, the negotiations presidential candidate Ronald Reagan campaign is alleged to have had with the Iranians to prevent the Iranian’s release of U.S. hostages when Reagan was running against President Carter is easy to view as treason.  (Russia is not currently a declared enemy and we have no war with them at the moment.)

Two final points with respect to the core of the conspiracy theory investigated by Mueller: No matter the efforts to make the Russians hateful or to imagine them as having extraordinary powers, does that make it reasonable to believe either that the Russians had any truly appreciable effect on the U.S. elections, or that Trump is somehow an “asset” of the Kremlin.  Unfortunately, all the unresolved sound and fury, general confusion, and obfuscation is giving an emotionally riled population the cover to continue to hold onto such beliefs, whether or not they are reasonable.  Plus, whether its believable or not, unchallenged by Barr, the Mueller Report is putting out information that Russia’s intelligence Agency engaged in various forms of “hacking” the election.  This is not to say that this asserted hacking necessarily had any true bottom-line important effect.  Furthermore, there is good reason to exercise skepticism about many of these stories about hacking that our deep state intelligence community is producing.  (We are also told that Russia is a tremendous threat to us militarily: CBS News just offered a what was essentially a slickly crafted commercial for selling more Lockheed Martin stealth fighter jets to NATO based on that threat.  Nowhere did CBS offer the context that just the increase in the U.S. military budget in the two years of the Trump presidency is equal to the entire Russian military budget.  Meanwhile, in recent years Putin has been reducing Russian military spending to spend more on Russia's social benefit programs.)  

    •    Then there is the indictment by of Mueller of Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer.  The indictment by Mueller flows from its characterization as a campaign law violation, and Cohen agreed to characterize it as such in his plea agreement. The indictment is based on how "hush money" flowed from Trump to an adult movie star and to a Playboy Playmate to avoid tarnishing Trump’s reputation.  The theory that made the particular way the money flowed in these attempts to protect Trump’s reputation a campaign violation is that the payments flowed during an ongoing campaign.  It’s salacious, juicy and unsavory.  Nonetheless, our campaign laws are notoriously weak as well as complicated.  Would the Supreme Court (Trump and private private money campaign spending friendly) ultimately uphold as illegal this kind of strict restraint on personal image control efforts via such laws whenever anyone runs for office?   It doesn’t sound like a “high crime or misdemeanor.” And it has nothing to do with Russia (except to indicate that Mueller couldn’t find that anyone committed such a technical violation of these complex campaign laws with respect to Russia).

    •    Then there are the twelve foreboding criminal referrals that are sealed and mysteriously secret because they are outstanding.  Consider: All those people around Trump being instigated for activities possibly transgressing various criminal laws!  On must wonder if people around Trump breaking laws were hard to find.  All those people who could have been leaned on to disclose “Russiagate” information, but it seems that none of them did disclose anything, and all of the referrals are for matters without Russiagate substance or it would have been Mueller’s job to follow up on them rather than refer the matters out to others.

    •    There is the suspenseful multi-stage release of the Mueller investigation’s findings:

        ••    First, the years of dribbled out, titrated leaks with all sorts of suggestions about things untrue as well as true, that got intemperately interpreted by the likes of MSNC’s Rachel Maddow as she ignored other national issues.  Dribbling leaks, especially as it combined with spin, is a well appreciated media strategy.

        ••    There were the presaging hints about when the report would come out and what it would say.

        ••    The initial surfacing of the report through William Barr’s summary, Barr having arrived in his seat for the chore having clearly and rather publicly self-labeled himself as blindly partisan so as to ensure doubt about anything he says or interprets, which doubt he seals by stating things about “exoneration” that are clearly contradicted by the actual report when released.  That way the contradiction of “exoneration” with “no exoneration” became a big superseding headline.  Previously Trump’s firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions while bringing in Matthew Whitaker as an obvious loyalist served to create the same sort of headline grabbing suspicions so that, writing in November 2018, I suggested that if Trump was smart enough it could be his ploy to keep the Russiagate preoccupations alive: The campaigning in the midterm national elections had just emphatically demonstrated Russiagate to be a non-issue in the campaign and what won seats for Democrats had been other issues.  (See: Is Trump Smart Enough To Try A Certain Russiagate Ploy?: Why Is Trump Firing Jeff Sessions Really?)  The continuing failure to focus on other issues is probably doing more harm to the Democrats and others opposed to Trump than the other thing that has been suggested, which is that the Trump will gain strength as a perceived victim of Mueller investigation “witch hunt.” 

        ••    For the smaller subset of those of us who insist on having long memories and reading the alternate press to connect the dots, Barr comes on the scene with the pedigree of being previously labeled (by conservative New Times columnist William Safire no less) as “Coverup-General” for his work as U.S. Attorney General stymying the Iran Contra investigations and prosecution.  But, on the other hand, Mueller has also been accused of involvement in official coverups, including matters with Iran Contra connections. . .  So maybe that means Barr and Mueller can work well together.

        ••    William Barr continued his tactic of conspicuously heavy-handed and therefore dismissible spin by holding a press conference about the release of the Mueller Report while holding back the report itself for two hours.  Again, this makes the suspiciousness of it a cynosure for the delectation of spin coming from the "other side."

        ••    Mueller cooperates with his friend Barr’s contributions to this suspiciousness by writing a letter complaining that Barr’s summary is misleading and has created “public confusion” undermining the purpose of the investigation.

        ••    The adversarial arguing between Mueller and Barr about these characterizations has the effect of presenting a binary set of choices where erroneous assumptions could easily be provoked that anything Mueller and Barr don’t disagree about respecting what the report’s assertions are true.  That Russia is bad?  Not necessarily: but isn’t that kind of simplemindedness always the trap of getting shunted into binary choices?

        ••    The report then comes out redacted, redacted in two redacted versions no less, one of the public and another version for Congress.  The redactions, inherently mysterious, are also instantly suspicious when they are supposed to have come from William Barr’s office alone (not true though).  And, a great bit of PR fun: Extra attention gets called to the redactions because they are theatrically color coded!               
                   
        ••    Next we are having the dramatic fight for the unredacted report.  The drama of that fight will make the report seem more important (and seemingly credible) still.

        ••    Plus we are going to be fighting about whether Barr should resign as Attorney General or be disbarred as a lawyer because he mischaracterized (“lied about”) Mueller’s chercteriziations in the report.

        ••    Similarly, with the continuing unfolding of it all, we are going to have all sorts of ensuing debates about whether “Russiagate,” rather than other things, should be grounds for pursuing investigation and charges to impeach Trump, and that will include secondary debates about which Democrats are being aggressive enough and what are the best tactics.

    •    Added in is the whole mishegoss of Trump’s lying that generates the theory: If Trump didn’t do anything illegal, why did he lie about it?  Why?: Because generally whenever Trump opens his mouth he lies.  He is always interested in saying what he thinks will make him sound good to his listener. In the end, Trump’s lies say more about what Trump thinks about the perceptions of his listeners and what he thinks would sound good to them on a particular day than anything else.  Essentially that same back and forth can be thrown in as a question and answer to explain Trump’s habitual bullying and throwing his weight around, including wanting to quash investigations.

It's clear why people would want to cut through and dispense with all this distracting nonsense, and clear why they would want to put matters to bed by proclaiming that the Mueller investigation shows that there has never been any "there" "there" when it comes to the Russiagate investigation. Understanding that the distractions have been founded on what is essentially a hoax would provide clarity and allow us to move on.  Somewhat unfortunately, in simplifying things toward this end, those wanting to make the point that the Mueller Report found no Trump criminal conspiracy with the Russians are often unnecessarily throwing in compliments, not necessarily deserved, for the thoroughness, accuracy and reliability of Mueller's investigation.

I can concur in the opinion that "Russiagate" has been fielded as a distraction by those who are largely insincere (and if there were anything significant to find it would have been out by now), but Mueller, with all the finely tuned vagaries of his report, is not cooperating in making this go away.  There those proclaiming the opposite, that the news media's two-year gyer of leaks and obsessed over suspicions has been "vindicated"  by the Mueller Report.  Nor is Barr helping to end things with the way his antics help so many to be sure that there is, in fact, something to hide, while at the same time such antics encourage Trump stalwarts to think Trump's been "exonerated" and persecuted.
                       
The Mueller/Barr investigation report dance is doing an excellent job of dividing up the public and keeping it divided.  Now we not only have Trump Republicans and anti-Trump people, the anti-Trump people are now divided into the Russiagate preoccupationalists, and those who would get on to the real problems of which Trump is largely just a symptom.  Yes, that includes myriad concerns about how and why democracy is tanking in the U.S.

Here is what is really more important-  In terms of what generally ought to be recognized as big picture propaganda, the Mueller/Barr Report distractions are being effectively used to kill several birds with one stone (Roger that?)- Get people angry at Julian Assange and retroactively justify going after him for the publishing the Chelsea Manning leaks about U.S. war crimes, which is what the intelligence community has long been after Assange for (and it's clearly resorting to every available tool it has available, plus notice now how new moves against Assange and Manning have been timed)- Make Russians our enemy again- And every time they say that Russia “hacked our democracy” they imply that we have a properly functioning democracy, one that wasn't already profoundly hacked.  It implies, as Noam Chomsky says, that money doesn't fairly predictably control our politics.  It implies that a foreign country like Israel (are they “hostile” if they don't share our national interests?) isn't immensely involved in “interfering” with our elections.  It implies that the U.S. isn't routinely involved with election interference and regime change around he world.  Should Ecuador (whose previous government gave Julian Assange asylum) be on that long list as part of this story?  Venezuela (maybe Cuba too now) is openly high on our list to be next- all of which regime change activity on our part gets justified by saying the "Russians" are terrible.

Another effect of what’s achieved is that the intelligence community is being unskeptically embraced by liberals and people with a new set of assumptions that those in the intelligence community are reliable heroes to save us.  This is a point that journalist William Arkin recently made with the issuance of his “Perpetual War” letter, a wide ranging protest of the conduct of the mainstream corporate press.  He pointed out that under Trump the intelligence community has become “more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism.”  He’s gone on to say:

there are a lot of liberals in America who believe that the CIA and the FBI is going to somehow save the country from Donald Trump. Well, I’m sorry, I’m not a particular fan of either the CIA or the FBI. And the FBI, in particular, has a deplorable record in American society, from Martin Luther King and the peace movements of the 1960s all the way up through Wen Ho Lee and others who have been persecuted by the FBI. And there’s no real evidence that the FBI is either—is that competent of an institution, to begin with, in terms of even pursuing the prosecutions that it’s pursuing. But yet we lionize them. We hold them up on a pedestal, that somehow they are the truth tellers, that they’re the ones who are getting to the bottom of things, when there’s just no evidence that that’s the case.

The mainstream corporate media mantra talking point is that Mueller (albeit a Republican) is a “straight arrow.”  Mr. Mueller, aside from his friendship with William Barr, is actually a strange dude, or at the very least there are strange things to consider about him.  When Mueller was brought in to head the FBI (his was one of the multiple oddly timed 9/11 appointments, he started at the FBI September 4, 2001) he dismantled- shifted/- at least half of the investigative resources and focus of the bureau away from white collar crime (to “terrorism”).  Mueller’s family (his great uncle Richard Bissell) and his wife Ann Cabell Standish's family (her grandfather Charles Cabell) both hail back to top people Kennedy purged from the CIA before he was assassinated.  And there is more if you want to check out how Mueller’s record is described by those not part of the mainstream corporate media.

I provide this analysis recognizing that all of the corporate media has been essentially lockstep in uncritically and participatorily reporting the Mueller Report/Barr summary concoctions as if engaged in some huge performance art piece.  My hope is that those in the alternative press universe will have the perspective to keep their bearings and do something better. 

Fossil Fuel Greenhouse Gas Pollution Blamed For Trump’s Election: New Study Teaming Up Health Scientists And Election Data Scientists Reaches Startling Conclusion

A scientific analysis that clouded thinking, i.e. CO2 clouds, led to the election of Donald J. Trump

A scientific analysis that clouded think, i.e. CO2 clouds, led to the election of Donald J. Trump.
Two heads are better than one, and two teams of scientist bringing together different areas of expertise that might never have been thought of as related can uncover and explain things that heretofore have gone entirely unnoticed. . . .

. . . That’s why we are now getting crucial new insights into some very important matters from a new study produced by health scientists studying the effects of carbon dioxide, CO2, the greenhouse house gas being pumped into the atmosphere as we burn fossil fuels, who teamed up with election data scientists who can explain exactly what accounts for often unpredictable swings of the American electorate.  It’s been more than two years, almost two and half, since Donald J. Trump was, to the great surprise of many, declared the elected president of the United States.  Now, reviewing carefully collected facts and statistics and applying a kind of analysis that nobody previously was perspicacious enough to apply, it turns out that Trump’s election can be handily explained– It's not a reason anyone thought of before.

That nobody thought of it before is probably due to the way that scientists too often operate in their own independent thought silos not realizing how their work interrelates with work that others are doing in the world.  Thankfully, we got some synergy leading to something better after two scientists from disparate specialties encountered each other in one of Harvard's faculty cafeterias and afterwards decided to bring their teams together to fashion a joint study uniting their respective areas of expertise.

For some time now scientists have known, including the work of a Harvard study confirming the findings of a little-publicized 2012 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, that increasing levels of CO2, although colorless and odorless, can have deliver adverse health effects.  That includes “a direct and negative impact on human cognition and decision-making.”  (See- Exclusive: Elevated CO2 Levels Directly Affect Human Cognition, New Harvard Study Shows, Joe Romm, October 26, 2015.)  The effects are more pronounced in indoor environments where trapped CO2 can accumulate and rise to even higher levels, the more sealed an insulated the room is to conserve energy, the more readily the CO2 can accumulate.  That can be especially problematic in situations where rooms are well populated by the carbon dioxide-expelling breath of many human beings.

At concentrations of 1,000 ppm, human cognitive ability declines by around 21 percent.  (See: The Uninhabitable Earth- Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think, by David Wallace-Wells, July 9, 2017.)  The problem is not just the better insulation of buildings that prevents air exchange; it is that with CO2 rising throughout the earth’s atmosphere, now over 400 parts per million, the baseline from which such build up starts is increasing and the outdoor atmosphere has a less restorative effect when mixed back in where indoor levels are high.

What can this look like indoors?  In examples the 2012 LBNL-SUNY article gives:

In surveys of elementary school classrooms in California and Texas, average CO2 concentrations were above 1,000 ppm, a substantial proportion exceeded 2,000 ppm, and in 21% of Texas classrooms peak CO2 concentration exceeded 3,000 ppm.

The Harvard health scientists noted that when cognition and decision-making are impaired by high CO2 levels, thinking becomes more primal and what has, in politics, been termed the “lizard brain,” that operates out of the brain’s more primitive limbic system and its amygdala, asserts itself.  The effects on politics and political outcomes of the “lizard brain” have already been widely discussed and analyzed by those concerned with political dynamics, prediction and calculations.

Trump rise psychology? - The "lizard Brain"

Predicted voting behaviors= matrix

What the teamed up scientists were able to do was create a matrix of predictive behaviors for cohorts of voters across all spectrums.  This was coupled with replicative testing involving focus sessions about how these cohorts would vote.  Overlaid was testing of the predictive shifts based on the brain and cognitive effects of the current amounts of extra CO2 pollution that they were able to research and determine that different cohorts of voters were experiencing and how with impaired cognition they would let their lizard brain impulses surface and ultimately control their choice. . .

The result was a range of predicted outcomes from the assessed influence that CO2 pollution was already having through cognitive impairment on U.S. voting behavior in 2016.  The scientists said that it was impossible to tell exactly where within this determined range the effect might actually have been on the election, but that no matter where it fell, it was clear that the effective decision making impairment was enough to account for swinging enough voters to get Trump “elected” in each and every set of determined probabilities.

As an example of how the effects were taken into account, information about how much time different groups of voters generally spend inside also had to be considered.  California voted very blue in the national election and that was accounted for partly by the amount of time Californians spend outdoors, often at the patios of outdoor restaurants where patrons are kept warm with outdoor gas burning space heaters.

While the results of the study only reached conclusions about the direct cognitive impairment effects of CO2, the paper also noted for future analysis a number of other ways the researchers have already begun to study that increased CO2 pollution in the atmosphere could have affects on the election as well.  As OSHA, the United States Occupational Health Administration, notes, high CO2 levels can also leave human beings lethargic.  The researchers feel that this probably affected voter turnout.

The researchers further pointed out that high CO2 levels also affect human cognition (and generate listlessness) indirectly via a reduction in the nutrients in the food human beings are eating.  See: Rising CO2 Is Reducing The Nutritional Value Of Our Food, by Fiona McMillan, May 27, 2018 and How More Carbon Dioxide Can Make Food Less Nutritious, by Brad Plumer, May 23, 2018.

With CO2 levels still rising in the planet's atmosphere, the scientists predict that in future elections will reflect even more exaggerated swings in the voting electorate of this nature.

The scientists said that they had hurried to get the results of their study out in time for the unfolding of the next national election cycle.  They said that they regretted not having been able to do their research and release information even sooner.  They said they would have been able to produce results sooner, but that they had a hard time being taken seriously when they proposed their study for funding.  This was because so many of their potential funders believed that other reasons provided a more probable explanation for Trump’s election.

The researchers admitted that other factors were highly influential in turning the election Trump’s way.  They said that included various forms of voter suppression, unreliable voting machines and votes that likely went uncounted. However, they said what really derailed their ability to get to bottom of what turned the election was something else. . 

The researchers said that, at one point, funding they had lined up for their study was diverted when their funder decided that a better use of the funds would be to send it as an unsolicited bonus to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to encourage Ms. Maddow to do more of her Russiagate investigation reporting.  The researchers pointed out that the unsolicited bonus must have been the very teeniest drop in the bucket given Ms. Maddow’s astronomical multi-million annual salary.
                                   
The irony is that the researchers, who are now at work on documentation respecting a new analysis, say that the cognition-impairing effects of CO2 pollution, which are indiscriminate, almost certainly account for the nation’s long distraction by the Russiagate probe championed by Maddow.

First publication of the researchers study and documentation is to be put up on Facebook on April 1st.

Is Trump Smart Enough To Try A Certain Russiagate Ploy?: Why Is Trump Firing Jeff Sessions Really?

Was Russiagate fizzling out as a distraction?  Oops. . .

This will be short and sweet, almost just the tweet that it can perhaps be whittled down to. . .

I am hesitant to ask questions about whether Trump is smart enough to do certain things.  It’s true that Mr. Trump hardly ever shows even the teeniest amount of erudition in his sentence construction and rarely searches for any new or more appropriate adjectives varying from the sideshow barker ones he uses repetitively.  His disregard for facts and disregard for hewing to any consistency makes it seem like he can’t keep track of facts or what he has said before. . .

. . .  Nevertheless, there are different kinds of intelligence.  Trump’s should never be underestimated.  He has a certain innate sort of trickster’s intelligence, an instinct and talent for distraction and deflection.  His trampling of facts as irrelevancies communicates his power plus how secure he feels (and how secure those who would side with him should feel) about his hold on power.  Similarly, the pronounced lack of effort he displays to be articulate declares to whom he is speaking, plus to whom he is not, and to whom he is not to be considered beholden.

So I am willing to give Trump a decent amount of credit when I ask the question whether he is smart enough to intentionally be pulling off a Russiagate ploy with his firing of his Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, who as the worst kind of racist, has served Trump quite faithfully in almost all respects since Trump appointed him at the commencement of his presidential term.  Trump made explicit that he was firing Sessions because Sessions had recused himself on the Mueller investigation.

It is natural and perhaps accurate to suppose two things about the timing of Trump’s firing of Sessions: first, that Trump fired Sessions only after the midterm elections in order that the firing not influence the elections, and second, that, looking at a shifted House of Representatives, with its investigative powers, now ruled a Democratic majority, Trump wants to fling extra hurdles into any possible investigations of his affairs (including things other than Russiagate, like Emoluments Clause violations and previous money laundering in connection with real estate transactions).  That's a tactic that can, no doubt, be assisted if Matthew Whitaker, Trump’s pick to replace Sessions, underfunds Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation.  That’s the Mueller investigation typically referred to as the “Russiagate investigation.”

A third thing that perhaps nobody seems to be supposing, and that Trump is perhaps getting away with, is that Trump, always the masterful Distractor-in-Chief, is pulling off a beautifully executed Russiagate ploy. . .

To wit: As the midterm elections drew to a close Aaron Maté writing in The Nation (retweeted by Glenn Greenwald) pointed out that “Russiagate” was MIA (Missing In Action) as a campaign issue, something confirmed by a Gallup Poll, and also mentioned during the Democracy Now!/The Intercept’s Election Night coverage by Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill.  Scahill said, “You know another thing that I think is really fascinating? It’s whatever happened to that whole Russia story?”

With no Democrats running for election picking up on or mentioning Russiagate as having any valid relationship to their chances of getting elected, the issue seemed to be dying out, losing its last bits of steam.  Not only that, but comedian media watchdog Jimmy Dore was predicting that whole Russiagate investigation was about to turn out to be a big “nothing burger,” pointing to a Politco article just days before the election saying that the investigation is probably doomed to disappoint as “government investigation experts are waving a giant yellow caution flag now to warn” that the investigation, aside from ultimately likely making little information public, is probably going to disappoint those expecting any “presidency-wrecking” accounts of “Kremlin meddling.”

As Aaron Maté (and others) have pointed out, the Russiagate scandal has served as a distraction for nearly two years, essentially the entire Trump presidency, sidelining people like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow (one of Maté’s favorite targets), from talking about truly critical domestic issues important to the public (like the tax cuts for the rich), from postmorteming the real reasons for the Democratic party’s 2016 loss, and letting MSNBC go more than a year without mentioning the war in Yemen despite the U.S. government's playing a leading role in the protracted war (and the colossal inflicted cholera epidemic), supplying the arms and equipment, refueling the bombers mid-air, and targeting the sites.

That redirection away from other issues gave Trump and cohorts a much freer hand in pursuing their fairly destructive agenda for this country.

Trump’s firing of Jeff Sessions resurrects the Russiagate issue.  Will it give Trump yet another two years of free rein to not be held accountable for other things?  The New York Times has, for two-years, been assisting in this blame-and-fear-the-Russians, Trump-related distraction.  That has set the Times up, along side of Trump and Rachel Maddow, as another major distraction machine.   The Times immediately jumped on the Sessions firing with a gigantic headline—  that was the top-of-the-page headline that screamed on the day following the first announcement of the election results, the day when the `sober' respective analysis traditionally begins. 

Much can be made of how Trump firing Sessions echos Watergate and Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre firings, and certainly the Russiagate to Watergate analogies have been unproductively pushed before, but now is a different time. . .  Back then the Republicans themselves were willing to help push Nixon out; what we know about Watergate was worse; and with Reagan and the Iran Contra scandals we have long since pushed the envelope of what abuses of power we tolerate from the chief executives of the United States. . .  Trump can expect there will be no serious negative repercussions for himself as a result of firing Sessions.

It’s true that just because an issue doesn’t get covered in an election, doesn’t mean that it is not important.  During the midterms there was also very little coverage of debate about climate change, but the difference with respect to that issue this time is that, according to polls, voters actually did care about that undiscussed issue, probably often factoring it into their votes even, this election year, as in others (2016), climate change wasn’t actually covered by the media as an election issue. However important the ultimate facts ever prove Russiagate to be, climate change is just one example of a fundamental, existential issue that's more important and is being ignored in the circus of distractions.

As noted, Trump can expect there will be no serious negative repercussions for himself as a result of firing Sessions, but will it generate another year or two of Russiagate distraction that will give him a freehand to continue to do his worst? . .  It may, indeed.

Is Trump smart enough to figure that out?  Probably.

(So maybe this is a tad longer than just a tweet.)

Feeling Constrained By Your Digital `Liberation’? Speaking Personally, I Am

Here is a personal dispatch from New York City– Weren’t computers and all the delights of digital supposed to liberate and set us free?  I know that was once propounded as the concept, but computers are great. . .  Until they are not.               

Not very long ago I had yet more conversations with Verizon about our Verizon land line, which has been out of service since mid-May.  Verizon gave us a revised estimated restoration of service date extending another six weeks into the future.  That makes it more than an entire half year now in all, with us having to suspect that, as before, the date could be pushed back even further before everything concludes.

Verizon offered to give us a device that would use a cellular signal to supply service to the line.  In that case, they would start charging us again for the full price of a land line, notwithstanding the lower voice quality we would get, and that, on our own, we could install the equivalent connection via cell signal for a fraction of that price. We declined Verizon’s seemingly kind offer.

It is almost as if Verizon is trying to convince us that we don’t want to have a land line. . For one thing land lines are now so much more expensive than digital signal options.

Once upon a time, (and it was up until very recently) it was the land lines that never went out, that worked faithfully and dependably when electricity went out, whenever cell phones didn't, when there were internet or cable outages.  Land line problems, which pretty much never occurred, were always resolved within mere hours if they did occur, as if people's lives depended on it, as they often did. . . Now, it’s as if Verizon wants to convince us that land lines are the least dependable and desirable options.

I don’t know if you have noticed, but if you want to call Verizon about repairing your land line its very hard to find the number to do so: It’s like they hide the number. We also now get a separate bill for the land line from your cell phone.  If you call the easy-to-find number to call about cell phones, they will tell you have the wrong number to call about land lines.  However, on the other hand, if you call about your land line on the correct number using your cell phone (it’s about the only way to call if your land line isn’t working), a robot will ask if you are calling about fixing the cell number you are calling from.

About the only way it doesn’t feel that the phone company is pushing cell phones over land lines is that they haven’t devoted the resources– band-width etc.–  or used the technology (and it is available) to make the voice quality better.  Guess they just don’t want to give up that little bit of profit.

Just the other day, I was reading about good old-fashioned land lines in Tim Shorrock’s book “Spies for Hire,” so I was remembering that at page 199 Mr. Shorrock was saying that in the 1990's the NSA’s historical dominance in surveillance technology was beginning to fade and that it was having difficulty keeping up “with the millions of calls it was monitoring every day.”

He wrote:

And in the course of a few years, the world switched from using telephone lines and calls beamed by radar to using fiber-optic lines, cell phones, and wireless technology. The NSA's eavesdropping skills, in contrast, were in the old telephony infrastructure and electronic signals; the fiber-optic lines increasingly used around the world were almost impossible to monitor from above the ground.

"Wiretapping was physically relatively easy" prior to the 1990s, says Peter Swire, the Ohio State law professor. “If I touch my copper wires to your copper wire, I can listen in. That's the old-fashioned wire-tap.”  But that doesn't work with fiber optics. “If I touch my glass to your piece of glass, it doesn't do anything to conduct.” As fiber optics increasingly became the system of choice for communications, intelligence analysts began to say the NSA was “going deaf.” 

But as we all know now from the Snowden revelations, things pretty much flipped around after that: The NSA got the technology it needs to collect vast quantities of information and data electronically transmitted over the newer infrastructure and have that automatically transcribed, indexed and searchable.  They can even unleash artificial intelligence on it.  “Total Information Awareness,” it’s an intelligence agency catchphrase, it’s the name of a program and it’s even an acronym: “TIA.”  So these days it’s really become the reverse, the NSA, must by contrast to those nostalgic old days, feel relatively deaf with the old copper wire technologies.

When our Verizon land line went out, our intercom for people coming into the building to visit our apartment went out as well.  In all likelihood, that’s because our intercom used the phone line to for us to hear people at our front door and operate the front door lock to let them in.  That’s the way it's been for a number of years, since we went with a new state-of-the-art system in 1996.  When we moved into our building before that, there was a system with push button squawk boxes that had its own designated speaker lines and power source.  We also discovered during a renovation of our 1883 building, once the tallest in Brooklyn, that once upon a time they did it the real old-fashioned way: The walls were filled with courses of hollow tin tubes, one for each apartment in the building, that went all the way up to the top floors.

Our 1996 system was always supposed to work with or without a telephone company involved, but because the technology is now different (and Verizon is reportedly difficult and obstructionist, if not an outright saboteur) we are going to have to get a new system for the building.  The new systems these days all work through our cell phones.  Whoever comes to your front door to visit winds up, by pressing the front door bell, calling you through your cell phone.  Interesting.

Another way I am feeling constrained by technology right now is that I am having problems with Apple.  Yes, I guess that means what I am telling you is that I am having trouble with my cell phone too.  Actually, what I am having problems with is losing my “memos,” the notes, I store on my phone for information and reference. . . .

. . . To be fair, the problem also involves AOL.  (BTW: Let’s mention, for those of you who don’t know, the AOL email service recently merged with the Yahoo email service, so AOL and Yahoo are no longer competitors or alternatives to each other; they are just two different faces for identically operating services– When AOL changed its terms of service recently, Yahoo made exactly the same changes at exactly the same time, with exactly the same message to users asking us if we `consented’ to their new terms.)

What happened with my Apple cell phone is that an update for the operating system came through.  After my phone loaded it, my AOL email no longer worked properly; I was receiving emails, but I could not any longer send emails from AOL, my main email account.  When I tried I got a message about not being ablet to find the server.  (I know other AOL subscribers, so I know I was not the only one who this happened to.)  I intuited that the solution was to simply delete my AOL account from my phone and reinstall it.  (In fact that is what Apple Support told other users to do as well.)  I even did some preliminary research just to reconfirm that, as should have been the case, I would not lose anything this way: Advisory sites told me I wouldn’t lose anything because the information was all securely on a server that would put it right back on my phone.

I deleted and reinstalled my AOL account on my phone.  My AOL email worked perfectly; I received emails and I could send them again.  Then a few days later, I noted that all my memos were gone from my phone.  Why?: Because my memos were stored as AOL memos and my phone was apparently now pointing to a different server for memos than it had before.

What were these “memos” of mine that were missing?  Oh, just a few things I’d been collecting over the decades: Family anecdotes and reminiscences involving ancestors or histories that had been emailed to me; a list of about a hundred classic films I had compiled by genre for my daughters as suggested viewing as they grew up; things to remember like my eye glass prescription or for filling out medical forms, how many micrograms I am (or my mother is) taking for certain prescriptions; a list of all the mayors of NYC, and another of the president’s of the United States; the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States, Bill of Rights and other amendments; key facts about global warming/climate change I’d collected over time; a time line I’d put together with major events in the formation and geo-history of the earth and the evolution of different species, including mankind on earth; what everyone in my family wants if I am picking up dinner at Chipolte .  . . .  I could go on, but you get the idea: a collection of the things you want to collect and have on hand for easy reference.

In the very distant past, I would have kept a lot of these things in my pocket in a small notebook, perhaps a few inserted pages therein, or in my pocket calendars.  Remember pocket calendars?; Remember when everybody had one? . .

. . . At a later time, I was carrying these notes in my Palm Pilot, the last one of these I owned being a Palm V.  That’s what replaced my calendar too.  The Palm was nice because it not only kept all these notes available to me in my pocket, it also “synced” to make them available on my computers and, vice versa, moved what I wanted from my computer to put in my pocket in the Palm.  My computers were safely under my control.

There were nice things about those days: My Palm also played music and when I wanted it to be able to hold more information or music I could insert tiny memory cards that could be upgraded and were always getting cheaper, going from inexpensive to costing still less, at the same time they were becoming exponentially more capacious.  My iPhone now has tons of memory, but only because I was careful to pay extra for a lot of it upfront: I can now never upgrade.

When I started carrying a phone with me (and the Palm Pilots came in phone versions too in the fashion of what everyone was referring to back then as “convergence”), I never ran out of battery, because I carried two extra batteries in my pocket (they were cheap and small) to swap out whenever needed.  You can’t do that with an iPhone.

When I gave up my Palm Pilot to start using an iPhone as my new phone (and for my calendar and address book), I would have lost my collection of memos, except that, obviously, I was not the only one who didn’t want to lose data like that: There was an iPhone app that would efficiently transfer the notes with all these things I wanted to remember, and it would keep them where I could open and, by hitting the app’s little button, I could search through them.  It was a fine solution for a while. . .

There came a day when my iPhone 4s operating system needed to be `upgraded.’   I didn’t want to upgrade: I had been holding back from doing so and skipped quite a few iterations of 'upgrade'.  But Twitter and some other things on my iPhone that had been working fine, suddenly weren’t working any longer.  At the Apple Genius desk they told me I had to upgrade the operating system to make Twitter work again.  I ‘upgraded’ and doing so caused my handy memo app to stop working.  That’s when I “moved” my memos, this time to the iPhone `notes’ app (in the AOL category) by laboriously copying them there.  To do so, I had to restore my 4s iPhone to its previous state to temporarily get back the previously handy app that wouldn’t work with the upgrade.

In the end, upgrading my 4s iPhone to the new operating system (IOS) to use Twitter was not such a good idea in certain other ways.  It turns out that the new IOS had a buggy relationship with 4s iPhones.  It caused the phone to think the internal antenna was overheating and shut it down, thus turning off the phone’s wifi access to the internet, while it also wrecked the phone’s battery life.  (The same thing had happened to my wife's phone when upgraded.)  On the internet (particularly YouTube videos) I found lots of advice and videos telling me that there was strange fix to the problem: Heating the phone up to a high heat with a hair dryer and then freezing it to reset its calibrations.  At the Apple Genius Bar they told me this was very ill-advised; that it would break the phone and that I needed to buy a new one, advice to which I succumbed.  Nevertheless, trying the hair dryer fix on the device that was then no longer my phone, it did indeed, absolutely fix it (and it has stayed fixed), so the device is now a very nice music player.

Was Apple just trying to sell me, like other 4s owners, a new phone?
 
Apple Support hasn’t been able to fix my most recent lost memo problem yet.  They tell me they are still trying.  Let me explain that I haven’t exactly lost my memos completely.  My memos are still on my iPad, and because I did not upgrade my iPad to the new operating system like I did my phone they are not lost to me there.  But I can’t upgrade my iPad to the new operating system although my iPad persists in electronic notifications telling me that I should want to.  Apple Support tells me if I upgrade I will lose my memos from that device too.

There is a workaround: I could “move” all the memos still on my iPad from the AOL category (thus the AOL server) to the iCloud memo category (which get saved by Apple on the iCloud server).  Do you remember when Apple was working to convince you to store all your music on their iCloud server?  This is sort of the same thing, except that it means that Apple gets all your memos as well any of your music that you might have entrusted to their cloud.  It wasn’t exactly consoling to learn that, as I was considering this, the iCloud server went down for a while.  People I knew couldn't use their iCloud accounts to send emails. It’s interesting to speculate whether the system was overtaxed with people moving data onto their cloud for the same reason that I was considering doing so just at that moment.

I could also go to look at some of my older notes and memos in the desktop program that went with my old Palm that operates on my faithful old and steady XP operating system computer.  I could do that, but Microsoft has abandoned support for the XP operating system and doesn't want me using it any longer.   Browsers are not working well with it anymore.   The abandonment was a major reason I had to buy and migrate to a new computer.

I must confess that, while it was working on my phone, it was nice to have my memos and notes about things “in the cloud,” since I could make a note or put in an update on my iPad and it would show up on my iPhone or vice versa.  Maybe it’s less private, but having things in the cloud can feel reassuring and easy— until those things disappear.

It has been suggested that the ability to stream all sorts of excellent films from the cloud makes it seem “less important to purchase and own pricey Criterion Blu-rays or to leave the house to see a digital restoration at the American Cinematheque,” when you can conveniently rely on the cloud, but now some cinephiles are declaring that they will “clutch” their “Blu-Rays and DVDs tighter” since Filmstruck, the classic film streaming service from Criterion and Turner Classic movies, announced that it is shutting down after just two years of operation.  It was just announced this October, but the “lights go out” at the company on November 29th.

That shutdown may very well be attributable to the different decisions and views about profit engendered by AT&T’s monopolistic takeover of Time Warner.  There are fewer and fewer companies owning things and delivering such things as news and content. This shifts the thinking of those decision makers about what we may be delivered as consumers as that number dwindles steadily downward.

Would it be better and more secure to buy your streaming rights from Amazon, and if you buy a film from Amazon, do you really own it forever?  Might you then find yourself rooting for Amazon’s continued existence?

I know that I am complaining about some of the technology that we have, but sometimes it amazes me, and I complain about the technology that we don’t get—  Once upon a time, not that long ago it seems, I carried a small pocket radio with me at all times.  It’s the way I quickly knew that radio stations were down on 9/11, because I tuned in for news on it that morning as I was arriving at work.  Since that time, radio technology has been improved.  Something called HD radio, or “High Definition” radio has been invented and deployed.  It’s radio that provides an ultra-clear listening experience, without the static.  It even allows extra stations and programming to be broadcast with extra spectrum needing to be assigned to it.  You could be listening to it now and you could easily be carrying a tiny inexpensive HD radio in you pocket.  In fact, taking up no space, they can be built into MP3 music players.  That’s what Microsoft did in 2009 when it designed its new Zune music player. 

Palm Pilots and Microsoft's Internet capable 2009 HD radio and MP3 Music player, mysteriously withdrawn from the market- Try finding pocket HD radios now: It's hard!

Then Microsoft mysteriously withdrew its Zune players from the market, abandoning everything to Apple.  Mini-portable pocket HD radios have been designed and built since, proving that they need cost virtually nothing, but try finding one: They are inexplicably almost totally absent from the marketplace now.

I remember periodically going in and asking the salesmen at J&R (remember the J&R, the now vanished cornucopia electronics store?) why they didn’t have other combination music players/HD radios.  I remember the shrug of the salesmen as they responded that people were supposed to be listening to their music and radio stations over the internet now.  But sometimes you are not close to the internet or a cell phone signal that could connect you.  And there is a difference: When you listen to terrestrial broadcast radio no one can monitor you and collect your data.

Is it just that almost everyone automatically carries a phone now so they don’t think about what else could be available?  It would be a cinch for our slim little phones with built in cell antenna and built in wifi antennae to also have HD radio capacity that way the 2009 Zunes (which also accessed the internet) did.  It would be a cinch also for them to load apps that would (like Tivos or DVRs for radio) and record programs time shifting them for later listening.  Maybe that’s solving a problem that podcasting also readily solves, but it would give the user more control and there might not be the same kind of monitoring and data collection.

Getting back to my disappearing memos— People warn that what is in the digital realm can’t be expected to be forgotten, that your college antics in Facebook posts could follow you around for life.  All right, fair enough, but the potential evanescence of the digital can also be frightening.  HBO recently aired a new film version of “Fahrenheit 451,” Ray Bradbury’s very famous novel about a future where the government has banned books and burns them.  I found the remake quite inferior to François Truffaut’s 1966 poetic film with its brooding Bernard Herrmann score.  Nevertheless the film briefly introduced a brilliant notion that it hardly explained and didn’t elaborate upon at all: That the book-loving enemies of the government were subject to being punished by having their identities digitally `erased.’

That seems potentially terrifying.  And maybe it was more and more terrifying because the film didn't make clear what was being erased.  As more and more of our identities and the record of who we are is entrusted to a few big companies that may or may not keep what we give them, it seems there is a huge proportion of who we are documented to be and how we might remember about our selves, friends and families, that might disappear when those companies vanish or if we fail to migrate to their next idea for the digital playgrounds they want us to be playing in.

I am convinced that many families have stopped keeping scrap books, expecting Facebook and/or other web and social media platforms to make it all available for them in perpetuity.  Want an example of the way things can disappear?: An entire major social media connection service set up by Google to compete with Facebook, Google’s Google+, is going to be shut down.  (I don't whether that means that all my Google+ posts will vanish.  Yoko Ono's?)  Fairly widely used, Google+ is pretty closely modeled on Facebook; it's more or less the same thing.  It presently hasn’t gotten to nearly the same scale as Facebook, which is probably why the shutting down of such a similar site doesn’t cause us to image that Facebook, which didn’t exist in 2003, might one day not exist again.
    
The timing of the shutting down of Google+ as well as the reasons given for it are suspicious, something I’ll have to get into in a later article.  Facebook isn’t down, but just recently in a huge censorship binge (right in time for the midterm elections) Facebook expanding upon previous censorship endeavors is taking down hundreds of pages (apparently coordinating its censorship with Twitter in doing so).  Many trying to do good work (although it may have been considered dangerous or irksome to government officials or the corptocracy) have lost year's worth of work they expected to keep along with connections to online communities they had been building, all of which will have to be subject another later National Notice article.

Mainly, I just wanted to ask in this article: Are you feeling constrained by your digital “liberation”?  Because I am.

Interesting to Think That it All Began With BOOKS? Except That Amazon and World’s Wealthiest Man (As We Know Jeff Bezos Today) Didn’t Exactly Begin That Way. . .

Jeff Bezos speaking at a recent Air Force Association event illustrating New York Times op-ed, and a Citizens Defending Libraries post wondering about how Amazon all began with “books,” but did it really?

I am a co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries, formed in 2013 to oppose the sale and shrinkage of New York City public libraries for the benefit of real estate developers, to prevent the elimination of books and librarians, and the underfunding of the New York City libraries.  As such, I frequently contribute writing related to those subjects for posts put up on the Citizens Defending Libraries web pages.

When I write what I write for Citizens Defending Libraries I frequently have to decide whether what I am about to write should be posted as a National Notice article instead, because many of the national policy concerns I address writing in National Notice overlap with concerns we take up and raise at Citizens Defending Libraries; concerns like censorship, control and limitation of information as well as surveillance of the dissemination of ideas.  Similarly, Noticing New York, which I also write, addressing real estate and development in New York City and associated politics, may also have similarly shared or overlapping concerns.  That can include why libraries in New York that are so valued by the city’s public and cost so relatively little are being sold and turned into real estate deals, and whether the shift over the internet and digital books for information sometimes given as an excuse for such conduct is a legitimate one when the public still prefers physical books.

There was a particular post I wrote recently put up at Citizens Defending Libraries that I thought would make a very fine and important National Notice article.  It was a post that wondered at the phenomenal growth that has recently made Amazon the second U.S. company (following Apple) and made Jeff Bezos ($167 billion) the world's richest man. . .   It marveled at how the huge company that is now Amazon began with books, and how Amazon, early on, as one of its first exploits and eschewing profit, led a push for digital books while supplanting physical books.  The article went into issues of surveillance (which Amazon is in a primo position to do) and considered the links between Amazon, the internet and the military and surveillance industry, plus how the U.S. intelligence agencies have been involved in funding technology companies.  It considered what is apparently true: That, in many cases, such U.S. government agencies likely had a hand in picking the winner and losers among many of the theoretically “private” companies in the technology races.
   
That Citizens Defending Libraries post is: Interesting to think that it all began with BOOKS! Amazon, With Bezos Now The World’s Wealthiest Man At Its Helm, Tops $1 Trillion!

Because that post was so perfectly fitting for National Notice and dealt with such important subjects for National Notice readers to know about, I considered a quick republication of it here with perhaps only minor revision.  That was early September (the 10th).  Having waited, the present time actually turns out to be better for me to offer such a National Notice republication, including with it a supplemental introduction with new information.

Monday of this past week, the New York Times ran an op-ed by professor of history Margaret O’Mara, that provides some pertinent updates for my original “Interesting to think that it all began with BOOKS!” post.  Professor O’Mara similarly writes about how inextricably intertwined Silicon Valley is with “the military-industrial complex”: “The Pentagon has been part of the Silicon Valley story all along. . .  The military origins of modern tech gradually faded from view, but the business of war didn’t go away. ”  The title of Professor O’Mara’s op-ed in Monday’s October 29th print edition was “Tech's Military Tradition”; The Times title for its digital October 26th publication of it is currently: “Silicon Valley Can’t Escape the Business of War– Many in the tech industry don’t want to be part of the military-industrial complex. But defense work is already part of Silicon Valley’s DNA.”  (Buried in the Times url link for the article is “Amazon Bezos hg”-- Does "HQ" stand for headquarters?)

Professor Mara has a new book coming out soon: “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America,” which is about “the origins of Silicon Valley,” and based on her op-ed it sounds like it may cover much of the same subject matter covered by Yasha Levine in his book “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet” which I cited for my “Interesting to think that it all began with BOOKS!” post.

The points Professor O’Mara made that provide additional interesting background to supplement my account of the Amazon/Bezos “success” story are:

    •    A Jeff Bezos quote (from an October 15th Wired interview): “If big tech companies are going to turn their back on the U.S. Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble.”
    •    That Amazon will likely be the winner of a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract.
    •    That a site in Northern Virginia, down the road from the Pentagon, has emerged as a front-runner for Amazon’s second headquarters.
    •    That Jeff Bezos' “beloved grandfather” (and mentor) was Lawrence Preston Gise, one of the first employees of the Pentagon’s advanced research agency, DARPA.

When I wrote my original post, and was looking for explanations, I was aware of information that Jeff Bezos was exceptionally close to his maternal grandfather and of his grandfather’s position with  the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in Albuquerque and Los Alamos (birthplace of the bomb) who supervised the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories.  I was not aware of his grandfather’s significant DARPA (the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) connection.  (Sometimes it’s remarkable what Wikipedia, as a theoretically reliable source, will leave out.) DARPA, formerly known as ARPA, was responsible for originating the internet, launching the ARPANET in the late 1960s, the original incarnation of, and what became, what we now know as the internet.  According to Yasha Levine’s book (p.8):

In 1972, almost as soon as the ARPANET was rolled out on a national level, the network was used to help the CIA, the NSA, and the US Army spy on tens of thousands of antiwar and civil rights activists.  It was a big scandal at the time, and the ARPANet’s role in it was discussed at length on American television, including NBC Evening News.

So in one sense, yes, it is amazing to think that Amazon and who Jeff Bezos is today all began with books, but that it not exactly how it all began.

Wikipedia: No DARPA information here.

Who Jeff Bezos is, in terms of the family he came from, sets up interesting explorations; interesting not just because of his maternal grandfather, but also because of the father who raised him.  His mother, Jackie Gise, divorced his birth father (now reportedly a bike shop owner) the year after Bezos was born (Jackie had been married and given birth at very young age) and he was adopted by Gise’s new husband, Mike Bezos.  Gise married her second husband Mike Bezos when she was 17 and he was 18.*

(* There seems to be some conflicting information about relevant dates.)

Although Mike Bezos worked as a petroleum engineer for Exxon, what’s more interesting about him is his status as a sort of quasi-orphan by virtue of how he arrived in this country alone in 1962 at the age of 15, something that would very likely contribute to a somewhat unusual mind set.  He arrived from Cuba as part of what has been reported to be a CIA-run program: “Operation Pedro Pan” or “Operation Peter Pan.”  A description of the secretly operated CIA program in Counterpunch says the goal of the program was to “separate elite children from parents (a Cuban brain drain) [ultimately 14,000 Cuban children] and generate political instability,” and according to one of the CIA recruits “to wage psychological war — to destabilize the government.”  Evidence reportedly shows that this was done via the CIA working deceptively with a priest and the regional Catholic hierarchy to forge documents and spread lies to convince wealthy Cuban families that Castro’s government was going to take their children away.

A 2011 NPR retrospective on the program that the Counterpunch article cites only to criticize says that “the Pedro Pan kids have done well” and that they are “firmly opposed to any normalization of relations with the Castro regime, the regime that was responsible for breaking up their families and forcing them from their homeland.”

However, on to a more important influence in Jeff Bezos' life: Lawrence Preston Gise, the maternal grandfather with whom Jeff Bezos spent his childhood and youthful summers, and to whom Bezos attributes huge significance as a mentor.  Lawrence Preston Gise was seriously connected. 

An October 28, 2018 article posted by Benjamin David Steele, Plutocratic Mirage of Self-Made Billionaires (Marmalade), does an excellent job of putting together who Lawrence Preston Gise was with how that factored into who Jeff Bezos became and how that made Amazon.  He offers this telling paragraph to describe Gise (quoting from the book “The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos,” by Christian Davenport):

“Some of the top brass in the Pentagon were charged with single-handedly picking top talent for ARPA, renamed DARPA in 1972 — the “D” for “Defense” (Christian Davenport, The Space Barons), “the research and development arm of the Department of Defense that is credited with designing a communications network that could still function even if a nuclear attack demolished conventional lines of communication, ARPAnet, was the foundation of what would eventually become the Internet” (Expose the Deep State, Jeff Bezos). “Wilfred McNeil, the Pentagon’s comptroller, helped recruit top talent to help run the agency. One of his top choices was Lawrence Preston Gise, a stolid and principled former navy lieutenant commander” (Davenport).

Gise worked on space technology and missile defense systems at DARPA and, at the Atomic Energy Commission's Albuquerque operations, supervised 26,000 employees in the AEC's western region, including the Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore laboratories.

Like me, Mr. Steele also came across the recent Times op-ed by professor O’Mara and he quotes this part of it to impute familiarity on the part of Jeff Bezos with the kind of research with intended military applications that DARPA gets involved with:

The military origins of modern tech gradually faded from view, but the business of war didn’t go away. The Pentagon remained the only place with the resources and the patience to fund blue-sky research that the market wasn’t quite ready for yet. Mr. Bezos knows this history well. His beloved grandfather Lawrence Preston Gise was one of the first employees of the Pentagon’s advanced research agency, Darpa. In the 1980s and 1990s, money from Darpa helped spur breakthroughs in high-speed networking, voice recognition and internet search. Today, it is funding research in artificial intelligence and machine learning, subterranean exploration and deep-space satellites, high-performance molecules and better GPS.

Steele then argues convincingly to link Gise and his DARPA/military history with Bezos’ success with Amazon:

Gise was a creature of government, specifically of the military-industrial complex. He also oversaw government work done with private contractors. In various capacities, he was involved in numerous projects, some of them covert. For example, he was a key member in secret meetings about the development of the hydrogen bomb. This guy had immense knowledge and experience about both technology and the workings of government. He was far beyond the standard bureaucrat, as his technical skill was not only theoretical but applied, with his career having been focused on space technology and missile defense systems. When he helped raise his grandson, Jeff Bezos received the full attention in being tutored and moulded for a life of privilege and ambition.

Ergo, he says: Bezos “inherited the social connections, the access to private and public funding, and the open doors into government.”  The question is what else came with that inheritance, whether it was all, so to speak, just on the receiving end.

That said, starting here I reprise for National Notice readers my "Interesting to think that it all began with BOOKS!" essay.

And frankly, in light of the above, it is curiouser and curiouser that it all began with books.

Interesting to think that it all began with BOOKS! Amazon, With Bezos Now The World’s Wealthiest Man At Its Helm, Tops $1 Trillion! – Monday, September 10, 2018

Amazon growth charts, one of revenues and one of returns since Amazon went public.  Not the respective flat lines in each and consider what that means.

Interesting to think that it all began with BOOKS!

Amazon is now the second U.S. company (following Apple) to top $1 trillion in value.  That makes Jeff Bezos ($167 billion) world's richest man.

As Yasha Levine covered in his book “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet” Amazon is an internet company engaged in surveillance as a key part of its profit model and it works with the federal government and the federal government’s military and CIA.  As part of the sales blurb (on Amazon) for Mr. Levine’s book states:

Levine examines the private surveillance business that powers tech-industry giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, revealing how these companies spy on their users for profit, all while doing double duty as military and intelligence contractors. Levine shows that the military and Silicon Valley are effectively inseparable: a military-digital complex that permeates everything connected to the internet, even coopting and weaponizing the antigovernment privacy movement that sprang up in the wake of Edward Snowden.*

(* If, at this point, you desperately need something lighthearted to help deal with this watch this three-minute video about it.)

For more on what Citizens Defending Libraries has already covered on this see: Reading on the Internet vs. Reading a Book You Picked Up Browsing In Your Library: Yasha Levine’s “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet” and for even more that is relevant coming from Mr. Levine’s book; Self Proclaimed As Fighting Surveillance, Library Freedom Project Is Tied to Tor Service With Its Deep Ongoing Connections, Including Financing, To The U.S. Government.

Second biggest U.S. Company as of September 2018?  Amazon grew very fast to do that.

Amazon, which began in a converted garage of Bezos’ rented home, launched on the internet in July of 1995.  That’s just 23 years ago.

The story is that Bezos, not particularly a book lover for any reason, coming out of an unusually successful Wall Street hedge fund, D. E. Shaw & Co., was not so to speak “following his bliss” when he decided to start his internet sales company with books.  He was instead selecting books from amongst “a list of 20 products” he was considering theoretically as the result of what where essentially mathematical computations:

Bezos eventually decided that his venture would sell books over the Web, due to the large worldwide market for literature, the low price that could be offered for books, and the tremendous selection of titles that were available in print.

The Unites States, in 2013, according to a Bloomberg Industries analysis was contracting out “about 70 percent” of its “intelligence budget.”  That figure is probably, for the most part not calculated to take into consideration that most of the surveillance being done is by companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook, as talked about by Levine in his book.

What is clear, as written about by Mr. Levine in his book and by Tim Shorrock, author of “Spies for Hire- The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing,” is how intertwined the intelligence community is with private sector companies with an interdependence that has a lot of implications for who succeeds or fails in the private market place.  If we are talking about small start up companies trying to establish themselves, both these authors write about how the efforts of those companies may be aided and quietly, nay secretly, assisted by the government.  Both authors write about how “In-Q-Tel” was founded in 1999 (an interesting date in terms of ramping up electronic surveillance) as the CIA’s venture capitalist company operating in Silicon Valley “to invest in start-up that aligned with the agency’s intelligence needs.”  (Yasha Levine p. 174)  And “through its In-Q-Tel venture capital fund, the CIA invested in all sorts of companies that mined the Internet for open-source intelligence” that’s “information that it could grab from the public web: Videos, personal blogs, photos, and posts on platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram amd Google+.” (Yasha Levine p. 188 -189)

In-Q-Tel “works with the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology” to find companies with products with intelligence application and then “buys equity positions in these firms— many of which are managed by former intelligence officials.”  (Shorrock p.16) Along with technology incubation funding from the CIA and other agencies “high-tech companies would be offered a huge natural market—the Intelligence Community and the federal government, plus assistance in testing and perfecting their products for use by the private sector.”  (Shorrock p.144) The interrelationships between the Intelligence Community and the tech community are very widespread, Stephanie O’Sullivan, the CIA’s director for science and technology said in 2006: “There is no technology out there that is not relevant to our mission.”  (Shorrock p.145)

Citing In-Q-Tel as just one example of “private-partnerships” with the technology industry that serve as a “convenient cover for the perpetuation of corporate interests” Tim Shorrock in his book (p. 365) describes In-Q-Tel’s “partnerships” as “masking the fact that the CIA’s investments amounted to a hefty government subsidy that allowed companies to do things like hire lobbyiests to expand their market share.”  And the companies with those expanded market shares are likely to get a pass for when the private surveillance they engage in may flout  laws—   Citing the defense cavalierly offered by the the Chamber of Commerce for AT&T’s secret spying on U.S. citizens, Shorrock writes that “the ultimate result of the privatization of intelligence activities” is that the Chamber’s an amicus defense brief ventures to describe as a “friendly `partnership’” a “secret alliance between business and government that may be one of the most egregious examples of a corporation skirting U.S. privacy and foreign intelligence laws” (p. 366)

In-Q-Tel, designed with a focus on incubating start-ups, is one end, the small company end, of the spectrum of the government as a presence injecting itself into the picking of winners and losers in the market place.  And In-Q-Tel is only one of those government market influences out there; for example, there is also a cousin company of British Intelligence heritage, defense and intelligence research company, QinetiQ Group a privatizing ownership share of which was transferred to the Carlyle Group.  Shorrock writes of George Tenet, former head of the CIA (under whom In-Q-Tel was launched) being on the QinetiQ  board.  The U-less Qs in the names of both these companies are intended to merrily invoke the Q of the James Bond films who equipped 007 with all his disguised tech gadgets.  QinetiQ’s model and influence on the market is different from In-Q-Tel's, buying up other tech companies for Intelligence Community purposes after becoming a privatized part of the Carlyle Group.  (One thing they like is robots.)

The other end of the spectrum of how the government is a presence injecting itself into the picking of winners and losers in the market place is the big company end.  And obviously, Amazon is now a really big company.  (For instance, circa 2014 Amazon was reportedly providing the CIA with cloud computing services pursuant to a $600 million contract.)

When the companies that the United States relies on to do its intelligence work are really huge, when those companies have most of the available experts with security clearances working for them (at higher salaries than individuals working for the government), when those companies have most of the collected data and most of the systems that are up and running that the government has grown dependent on them for, plus when those companies have huge government derived income streams that they can recycle into lobbying for the big shares of secret government budgets that they are allowed to know and can talk about, but that the public isn't allowed to find out about, there is a question of who is running the show.  This question about contracting out is one that Tim Shorrock delves into and contemplates at length in his book mulling it over from many different perspectives.  Finally, while government officials may or may not lose the upper hand, government officials can nevertheless direct huge influence about who amongst these big companies will be the winners or losers in the market.

The implications of huge private corporations having so much power in the Intelligence Community are more pronounced given that, when individuals work for such private corporations, unlike the individuals who work directly for government, loyalties run in the direction of making profit.  By corporate law definition, that means profit first, not patriotism.  Furthermore, loyalties can be bought or sold.  And private corporations pursuing private profit are becoming increasingly multi-national in character and thus untethered from the patriotisms of any particular nations, including ours, that may hire them.  Hiring out to other private firms or interests (not nations) as they are allowed to do, they may be acting with no national patriotism at all.

Bezos started with books, but in time expanded Amazon’s offerings beyond books, including, initially, to some of the other products he was supposed to have been considering early on, music, by selling CDs and videos.  . . .  Nowadays if you want to see a video, a movie, particularly anything you might consider vintage or historic, say you want to see something with a political message, like “Seven Days In May” (about a military coup against the U.S. President in the Kennedy era) it’s likely you may find that your best chance, your path of least resistance to easily view the film easily will be to pay for it to stream through Amazon.  This is a far cry from the days when pretty much everyone’s  Friday night film viewing came from their local, often independently owned, video store.  In 1988, the year after the home video market surpassed box office revenues, with the number of stores leveling off, (the Blockbuster chain was simultaneously buying another chain to expand) there were 25,000 video stores nationally (about 45,000 other outlets renting tapes); in 1997 there were 23,036.

Video stores are vanishing practically to the point of non-existence, including in New York City. . .  Amazon, with probably lower overhead and fewer employees involved, will charge you about as much, maybe more, than your local video store once charged.  Did you once have a relationship with your local video store operator who knew your tastes, what to recommend intimately?  Think of what Amazon knows about you, learning more each time you rent a film like “Seven Days In May.”  Once Amazon just knew the books you read, but now as you might browse to look to possibly buy almost everything in your life through Amazon, Amazon now knows so much more.

In 1998, months after starting it's expansion into music, Amazon announced its expansion beyond books.  At the same time it bought a service that would keep track of your friends and their birthdays, so, for example, Amazon could suggest when it was time to order them presents.

In November 2007 Amazon introduced its, three year in development, Kindle (continually connecting you to the Internet) to sell ebooks, staring with 90,000 books (more than four times as many as Sony offered at the time and 90 percent of the current best sellers) and vowing that its “goal” was “to have every printed book on earth available for instant download.”  Of course, whatever their benefits, the ways in which e-books in contradistinction to physical books, are problematic are manifold, especially in terms of issues of surveillance.

By the beginning of 2010, hardly two years later, with the “nascent” ebook market still “only a few years old,” Amazon was clearly dominating it with an estimated “80 percent of e-book purchases” and by the end of 2010 an expected“50% share.”   The difference in those two percentages offered (books vs. market share) may reflect the low price that Amazon was charging for every book.

Offering best sellers for $9.99, Amazon left no room for any profit margin as it sought to claim virtually the entire market.  In 2013, author (and lawyer) Scott Turow said that Amazon was using “unfair tactics” trying to “monopolize” the e-book market.  He said:

If you price e-books well below the cost, which is what they did for years, it both destroys physical book stores and drives the reading public into the e-book, which of course Amazon dominates.

As the point is made in Scott Turow's quote above, Amazon's disruption of the market not only drove e-book competitors out of the e-book market, but also drove brick and mortar book stores and stores selling physical books into bankruptcy as well.  Furthermore, publishers haven't liked Amazon very well either because they too have found themselves impoverished by Amazon's model.  Their impoverishment can limit support given to authors.

Should we all just relax and surrender to the fact that Amazon dominates the market while pushing digital books?  Citizens Defending Libraries reported last year how New York City library officials were partnering to further promote digital books in a program that featured prizes from Amazon.  See: NYC Library Officials Partner To Promote Digital Books With Prizes From Amazon.

A New York Times Sunday Review Op-ed this week by sociologist and author Eric Klinenberg reminded us that this summer Forbes Magazine ran published an article arguing that Amazon should replace libraries with its own retail outlets, and claimed that most Americans would prefer a free-market option. But, the public response "was so overwhelmingly negative that Forbes deleted the article from its website." 

Amazon has grown fast because its model is to grow fast.  Although its valuation, its gross revenues and its market share keep growing dramatically, Amazon's net revenues have been nearly flat.  Everything goes into expansion.  There have been times in the past when that strategy was problematic and close to edge, a risk to have no profit going out to shareholders, but whatever threats that lack of net return seemed to pose to company or to Jeff Bezos as its leader financing always came to the rescue, and they both survived. . . . and continued to take over market after market.

Amazon should be a walking poster-child advertisement for antitrust litigation and legislation.  Instead, Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, the newspaper for the national capital where such issues should be discussed and where the careers and day to day lives of the all the legislators and government officials responsible for the enforcement such antitrust measures are reported on.

The Washington Post has always had a special role in influencing the nation.  We are pretty sure it was Peter Dale Scott, credited with coining the term the "deep state," who in one of his interviews said that the Washington Post along with the New York Times and the LA Times was a preferred outlet by the CIA when it wanted to get its stories out to the public (often without telltale fingerprints).  Whether that's exactly the case, the Washington Post has certainly played an important role historically for the CIA in this regard.

If it all started with BOOKS, why Amazon?  Why not Barnes and Noble?  Why isn't Barnes and Noble now the second biggest company in the United States?

An interesting comparative analysis points out that as of Spring 2017 Amazon increases would have returned 48,197% since their May 15, 1997 (before their 1988 announced expansion beyond books) debut as a public company.  Barnes & Noble would have only returned 26%. Borders went bankrupt! Some other comparatives: Walmart-  +96%; Best Buy: +38% ;  Macys:+19%: Target: +4%: Staples: -50%. 

And Amazon has become the second trillion dollar company in the U.S. even as sales of the digital books it is pushing are dropping for years in succession.