The New Yorker Strongbox

The following is cut-and-pasted from an article in The New Yorker:

The New Yorker Strongbox

Strongbox is a new way for you to share information, messages, and files with our writers and editors and is designed to provide you with a greater degree of anonymity and security than afforded by conventional e-mail.

To help protect your anonymity, Strongbox is only accessible using the Tor network (https://www.torproject.org). When using Strongbox, The New Yorker will not record your I.P. address or information about your browser, computer, or operating system, nor will we embed third-party content or deliver cookies to your browser.

You can read our full privacy promise here.

The New Yorker Strongbox is powered by SecureDrop. To get to Strongbox and begin using it to contact writers and editors at The New Yorker, just follow these two steps:

1. Download and install software to access the Tor Project: https://www.torproject.org. This should only take a few minutes.

2. Once you have access to the Tor network, go to Strongbox at http://strngbxhwyuu37a3.onion, where you will find further instructions on how to submit files and messages to The New Yorker.

You will be assigned a randomly generated and unique code name as part of the process. If a writer or editor at The New Yorker wants to contact you about the information you have submitted, he or she will leave a message for you in Strongbox. These messages are the only way we will be able to reach you, and this message can only be accessed using your code name.

Our privacy promise

The New Yorker's Strongbox is designed to let you communicate with our writers and editors with greater anonymity and security than afforded by conventional e-mail.

When you visit or use our public Strongbox server at http://strngbxhwyuu37a3.onion, The New Yorker and our parent company, Condé Nast, will not record your I.P. address or information about your browser, computer, or operating system, nor will we embed third-party content or deliver cookies to your browser.

Strongbox servers are under the physical control of The New Yorker and Condé Nast.

Strongbox is designed to be accessed only through a “hidden service” on the Tor anonymity network, which is set up to conceal both your online and physical location from us and to offer full end-to-end encryption for your communications with us. This provides a higher level of security and anonymity in your communication with us than afforded by standard e-mail or unencrypted Web forms. Strongbox does not provide perfect security. Among other risks, if you share your unique code name, or if your computer is compromised, any activities, including communications through Strongbox, should be considered compromised as well.

The system is provided on an “as is” basis, with no warranties or representations, and any use of it is at the user's own risk.

Excellent GoPro Tutorial

Arctic Sea Ice, Minimum Volumes, 1979-2015

Will the polar bear go the way of the dinosaur? Extinction is forever.



Albedo is the fraction of solar energy (shortwave radiation) reflected from the Earth back into space. It is a measure of the reflectivity of the earth's surface. Ice, especially with snow on top of it, has a high albedo: most sunlight hitting the surface bounces back towards space.

Less ice, lower albedo; increased absorption of solar energy into the atmosphere. Over the last several decades, the volume of Arctic Sea ice has reduced by something like 80%.

David Brooks Gets It Right!

Wow! What a blockbuster! In an article entitled The Republicans' Incompetence Caucus, The New York Times columnist David Brooks, who runs closely behind Bloody Bill Kristol (of The Weekly Standard) as being dependably wrong about everything, got one right for a change! Click here!

Over the past 30 years, or at least since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene, the Republican rhetorical tone has grown ever more bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced. Public figures are prisoners of their own prose styles, and Republicans from Newt Gingrich through Ben Carson have become addicted to a crisis mentality. Civilization was always on the brink of collapse. Every setback, like the passage of Obamacare, became the ruination of the republic. Comparisons to Nazi Germany became a staple.

And again:

Republicans developed a contempt for Washington and government, but they elected leaders who made the most lavish promises imaginable. Government would be reduced by a quarter! Shutdowns would happen! The nation would be saved by transformational change!

Says Brooks, "This anti-political political ethos produced elected leaders of jaw-dropping incompetence."

Welcome to Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and the Freedom Caucus.

Pigs fly! Hell freezes over! David Brooks acknowledges that over the last 30 years, the Republican party has become steadily more insane!

GoPro Hero4 Silver Tutorial

Republicans Split: Rebuild The Village, Or Burn It Down?

Click here for an article in The New York Times by Peter Wehner (who served in the last three Republican administrations) entitled "Seeking President, No Experience Necessary."

People who would never board an airplane piloted by a person who has never flown before, or even used a flight simulator, apparently want to elect as president someone who has never served in public office.

It was a huge shock to Republicans when Obama was reelected in 20012. Wehner says this was a psychological blow like that suffered by Democrats in 1984 with the reelection of Reagan; could be, but I find a more recent parallel in the 2004 reelection of Dubya. Okay, he stole it in 2000 with the help of his father's Supreme Court, and Kerry was an unappealing candidate -- but Dubya??!

... by 2012, President Obama was viewed by Republicans as a complete failure whose repudiation was inevitable. The fact that he easily won re-election, with 332 electoral votes to Mitt Romney’s 206, was a huge psychological blow to Republicans, much like the one Democrats experienced in 1984, when Ronald Reagan — despised by many liberals — won re-election in a landslide.

When the Republicans swept the House and Senate in 2014, low-information Fox News voters were led by demagogues into believing that the policies Obama's administration had enacted in the previous six years would be undone; they have reacted with impotent rage against the Republicans they elected, who of course were constrained by the checks and balances of the U.S. constitution. Without a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, the Affordable Care Act can't be repealed, as some lying politicians promised; neither can the legislation legalizing gay marriage or the executive order on nuclear weapons with Iran (which lying demagogue politicians, pundits, and hate radio jocks are characterizing as Obama having handed Iran The Bomb).

The way this has worked itself out is in rage directed at Republican lawmakers. Many on the right refuse to recognize the institutional constraints that prevent lawmakers from doing what they want them to do, which is use their majority status in Congress to reverse the early achievements of the Obama presidency. One telling example: Advocates for the 2013 government shutdown insisted that doing so could fully defund the Affordable Care Act, when in fact no such thing was possible. Obamacare’s subsidies are an entitlement whose spending levels are not set by the annual appropriations process, meaning a shutdown could not unilaterally defund or eliminate it. No matter; with Republicans in control of the House and Senate, the Obama agenda was expected to be undone root and branch. The fact that it could not be undone created fury.

Hence the popularity of Trump, Carson, and Fiorina.

Home Of The Brave?

Click here for a Charles Blow article in The New York Times entitled "On Guns, Fear is Winning."

Fear: What would Fox News do without it?

Krugman On Energy Policy

Nobel-winning economist and columnist at The New York Times, Paul Krugman writes another winner: an article entitled "Enemies of the Sun." Click here for his critique of Republican energy policy (drill, baby, drill; frack, baby, frack -- oh, and as Don Blankenship would say, "Run coal").

Krugman points out that the energy policies of Bush and Rubio specifically (but the other candidates' policies are along the same lines) are to the right even of Dick Cheney, of all people, as expressed in Cheney's report derived from deliberations with oil, gas, and coal company executives in secret early in the Bush years.

One factor in the bullheaded Republican insistence on "Old Energy," says Krugman, is the general widespread antipathy toward the subject of climate change, which is a principle of Republican dogma that poisons from the get-go any discussion of renewable energy.

The Source Of Ben Carson's Political "Knowledge"

Prepare yourself: Cleon Skousen.

Click here for his Wikipedia entry, which describes him as a "faith-based political theorist" (!?)and a "notable anti-communist and supporter of the John Birch Society."

In 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan's presidency, Skousen was asked to be a charter member of the conservative think tank the Council for National Policy, founded by Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind series of books. Other early participants included Paul Weyrich; Phyllis Schlafly; Robert Grant; Howard Phillips, a former Republican affiliated with the Constitution Party; Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail specialist; and Morton Blackwell, a Louisiana and Virginia activist who is considered a specialist on the rules of the Republican Party.

I'm aware of the wingnuttery of LaHaye, Weyrich, Schlafly, Viguerie, and Blackwell; Robert Grant and Howard Phillips are new to me, and I have no desire to learn anything about them.

Skousen disregarded all federal regulatory agencies and argued against the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency.[25] He also wanted to repeal the minimum wage, eliminate unions, nullify anti-discrimination laws, sell off public lands and national parks, end the direct election of senators, eliminate the income tax and the estate tax, remove the walls separating church and state, and end the Federal Reserve System.

Here's an excerpt from an article by Hunter in Daily Kos entitled "Oh, Lord. Ben Carson's been getting his policy ideas from one of the kookiest kooks in conservatism."

For you youngsters out there who have never been exposed to the name Willard Cleon Skousen, think of him as a Cold War-era conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, but with about three Joe McCarthys and Glenn Beck's chalkboard stuffed inside his noggin via his ear-holes. He saw secret communists everywhere. He was convinced that Marxist forces had infiltrated Hollywood, and schools, and banking, and the arts, and architecture, and everything else you can name. He considered the American founding fathers to be descendants of "the Lost Tribes of Israel." He argued that American slaves had it pretty good, all things considered. He was certain that homosexuality was part of an elaborate plot to weaken America for the Ruskies.

In short, there's not many ridiculous conspiracy theories he wasn't an active proponent of. For all these reasons, he continues to hold disproportionate sway among the stupid and the paranoid—oh, and it doesn't hurt that Glenn Beck has been peddling him for a long while now, making sure a raving lunatic's half-century old fever dreams still get a fair shake. In general, if you're a fan of Cleon Skousen you should damn well keep it to yourself.

"President Carson"? God almighty.

Krugman On Boehner's Resignation

Click here for another spot-on article by Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman in The New York times entitled "The Blackmail Caucus, a.k.a. the Republican Party."

The article starts off:

John Boehner was a terrible, very bad, no good speaker of the House. Under his leadership, Republicans pursued an unprecedented strategy of scorched-earth obstructionism, which did immense damage to the economy and undermined America’s credibility around the world.

Still, things could have been worse. And under his successor they almost surely will be worse.

"It's Even Worse Than It Looks"

"It's Even Worse Than It Looks" is the title of a 2012 book by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein. Click here for an article in The New York Times, dated April 27, 2012, by Mann and Ornstein. The title of the article is "Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem." Mann is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution (probably the most influential think tank in the world, generally considered to be bipartisan), and Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (considered to be center-right).

The article starts off with a reference to the totally irresponsible remark by Congressional freshman Allen West that there were "78 to 81" Democrats in Congress who were members of the Communist Party. A lie, of course, and completely unsubstantiated; but such was and is the sorry state of American politics and the Republican party.

The Answer Is Yes

Click here for an article by Mark E. Andersen at Daily Kos entitled "Did we lose the War on Terror?"

The answer is yes. I have frequently observed that on March 19, 2003, the night of "Shock and Awe" in Baghdad, the happiest person on the planet must have been Osama bin Laden -- the 9/11 attacks had been an amazing success.

Click here for the Wikipedia entry 2003 invasion of Iraq. It's a fun read.

The Party Of Reagan?

Click here for an article in The New York Times Magazine entitled The De-Reaganization of the Republican Party.

The party base has shifted so far to the right that Reagan wouldn't recognize it -- and would probably be drummed out of it for his political views, which would be considered far too moderate.

Fox News Ginning Up War With Iran

Here's a short (about 3-minute) clip from Brave New Films, published in 2007, chronicling Fox News' support for and encouragement of the war in Iraq.

Eight years later, in 2015, here's a compilation of clips from Fox News by many of the same people, saying the same things -- about war with Iran:

Contrasting Sanders And Trump

Click here for an article in Daily Kos by Laurence Lewis entitled "Nate Silver: 'Stop Comparing Donald Trump And Bernie Sanders.'" It discusses and links to a piece by Nate Silver pointing out ten major differences between the two, and why, in a head-to-head contest, Sanders would be far more electable.

Thank You, Digby, For This Article

Click here.

Just do it.

And, as Digby says, read on. Copy and paste this into your address bar:

http://prospect.org/article/solidarity-squandered-1

Daily Kos Blast From The Past - Summer, 2002

Click here for the Daily Kos article, entitled "Putting the horse before the cart," dated September 11, 2002. In the summer of 2002, of course, the Bush/Cheney White House was gearing up to attack Iraq, which they did in the spring of 2003. USA Today published an article which included the following paragraph:

The White House still has not requested that the CIA and other intelligence agencies produce a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, a formal document that would compile all the intelligence data into a single analysis. An intelligence official says that's because the White House doesn't want to detail the uncertainties that persist about Iraq's arsenal and Saddam's intentions. A senior administration official says such an assessment simply wasn't seen as helpful.

In other words, the White House -- determined to attack Iraq -- didn't want to gather and compile all the available information, because it was riddled with uncertainties and inconsistencies which would undermine their case for war. Damn the torpedoes facts -- full speed ahead!

Suspected Credit Card Fraudster Taken Down Hard!

James Blake, tennis pro formerly ranked #4 in the world, standing outside the Hyatt hotel waiting for his ride to the US Open, texting on his mobile:

 

Like that's how the cops treat all suspected credit card fraudsters -- right? I'm sure they'd arrest Jamie Dimon -- or Bernie Madoff -- for white-collar fraud in the same way -- right?

Trump - The Movie

Movement Conservatism Since The Civil War

An excellent article, demonstrating political parallels between today and the Gilded Age, around 1900, when -- as today -- conservatism went too far. Click here. Heather Cox Richardson, at Salon.