RNC First Night

I thought last night was pretty disgusting. Daniel Dale had my favorite summation of the first day of the RNC (some links from The Five Best Mother Jones

• The candidates wife was widely accused of plagiarism
• A congressman said on TV that whites have done more for civilization than non-whites
• A former child star defended a meme calling Hillary Clinton a "cunt"
• A soap opera actor called the president a Muslim
• A Duck Dynasty star accused some Americans of just wanting "free stuff"
• A sheriff celebrated the acquittals of offerces charged in Freddie Gray's death and called Black Lives Matter "anarchy"
• A mother of a Benghazi victim said "Hillary For Prison"
• The candidate phoned in to Fox News during the mother's speech
• The second-last speaker, a lieutenant-general, led a chant of "lock her up"
• Two speakers railed against "illegals"
• The opening prayer referred to Clinton and Democrats as "the enemy"

And to be clear, those "former child star" and "actors" weren't just random people in the press, they were speakers at the convention, on stage, during prime time, picked by the campaign!

And of course they were just factually wrong on most things. Here's what every speaker at the Republican convention should have, but didn't, tell you

• The border is more secure than it was eight years ago
• Fewer unauthorized immigrants are crossing the border than in 2008
• The Border Patrol's grown since 2008
• There are fewer unauthorized immigrants in the US than there were eight years ago
• Violent crime has declined each of the past eight years
• Terrorism's gone up since 2008 — but it's down from 2014 levels

Factcheck.org said Republican speakers twist facts on immigration, crime, Benghazi and employment:

• Two security contractors at the CIA annex in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, repeated their claim that they were told to “stand down” and not help Americans under attack. But multiple official reports say such an order was never issued.
• The sister of a slain Border Patrol agent said President Obama has left “border patrol agents thinly equipped,” and undermanned. In fact, both funding and staffing have increased under Obama.
• A Senate candidate claimed “neighborhoods have become more violent” under President Obama. In fact, the violent crime rate has gone down 20 percent under Obama, as of the most recent FBI statistics for 2014.
• Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Rep. Michael McCaul both wrongly claimed that Hillary Clinton supports “open borders.” She supported a bill that would have created a path to citizenship for those in the country illegally, but it also would have increased border security.
• Giuliani said that Clinton “advocated for the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya” and should be “accountable” for the country’s chaos. But he failed to mention that Trump, at the time, also supported the ouster of Gadhafi.
• Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions claimed that wages “have fallen,” when they’re up under Obama. He blamed immigration for a low labor force participation rate, when it’s mainly the result of demographics, including the aging of baby boomers.

More by CNN, Day 1 of GOP convention speeches: CNN vets the claims

Matt Yglesias describes 4 winners and 4 losers from the first night of the RNC

• Loser: The GOP’s future
• Loser: Neoconservatives
• Loser: Joni Ernst
• Loser: Melania Trump
• Winner: Donald Trump
• Winner: The city of Cleveland
• Winner: Rudy Giuliani - on how Trump will make America great again: "He will lead by leading."
• Winner: The Benghazi acrostic meme

That Stephen Colbert returned with a segment The Word: Trumpiness. "Truthiness was from the gut, but Trumpiness clearly comes from much further down the gastrointestinal tract."

Edward R Murrow on McCarthy - March 9, 1954

David Mindich reminds us, For journalists covering Trump, a Murrow moment

After months of holding back, modern-day journalists are acting a lot like Murrow, pushing explicitly against Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. To be sure, these modern-day Murrow moments carry less impact: Long gone are the days in which a vast majority of eyeballs were tuned to the big-three television news programs. But we nonetheless are witnessing a change from existing practice of steadfast detachment, and the context in which journalists are reacting is not unlike that of Murrow: The candidate’s comments fall outside acceptable societal norms, and critical journalists are not alone in speaking up.

I'm not sure I agree that journalists are speaking up. Nancy LeTourneau adds in the Washington Monthly, Why Journalists Should Be Concerned About the Trump/Pence Ticket:

Trump began his attempts to silence the media by throwing Jorge Ramos out of a news conference for asking a question he didn’t like. That eventually turned into a blacklist of media outlets that were banned from his events. The list eventually grew to include Univision, Buzzfeed, Politico, The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, The Des Moines Register and the Washington Post.

Perhaps even more disturbing is Trump’s proposal to loosen libel laws in order to make it easier for him to sue media outlets for reporting he doesn’t like. Callum Borchers explains how that could happen.

Finally, we add Mike Pence to the equation. As Governor of Indiana, he set up his own state-run news outlet to compete with the media.

This is a ramping up of what we saw from the last Republican administration – which brought us everything from Jeff Gannon as part of the White House Press Corp (how the hell did that happen?) to the “payola scandal” of taxpayer-funded commentators like Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus.

Regardless, Murrow's moment is worth remembering...

No one familiar with the history of this country can deny that congressional committees are useful. It is necessary to investigate before legislating, but the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind as between the internal and the external threats of communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it -- and rather successfully. Cassius was right. 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.'

Good night, and good luck.

GOP Retrospection

I guess the morning of the Republican National Convention is the day to publish articles describing how we got here.

Matthew Yglesias wrote in Vox (with drawings) How Donald Trump won

McKay Coppins wrote in BuzzFeed, Confessions of a Dishonest Slob: How The Haters Got Trump This Close To The White House.

Trump’s tirades against the “donor puppets” would become one of the most compelling elements of his primary campaign message — that of the blue-collar billionaire who couldn’t be bought. ... Nunberg later confessed to me that Trump’s principled stand against the corrupt donor class was little more than lucky spin. “The truth is, he would have raised money if he could have … Donald never had any intention of self-financing.”

Clare Malone wrote in FiveThirtyEight wrote The End Of A Republican Party. "Racial and cultural resentment have replaced the party’s small government ethos."

The shock of 2016, though, is just how self-evident the inflection point at which the Republican Party finds itself is; Trump is a one-man crisis for the GOP. The party has been growing more conservative and less tolerant of deviations from doctrine over the past decades, so what does it mean that a man who has freely eschewed conservative orthodoxy on policy is now the Republicans’ standard-bearer?

Many have assumed that adherence to a certain conservative purity was the engine of the GOP, and given the party’s demographic homogeneity, this made sense. But re-evaluating recent history in light of Trump, and looking a bit closer at this year’s numbers, something else seems to be the primary motivator of GOP voters, something closer to the neighborhood of cultural conservatism and racial and economic grievance rather than a passion for small government.

Taking a longer view, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann wrote in Vox The Republicans waged a 3-decade war on government. They got Trump.

We did not advance our argument about asymmetric polarization lightly. We had worked closely with members of both parties and are not unaware of the issues and divisions inside the Democratic Party. But we had seen the GOP go from a problem-solving center-right party to a problem-solving very conservative party — and then evolve into an obstructionist party intent on appeasing extreme forces inside and outside Congress.

The last two both end with sections that try to foresee what a post Trump GOP looks like and it's not pretty. "The prospect that the GOP leaders wouldn’t even be able to agree on why Trump — arguably the worst crisis the modern party has experienced — was even a crisis to begin with, seemed to say it all. “There is no happy ending to this story,” she said."

Trump’s Ghostwriter Speaks

Vox had a series of articles not two weeks ago, What you learn from reading 12 of Donald Trump's books. I enjoyed reading Zack Beauchamp's Donald Trump’s run for president is baffling — until you read The Art of the Deal.

Today, The New Yorker published an interview by Jane Mayer with Tony Schwartz, Donald Trump's Ghostwriter Tells All. "‘The Art of the Deal’ made America see Trump as a charmer with an unfailing knack for business. Tony Schwartz helped create that myth—and regrets it." If you're named on the cover is it still called ghostwriting?

"I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.” If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”

“Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood,” Schwartz told me. “It’s implicit in a lot of what people write, but it’s never explicit—or, at least, I haven’t seen it. And that is that it’s impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then . . . ” Schwartz trailed off, shaking his head in amazement. He regards Trump’s inability to concentrate as alarming in a Presidential candidate. “If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time,” he said.

Tara Goshen wrote about the interview for Vox. I'm disappointed she didn't mention the previous Vox Series, because Schwartz completely pulls the rug out from under Beauchamp's article. Schwartz came up with the title and even the idea for the book since before it was just going to be an autobiography. He also wrote all of it, not Trump. Here are some quotes:

• “All he is is ‘stomp, stomp, stomp’—recognition from outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in particular,” he observed, on October 21, 1986. But, as he noted in the journal a few days later, “the book will be far more successful if Trump is a sympathetic character—even weirdly sympathetic—than if he is just hateful or, worse yet, a one-dimensional blowhard.”
• When Schwartz began writing “The Art of the Deal,” he realized that he needed to put an acceptable face on Trump’s loose relationship with the truth. So he concocted an artful euphemism. Writing in Trump’s voice, he explained to the reader, “I play to people’s fantasies. . . . People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and it’s a very effective form of promotion.”
• Looking back at the text now, Schwartz says, “I created a character far more winning than Trump actually is.” The first line of the book is an example. “I don’t do it for the money,” Trump declares. “I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” Schwartz now laughs at this depiction of Trump as a devoted artisan. “Of course he’s in it for the money,” he said. “One of the most deep and basic needs he has is to prove that ‘I’m richer than you.’ ” As for the idea that making deals is a form of poetry, Schwartz says, “He was incapable of saying something like that—it wouldn’t even be in his vocabulary.” He saw Trump as driven not by a pure love of dealmaking but by an insatiable hunger for “money, praise, and celebrity.”
• Rhetorically, Schwartz’s aim in “The Art of the Deal” was to present Trump as the hero of every chapter, but, after looking into some of his supposedly brilliant deals, Schwartz concluded that there were cases in which there was no way to make Trump look good. So he sidestepped unflattering incidents and details. “I didn’t consider it my job to investigate,” he says.

Delving Deep Into The Clinton E-Mail Saga

Ars Technica writes Indifference and ignorance: Delving deep into the Clinton e-mail saga

In order to have an intelligent conversation about Clinton’s e-mails, here is a technical analysis of the evidence as it has been presented (think of it like a print version of Congressional hearings, minus screaming, finger-pointing, and grandstanding). A clearer picture has started emerging based on the testimony given by FBI Director James Comey and the Inspectors General of the State Department and the Intelligence Community (OIG), plus a portion of the 30,000-plus e-mails released thus far through FOIA requests by the State Department and other agencies. That picture, based on our assessment, is not a very pretty one."

I basically knew this but it gave a bunch of nice details. If I were to characterize it, corporate (in this case government) IT department didn't keep up technologically with commercial systems and executives (in this case a Secretary) wanted the convenience of commercial systems and did so on their own accord (ignorant of the risks they were taking). Wrong? Yes. Criminal? No, or at least not seriously so. As Comey said, no reasonable prosecutor would charge this, of course we know sometimes prosecutors can be unreasonable, as in the case of Carmen Ortiz prosecuting Aaron Swartz and others.

There's an argument to made here that commercial systems should be made more secure and government IT departments should have more funding to be able to better integrate them into their systems easily.

New UK PM Theresa May Closed Climate Change Dept

The Independent reports Climate change department closed by Theresa May in 'plain stupid' and 'deeply worrying' move.

The decision to abolish the Department for Energy and Climate Change has been variously condemned as “plain stupid”, “deeply worrying” and “terrible” by politicians, campaigners and experts.

One of Theresa May’s first acts as Prime Minister was to move responsibility for climate change to a new Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.

The news came after the appointment of Andrea Leadsom – who revealed her first question to officials when she became Energy Minister last year was “Is climate change real? – was appointed as the new Environment Secretary.

Well, evidently we're not the only country with a conservative party that denies science. The world is screwed.

Sadly it looks like Europe is also losing on net neutrality.

It's been a year since the Iran deal was signed. So far, it’s worked.

Vox asked Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, It's been a year since the Iran deal was signed. So far, it’s worked

His verdict is pretty upbeat: ‘I'm going to be roundly attacked for saying it, but I think it's gone very well,’ he says.

Lewis explains that the nuclear deal is, to the disappointment of critics, mostly working out as written. Iran is basically complying with the core parts of the agreement — such as limiting the number of centrifuges it has and eliminating its stockpile of highly enriched uranium that could quickly be converted to weapons-grade material — that make it harder for the country to make a nuclear weapon.

But the deal has also failed to satisfy some of its strongest proponents.

These folks — including some in the Obama administration — hoped that a nuclear agreement might reorient Iran’s foreign policy in a more pro-American direction. This hasn’t happened: Iran still hates Israel, props up Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and supports Shia sectarianism in places like Iraq and Yemen."

But Lewis argues that anyone who was expecting that to happen was deluding themselves. The deal on the nuclear program was always just that: a deal on the nuclear program — not a deal on Syria or Israel. The problem with the Washington debate over the Iran deal, he says, is that it’s serving as a proxy for debates over US foreign policy — which distract from the core question of whether Iran is further away from a bomb than it was a year ago.

The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists

Vox writes The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists "Explore the biggest challenges facing science, and how we can fix them:

1. Academia has a huge money problem
2. Too many studies are poorly designed
3. Replicating results is crucial — and rare
4. Peer review is broken
5. Too much science is locked behind paywalls
6. Science is poorly communicated
7. Life as a young academic is incredibly stressful

Conclusion:

• Science is not doomed

I was too hard on Mike Pence, and I’m sorry - Vox

Matthew Yglesias writes I was too hard on Mike Pence, and I’m sorry. This is based on his early reporting 10 years ago on Bush's privatizing social security plan. "Today, more than a decade removed from the first time I met Pence, I can say that it’s actually quite common for members of Congress to have no idea what they’re talking about." He makes a very depressing point:

What I now understand is that all the factors that push individual members of Congress toward ignorance push would-be congressional leaders even further in this direction. To become a congressional leader means, first and foremost, that you need to be really good at raising money. That’s a difficult and time-consuming task, and one for which detailed policy knowledge isn’t especially helpful.

The ultimate result is legitimately bad. Congress is the most important policymaking institution in the American constitutional system. But individual members of Congress are not knowledgeable about policy and are not equipped to become knowledgeable, and becoming knowledgeable is not a good way to shift into a leadership position.

Pence may well have been dumber or more ignorant than your average member of Congress, but most fundamentally he was an integral part of a larger institutional framework that cultivates and promotes ignorance. That system, more than anything about Pence himself, is what’s really scary."

Life after the Olympics

Vox has some fascinating first person stories of Life after the Olympics "We talked to eight Olympians, all of whom struggled when they came home from the games. Some wrestled with health problems and financial woes. Some faced public anger or disdain for their politics. Some confronted anxiety, depression, and self-doubt. But these are not stories of defeat — they are ultimately about renewal and reinvention. Click on the links below to read these athletes' stories in full."

Cash-Strapped Towns Are Un-Paving Roads They Can’t Afford to Fix

Wired reports we're just giving up as a society, Cash-Strapped Towns Are Un-Paving Roads They Can’t Afford to Fix

In an era of dismal infrastructure spending, where the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the country’s roads a D grade, rural areas all over the country are embracing this kind of strategic retreat. Transportation agencies in at least 27 states have unpaved roads, according to a new report from the National Highway Cooperative Highway Research program. They’ve done the bulk of that work in the past five years.

Interest rates are near zero, which means the government could borrow money at almost no cost and repair our infrastructure (and by the way provide jobs) so we can rejoin the first world. But no, instead we're just giving up.

Game of Thrones Beginner’s Guide: Uncensored (HBO)

Narrated hilariously by Samuel L. Jackson. It's got serious spoilers for the first 5 seasons and some for the 6th.

Juno Reaches Jupiter

From July 4th, NASA's Juno spacecraft is now in orbit around Jupiter. "NASA’s Juno spacecraft has successfully entered Jupiter’s orbit, bringing it closer to the planet than any probe has come so far. The vehicle reached the gas giant’s north pole this evening, and NASA received confirmation that the vehicle had turned on its main engine at 11:18PM ET. The engine burned for 35 minutes, helping to slow the spacecraft down enough so that it was captured by Jupiter’s gravitational pull. NASA confirmed that the burn was successful at around 11:53PM ET and that Juno was in its intended 53-day orbit."

But now, Juno is in a highly elliptical orbit around Jupiter that takes 53 days to complete. For most of that orbit, the spacecraft will be far out from Jupiter, avoiding its intense radiation belts and debris field. But at the end of the 53-day cycle, Juno will swing back close to the planet again. During this close pass, the vehicle will first fly over the north pole and then swoop in close over Jupiter's equator — squeezing in between the radiation belts and the planet's surface. Juno then swings back out into space over the planet's south pole.

This whole sequence of events, known as the Perijove pass, will take just a few hours to complete. But it's during this time that Juno will conduct the most science over Jupiter. The spacecraft's onboard instruments will be measuring the amount of water in Jupiter's atmosphere, as well as the planet's gravity and magnetic field. These measurements will help NASA figure out if Jupiter has a dense core underneath its surface. All of these details can be used to piece together exactly how and when Jupiter formed more than 4 billion years ago.

The two big close to Jupiter swings are scheduled for Aug 27th and Oct 19th.

Are has more, After 1.7 billion miles Juno nails its Jupiter orbit to within tens of miles.

In reality, NASA also now sentenced its $1.1 billion (~£850M) spacecraft to die. Mission managers hope to get 37 orbits out of Juno over the next 20 months before radiation slowly breaks down its electronics and propulsion system. Even though a 1cm-thick wall of titanium encases the spacecraft’s electronics to provide some protection, a few of its nine instruments may begin to fail in as few as eight or 10 orbits. Before the spacecraft fails entirely engineers will place Juno into a slowly degrading orbit that will eventually force it to plunge into the planet. This is so that none of its potentially life bearing moons, such as Europa, might be contaminated.

In other NASA news, The Verge reports Hubble is capturing stunning photos of Jupiter’s giant auroras

One Simple Change to the Law Could Make Prosecuting Killer Cops Easier

The Intercept describes One Simple Change to the Law Could Make Prosecuting Killer Cops Easier

Currently, police abuse is subject largely to one federal statute enacted in 1866: Title 18 U.S. Code, Section 242, which punishes anyone who ‘willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.’

The problem is that the statute ‘has nothing to do on its face with police officers or police violence,’ said former Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights William Yeomans. ‘It’s about deprivation of rights. So what you’re actually proving in these cases is that the officer acted with the intent to [deny the victim rights].’

This willfulness standard makes it difficult to prosecute police officers. ‘The government has to show beyond a reasonable doubt the officer acted with willful attempt to deny the victim a right,’ he said."

He suggested a solution. Congress could lower the intent standard to “something like if the officer acted with reckless disregard.” That way, “you don’t have to actually show that the officer intended to use more force than was necessary. … If the officer recklessly used more force than was necessary, he could then be prosecuted.”

I'm no expert, but it seems like a place to start a conversation...

Police Racism

Tony Zhou posted incredibly relevant parts of A 1974 Interview about Police Racism with Renault Robinson, a Black Police Officer. Here's just one:

Why Traffic Stops Are More Common for Black People

“About sixty percent of police-citizen conflict starts in a traffic situation. It’s easier to stop a person on the pretext of a traffic violation than to stop him on the street. It’s a lot easier to say, “Your tail light’s out.” “Your plate is dented.” “You didn’t make that turn right.” You can then search his automobile, hoping you can find some contraband or a weapon. If he becomes irritated, with very little pushing on your part, you can make an arrest for disorderly conduct. These are all statistics which help your records.

Certain units in the task force have developed a science around stopping your automobile. These men know it’s impossible to drive three blocks without committing a traffic violation. We’ve got so many rules on the books. These police officers use these things to get points and also hustle for money. The traffic law is a fat book. He knows if you don’t have two lights on your license plate, that’s a violation. If you have a crack in your windshield, that’s a violation. If your muffler’s dragging, that’s a violation. He knows all these little things….

So if they stop the average black driver, in their mind the likelihood of finding five or six violations out of a hundred cars is highly possible…. After you’ve stopped a thousand, you’ve got 950 people who are very pissed off, 950 who might have been just average citizens, not doing anything wrong — teachers, doctors, lawyers, working people. The police don’t care. Black folks don’t have a voice to complain. Consequently, they continue to be victims of shadowy, improper, overburdened police service. Traffic is the big entree.”

Two months ago, NBC in NYC proved this is still relevant. I-Team: More NYPD Officers Say There's Proof of Quota-Driven Arrests.

Officer Derick Waller told the I-Team, "At the end of the month, these officers who don’t have that arrest or those few summonses, they’re pressured to find something. You might not see anything but you go hunting, like bounty hunting for an arrest, locking up some old guy, some homeless guy, finding someone who’s spitting on the sidewalk, and you bring them in."

Officer Adhyl Polanco added, "The problem is, when you go hunting, when you put any type of numbers on a police officer to perform, we are going to go for the most vulnerable. Of course, we’re going to go for the LGBT community, we’re going to the black community, we’re going to those that have no vote, that have no power.”

Maybe it's sinking in where it needs to, Conservative writers explain why they’re now more skeptical of police.

Tech Helping Black Lives Matter

The Verge explains, How Facebook Live became our new global distress signal. "This week the world has been and horrified — and captivated — by videos showing the deaths at the hands of police of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota. Last night, at a demonstration protesting those deaths and the broader trend of police violence toward black people, a sniper killed five police officers and wounded seven more. Sterling’s death was captured in videos shot on mobile phones and shared later. But the deaths that came later came to us live, via Facebook’s seven-month-old live-streaming tool. Facebook came late to live streaming, after it was popularized last year by Meerkat and Twitter-owned Periscope. But Facebook’s ubiquity has made it the go-to app for anyone who suddenly becomes a witness to violence or its aftermath. In just a few weeks, it has become a new kind of SOS."

The Washington Post writes The inspiring way hundreds of Asian Americans are teaching their families about Black Lives Matter

In the Internet age, crises have a way of turning completely ordinary, unremarkable tools into tremendously powerful instruments for organizing. Think of the way Hong Kong's democracy protesters used FireChat to message one another in spite of the area's overloaded cellular networks, or how Syrian rebels turned to Skype as a way to plan their opposition.

To that list of technologies we can now add Google Docs, the simple word-processing app that on Thursday became a destination for hundreds of Americans as they tried to assemble an open letter addressing the twin shootings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota. The authors were largely anonymous to one another. But together, and with remarkable coordination, they took advantage of Google Docs' killer feature: the ability to edit a document, in unison, in real time — something that could not have been achieved a decade ago.

Website Campaign Zero says "We Can End Police Violence In America" and offers some practical ways to help. "Campaign ZERO was developed with contributions from activists, protesters and researchers across the nation. This data-informed platform presents comprehensive solutions to end police violence in America. It integrates community demands and policy recommendations from research organizations and the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Together, we will win."

Some Science Stories

io9 reports New Cancer Therapy Leaves Three Dead "Clinical trials of a promising new therapy, in which white blood cells are reprogrammed to attack cancer cells, has resulted in the deaths of three patients. In response, the US Food and Drug Administration has ordered a temporary halt to the trial."

It’s an incredibly promising new approach to battling cancer—but now there’s been a major setback. Three patients, all under the age of 25, have died in a Juno Therapeutics Phase II clinical trial that’s been using the CAR-T cells to treat ALL. The patients died after excess fluids accumulated in their brains (cerebral edemas). In all cases, the deaths happened after a chemotherapy drug, fludarabine, was added to the treatment regimen.

stat news has more, What's next for CAR-T after Juno's clinical misstep?

The Verge reports This robot stingray is propelled by rat heart cells, and it’s teaching us about underwater robotics. "A team of scientists have developed a robot that mimics the motion of a stingray by using the cardiac muscles from a rat mounted on a stingray-shaped skeleton. The robot, detailed in a study published in the journal Science, is a wonderfully weird hybrid of biological and mechanical engineering that could be the first step towards a new class of underwater robots."

This robot uses a single layer of muscle allowed for downward contraction to mimic movement. While live creatures have another layer of muscle to pull their wings upward, the skeleton of this robot is designed to rebound after such a contraction, simplifying the overall structure. When the muscles were stimulated with light, the combined actions allowed the robot to swim forward.

FIveThirtyEight reports, The Loudest Sound In The World Would Kill You On The Spot. "Consider this piece of history: On the morning of Aug. 27, 1883, ranchers on a sheep camp outside Alice Springs, Australia, heard a sound like two shots from a rifle. At that very moment, the Indonesian volcanic island of Krakatoa was blowing itself to bits 2,233 miles away. Scientists think this is probably the loudest sound humans have ever accurately measured. Not only are there records of people hearing the sound of Krakatoa thousands of miles away, there is also physical evidence that the sound of the volcano’s explosion traveled all the way around the globe multiple times."

Are reports, HTTPS crypto’s days are numbered. Here’s how Google wants to save it. "In the coming months, Google servers will add a new, experimental cryptographic algorithm to the more established elliptic curve algorithm it has been using for the past few years to help encrypt HTTPS communications. The algorithm—which goes by the wonky name "Ring Learning With Errors"—is a method of exchanging cryptographic keys that's currently considered one of the great new hopes in the age of quantum computing. Like other forms of public key encryption, it allows two parties who have never met to encrypt their communications, making it ideal for Internet usage."

Hillary’s Emails

Fred Kaplan in The Atlantic, puts it in some context, Hillary’s email scandal was overhyped.

Top secret information is another matter, but the stuff that showed up in Clinton’s private email wasn’t so special. Seven of the eight email chains dealt with CIA drone strikes, which are classified top secret/special access program—unlike Defense Department drone strikes, which are unclassified. The difference is that CIA drones hit targets in countries, like Pakistan and Yemen, where we are not officially at war; they are part of covert operations. (Defense Department drone strikes are in places where we are officially at war.) But these operations are covert mainly to provide cover for the Pakistani and Yemeni governments, so they don’t have to admit they’re cooperating with America. Everyone in the world knows about these strikes; nongovernment organizations, such as New America, tabulate them; newspapers around the world—including the New York Times, where some of the same reporters are now writing so breathlessly about Clinton’s careless handling of classified information—cover these strikes routinely.

The other top secret email chain described a conversation with the president of Malawi. Conversations with foreign leaders are inherently classified.

In other words, even if Russian, Chinese, Iranian, or Syrian spies had hacked into Clinton’s email servers, and if they’d pored through 60,000 emails and come across these eight chains that held top secret material, they would not have learned anything the slightest bit new or worthy of their efforts. The FBI’s discoveries should be viewed in that context."

There are a few federal statutes dealing with the mishandling of classified information. Some are defined as misdemeanors, some as felonies. But all of them require the finding of an “intent” to mishandle information—and most of them involve an intent to share the information with people (usually, but not always, foreign agents) who are not cleared to see it. As Comey said of the Clinton case, “We do not see these things here.”

He goes on in the comparisons to Petraeus, to lower ranked officials, to her use of multiple devices, to leakers and more.

Kevin Drum points out, Hillary Clinton Never Came Close to Compromising National Security.

If you choose to believe that top secret is top secret, and it doesn't matter if the classification was ridiculous, that's fine. Knock yourself out. The rest of us can examine Emailgate in a real-world sense and try to decide if Hillary Clinton actually did anything that might have compromised national security. The answer, pretty clearly, is no. We've seen virtually all the emails. We know what the top secret emails were about. We know that Russia could have hacked into her server and read every word and learned nothing of interest.

Hillary was still careless, and she still shouldn't have done it. But for anyone interested in actual national security, it's pretty clear that she never came close to compromising anything even remotely important. We've known this for many months. We still know it. And all the faux outrage from Republicans in Congress won't change it.

If you want more, factcheck.org goes into some gorey details, Revisiting Clinton and Classified Information.

Donald Trump and Hitler’s Rise to Power

Jonathan Chait writes in NY Magazine, Donald Trump and Hitler’s Rise to Power. It's more history lesson than hyperbole and it's worth a full read. Here's a little of it:

To be perfectly clear, Trump is not Hitler or a Nazi. Trump’s racism is not of the genocidal variety, and he is committed neither to a program of Darwinian racial conquest nor the principled imposition of one-party rule. If President Trump does start a world war, it would probably be as a result of blundering rather than a long-term master plan. But the two figures do have certain traits in common relative to the political environments they inhabit."

Hindenburg and the German right viewed Hitler in strikingly similar terms to how Republican elites view Trump. Yes, they badly underestimated his fanaticism, which Hitler had downplayed in public. While they failed to anticipate that Hitler would launch a total war and industrial-scale genocide, they did consider him a buffoon. Alfred Hugenberg, leader of the German-Nationals, deemed the Nazis “little better than a rabble, with dangerously radical social and economic notions,” writes Turner. Hindenburg considered Hitler qualified to head the postal ministry at best. Hitler, in their eyes, was not a serious man, unfit to govern, a classless buffoon. His appeal, the German elite believed, came from his outsider status, which allowed him to posture against the political system and make extravagant promises to his followers that would never be tested against reality. What’s more, Hitler’s explicit contempt for democracy made even the authoritarian German right nervous about entrusting him with power.

All this is to say that German conservatives did not see Hitler as Hitler — they saw Hitler as Trump. And the reasons they devised to overcome their qualms and accept him as the head of the government would ring familiar to followers of the 2016 campaign. They believed the responsibility of governing would tame Hitler, and that his beliefs were amorphous and could be shaped by advisers once in office. They respected his populist appeal and believed it could serve their own ends. (Hugenberg, writes Turner, “recognized that [the Nazis] were far more successful than his party in mobilizing mass support and hoped to harness their movement to destroy the republic and establish a rightist authoritarian regime.”) Their myopic concern with specifics of their policy agenda overcame their general sense of unease. (One right-wing landowner was “hopeful of relief measures by a Hitler cabinet for the depressed agriculture of the east,” and thus concluded “the army and the forces of conservatism would suffice to prevent a one-party Nazi dictatorship.”) Think of the supply-siders supporting Trump in the hope he can enact major tax cuts, or the social conservatives enthused about his list of potential judges, and you’ll have a picture of the thought process.

Vox has a series of articles, What you learn from reading 12 of Donald Trump's books. The best of which is Donald Trump’s run for president is baffling — until you read The Art of the Deal. I read it shortly after college (getting it when joining the Book of the Month club) but don't remember little of it. This article was a good refresher.

Update: How Southern racism found a home in the Tea Party.

Use of robot in Dallas highlights tactical opportunities, ethical questions for police

Obviously the shooting in Dallas were horrible. There are a lot of stories in that event, here's one of them, for the first time, police used a robot to deliver a bomb to blow up a suspect.

The LA Times writes Use of robot in Dallas highlights tactical opportunities, ethical questions for police "Negotiators had been talking for hours with the hunkered-down killer of five police officers in downtown Dallas when the man suddenly resumed firing with an assault rifle. Fearing additional casualties, the officers deployed a small, remote-controlled robot to carry an explosive device near shooter Micah Xavier Johnson, which they then detonated, killing him."

Holland Michel said police departments have been using robots for years. They were deployed at the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11 attacks. Their popularity increased with the aid of the Pentagon’s surplus program, he said, saying the program has provided police with at least 400 robots nationwide.

Although it is an unusual tactic, police have used robots during armed standoffs before. In April 2011, police in Blountville, Tenn., chased a murder suspect to a double-wide trailer. During the ensuing confrontation, police rolled a bomb squad robot into the trailer and had it detonate a tear gas grenade, according to a police incident report released to the Bristol Herald Courier newspaper. The explosion started a fire and the suspect escaped before turning himself in two days later.

In November 2014, a SWAT team in Albuquerque, N.M., requested “robot assistance” to subdue an armed suspect barricaded inside a motel room. “The Bomb Squad robot was able to deploy chemical munitions into the subject’s motel room, which led to the subject’s surrender," according to the Albuquerque Police Department’s description of the incident.

The Intercept couldn't find any previous use by police of a robot in this way, How the Dallas Police Used an Improvised Killer Robot to Take Down the Gunman.

The Verge wrote Everything we know about the bomb robot used by Dallas police.

Bomb disposal robots, though, have emerged as a flexible tool for law enforcement, particularly SWAT teams. In April, members of the California Highway Patrol used a bomb disposal robot to deliver a pizza to a suspect, effectively ending a standoff. And in 2013, a SWAT team in Albuquerque used their bot to remove the blanket from a suicidal individual barricaded in his room, checking whether or not he was armed. (No weapon was found and a SWAT team took him into custody.)

Outside of the ethical questions facing the Dallas police department (what led them to take the decision to simply kill the suspect rather than try other options to capture them?), this incident raises a number of practical considerations. These include the decreased usefulness of such robots as negotiators. If suspects fear them as potential assassins, why bother to talk to the police at the other end?

I first heard of the use of a robot in this case from Matt Blaze's tweet, "How was the control link to the Dallas bomb robot secured? Stakes go way up when something like this is repurposed as a weapon."

Update: Ars has some more, Dallas deployment of robot bomb to kill suspect is “without precedent”

Trevor Noah Does His Best Yet

I've watched all of Trevor Noah's Daily Show so far and it's just been ok. Given that John Oliver and Samantha Bee are hitting it out of the park virtually every week (though just once a week), he's probably doing better than it seems. I've been thinking of giving up my season pass and usually find he does a really good segment that gives me hope. That happened again last night. Taped before the Dallas shootings, Noah did this:

"Trevor reacts to the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, two African-American men shot by police officers, and calls on law enforcement to address systemic racism. (7:40)"

"They're making changes for a gorilla! One gorilla!"

Game of Thrones Map

This Interactive Game of Thrones Map with Spoilers Control is pretty amazing. It seems to be based around the books and not the TV show. You can set a slider for what to reveal up to and show character movements through that time.

The Complete List of Movies and TV Shows On Board the International Space Station

The Complete List of Movies and TV Shows On Board the International Space Station

I've seen about 80% of everything on the space station and don't really want to see any of the other 20%.

How do you have Beverly Hills Cop II and III but not the original? At least they skipped the third Matrix film.

I don't know what Blazing Saddles Blended is.

Though listed separately, Elizabeth and The Golden Age is probably, Elizabeth: The Golden Age

Book Marks: The book review aggregator

Book Marks is Rotten Tomatoes for books.

Best Illusion of the Year Contest: Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion

Here are the winners of the Best Illusion of the Year Contest. I'm just going to embed the second place finisher: