And cheating on crucial standards is more than slight misconduct. In 1999, in the aftermath of a major earthquake in Turkey, I walked on mangled streets lined by a zigzagged skyline: Some buildings had collapsed into twisted heaps while others next to them stood tall. A seasoned earthquake rescuer explained to me how survival could be so random. Some of the builders cheated on the codes for concrete — too much sand, no interconnecting metal rods to keep the columns in place. Just this month, a powerful earthquake in Chile — where strict building regulations are properly enforced — killed about 20 people, while 17,000 perished in Turkey’s 1999 earthquake.
.. For voting machines that do not have an auditable paper trail, that means “parallel testing” — randomly selecting some machines on Election Day, and voting on them under observation to check their tallies. It is otherwise too easy for the voting machine software to behave perfectly well on all days of the year except, say, Nov. 8, 2016.
Trump and Republicans: Their Chicken has come home to Roost
This is where his true gifts are on display, this form of emotional intelligence and business acumen, the ability to tap into and exploit other people’s emotions, even those whose response to him is revulsion. This is the art and craft of the demagogue.
You have to see Trump’s statement for what it was: A naked attempt at Willie Horton-izing Mexican immigrants, and thereby the exploiting of the image, substantiated or not, of the brown-bodied predator destroying our country and taking the virtue of our women.
It provides language for people to hide their racism and nativism inside the more honorable shell of civility and chivalry. It allows Trump to tap into anger and call it adulation.
Trump knows how to get a rise out of people, and he’s doing it.
But the Republican Party isn’t innocent here. Trump isn’t imposing a poisonous view of Hispanics; he’s voicing it. And he’s voicing it in precisely the blunt and noxious terms that a sizable portion of the party feels it and in which they want to hear it discussed.
.. There is no need for anyone to have one ounce of sympathy for the G.O.P. Its chicken has come home to roost.
On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure
Sometimes, however, a mark is not quite prepared to accept his loss as a gain in experience and to say and do nothing about his venture. He may feel moved to [p. 452] complain to the police or to chase after the operators. In the terminology of the trade, the mark may squawk, beef, or come through. From the operators’ point of view, this kind of behavior is bad for business. It gives the members of the mob a bad reputation with such police as have not. yet been fixed and with marks who have not yet been taken. In order to avoid this adverse publicity, an additional phase is sometimes added at the end of the play. It is called cooling the mark out After the blowoff has occurred, one of the operators stays with the mark and makes an effort to keep the anger of the mark within manageable and sensible proportions. The operator stays behind his team‑mates in the capacity of what might be called a cooler and exercises upon the mark the art of consolation. An attempt is made to define the situation for the mark in a way that makes it easy for him to accept the inevitable and quietly go home. The mark is given instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss.
.. In restaurants of some size, for example, one of the crucial functions of the hostess is to pacify customers whose self-conceptions have been injured by waitresses or by the food. In large stores the complaint department and the floorwalker perform a similar function.
.. The cooler protects himself from feelings of guilt by arguing that the customer is not really in need of the service he expected to receive, that bad service is not really deprivational, and that beefs and complaints are a sign of bile, not a sign of injury. In a similar way, the con man protects himself from remorseful images of bankrupt marks by arguing that the mark is a fool and not a full‑fledged person, possessing an inclination towards illegal gain but not the decency to admit it or the capacity to succeed at it.
.. One general way of handling the problem [457] of cooling the mark out is to give the task to someone whose status relative to the mark will serve to ease the situation in some way. In formal organizations, frequently, someone who is two or three levels above the mark in line of command will do the hatchet work, on the assumption that words of consolation and redirection will have a greater power to convince if they come from high places.
.. As the individual grows older, he becomes defined as someone who must not be engaged in a role for which he is unsuited. He becomes defined as something that must not fail, while at the same time arrangements are made to decrease the chances of his failing.
.. Underlying this tone there is also the assumption that persons are sentimentally related to each other in such a way that if a person allows himself to be cooled out, however great the loss he has sustained, then the cooler withdraws all emotional identification from him; but if the mark cannot absorb the injury to his self and if he becomes personally disorganized in some way, then the cooler cannot help but feel guilt and concern over the predicament.
How Mitch McConnell Proved Rand Paul Right
McConnell did so utterly unchastened by a Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruling last month, which said that the law did not actually allow the N.S.A. to do the things that the agency did in its name. Section 215 says that the N.S.A. can, after going to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, compel the production of “tangible things” that are “relevant” to an “authorized investigation.” As the Second Circuit found, the N.S.A. treated the entire universe of American phone records as one tangible thing, broadened relevance to the point of meaninglessness, and ignored the limitations that the law placed on what counted as a specific investigation, to the point that “the government effectively argues that there is only one enormous ‘anti-terrorism’ investigation, and that any records that might ever be of use in developing any aspect of that investigation are relevant to the overall counterterrorism effort.”
.. Ron Wyden, the Democratic senator from Oregon, who has been a leader in trying to get Congress to fulfill its intelligence-oversight responsibilities, picked up on the theme of trust in his own speech on Sunday evening, in which he pointed out that James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, lied to him in a Senate hearing when asked about bulk collection—even though Wyden had told him in advance that he’d ask the question.