February 2014 archive

Feb 27 2014

On This Day In History February 27

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

February 27 is the 58th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 307 days remaining until the end of the year (308 in leap years).

On this day in 1827, New Orleanians take to the streets for Mardi Gras with groups of masked and costumed students dance through the streets of New Orleans, Louisiana, marking the beginning of the city’s famous Mardi Gras celebrations.

The celebration of Carnival–or the weeks between Twelfth Night on January 6 and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Christian period of Lent–spread from Rome across Europe and later to the Americas. Nowhere in the United States is Carnival celebrated as grandly as in New Orleans, famous for its over-the-top parades and parties for Mardi Gras (or Fat Tuesday), the last day of the Carnival season.

History

The celebration of Mardi Gras was brought to Louisiana by early French settlers. The first record of the holiday being celebrated in Louisiana was at the mouth of the Mississippi River in what is now lower Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, on March 3, 1699. Iberville, Bienville, and their men celebrated it as part of an observance of Catholic practice.

The starting date of festivities in New Orleans is unknown. An account from 1743 notes that the custom of Carnival balls was already established. Processions and wearing of masks in the streets on Mardi Gras took place. They were sometimes prohibited by law, and were quickly renewed whenever such restrictions were lifted or enforcement waned. In 1833 Bernard Xavier de Marigny de Mandeville, a rich plantation owner of French descent, raised money to fund an official Mardi Gras celebration.

James R. Creecy in his book Scenes in the South, and Other Miscellaneous Pieces describes New Orleans Mardi Gras in 1835:

   Shrove Tuesday is a day to be remembered by strangers in New Orleans, for that is the day for fun, frolic, and comic masquerading. All of the mischief of the city is alive and wide awake in active operation. Men and boys, women and girls, bond and free, white and black, yellow and brown, exert themselves to invent and appear in grotesque, quizzical, diabolic, horrible, strange masks, and disguises. Human bodies are seen with heads of beasts and birds, beasts and birds with human heads; demi-beasts, demi-fishes, snakes’ heads and bodies with arms of apes; man-bats from the moon; mermaids; satyrs, beggars, monks, and robbers parade and march on foot, on horseback, in wagons, carts, coaches, cars, etc., in rich confusion, up and down the streets, wildly shouting, singing, laughing, drumming, fiddling, fifeing, and all throwing flour broadcast as they wend their reckless way.

On Mardi Gras of 1857, the Mystick Krewe of Comus held its first parade. Comus is the oldest continuously active Mardi Gras organization. It started a number of continuing traditions. It is considered the first Carnival krewe in the modern sense. According to one historian, “Comus was aggressively English in its celebration of what New Orleans had always considered a French festival. It is hard to think of a clearer assertion than this parade that the lead in the holiday had passed from French-speakers to Anglo-Americans. . . .To a certain extent, Americans ‘Americanized’ New Orleans and its Creoles. To a certain extent, New Orleans ‘creolized’ the Americans. Thus the wonder of Anglo-Americans boasting of how their business prowess helped them construct a more elaborate version of the old Creole Carnival. The lead in organized Carnival passed from Creole to American just as political and economic power did over the course of the nineteenth century. The spectacle of Creole-American Carnival, with Americans using Carnival forms to compete with Creoles in the ballrooms and on the streets, represents the creation of a New Orleans culture neither entirely Creole nor entirely American.”

In 1875 Louisiana declared Mardi Gras a legal state holiday. War, economic, political, and weather conditions sometimes led to cancellation of some or all major parades, especially during the American Civil War, World War I and World War II, but the city has always celebrated Carnival.

Feb 27 2014

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning


Where the shadows run from themselves

Feb 27 2014

Late Night Karaoke

Feb 27 2014

The Demise of Liberal in America

The Surrender of America’s Liberals

In a Web-exclusive interview, political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. talks with Bill Moyers about his new article in the March issue of Harper’s Magazine – a challenge to America’s progressives provocatively titled, “Nothing Left: The Long, Slow Surrender of American Liberals.”

In the piece, Reed writes that Democrats and liberals have become too fixated on election results rather than aiming for long term goals that address the issues of economic inequality, and that the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama too often acquiesced to the demands of Wall Street and the right.

As a result, Reed tells Moyers, the left is no longer a significant force in American politics. “If we understand the left to be anchored to our convictions that society can be made better than it actually is, and a commitment to combating economic inequality as a primary one, the left is just gone.”

Liberals Face a Hard Day’s Knight?

By Michael Winship, Moyers and Company

Battered Knight photo Harpers-1403-302x410_zpsef237499.png That’s a pretty pathetic knight up there on the cover of the March issue of Harper’s Magazine. Battered and defeated, his shield in pieces, he’s slumped and saddled backwards on a Democratic donkey that has a distinctly woeful – or bored, maybe – countenance. It’s the magazine’s sardonic way of illustrating a powerful throwing down of the gauntlet by political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. He has challenged the nation’s progressives with an article in the magazine provocatively titled “Nothing Left: The Long, Slow Surrender of American Liberals.”

His thesis flies in the face of a current spate of articles and op-ed columns touting a resurgence of progressive politics within the Democratic Party – often pointing to last year’s elections of Senator Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Bill de Blasio as mayor of New York City as evidence – although at the same time many of the pieces note that the wave is smashing up against a wall of resistance from the corporate wing of the party. [..]

Reed says that the presidencies of Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama too often acquiesced to the demands of Wall Street and the right. Of Clinton’s White House years, he clams, “It is difficult to imagine that a Republican administration could have been much more successful in advancing Reaganism’s agenda.” And President Obama “has always been no more than an unexceptional neo-liberal Democrat with an exceptional knack for self-presentation persuasive to those who want to believe, and with solid connections and considerable good will from the corporate and financial sectors… his appeal has always been about the persona he projects – the extent to which he encourages people to feel good about their politics, the political future, and themselves through feeling good about him – than about any concrete vision or political program he has advanced. And that persona has always been bound up in and continues to play off complex and contradictory representations of race in American politics.”

“The left has no particular place it wants to go,” Reed asserts. “And, to rehash an old quip, if you have no destination, any direction can seem as good as any other… the left operates with no learning curve and is therefore always vulnerable to the new enthusiasm. It long ago lost the ability to move forward under its own steam…”

Up dated with a link to Prof. Reid’s article in Harper’s Magazince

The Long, Slow Surrender of American Liberals

For nearly all the twentieth century there was a dynamic left in the United States grounded in the belief that unrestrained capitalism generated unacceptable social costs. That left crested in influence between 1935 and 1945, when it anchored a coalition centered in the labor movement, most significantly within the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). It was a prominent voice in the Democratic Party of the era, and at the federal level its high point may have come in 1944, when FDR propounded what he called “a second Bill of Rights.” Among these rights, Roosevelt proclaimed, were the right to a “useful and remunerative job,” “adequate medical care,” and “adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.”

The labor-left alliance remained a meaningful presence in American politics through the 1960s. What have become known as the social movements of the Sixties – civil rights activism, protests against the Vietnam War, and a renewed women’s movement – were vitally linked to that egalitarian left. Those movements drew institutional resources, including organizing talents and committed activists, from that older left and built on both the legislative and the ideological victories it had won. But during the 1980s and early 1990s, fears of a relentless Republican juggernaut pressured those left of center to take a defensive stance, focusing on the immediate goal of electing Democrats to stem or slow the rightward tide. At the same time, business interests, in concert with the Republican right and supported by an emerging wing of neoliberal Democrats, set out to roll back as many as possible of the social protections and regulations the left had won. As this defensiveness overtook leftist interest groups, institutions, and opinion leaders, it increasingly came to define left-wing journalistic commentary and criticism. New editorial voices – for example, The American Prospect – emerged to articulate the views of an intellectual left that defined itself as liberal rather than radical. To be sure, this shift was not absolute. Such publications as New Labor Forum, New Politics, Science & Society, Monthly Review, and others maintained an oppositional stance, and the Great Recession has encouraged new outlets such as Jacobin and Endnotes. But the American left moved increasingly toward the middle.

Today, the labor movement has been largely subdued, and social activists have made their peace with neoliberalism and adjusted their horizons accordingly. Within the women’s movement, goals have shifted from practical objectives such as comparable worth and universal child care in the 1980s to celebrating appointments of individual women to public office and challenging the corporate glass ceiling. Dominant figures in the antiwar movement have long since accepted the framework of American military interventionism. The movement for racial justice has shifted its focus from inequality to “disparity,” while neatly evading any critique of the structures that produce inequality.

Feb 26 2014

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Feb 26 2014

The Most Potent Message

The Golden Rule: Why Bankers Are In Charge

by Ian Welsh

2014 February 26

The most potent message, and the strongest effect on behaviour, is when someone has the right to create money. Money, in our society, is created by borrowing. Banks and other financial institutions which have the right to lend thus have the right to create money. They have to have some form of collateral, even if that collateral is just an expectation of future earnings “great business idea, we’ll lend you money, and use your expected profits as our collateral.”

This money can be loaned out at multiples of the underlying asset. During the 2000s some brokerages were allowed multipliers (leverage) of over 40%. Even better, often whatever you buy with a leveraged loan can then be used as an asset for another round of leverage, leading to extremely high levels of effective leverage.

Some organizations also have access to very low interest rates: they can borrow at close to “prime” the rate the central bank offers to the very best credit risks. Major banks are amongst those who can borrow at this rate. They can then lend out to other people, again, at a higher interest rate, and with leverage.

If you, personally, could borrow money at 1% annual interest rate, and lend out ten times that, do you think you could make a profit? What is your mortgage rate? What is your credit card’s interest rate?

…

In theory profits are supposed to be self-limiting. If an industry makes more money than other industries, outsiders should see an opportunity, start up businesses, compete and drive down prices.

In the real world, that doesn’t happen as often as it does in theory, because you can’t just start up a bank with access to the Central Bank’s window. You can’t easily start up new pharmaceutical businesses, because it’s vastly expensive and there are huge regulatory hurdles. And when it does happen, why would you compete? Why not take the outsize profits? Why would you drive down profits? How does that benefit you?

The other check is supposed to be diminishing returns. The more money you have, the harder it is to find something to invest in: you run out of mortgages, or you run out of businesses to invest in which can make those returns. This does work, somewhat. It is at the heart of why the financial collapse happened: there weren’t enough assets for all the money chasing them, so widespread fraud occurred (liars loans, for example) and many people were given loans who couldn’t pay them back, while artificial assets were created which were not worth what they were sold for. Eventually this collapsed, but because the financial industry had already bought the political world, they were bailed out at a cost of trillions.

…

When you make millions in a few years: enough to live on for the rest of your life, in high style, it isn’t important if you’re driving the firm to bankruptcy. You don’t need the bank or the firm to be there, you’ve already made your mint.

Now, as a politician, if you do what the financial industry (or any other wealth industry) wants, they donate to your reelection campaign. They make sure your friends and family have jobs. They invite you to the best parties. And if you’re defeated, and have voted the right way, well, they’ll take care of you afterwards as well, with a cushy job. Bill Clinton, who deregulated Wall Street, is worth 100 million dollars.

Because bankers control a lot of money, they control what other people do.

Feb 26 2014

Trust and Paranoia

So, just how much do you trust the NSA?  Do you even trust it’s “professionalism”?

Your Humble Blogger is the Probable Target of Penny-Ante Cyber Predation

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism

Posted on February 26, 2014

I was hacked yesterday.

On the scale of hacks, it was simultaneously trivial but meant to intimidate. Or else hugely inept.

I am on some politically-oriented listservs. They are all Google Groups, hence one has to have a Google account to post to them and receive messages from them. I also have one political correspondent who was very communicative a while back, and so I also filtered his messages into a separate folder. Generally I’m not a fan of filtering (I prefer to get everything in my main mail account) but these were two exceptions where it made sense to put them in a separate place. He uses Gmail. I set up both folders under my Gmail account.

Both those email boxes were gone yesterday. That does not mean the contents were gone, that means the folders were deleted and the messages were gone too (I use IMAP, not POP).

I am highly confident (to use the old Drexel formulation) that I didn’t delete them by accident. First, Macs give you all sorts of warnings for actions like that. Second, I only occasionally access those folders, and you have to highlight those accounts to do something stupid to them. Third, the removal of one could conceivably be an accident, but two? Particularly since these are the only two that are focused solely on political activity (by contrast, my main email box has so much spam, both genuine spam and news-related spamming, that the noise to content ratio is very high).

…

The more interesting question is therefore what this signifies. Deleting two folders both politically-related, is either very clumsy or intended to send a message. If the latter, even though I regularly harass banks, I doubt they’d be that interested. I don’t do much original reporting, as opposed to interpreting and sharpening public domain information. Banks are more concerned about what runs in the New York Times or the Washington Post or USA Today (or until recently, Rolling Stone). Blogs are ankle-biters at most and I doubt they see them as any threat. By contrast, I’ve been told our efforts have been helpful in at least for now stymieing the TransPacific Partnership, and we’ve also been consistent critics of Obamacare. My sense is the Democratic party feels vulnerable on the Obamacare front, with the Senate majority at risk in the midterm elections and the Republicans pounding on that topic (as confirmed by the frequency of the attacks in Democrat-favoring blogs on the MSM stories critical of Obamacare). So the odds favor this being someone who is not happy with our political writings of late. Note that the Project on Government Oversight, clearly a more influential group than NC, had a break-in that looked designed to intimidate rather than extract information. So this may be the fashion of the month in incursions.

Nevertheless, this sort of incursion is the cyber analogue of the sort of penny-ante predation the banks engage in routinely, like charging 3% for foreign exchange transactions. Yes, you can get a separate no-FX charge card, but if you are busy like me, and you actually do buy once in a while from foreign sites, it’s altogether too easy to forget to check to pay that weirdo card you hardly use and incur more in late fees than the 3% ripoff on your regular card. Or how about the $25 account charge if you balance drops below a certain level? I had that happen all of one day in one month last year and was royally pissed, and it was due to the order in which they credited charges versus deposits that day. Not worth fighting it.

Remember, if my aim was to end vulnerability, I can’t secure my communications by myself. I either have to encrypt (which requires two party cooperation) or at least get my most important correspondents on a more secure mail service. And I can’t participate in these very useful Google Groups. And if you’ve got a determined, well-connected intruder, we now know computers have backdoors at the Bios level. How does a mere mortal like me contend with that when even the hard-core techies seem flummoxed?

So just as we’ve all become resigned to having banks take more than they deserve, most of us are similarly resigned to routine snooping (the capture of data by vendors, use of cookies, etc). Those of us who are more visible on the Web face a correspondingly greater level of exposure. It’s just not possible to be secure and be on the Web, and I may accidentally be a little less at risk than most people in my shoes, not by virtue of great planning or even adequate defenses, but simply by not having migrated as much of my life to the computer or even a stupid phone as have the overwhelming majority of Americans.

Yes, we should be alarmed by documentation that shows spy agencies could be involved in dirty tricks

by digby, Hullabaloo

2/25/2014 01:30:00 PM

I notice that people are complaining about Glenn Greenwald’s latest piece about the spy agencies’ ratfucking operations because of its “tone” and I realize that it’s time to remind people of this little episode in case anyone’s gotten it into their heads that this is just some paranoid conspiracy theory.

…

If they could give us even one good reason beyond “because we can” and “maybe we might find it useful some day” perhaps people would be less alarmed. But when you have documented misuse of the data by private organizations, documented plans to use propaganda and dirty tricks to discredit dissenters along with not even one example of how these programs have been helpful, it’s just beyond my ken as to why people are still defending the government’s ongoing insistence that this is perfectly above board.

…

I truly believe that lies at the center of this issue. The national security apparatus and, in particular, the spy agencies, are like a cloistered cult at this point, completely oblivious to the real world implications of what they are doing or how it’s being perceived. They seem to be stunned that anyone would question them — a very bad characteristic for any institution with the kind of power they have. You don’t have to be an oracle to see how that can go sideways very easily. Indeed, all you have to do is look at that Chamber of Commerce gambit to see exactly how it can happen.

Feb 26 2014

Cartnoon

Feb 26 2014

On This Day In History February 26

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

February 26 is the 57th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 308 days remaining until the end of the year (309 in leap years).

Two national parks preserved, 10 years apart. The two national parks were established in the United States 10 years apart, the Grand Canyon in 1919 and the Grand Tetons in 1929.

The Grand Canyon National Park

U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt visited the Grand Canyon in 1903. An avid outdoorsman and staunch conservationist, he established the Grand Canyon Game Preserve on November 28, 1906. Livestock grazing was reduced, but predators such as mountain lions, eagles, and wolves were eradicated. Roosevelt added adjacent national forest lands and redesignated the preserve a U.S. National Monument on January 11, 1908. Opponents such as land and mining claim holders blocked efforts to reclassify the monument as a U.S. National Park for 11 years. Grand Canyon National Park was finally established as the 17th U.S. National Park by an Act of Congress signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on February 26, 1919.

Grand Teton National Park

In 1897 acting Yellowstone superintendent Colonel S.B.M. Young proposed expanding that park’s borders south to encompass the northern extent of Jackson Hole in order to protect migrating herds of elk. Next year, United States Geological Survey head Charles D. Walcott suggested that the Teton Range should be included as well. Stephen Mather, director of the newly-created National Park Service and his assistant Horace Albright sent a report to Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane in 1917 stating much the same. Wyoming Representative Frank Mondell sponsored a bill that unanimously passed the United States House of Representatives in 1918 but was killed in the United States Senate when Idaho Senator [John Nugent feared that the expansion of Park Service jurisdiction would threaten sheep grazing permits. Public opposition to park expansion also mounted in and around Jackson Hole. Albright, in fact, was practically run out of Jackson, Wyoming, by angry townspeople in 1919 when he traveled there to speak in favor of park expansion.

Local attitudes started to change that same year when proposals to dam Jenny, Emma Matilda, and Two Ocean lakes surfaced. Then on July 26, 1923, local and Park Service representatives including Albright met in Maud Noble’s cabin to work on a plan to buy private lands to create a recreation area to preserve the “Old West” character of the valley. Albright was the only person who supported Park Service management; the others wanted traditional hunting, grazing, and dude-ranching activities to continue. In 1927 philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. founded the Snake River Land Company so he and others could buy land in the area incognito and have it held until the National Park Service could administer it. The company launched a campaign to purchase more than 35,000 acres for $1.4 million but faced 15 years of opposition by ranchers and a refusal by the Park Service to take the land.

In 1928, a Coordinating Commission on National Parks and Forests met with valley residents and reached an agreement for the establishment of a park. Wyoming Senator John Kendrick then introduced a bill to establish Grand Teton National Park. It was passed by both houses of the U.S. Congress and signed into law by U.S. President Calvin Coolidge on February 26, 1929. The 96,000 acres park was carved from Teton National Forest and included the Teton Range and six glacial lakes at its foot in Jackson Hole. Lobbying by cattlemen, however, meant that the original park borders did not include most of Jackson Hole (whose floor was used for grazing). Meanwhile the Park Service refused to accept the 35,000 acres held by the Snake River Company.

Discouraged by the stalemate, Rockefeller sent a letter to then U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt telling him that if the federal government did not accept the land that he intended to make some other disposition of it or to sell it in the market to any satisfactory buyers. Soon afterward on March 15, 1943 the president declared 221,000 acres (890 km2) of public land as Jackson Hole National Monument. Continued controversy over the Rockefeller gift still made it impossible for the monument to officially include that land, however.

Opposition to the monument by local residents immediately followed with criticism that the declaration was a violation of states’ rights and that it would destroy the local economy and tax base. Ranchers, led in part by famed actor Wallace Beery, drove 500 cattle across the newly created monument in a demonstration designed to provoke conflict. The Park Service did not respond to the stunt but the event brought national attention to the issue nonetheless. Wyoming Representative Frank A. Barrett introduced a bill to abolish the monument that passed both houses of Congress but was pocket vetoed by Roosevelt. U.S. Forest Service officials did not want to cede another large part of the Teton National Forest to the Park Service so they fought against transfer. One final act was to order forest rangers to gut the Jackson Lake Ranger Station before handing it over to park rangers. Residents in the area who supported the park and the monument were boycotted and harassed.

Other bills to abolish the monument were introduced between 1945 and 1947 but none passed. Increases in tourism money following the end of World War II has been cited as a cause of the change in local attitudes. A move to merge the monument into an enlarged park gained steam and by April, 1949, interested parties gathered in the Senate Appropriation Committee chambers to finalize a compromise. The Rockefeller lands were finally transferred from private to public ownership on December 16, 1949, when they were added to the monument. A bill merging most of Jackson Hole National Monument (except for its southern extent, which was added to the National Elk Refuge) into Grand Teton National Park was signed into law by President Harry S. Truman on September 14, 1950. One concession in the law modified the Antiquities Act, limiting the future power of a president to proclaim National Monuments in Wyoming. The scenic highway that extends from the northern border of Grand Teton National Park to the southern entrance of Yellowstone National Park was named the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Memorial Parkway to recognize Rockefeller’s contribution to protecting the area. In 2001, the Rockefellers donated their Jackson Hole retreat, the JY Ranch, to the national park for the establishment of the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve, dedicated on June 21, 2008.

Feb 26 2014

Muse in the Morning

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Sapling

Feb 26 2014

Late Night Karaoke

Feb 26 2014

Competely True

Conspiracy Theories

CASS R. SUNSTEIN University of Chicago – Law School

ADRIAN VERMEULE  Harvard University – Harvard Law School

January 15, 2008

Of course some conspiracy theories, under our definition, have turned out to be true. The Watergate hotel room used by Democratic National Committee was, in fact,  bugged by Republican officials, operating at the behest of the White House. In the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency did, in fact, administer LSD and related drugs under Project MKULTRA, in an effort to investigate the possibility of “mind control.” Operation Northwoods, a rumored plan by the Department of Defense to simulate acts of terrorism and to blame them on Cuba, really was proposed by high-level officials (though the plan never went into effect).

…

For our purposes, the most useful way to understand the pervasiveness of conspiracy theories is to examine how people acquire information. For most of what they believe that they know, human beings lack personal or direct information; they must rely on what other people think. In some domains, people suffer from a “crippled epistemology,” in the sense that they know very few things, and what they know is wrong. Many extremists fall in this category; their extremism stems not from irrationality, but from the fact that they have little (r elevant) information, and their extremist views are supported by what little they know. Conspiracy theorizing often has the same feature. Those who believe that Israel was responsible for the attacks of 9/11, or that the Central Intelligence Agency killed President Kennedy, may well be responding quite rationally to the informational signals that they receive. Consider here the suggestive fact that terrorism is more likely to arise in nations that lack civil rights and civil liberties. An evident reason for the connection is that terrorism is an extreme form of political protest, and when peo ple lack the usual outlets for registering their protest, they might resort to violence. But consider another  possibility: When civil rights and civil liberties are restricted, little information is available, and what comes from government cannot be trusted. If the trustworthy information justifies conspiracy theories and extremism, and (therefore?) violence, then terrorism is more likely to arise.

…

Cognitive infiltration

Rather than taking the continued existence of the hard core as a constraint, and addressing itself solely to the third-party mass audience, government might undertake (legal) tactics for breaking up the tight cognitive clusters of extremist theories, arguments and rhetoric that are produced by the hard core and reinforce it in turn. One promising tactic is cognitive infiltration of extremist groups. By this we do not mean 1960s-style infiltration with a view to surveillance and collecting information, possibly for use in future prosecutions. Rather, we mean that government efforts might succeed in weakening or even breaking up the ideological and epistemological complexes that constitute these networks and groups.

How might this tactic work? Recall that extremist networks and groups, including the groups that purvey conspiracy theories, typically suffer from a kind of crippled epistemology. Hearing only conspiratorial accounts of government behavior, their members become ever more prone to believe and generate such accounts. Informational and reputational cascades, group polarization, and selection effects suggest that the generation of ever-more-extreme views within these groups can be dampened or reversed by the introduction of cognitive diversity. We suggest a role for government efforts, and agents, in introducing such diversity. Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.

In one variant, government agents would openly proclaim, or at least make no effort to conceal, their institutional affiliations. A recent newspaper story recounts that Arabic-speaking Muslim officials from the State Department have participated in dialogues at radical Islamist chat rooms and websites in order to ventilate arguments not usually heard among the groups that cluster around those sites, with some success. In another variant, government officials would participate anonymously or even with false identities. Each approach has distinct costs and benefits; the second is riskier but  potentially brings higher returns. In the former case, where government officials  participate openly as such, hard-core members of the relevant networks, communities and conspiracy-minded organizations may entirely discount what the officials say, right from the beginning. The risk with tactics of anonymous participation, conversely, is that if the tactic becomes known, any true member of the relevant groups who raises doubts may be suspected of government connections. Despite these difficulties, the two forms of cognitive infiltration offer different risk-reward mixes and are both potentially useful instruments.

There is a similar tradeoff along another dimension: whether the infiltration should occur in the real world, through physical penetration of conspiracist groups by undercover agents, or instead should occur strictly in cyberspace. The latter is safer, but  potentially less productive. The former will sometimes be indispensable, where the groups that purvey conspiracy theories (and perhaps themselves formulate conspiracies) formulate their views through real-space informational networks rather than virtual networks. Infiltration of any kind poses well-known risks: perhaps agents will be asked to perform criminal acts to prove their bona fides, or (less plausibly) will themselves  become persuaded by the conspiratorial views they are supposed to be undermining;  perhaps agents will be unmasked and harmed by the infiltrated group. But the risks are generally greater for real-world infiltration, where the agent is exposed to more serious harms.

Indeed, for some sycophantic OLC conception of “It’s legal if the President does it” that was Nixon’s last refuge from the rule of law.  Even England rejected this concept of despotic rule 799 years ago.

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