Month: May 2013

A reader writes:

It would be nice if what your reader said was true: that the nearly 40 percent increase in rape occurred because victims now feel more comfortable reporting it. (I said “victims” and not “women” because more than half of rapes in the military are done to men.) The nearly 40 percent jump was for cases of sexual assault reported in an anonymous survey. The number of reported rapes has stayed about the same. This shows the opposite of what the reader said – that no progress is being made in making victims feel that reporting their rape will lead to anything positive.

Another:

The most surprising thing about the public discussion of military sexual assault is that no one has said “duh.” Think about it – the military:

Is composed largely of men in their sexual prime;
who are in peak physical condition;
who are trained to be aggressive and violent;
who are deprived of the opportunity for normal sexual relationships for months at a time;
who are subjected to enormous stress and fear of death.

Take a lot of guys in their horniest ages, whip their bodies into prime shape, teach them aggression and violence, show them they might not live much longer, and deprive them of most opportunities for sex. What the hell do we think is going to happen?

This is not to excuse sexual assault at all. It is, rather, to indict the military establishment’s unpreparedness or unwillingness to deal with it. They should have seen it coming a mile away.

[Re-posted from earlier today]

Responding to the idiotic conventional wisdom that Obama just doesn’t have the schmoozing skills to be an effective president, Norm Ornstein loses it:

“Didn’t any of you ever read Richard Neustadt’s classic Presidential Leadership? Haven’t any of you taken Politics 101 and read about the limits of presidential power in a separation-of-powers system?”

No, it seems, they haven’t. It’s a terrific piece, because it grapples with actual history:

No one schmoozed more or better with legislators in both parties than Clinton. How many Republican votes did it get him on his signature initial priority, an economic plan? Zero in both houses. And it took eight months to get enough Democrats to limp over the finish line. How did things work out on his health care plan? How about his impeachment in the House?

No one knew Congress, or the buttons to push with every key lawmaker, better than LBJ. It worked like a charm in his famous 89th, Great Society Congress, largely because he had overwhelming majorities of his own party in both houses. But after the awful midterms in 1966, when those swollen majorities receded, LBJ’s mastery of Congress didn’t mean squat.

And the GOP Obama faces is arguably the most partisan, factional and deranged that it has been since I started observing it in the mid-1980s. Zero votes for a modest stimulus in the worst recession since the 1930s right after a new president’s astounding electoral victory? Total, hysterical and futile opposition to healthcare reform – rather than working to make it better? Mitch McConnell’s entire strategy of simply denying Obama a second term, regardless of what he did or did not do (and failing)?

If you want to be obstructionist douches in the American system, oppose everything and anything Obama wants in the House, and demand a 60 vote super-majority to pass anything in the Senate, then that is your prerogative. But the GOP is offering nothing constructive on healthcare, nothing that can seriously be accomplished in a two-party system on the debt and entitlements, nothing but Captain Hindsight on Syria, and nothing on climate change, or gay rights. Nothing. The few of them who have championed immigration reform are going to face a storm of hostility from their base – and will endure a media hazing from the “conservative” media industrial complex.

Nonetheless, Obama is schmoozing on.

And nonetheless, he has guided the economy to a sustainable recovery – unlike any other developed nation. He got his stimulus through; and he got universal healthcare. He ended two draining, bankrupting, failed wars. He presided over a civil rights revolution – and played a key role in nudging it to fruition. He has created a coalition that, without gerrymandering, would command majorities in both Houses, and may well become a durable realignment to his party’s favor. If immigration reform passes, the substantive legislative achievements will be huge.

This is how to make sense of the over-coverage of Benghazi on the right. Some, like Butters, just want to save themselves from primary challenges; others see this as an early opportunity to bloody the woman who might crush them in 2016. But all of it is a sign of desperation. I keep asking myself: this is all they’ve got? This is what they want to place in front of the public in a time of great challenges at home and abroad? This?

You don’t need to turn a lamentable piece of government incompetence and some weak, shifting talking points into Watergate and Iran-Contra combined if you actually have a popular and constructive set of proposals for Americans to weigh. They have already derailed four careers (Susan Rice’s and three State Dept officials) and ended one entirely at the State Dept. And yet they are still breathless for more accountability, even as they are running on fumes.

Some Republicans seem to think this kind of negative nihilism is a way back to power. They need to remind themselves that Roger Ailes’ need for ratings is not the same thing as the GOP’s need for votes.

(Photo: Getty Images).

Laura June has a long and fascinating look at how technology is changing the geneology game, from DNA testing to the advanced algorithms of sites like Ancestry.com:

A generic search engine such as Google can’t distinguish between, say, a first and last name, which can mean all the difference in this kind of work, especially if your ancestor’s first name was something common like “Smith” or “Taylor.” But Ancestry.com (and other companies like it) has built a search engine with a specific, single-minded purpose. It can handle, in one request: a first name associated with a last name (including a vast array of alternate spellings); a range of dates; a specific or broad range of documents to search; a geographic location as broad as a country or as specific as a town; a number of birth dates; a birth location; and additional names such as those of a relative’s children. The engine — which processes around 45 million searches a day (Google sees around three billion) — isn’t perfect, but it is very powerful, and it’s constantly being tweaked and upgraded.

Another key resource? The Family History Library, “the largest library in the world dedicated to genealogy,” founded by the Mormons in 1894:

Donald Anderson, the senior vice president of patron and partner services at the Family History Library, says that the Mormon church believes in “eternal families,” and in the ability of those families to “continue beyond this life.” So identifying ancestors, is, he says, a “significant part of the doctrine of the church.” Standing in-between giant banks of filed microfilms, he says, “We’re all God’s children.”

One of the Church’s fundamental tenets is doing genealogical research because its members believe that Mormons can baptize ancestors in their absence. The act of baptizing family by proxy — i.e., without the knowledge or permission of the ancestor, usually because they’re deceased — has been fairly controversial, but it’s not a focus for most genealogists. FamilySearch and The Family History Library’s staff welcome Mormons and non-Mormons alike. That’s because the library’s usefulness reaches far beyond its own religious goals, and the Latter-day Saints believe in spreading their information far and wide, all free of charge.

Kelsey Atherton unpacks an unsettling new proposal that would make it easier for the FBI to gain access to your online communications:

In 2006, the FCC expanded the [Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act] to include Internet access providers, but there’s a tricky caveat: court orders under existing law only instruct internet communications providers to offer technical assistance to law enforcement. That gives the tech companies some leeway if they’re uncomfortable handing over information; they can just say they were unable to make the technology work the way the FBI wants.

Under the new proposal, that wiggle room disappears. FBI officials can notify a company (with a wiretap order, say) that they need the tech to be surveillance-ready in 30 days. If not? Fines, starting at $25,000/day that the capability isn’t there.

Susan Landau explains why the idea of a “wiretap” needs updating:

This view of wiretapping is mired in the 1960s, when each phone was on a wire from the phone company’s central office, and a wiretap consisted of a pair of alligator clips and a headset.

In the 1990s, cellphones and advanced services eliminated the wire and made it harder to tap. … Now we have a new world with myriad services: Facebook, gmail, Skype, Republic Wireless, each one with a different architecture, some centralized (and thus with information “in the clear” at the provider), some peer-to-peer, some a mix. None of these are traditional carriers, so [the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act] doesn’t apply.

But the real issue, which the FBI does not seem to recognize, is that the providers of the infrastructure, the wire—or wireless signal, are different from the providers of the service. What this means is that sometimes the infrastructure provider has the content, sometimes the communications provider has the content, and sometimes no one does but the sender and receiver (which is actually the most secure way to communicate).