Predatory

Via openaccess.net.

New York Times catching up with Smut in policing the world of predatory journals:

Recently a group of researchers invented a fake academic: Anna O. Szust. The name in Polish means fraudster. Dr. Szust applied to legitimate and predatory journals asking to be an editor. She supplied a résumé in which her publications and degrees were total fabrications, as were the names of the publishers of the books she said she had contributed to.

The legitimate journals rejected her application immediately. But 48 out of 360 questionable journals made her an editor. Four made her editor in chief. One journal sent her an email saying, “It’s our pleasure to add your name as our editor in chief for the journal with no responsibilities.”

The lead author of the Dr. Szust sting operation, Katarzyna Pisanski, a psychologist at the University of Sussex in England, said the question of what motivates people to publish in such journals “is a touchy subject.”

“If you were tricked by spam email you might not want to admit it, and if you did it wittingly to increase your publication counts you might also not want to admit it,” she said in an email.

While Smut's moved on to used books published before the new ones come out, or possibly pirated from the future.

Correspondence: About those emails

Martyr Procopius, Sinai, 12th century, via IconReader.

Procopius wrote, re yesterday's post:

"Those would be the 20,000 emails from the Clinton campaign from John Podesta's personal Gmail account, which was hacked in March 2016." Wait a minute -- where did this interpretation come from? I thought they were supposed to be part of the 30,000 emails Hillary supposedly deleted? Why would anybody get excited about Podesta's emails which were already open to the public? I thought the reason to be angry about the proposal was because it showed that the FSA, the Russian intelligence agency, had been spying on Hillary's emails and stole them before she deleted them so able to expose her illegal behavior.

Also, "... (though they knew that the meeting itself, entertaining an offer of campaign assistance from a foreign governments, was unlawful) ." Wow. You're able to read minds! That must be fun. I think most people knew that campaign contributions in the form of money was illegal, but I don't think that many people realized that providing opposition research was also illegal. Has that actually been tested in court?

I spent so much time answering that I might as well just post it here:

Aha

Image via Oprah!

Very glad to hear Paul Manafort and his confederate Rick Gates have been busted for some of their many crimes against the people of the United States, and I'm not going to lie, it was bigger than I was expecting, but it's this morning's other Trumprussia story that really makes my heart beat faster, because it's really Trumprussia, and it looks like my story, the one I've been constructing, developing in an extremely major way, in the guilty plea of George Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign foreign policy adviser who kept trying to set up meetings between Russian officials and the campaign: pleaded guilty on October 5, we learn today, to lying in an interview with the FBI in January, and what he lied about was a meeting with a "Russian professor":

A “statement of the offense” document released by the special counsel’s office states that “on or about March 31, 2016,” Papadopoulos attended a national security meeting with Trump and other advisers, at which Papadopoulos stated that he “could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin”.

Papadopoulos told investigators as part of the plea that he befriended a London-based professor with “substantial connections” to Russian government officials after he became an adviser to the campaign.

Papadopoulos initially told investigators that he met the professor before joining the campaign.

The professor was not named in court documents but is described as a person with close connections to the Kremlin who told Papadopoulos that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails”.

For the Record: Shocked-shocked to find that this high-powered DC law firm charges clients a lot!

Image via Above the Law.

As the screws tighten with the ongoing arrestation of Paul Manafort, the noise machine is starting to thrash, and the attempt to discredit the Steele dossier gets ever crazier, as exemplified by that Fox News thing we were looking at yesterday, or this remarkable report from The Federalist, transmitted or not exactly transmitted through the Trumpian Twitter:

Report out that Obama Campaign paid $972,000 to Fusion GPS. The firm also got $12,400,000 (really?) from DNC. Nobody knows who OK'd!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2017

Actually the report is that Organizing For America said to have paid that to their law firm, Perkins Coie https://t.co/gljgaOIGkb

— TalesFromTheCryptic (@Yastreblyansky) October 30, 2017

Tell me what evidence of collusion looks like? THIS is what evidence of collusion looks like

AP photo via The Independent.

This reported in The Hill is virtually insane, in the sense of a story that seems to have been melted into a kind of narrative plasma in which everything is equivalent to everything else and then extruded into a narrative of persecution, more or less, of dark forces conspiring against Chris Wallace's tribe:

Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said Friday that “there is more evidence at this point of Democratic collusion with the Russians than there is of Republican collusion with the Russians” in last year’s presidential election....

“The fact that Hillary Clinton, or at least her campaign and the DNC, was doing business with a foreign national, a British spy, to get information from the Russians for this dossier certainly blunts the idea, ‘Well, it was the Trump campaign and it was outrageous the Trump campaign was having anything to do with the Russians to maybe affect at the election,'” Wallace told “America's Newsroom” anchor Sandra Smith. 

“This is far more evidence than we’ve ever seen involving President Trump and his campaign that the Democrats were directly involved in trying to get information from the Russians to affect the 2016 campaign,” Wallace said.

A DC law firm closely connected to the DNC, Perkins Coie, was doing business with regard to the 2016 presidential campaign, looking for scandalous information about Donald Trump, with an American research association of a bunch of old Wall Street Journal reporters, Fusion GPS, which had previously been investigating Trump for a Republican newspaper, the Free Beacon, on behalf apparently of Marco Rubio; and Fusion GPS contracted some work to a former MI6 officer, Christopher Steele, who interviewed a bunch of sources with knowledge of the activities of members of the Trump campaign in Russia, his area of expertise, and prepared the 17 memos known as the Steele Dossier on that basis.

That other dossier

Via Evi L Blogger Lady.

Remember my theory that the anti-Clinton documents Natalya Veselnitskaya brought to the June 9 2016 Trump Tower meeting were printouts from the stolen DNC emails?

A whole host of developments have come up since then while I wasn't paying attention to suggest I probably got it all wrong; namely, Veselnitskaya came out herself, right at the beginning of the scandal in early July, to explain what she brought to the meeting, and what she said didn't sound like the DNC emails. (It was a "memo" about "a company run by a former US citizen. She believes this company didn’t pay taxes in either Russia or the US and may also have made donations to the DNC,"  she was quoted as saying.) Then again she's also said she couldn't have offered the Trump campaign any incriminating information on Clinton, since she didn't have any ("It is quite possible that maybe they were longing for such an information. They wanted it so badly that they could only hear the thought that they wanted"), and nobody believes that—if only because the correspondence between Rob Goldstone and Donald Jr. made it clear that they thought she did, and Donald Jr. ("I love it!") wouldn't have agreed to meet her otherwise. So perhaps she's not telling the whole truth about the documents as well.

In September, in any case, some details about her document showed up on CNN, through the offices of Scott Balber, who is the attorney for US matters of Aras Agalarov, the real estate developer and sometime Trump business partner whose son Emin originally requested the meeting and also of Irakly "Ike" Kaveladze, the "eighth man" at the meeting. And in early October Foreign Policy obtained exclusive access to the whole thing, a five-page set of notes in English that she hoped to leave with her hosts following her lecture about the injustice of Bill Browder getting the US Congress to pass the Magnitsky Sanctions when he was in fact a bad person whose company Hermitage Capital Investment didn't pay taxes to the US (noted, he gave up US citizenship long ago) or Russia, and neither did Ziff Brothers Investments, a US firm with a big investment in Hermitage, which not only failed to pay taxes to Russia but were also Democratic donors ("It cannot be ruled out that they also financed Hillary Clinton campaign").

Sadly, according to Veselnitskaya's report, the Americans were not interested in these fruits of her legal research:

Donald Trump's October Revolution

Feast of the Supreme Being, France 1794, via AlphaHistory.

Or, Ten Days That Snooked the World. Or, in David Brooks's own headline formulation, "The Week Trump Won". Trump is apparently Lenin, Bannon is Trotsky, Mitch McConnell is the hapless Kerensky of the defeated Mensheviks, and I guess the Democrats must be the bewildered nobility, not yet regrouped, or fleeing to France and Germany with our diamonds sewn into the lining of our immense fur coats:

One hundred years ago on Friday, John Reed was in St. Petersburg watching Lenin, Trotsky and the rest of the Bolsheviks take over Russia. It was interesting to read his account, “Ten Days That Shook the World,” this week — the week when Donald Trump and Steve Bannon solidified their grip on the Republican Party and America’s national government.

No, I'm really not seeing that. I'd say it's ten days in which, if anything, Mitch McConnell won some signal victories against the forces of what he regards as Bannonite chaos and darkness, from the calls Trump made last week to Senators on Stephen Bannon's kill list, John Barrasso of Wyoming, Deb Fischer of Nebraska and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, promising them endorsements, to the House's 216-212 vote to approve the Senate-passed budget resolution yesterday morning, and let's just say nobody's talking about Bannon's proposal for a 44% marginal income tax rate (his Breitbart home page headlines don't include any mention of the budget or tax proposals at all: it leads with praise for Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate Trump unsuccessfully opposed, and attacks on Obamacare, immigrants, and Jared Kushner).

Adults in the Room

Via Tenor.

Old Tom Friedman was wondering yesterday ("General Mattis, Stand Up to Trump or He''ll Drag You Down") what old General Mattis should do next, now that he's won the Survivor game in the White House island, last of the so-called adults in the room, the generals and generaloids who are supposed to be managing our rambunctious young president, what with McMaster having failed to "build up much of a relationship with Trump," Tillerson having burned his bridges with the "fucking moron" epithet, and Pompeo and Kelly having sacrificed their moral authority with their public lying in support of the president's lying:

Well, Secretary Mattis, here’s some free advice to the last man standing: Don’t just stand there. If you just stand there, you’ll be next. Because Trump and Sanders will be looking to enlist your old uniform next in their defense — that is, if Trump doesn’t throw you under the bus first to escape responsibility for the bungled operation in Niger.

Secretary Mattis, we don’t need any more diagnosis of the problem. We need action. And I am not talking about a coup. I mean you need to lead McMaster, Tillerson and Kelly (Pompeo is a lost cause) in telling Trump that if he does not change his ways you will all quit, en masse.

I hate to tell ya, Tom, but I think something like that has already been done, with the "suicide pact" among Mattis, Tillerson, and treasury secretary Mnuchin that Buzzfeed reported a couple of weeks ago:

Bleg

Image by the Blockhead Film Festival at the Art Institutes International Minnesota, a worthy thing that seems to have died, sadly, around October 2014.

Hi readers!

According to the Rectification avatar, Dr. Johnson in his bag wig, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

The donation box newly installed in the upper right over the search box does not mean that we have abandoned our precious blockhead status, but only that I've had to buy a new computer, as the old one was getting really balky and slow, with a row of sticky keys from t to o and all kinds of applications that couldn't be updated because the system software was so old, and I'd really appreciate some assistance paying for the thing, if, and only if, you can truly spare it.

We'll return shortly to our irregularly scheduled programming. I'll leave this pinned for a few days. Thanks!!!

What, then, must be done?

Flake in January looking very concerned about the treatment of refugees in that #MuslimBan, photo by David Kadlubowski/The Republic in AZCentral. It strikes me that there were enough Senators, between him and Sasse and the Democrats, to make an effective noise against that depredation, except that the Majority Leader wasn't one of them and would never allow it, and if Flake wanted to actually accomplish something instead of displaying what a noble guy he is he should have been working on McConnell, not the uncomprehending Fox News viewer in the White House. 

What, then (NPR wanted to know), must be done, Senator Flake?

Asked by Steve whether he thinks "something needs to be done" about President Trump, the Arizona senator replies: "If you are asking if I think the president has committed high crimes or misdemeanors, I don't think so."

"And I don't think there is any Article 25 remedy," he says, referring to a clause in the U.S. Constitution that provides for removing a president who "is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office."

"I just think we just ought to stand up and require something better in terms of behavior and treatment of members of Congress and others, Gold Star families, you name it," Flake says. "But that doesn't have to involve any remedy like the 25th Amendment or impeachment proceedings."

Nothing that bad, for goodness sake. Just a little "casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals" (Flake's words, yesterday) and "reckless, outrageous, and undignified behavior" and "threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth or decency." Congress should "require something better."

Require how?

I just want everybody to understand, before they fall into a swoon over the courage of this empty suit, what an abject surrender he has just made (he emphasized in the interview that he's still excited about the work he wants to accomplish in his remaining time in the Senate, including "getting the deficit under control", when he just voted five days ago for a budget plan that raises the deficit a trillion and a half dollars, for fuck's sake, after eight years during which the Obama lowered the annual deficit by two thirds against Flake's, and all congressional Republicans', relentless and unbending opposition) and what a sanctimonious poser he really is. Is he going to sponsor a Sense of the Senate resolution? That'll show that Trump! ANY FURTHER DEPLORABLE CONDUCT WILL BE OFFICIALLY DEPLORED AND WE REALLY MEAN IT!

Steve M suggests Flake was going to have a near-impossible time getting reelected anyway, for reasons that go back before Trump (every step he could take to placate the insane Republican primary voters was going to make him less sustainable among the general Arizona public, where his approval rating was at 27% as of March 2014). We're going to be hearing more and more of this using Trump as a convenient excuse for Republican collapse, when Trump is actually a consequence of that.

Who's a fanatic? Oh, *you* are.

Girona, Catalunya, via Auto-Europe.

David F. Brooks on the conversation everybody in the world is having ("How to Engage a Fanatic"):

I’ve had a series of experiences over the past two weeks that leave the impression that everybody on earth is having the same conversation: How do you engage with fanatics?

There are some tantalizing implications there that he doesn't get into: (1) that some of the people having the conversation are fanatics themselves, and (2) they're not having it from the standpoint that they're fanatics—they think you're a fanatic.

Lindsey Graham can't figure it out

Late 2013 was a particularly good time for peculiar and damaging interactions with women one doesn't know in the Ritz Carlton Moscow. If you've never heard this story from December 2013, you should.

Not only did Putin add me to the Interpol list, but the US simultaneously revoked my visa. @jaynordlinger explains https://t.co/d8KskJ5CTK

— Bill Browder (@Billbrowder) October 22, 2017

Sadly, no, Nordlinger's piece doesn't explain it at all, it's mostly National Review harrumphing, though I wouldn't disagree with that part of the message.

Browder is, as you remember, the old-Russia-hand investor (the grandson of Earl Browder, who was secretary general of the Communist Party USA during the Great Depression and World War II) who made an enormous fortune out of the privatization of the former Soviet economy in the 1990s, fell out with Putin and the oligarchs, and was subjected to various indignities, banned from entering Russia (he lives in London, having given up his US citizenship in 1998, I'm sorry to say, to avoid US taxes), his business offices raided and employees harassed and arrested, companies he owned outright stolen, and $230 million in tax payments from his companies to the Russian state robbed, upon which his Russian lawyer, Sergey Magnitsky, was arrested, imprisoned, tortured—authorities were trying to make him confess that he'd stolen the $230 million himself, on Browder's orders—and beaten to death.

Annals of Derp: President Don and Sec of State Rex had a great time

So Prime Minister Lee, prime minister of Singapore since 2004, and the son of Lee Kuan Yew who was prime minister from 1959 to 1990 and "senior minister" and "mentor minister" after that, is visiting the White House, and nobody in the State Department or the White House seems to have been able to find out what his name was (Hsien Loong is his given name, and "Loong" on its own is something his mother might call him) until after they'd humiliated themselves by publishing it in the wrong format everywhere in sight:

Concerned Monsignor is Concerned

California red-legged frog, via Amphibian Facts.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, is Very Concerned about the increasing radicalization of the Democratic Party, which has lurched violently to the left on issues such as abortion and immigration:

Consider recent developments in the state of Alabama, where the Republican Party has nominated a Senate candidate manifestly unfit for office, a bigot hostile to the rule of law and entranced with authoritarianism.

And who have the Democrats put up against him? An accomplished former prosecutor, the very model of a mainstream Democrat — and a man who told an interviewer after his nomination that he favors legal abortion, without restriction, right up until the baby emerges blue and flailing from the womb.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that Doug Jones, up against Ten Commandments idolator Roy Moore in the race to fill the Senate seat of Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, favors legal abortion without restriction right up until the baby emerges blue and flailing from the womb?

Coup who?

Giraffe, Air Mountain, Niger via African Rock Art.

Masha Gessen's New Yorker article noting the resemblances between General John Kelly's speech style and the language of the military coup:

Before walking off the stage, Kelly told Americans who haven’t served in the military that he pities them. “We don’t look down upon those of you who haven’t served,” he said. “In fact, in a way we are a little bit sorry because you’ll have never have experienced the wonderful joy you get in your heart when you do the kinds of things our servicemen and women do—not for any other reason than that they love this country.”

You know who in particular that applies to, right? The guy with the heel spurs, from which he may still suffer, judging from the style in which he exercises, riding his little golf cart from fairway to hole to fairway, getting on foot only those 36 times to make his brief gestures with the clubs and then climbing back in. I'll never forget that golf cart ride he took in Taormina last spring while the rest of the G-7 leaders were walking uphill 700 yards to the town piazza (The Hill notes that he did join them on the way back down).

Why would General Kelly be publicly humiliating the president that way?

What was the point of that pantomime of limiting questions to reporters from "Gold Star families" or their friends—

Nobody Expects the Spanish Disquisition

Chiron giving young Achilles his lyre lesson. Roman fresco from Herculaneum, 1st c. C.E., in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, via Wikimedia Commons.

David Brooks ("The Essential John McCain") would like us to believe he is on intimate terms with a book by the Spanish philosopher Javier Gomá Lanzón, La Ejemplaridad Pública, 2009, of which no English translation has yet been published, and Gomá's thoughts on the topic of paideia, the ancient Athenian idea of education for citizenship:

Topics in Post-Revolutionary Socialism

Wood engraving byVladimir Favorsky, via polis.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, "What's the Matter With Republicans?", October 18 2015:

When Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas came out in 2004 with the thesis that working class voters in places like Kansas voting Republican were voting, insanely, against their own economic interests, it was wrong, because Republican presidential administration did all kinds of great things for those people, like Reagan didn't get rid of Social Security and Medicare, and everybody could get a subprime adjustable-rate mortgage, and then in the Bush first term there was Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind. And everybody would get a tax cut! Not just the millionaires.

And yet now everything that Frank said that was false then is true! Thanks, Trump!

It wasn't false, was it? The "middle class tax cuts" were pathetic, the easy credit for creating an "ownership society" went sour, Part D had a doughnut hole, and children were getting left behind all over the place. These things were clearly designed to benefit not consumers but rent seekers with an interest in the industries involved, from drug companies to educational publishers, and in the case of the banking deregulation, that even went bad for the bankers. And compassionate conservative George W. Bush still wanted to privatize Social Security.

Transhumans and Cishumans

Image via transumanity.net.

It's transhuman activist David F. Brooks with a new opus in his beloved there-are-two-kinds-of-people genre, "Upswingers and Downswingers", which looks on its face as if it might be drawing its inspiration from boxing, or maybe wife-swapping—Upswingers are couples who like to swap with couples of higher social status, while Downswingers descend to their inferiors, and in politics it's sort of similar:

Both right and left are dividing into upswinger and downswinger camps. Among Republicans the upswingers embrace capitalist dynamism, global engagement and the open movement of people and ideas. The downswingers embrace ethnic and national cohesion and closed borders.

On the left it’s between those who believe the only realistic path is to reform existing structures and those who think they are so broken we need to start over.

But no, it turns out that it's based on a kind of typo inside Brooks's memory, projected onto the science fiction writer and futurology professor born as F.M. Esfandiary (1930-2000), and his 1973 Up-Wingers: A Futurist Manifesto, which

For the record: We have always been at war with D'Souza

Just sayin. Who knows if he does it on purpose? Via KnightErrant at Kos.

Mussolini left socialism in 1917 because of its anti-militarism and spent next years working to destroy it in Italy. https://t.co/9bpi9g1nMW pic.twitter.com/A5GGQFDtrE

— TalesFromTheCryptic (@Yastreblyansky) October 16, 2017

That's not correct; it was in 1914 that he was thrown out of the Partito Socialista Italiano, of which he was at 31 one of Italy's most prominent members, after starting a newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia, supporting Italian participation on the Allied side in the Great War, which the party regarded (with some justice) as a disgusting and immoral imperialist-capitalist adventure on both poxed sides, and called for strict neutrality. That was in November, and by December he was denouncing "orthodox" socialism and its focus on class struggle and egalitarianism in favor of a patriotism of language and culture and race:

For the Record: White House Follies of Early October

Trumpy saw an economist on TV!

Art Laffer just said that he doesn't know how a Democrat could vote against the big tax cut/reform bill and live with themselves! @FoxNews

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2017

71% of economists agree Art Laffer is an idiot https://t.co/PVk2N5qYHJ (It's not easy to get that many economsts to agree on anything!)

— TalesFromTheCryptic (@Yastreblyansky) October 16, 2017