The Daily Parker

It's not all about PETUS today:

• Via AVWeb, the FAA has issued an airworthiness directive requiring owners of Boeing 787-8 airplanes to reboot them at least every 21 days. I am not making this up.
• Trump, never a fan of intelligence of any kind, is sticking his fingers in his ears about Russian hacking of our election. Jeet Heer warns that this yet another way Trump is very dangerous. Plus, he's lying about the CIA's role in the Iraq WMD fiasco. It wasn't the CIA who lied; it was the Administration.
• By the way, Trump has the lowest approval ratings of any incoming president since 1988 (and probably since 1974).
• Oh, and we got about 200 mm of snow over the weekend. Parker's going to need a new pair of pairs of shoes.

Winter is here.

I keep coming back to this: no one has any idea what the Trump administration will actually do. This, more than anything else, is literally keeping me awake at night.

Brian Beutler worries about how the day-to-day business of being president will tax Trump beyond his ability to cope even on slow weeks. I've thought about that as well. You only need to watch an episode of The West Wing to get a sense of what kind of focus a president needs. Even George W. Bush, no scholar he, spent more time studying and preparing than Trump.

But beyond his temperament, we really have no information about what his policies and his relationship with Congress will be. So other than expecting something to go spectacularly wrong within the first few weeks he's in office, we just can't say what that will look like.

His team's lack of experience and discipline will probably give us a lot of signals, though. Think about how few leaks—and a complete lack of scandal—we've had during the Obama administration. With some of Trump's key advisors already under indictment, and the man himself party to more lawsuits than any other president in history even before he takes office, not to mention the unbelievable lack of control the campaign had over leaks from the beginning, it'll be epic. I'd say "pass the popcorn" if it weren't so horrifying.

But still: what kind of president will he be for real? Even his own supporters don't know.

In true Perceiver fashion, I'm going to gather data, at least through the first half of 2017, before freaking out completely. Is the analogy 1828, or is it 1856 (or 1933)? Is Trump Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jesse Ventura? Or is he more like Hugo Chávez or Rodrigo Duterte?

Trump broke nearly every norm of how we've elected presidents since the Civil War. Those norms existed in part because of lessons we learned in the 1830s through the 1870s. What norms will he break as president? What will his supporters do? Even if it doesn't affect me directly, being deep in the heart of one of the bluest cities in the country, what will happen to my friends who live in purple or mauve counties in North Carolina, Nebraska, and Wisconsin?

When George H.W. Bush won in the first election I voted in, I was disappointed. When his son won in 2000, I was angry; when he won again in 2004, I was embarrassed for my country. But in none of these elections did I have much doubt about how the Bushes would govern, or fear that the entire world order would be upended by the administration. Their policies made my blood boil, but I never feared for my liberty or that the Republic would fall. With Trump, I don't have any guesses, only apprehensions.

The world turned upside down...

Today is the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazis' rampage through Germany smashing the windows of Jewish-owned businesses and killing about 100 Jews.

It's also the first day in the countdown to the 115th Congress on January 3rd and the swearing-in of the 45th President on January 20th.

Having studied authoritarian, nativist takeovers in other countries, most notably Germany in the early 1930s, the U.S. in 1828, and Hungary in the last few years, I have some idea what we may be in for, and what we're not.

Our standing in the world will take a hit. How big depends on how stupidly Trump actually behaves. Given his record, and his lack of coherent policies, who knows what he'll do. But the Republican Congress? We know what they'll do pretty well.

It's not just the ACA, the Supreme Court, immigration, taxation, giveaways to private interests; all that's pretty bad. It's also the dozens of Federal District Court judges they've refused to confirm. Arts funding. Action on climate change. The regulations they'll write. The tiny, tiny ways they'll dig in like intestinal parasites to undo the Obama years and hold back progress for another generation.

I'm beyond disappointed with my country today. I'm ashamed. But I'm going to observe the first six months of 2017 intently to decide if we're America 1828, America 1856, Rome 120 BCE, or Germany 1933. Because I think we're one of those things now.

A diver off the coast of British Columbia appears to have found a 66-year-old atomic bomb casing:

The Canadian navy will be heading to the coast of British Columbia to investigate claims that a diver may have come across “the lost nuke” – a Mark IV bomb that went missing after an American B-36 bomber crashed in the region during the cold war.

Smyrichinsky started asking around, curious if anyone else had ever come across the mysterious object. “Nobody had ever seen it before or heard of it. Nobody ever dives there,” he told the Vancouver Sun. “Then some old-timer said: ‘Oh, you might have found that bomb.’”

It was a reference to the Mark IV, a 10-foot, blimp-shaped nuclear bomb weighing some five tonnes and which went missing over the Pacific during a US air force B-36 training flight on 13 February 1950.

Government records indicate that the lost bomb was a dummy and poses little risk of nuclear detonation, said a spokesperson.

Gosh, I hope so. Because let's not forget the missing fully-armed hydrogen bomb in North Carolina. I wonder what will happen when someone finds that.

Wired has a good, long article on how millions of security clearance documents were stolen from the Office of Personnel Management:

Once Captain America’s name popped up, there could be little doubt that the Office of Personnel Management had been hit by an advanced persistent threat (APT)—security-speak for a well-financed, often state-sponsored team of hackers. APTs like China’s Unit 61398 have no interest in run-of-the-mill criminal activities such as selling pilfered Social Security numbers on the black market; they exist solely to accumulate sensitive data that will advance their bosses’ political, economic, and military objectives.

The hackers...delved into the complete personnel files of 4.2 million employees, past and present. Then, just weeks before OPM booted them out, they grabbed approximately 5.6 million digital images of government employee fingerprints.

Scary stuff.

Via Bruce Schneier, the NSA lost control of a crap-ton of hacking tools sometime before 2013, and managed to stop the bleeding only after discovering Edward Snowden's leak:

The exploits themselves appear to target Fortinet, Cisco, Shaanxi Networkcloud Information Technology (sxnc.com.cn) Firewalls, and similar network security systems. I will leave it to others to analyze the reliability, versions supported, and other details. But nothing I've found in either the exploits or elsewhere is newer than 2013.

Because of the sheer volume and quality, it is overwhelmingly likely that this data is authentic. And it does not appear to be information taken from compromised targets. Instead, the exploits, binaries with help strings, server configuration scripts, 5 separate versions of one implant framework, and all sort of other features indicate that this is analyst-side code—the kind that probably never leaves the NSA.

From an operational standpoint, this is not a catastrophic leak. Nothing here reveals some special "NSA magic." Instead, this is evidence of good craftsmanship in a widely modular framework designed for ease of use. The immediate consequence is probably a lot of hours of work down the drain.

But the big picture is a far scarier one. Somebody managed to steal 301 MB of data from a TS//SCI system at some point between 2013 and today. Possibly, even probably, it occurred in 2013. But the theft also could have occurred yesterday with a simple utility run to scrub all newer documents. Relying on the file timestamps—which are easy to modify—the most likely date of acquisition was June 11, 2013 (see Update, however). That is two weeks after Snowden fled to Hong Kong and six days after the first Guardian publication. That would make sense, since in the immediate response to the leaks, as the NSA furiously ran down possible sources, it may have accidentally or deliberately eliminated this adversary’s access.

So, yeah. The NSA had a bigger problem than Edward Snowden until he broadcast his leak and sent their plumbers into overdrive. And even then, they didn't properly secure the data.

So says New Republic writer Bill McKibben:

We’re used to war as metaphor: the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on cancer. Usually this is just a rhetorical device, a way of saying, “We need to focus our attention and marshal our forces to fix something we don’t like.” But this is no metaphor. By most of the ways we measure wars, climate change is the real deal: Carbon and methane are seizing physical territory, sowing havoc and panic, racking up casualties, and even destabilizing governments. (Over the past few years, record-setting droughts have helped undermine the brutal strongman of Syria and fuel the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria.) It’s not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. Its first victims, ironically, are those who have done the least to cause the crisis. But it’s a world war aimed at us all. And if we lose, we will be as decimated and helpless as the losers in every conflict--except that this time, there will be no winners, and no end to the planetwide occupation that follows.

The question is not, are we in a world war? The question is, will we fight back? And if we do, can we actually defeat an enemy as powerful and inexorable as the laws of physics?

Meanwhile, scientists are saying that only about 30 major cities will remain cool enough to host the 2088 Olympics:

[Kirk Smith, a professor of global environmental health at University of California, Berkeley] and his colleagues looked the climate conditions of 645 cities in the Northern Hemisphere that are eligible to host the Olympics. Cities that had fewer than 600,000 in population were excluded, as were those that exceeded 1,600 meters (or roughly 5,250 feet) in elevation. They used data from two standard climate models to calculate the temperatures and humidity of those cities over the next century, assuming the levels of greenhouse gas emissions would remain high. With those numbers, they then estimated each city’s wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT), a measure of heat stress that takes into account temperature, humidity, heat radiation, and wind.

Cities are considered to be of high to medium risk if their WBGTs exceed 26 degree Celsius (or 78.8 degree Fahrenheit), which the researchers say is the maximum temperature to safely hold marathons, considered by some to be the most demanding events in the Olympics. (That’s actually a conservative measure; a 2010 study put the temperature threshold of risky marathons at 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Another analysis, based on data from more than 2 million marathoners, found the ideal temperature to be as low as 40 to 50 degrees.)

London and San Francisco meet the grade. Chicago is "medium risk." No cities in South America or Africa will be "low risk" by then.

Attention flat-earthers: you can't simultaneously believe in GPS and that the earth is a disk covered by the dome of Heaven. Maps of Australia are the latest casualty in the war between evidence and...well, flat-earthers:

The Australian Plate is moving about 7 centimeters (2.8 inches) northwards every single year. This motion has accumulated over the decades to produce a significant discrepancy between local coordinates on maps and global coordinates in digital navigation systems used by satellites.

At present, this difference amounts to an error of 1.5 meters (4.9 feet). This is enough to cause a problem to anything in Australia that uses GPS-like systems, including smartphones and vehicles.

"If you want to start using driverless cars, accurate map information is fundamental," Dan Jaksa, a member of Geoscience Australia, told BBC News. “We have tractors in Australia starting to go around farms without a driver, and if the information about the farm doesn't line up with the coordinates coming out of the navigation system there will be problems.”

This is yet another instance where, for whatever reason, people whose religious beliefs encounter their direct economic interests seem to make allowances for science.

Next thing you know, insurance companies will start charging more to cover property close to sea level. Oh wait...

London-based historian Tobias Stone sees the same parallels I see to periodic bouts of self-destruction. Le sigh:

[W]e humans have a habit of going into phases of mass destruction, generally self imposed to some extent or another.

At a local level in time people think things are fine, then things rapidly spiral out of control until they become unstoppable, and we wreak massive destruction on ourselves. For the people living in the midst of this it is hard to see happening and hard to understand. To historians later it all makes sense and we see clearly how one thing led to another.

But at the time people don’t realise they’re embarking on a route that will lead to a destruction period. They think they’re right, they’re cheered on by jeering angry mobs, their critics are mocked. This cycle, the one we saw for example from the Treaty of Versaille, to the rise of Hitler, to the Second World War, appears to be happening again. But as with before, most people cannot see it because:

1. They are only looking at the present, not the past or future

2. They are only looking immediately around them, not at how events connect globally

3. Most people don’t read, think, challenge, or hear opposing views

Trump is doing this in America. Those of us with some oversight from history can see it happening.

What can we do? Well, again, looking back, probably not much. The liberal intellectuals are always in the minority. See Clay Shirky’s Twitter Storm on this point. The people who see that open societies, being nice to other people, not being racist, not fighting wars, is a better way to live, they generally end up losing these fights. They don’t fight dirty. They are terrible at appealing to the populace. They are less violent, so end up in prisons, camps, and graves. We need to beware not to become divided (see: Labour party), we need to avoid getting lost in arguing through facts and logic, and counter the populist messages of passion and anger with our own similar messages. We need to understand and use social media. We need to harness a different fear. Fear of another World War nearly stopped World War 2, but didn’t. We need to avoid our own echo chambers. Trump and Putin supporters don’t read the Guardian, so writing there is just reassuring our friends. We need to find a way to bridge from our closed groups to other closed groups, try to cross the ever widening social divides.

Perhaps it's time to figure out where I can go into exile, if this is in fact inevitable. Is the UK (read, post-Brexit: Scotland) going to work? Is Canada safe as it has been for the past few centuries? Maybe New Zealand, which, as far as I know, has never been attacked by a foreign power?

Also when: do I go immediately if Trump gets elected, or should I wait until the purge begins?

Fun times, fun times.

Brian Beutler argues that Hillary Clinton needs to put the "lock her up" crap to rest:

It’s a problem to have this stench lingering in the air, but just as difficult to address without playing into the hands of her opponents, who’d love nothing more than to turn “lock her up” into a matter of partisan debate. (“Should Clinton be jailed? Some say yes, some say no!”) But a deft communicator could discredit “lock her up” not by protesting too much on Clinton’s behalf, but by treating it as the unhinged chant of a pitchfork-wielding mob that would claim power by imprisoning political enemies. They couldn’t beat Obama, so they questioned his eligibility for office; they’re losing to Clinton, so they want her dead or in jail. These are authoritarian instincts that must be opposed.

Predicting the political fallout of an event like the RNC or of a new ubiquitous talking point like “lock her up” is pure guesswork, and it might be the case that the air of vigilantism around the whole thing will make non-Republicans more sympathetic to Clinton. But on top of all the troubling democratic implications of a major political party believing the opposition party’s leader belongs in prison, Republicans may have successfully damaged Clinton with a false but powerful narrative. And if that’s the case, she will need to be prepared to deal with it.

Meanwhile, Josh Marshall (and others) are finding more connections between Russian president Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump:

To put this all into perspective, if Vladimir Putin were simply the CEO of a major American corporation and there was this much money flowing in Trump's direction, combined with this much solicitousness of Putin's policy agenda, it would set off alarm bells galore. That is not hyperbole or exaggeration. And yet Putin is not the CEO of an American corporation. He's the autocrat who rules a foreign state, with an increasingly hostile posture towards the United States and a substantial stockpile of nuclear weapons. The stakes involved in finding out 'what's going on' as Trump might put it are quite a bit higher.

There is something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence for a financial relationship between Trump and Putin or a non-tacit alliance between the two men. Even if you draw no adverse conclusions, Trump's financial empire is heavily leveraged and has a deep reliance on capital infusions from oligarchs and other sources of wealth aligned with Putin. That's simply not something that can be waved off or ignored.

This is the scariest election of my lifetime.