Tag Archives: ethics

Election Fraud vs Election Hacking

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Certainly these are different from each other in method and often (but not always) in purpose, but is there an important difference were these successful in altering our election outcomes or in raising doubt about those outcomes?

I didn’t think so.

Why, then, are so many who should know better so obstructive of the Federal effort to understand the method and extent of election fraud?

There were nearly 150,000 attempts to penetrate the voter-registration system on Election Day 2016, State Election Commission says

That’s the subhead of Sunday’s Wall Street Journal piece on US Election Hacking Efforts. Illinois was hit as badly:

…hackers were hitting the State Board of Elections “5 times per second, 24 hours per day” from late June until Aug 12, 2016…. Hackers ultimately accessed approximately 90,000 voter records, the State Board of Elections said.

Accessed, not simply trying to, as was the case in South Carolina, the state with those 150,000 hack attempts.  In all, at least 21 states (I say “at least;” the WSJ just cited the 21) were targeted, and the intelligence community’s consensus is that the Russians were behind most of the attempts.

That should give an idea of the extent of the hacking at/into our election system.  Isn’t election fraud—another version of influencing or altering our election outcomes at least as serious?  Domestic defrauding of our elections, in some senses, would be even worse; it would be a betrayal by our own.

But so many governors refuse to cooperate with Federal efforts to characterize election fraud.

Go figure.

Leaks

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Investigators are re-examining conversations detected by US intelligence agencies in spring 2015 that captured Russian government officials discussing associates of Donald Trump, according to current and former US officials, a move prompted by revelations that the president’s eldest son met with a Russian lawyer last year.

Emphasis added.

Why is Special Counsel Robert Mueller allowing these leaks?  Is he not interested in running an honest investigation?

On Whose Side Is He?

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Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) has said he will not vote for the latest Senate effort at beginning the repeal and replace process of Obamacare.  He claims he can’t tell the difference between this offer and the Obamacare that exists because, in part, it leaves some of the Obamacare taxes in place.

Never mind that a critical difference between the offer and Obamacare is that the offer does repeal some of the Obamacare taxes.

The offer isn’t a perfect bill, but it represents progress, and it’s not a final answer—and I know of no one, other than a few Senators, perhaps, who are arguing that it is; that there will be, can be, no possibility of coming back next year to make more progress and coming back in the next Congress to make yet more in each of those two years.

Furthermore, there aren’t enough votes to get all of the Obamacare taxes passed in this bill.  And, at least some Obamacare taxes must be repealed in order to be able to effect significant tax code reform.

Finally, the only politically possible alternative to passing a bill that repeals only some of the Obamacare taxes is to preserve the status quo and all of the Obamacare taxes.

Paul knows all of this, of course; he’s just virtue signaling.

I have to ask, then: on whose side is he?

The Left

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…doesn’t like us very much.  And, by “us” I don’t mean Conservatives, I mean the United States in particular and Western Civilization in general.

Here are a couple of examples.  Recall President Donald Trump’s speech in Poland last week wherein he touted the successes of Western Civilization and the United States’ role in that and further said that we would never give in to the forces arrayed against us.

Our adversaries, however, are doomed because we will never forget who we are.  And if we don’t forget who are, we just can’t be beaten.  Americans will never forget.  The nations of Europe will never forget.  We are the fastest and the greatest community.  There is nothing like our community of nations.  The world has never known anything like our community of nations.

And

[W]e value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom.  That is who we are.  Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.

And

Our citizens did not win freedom together, did not survive horrors together, did not face down evil together, only to lose our freedom to a lack of pride and confidence in our values.  We did not and we will not.  We will never back down.

But these are bigoted remarks, the Left says.

According to Salon, these are “white nationalist” remarks, and

Trump was fairly begging to be labeled a fascist with his speech painting the purity of white civilization as under threat from racialized foreigners….

Here’s Brad Woodhouse, former Communications Director for the Democratic National Committee:

Western civilization and Christian Values are dog whistles to white nationalists[.]

Malcolm Nance, author and commentator from the Left on terrorism [starts around 5:05]:

That speech was the ultimate fulfillment of Usama bin Laden’s ideology of the belief that there would be a clash of civilizations between what he views as his crazy version of Islam and the West.

Never mind that that clash, that war for our survival, has been inflicted on us for years.

And from the tabloid New York Times:

In Warsaw, Mr Trump boldly stated, “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” In saying that, he demonstrated his administration’s born-again commitment to preserve America’s post-Cold War Western alliances, though at the price of redefining the very meaning of “the West.”

In the heady days of the Cold War, “the West” referred to the so-called free world—a liberal democratic order. Today it has been replaced by a cultural, rather than political, notion. But unlike in the 19th century, when a “white man’s burden” took pride of place, today what dominates are the “white man’s fears.”

Sure.  Because an American President who happens to be a white US citizen said these things and is following an American President who happened to be a black US citizen and who retreated the US from the world, taking to global extent his own view that “there comes a time when you’ve made enough.”

In a side note, the NYT in particular, also chose to “misunderstand” along a different dimension, too:

What stands out most in Mr Trump’s speech is not its oft-quoted illiberalism but its stark pessimism about the future of the West.  …he appears preoccupied by the fear of defeat. What he promised his listeners was not the West’s “victory” but that the West shall never be broken.

Because “we will never surrender” was Churchill’s pessimistic fear of defeat and not his optimism of ultimate victory, so it is with “never be broken.”  Apparently these guys skipped over an earlier part of Trump’s speech (they didn’t bother to listen to it live):

…we know that these forces [adversaries and enemies], too, are doomed to fail if we want them to fail.  And we do, indeed, want them to fail.  They are doomed not only because our alliance is strong, our countries are resilient, and our power is unmatched.  Through all of that, you have to say everything is true.  Our adversaries, however, are doomed because we will never forget who we are.  And if we don’t forget who are, we just can’t be beaten.  Americans will never forget.  The nations of Europe will never forget.  We are the fastest and the greatest community.  There is nothing like our community of nations.  The world has never known anything like our community of nations.

Yeah, that’s pessimism, all right.  [/aside]

It’s racist bigotry to manufacture a racism beef where there is none present, and it’s a particularly dishonest bigotry (redundancy deliberate) to manufacture a bigotry beef purely for personal attention.

It’s almost like they hate themselves so much they have to relieve the pressure by projecting.

A Climate Trial Legal Outcome

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…is in the offing.  The piece by John O’Sullivan in Principia Scientific International is a bit optimistic, but the outcome is legitimately expected under Canadian law.  The offing-ed outcome concerns Penn State pseudo-scientist Michael Mann and his slander lawsuit against Canadian climatologist Dr Tim Ball in a British Columbia court.

It turns out that there are two legal factors of interest here.  One is that Canadian courts always grant adjournments before a trial in their belief that an out of court settlement is preferable, and Mann had moved for such an adjournment of the lawsuit’s trial that was scheduled to months ago on 20 Feb.  Ball agreed (of course), but he was able to get conditions imposed on that adjournment, one of which was that Mann would produce the data underlying his suit in court by 20 Feb.

Now (4 Jul) Mann has refused to provide the data.  That’s important scientifically because Ball had said Mann belongs in the state pen, not Penn State, and Ball produced this figure to illustrate why.

Notice that Mann’s graph disappears both the Medieval Warm Period and the following Little Ice Age, but it does draw in a pronounced uptick in the late 20th century, resulting in Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” representation. Below that, Ball’s graph, using more reliable and widely available public data—as opposed to “data” that Mann refused to produce in open court or anywhere else, shows the MWP (and the fact that it was warmer than today), the LIA, and that today’s temperature is well within the noisy variation of those prior 1,100 years.

The other legal factor, the larger one, is that this sort of contempt, this refusal to produce the data underlying a slander claim, is taken by Canadian courts as dispositive: the refused-to-produce data are taken ipso facto as false and so the slander claim itself is false.

[U]nder Canada’s unique “Truth Defense,” Mann is now proven to have willfully hidden his data, so the court may rule he hid it because it is fake. As such, the court must then dismiss Mann’s entire libel suit with costs awarded to Ball and his team.

This outcome, if the judge follows through as anticipated, will have tangential implications for Mann’s similar lawsuit against Mark Steyn in the DC Federal trial court.  There, the court had ruled that Mann could withhold the underlying data because they are his intellectual property.  The BC court ruling, based on Mann’s contempt of court, will be of interest in the US courts and may have some influence.

The influence will be tangential, though, for a couple of reasons.  One is that foreign court rulings have little influence on domestic courts: the logic in them might be useful to understand, but they do not direct an outcome.

The other reason is that the DC trial court erred in its ruling regarding the proprietary nature of Mann’s research results.  That research was funded by the Federal government through grants to Penn State.  What the US taxpayer pays for in the way of government funding for research or development or both, however, belongs to the Federal government, including the results of that research or development.  Only the processes used in the research or development can be proprietary.  Data aren’t proprietary.

There’s one other consideration regarding the PSI piece.  O’Sullivan is taking the (anticipated) ruling as blowing up Mann’s research and with it all of the research underlying claims of human-impacted global warming.  That’s a bit overwrought.  Court rulings are legal matters; they’re not scientific findings.  The (anticipated) ruling will blow up Mann’s reputation as a climate scientist, and little else.