Mediaboss Marketing

President Trumps last days in office offer a final opportunity to declassify critical information on the Russia investigation that engulfed his lone term.

Voluminous public records including investigative reports from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Congress and the Justice Departments inspector general have established that Trump and his associates were targeted with a baseless Russian collusion allegation. The fraudulent claim originated with the Hillary Clinton campaign, was fueled by a torrent of false or deceptive intelligence leaks, and was improperly investigated by the FBI, potentially to the point of being criminal. Despite these disclosures, key questions remain about the origins and the spread of the conspiracy theory.

Before he leaves office on Jan. 20, Trump could use his declassification authority to help clear up some critical issues of the Russiagate saga.

A version of this piece initially appeared Jan. 10 at RealClearInvestigations.com

The FBI says it opened its Trump-Russia investigation on July 31, 2016 after learning of a potential offer of Russian assistance to junior Trump campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos. It later emerged that the offer came from a Maltese academic named Joseph Mifsud, whom U.S. officials have suggested was acting as a Russian cutout.

Muellers team depicted Mifsud as having extensive contacts with Russia. Yet Mifsuds closest public ties had been to Western governments, politicians, and institutions, including the CIA, FBI, and British intelligence services. Despite Mifsuds central role in the investigation, the FBI conducted only one brief interview with him in February 2017. The Mueller team later claimed that Mifsud gave false statements to FBI agents yet, conspicuously, did not indict him for lying. The FBIs notes on the interview show that Mifsud denied having any advance knowledge of Russian hacking.

Why didnt the FBI grill Mifsud about his sources, methods and contacts? What other efforts, if any, were made to surveil him?

A highly placed Kremlin mole was the main source of the core claim in CIA Director John Brennans hastily produced 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russian President Vladimir Putin intervened in the 2016 election to help defeat Clinton and support Trump.

The ICAs claim was widely portrayed as the consensus view of U.S. spy agencies, but in reality it was the conclusion drawn by a small group of CIA analysts, closely managed by then-Director Brennan. Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations revealed that Brennan overruled two senior analysts who disagreed with it.

Multiple outlets have already outed the mole, Oleg Smolenkov, and the circumstances of his exit from Russia in June 2017. This supposed betrayer of the Kremlins secrets was found to be living under his own name in a Virginia suburb.

After the FBIs collusion probe got underway in July 2016, it purportedly did not rely on the Steele dossier, a series of opposition-research memos prepared by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. In his testimony to Congress in July 2019, Mueller claimed that the dossier was outside my purview.

Yet the FBI did extensively rely on the Steele dossier, most egregiously to obtain a surveillance warrant on Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.

There may be more evidence, as suggested in recently declassified documents, that the Steele material played a bigger role in the Mueller investigation than previously known. Further declassification could shed additional light on whether Muellers disavowal of Steele aligns with the conduct of his investigators.

In June 2016, CrowdStrike, a private company, accused Russian government hackers of infiltrating the Democratic National Committees servers. This assessment was presented as direct evidence of Russian interference in the presidential election and was later endorsed by the FBI and Muellers team.

CrowdStrikes highly consequential allegation has been contradicted by subsequent disclosures. Like Steele, CrowdStrike was a Democratic Party contractor whose version of events dovetailed with the Clintons campaigns apparent desire to muddy Trump with Russia connections. In a stunning admission, U.S. prosecutors told a court in June 2019 that CrowdStrike had submitted reports of a forensic analysis of its servers to the government in draft, redacted form.

The Crowdstrike reports would indicate whether the FBI and Muellers team were on solid ground in asserting Russia hacked the DNC and stole its emails.

Given the importance of the hacking allegation, and if its evidence is non-classified, why shouldnt Trump direct the U.S. intelligence community to release all of it?

The January 2017 ICA assessed with high confidence that a Russian intelligence agency, the GRU, used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release the stolen DNC files. In its July 2018 indictment of GRU officers, the Mueller team also strongly suggested that Guccifer transferred the stolen DNC emails to WikiLeaks.

The special counsels final report, issued in March 2019, quietly acknowledged that it cannot rule out that stolen documents were transferred to WikiLeaks through intermediaries an admission that it has no hard evidence that Guccifer 2.0 was WikiLeaks source. It does not identify who those intermediaries might have been. Also missing from Muellers account is the evidence used to identify Guccifer 2.0 as a Russian intelligence front.

The Russia investigation remains a bitterly partisan issue, but its worth remembering that in November 2016, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta called on the U.S. government to declassify information around Russias roles in the election and to make this data available to the public. His purposes were different, of course. Nonetheless, disclosing such information now would give Americans a fair understanding of an unprecedented investigation into a sitting president as well as the conduct of the intelligence officials who it carried out.

This article was adapted from RealClearInvestigations.

See the rest here:
Op-Ed: Its Trumps last chance to declassify these secrets of the Russia collusion dud - The Center Square

Not that this was a shock. As an accusation, voter fraud has been used historically to disparage the participation of Black voters and immigrants to cast their votes as illegitimate. And Obama came to office on the strength of historic turnout among Black Americans and other nonwhite groups. To the conservative grass roots, Obamas very presence in the White House was, on its face, evidence that fraud had overtaken American elections.

In 2011, Republicans in Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin capitalized on their legislative gains to pass new voter restrictions under the guise of election protection. Other states slashed early voting and made it more difficult to run registration drives. One 2013 study found that in states with unencumbered Republican majorities and large Black populations, lawmakers were especially likely to pass new voter identification laws and other restrictions on the franchise.

The 2012 election saw more of the same accusations of voter fraud. Donald Trump, who had flirted with running for president that year, called the election a total sham and a travesty and claimed that Obama had lost the popular vote by a lot. According to one survey taken after the election, 49 percent of Republican voters said they thought ACORN had stolen the election for the president.

ACORN, however, no longer existed. It closed its doors in 2010 after Congress stripped it of federal funding in the aftermath of a scandal stoked by right-wing provocateurs, whose accusations have since been discredited.

The absence of any evidence for voter fraud was not, for Republicans, evidence of its absence. Freed by the Supreme Courts ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which ended federal preclearance of election laws in much of the South, Republican lawmakers passed still more voter restrictions, each justified as necessary measures in the war against fraud.

Prominent Republican voices continued to spread the myth. Ive always thought in this state, close elections, presidential elections, it means you probably have to win with at least 53 percent of the vote to account for fraud, Scott Walker, then the governor of Wisconsin, said in a 2014 interview with The Weekly Standard. One or two points, potentially.

Rank-and-file Republicans had already been marinating in 16 years of concentrated propaganda about the prevalence of voter fraud by the time Donald Trump claimed, in 2016, that Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote with millions of illegal ballots. If Republican voters today are quick to believe baroque conspiracy theories about fabricated and stolen votes, then it has quite a lot to do with the words and actions of a generation of mainstream Republican politicians who refused to accept that a Democratic majority was a legitimate majority.

Read the original post:
Opinion | Stop the Steal Didnt Start With Trump - The New York Times

Mary Catherine Bateson, a cultural anthropologist who was the author of quietly groundbreaking books on womens lives and who as the only child of Margaret Mead had once been one of the most famous babies in America died on Jan. 2 in Dartmouth, N.H. She was 81.

Her husband, J. Barkev Kassarjian, confirmed the death, at a hospice facility. He did not specify the cause but said she had suffered a fall earlier that week and experienced brain damage.

Dr. Batesons parents, Dr. Mead and Gregory Bateson, an Englishman, were celebrated anthropologists who fell in love in New Guinea while both were studying the cultures there. (Dr. Mead was married to someone else at the time.) They treated their daughters arrival almost as more field work, documenting her birth on film not a typical practice in 1939 and continuing to record her early childhood with the intention of using the footage not just as home movies but also as educational material. (Dr. Batesons first memory of her father was with a Leica camera hanging from his neck.)

Benjamin Spock was her pediatrician she was Dr. Spocks first baby, it was often said and his celebrated books on child care drew from lessons learned by Dr. Mead.

Still, it wasnt her babyhood, her lineage or her scholarship an expert on classical Arabic poetry, she was as polymathic as her mother that brought Dr. Bateson renown; it was her 1989 book Composing a Life, an examination of the stop-and-start nature of womens lives and their adaptive responses life as an improvisatory art, as she wrote.

In the book, Dr. Bateson used her own history and those of four friends as examples of ambitious women at midlife. (She was 50 at the time of its publication.) All five had lived long enough to have experienced loss, the strains of motherhood, sexism, racism, career setbacks and betrayals. In Dr. Batesons case, she had been ousted as dean of faculty at Amherst College in Massachusetts in an apparent back-room deal orchestrated by male colleagues. It left her hurt at first; her anger would take years to blossom.

Written with wry compassion and a behavorial scientists sharp eye, the book became in its way an unassumimg blockbuster and a touchstone for feminists. Jane Fonda hailed it as an inspiration, as did Hillary Clinton, who as first lady invited Dr. Bateson to advise her.

Reading Composing a Life made me gnash my teeth and weep, the author and Ms. magazine co-founder Jane OReilly wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1989. I scribbled all over the margins, turned down every other page corner and underlined passages with such ferocity that my desk was flecked with broken-off pencil points.

The insights in the book, Dr. Bateson wrote, started from a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings, as if she were rummaging frantically in the fridge to make a meal for unexpected guests.

Mary Catherine Bateson was born on Dec. 8, 1939, in New York City. Her father was in England at the time; an avowed atheist, he sent his wife a congratulatory telegram instructing, Do Not Christen.

Mary Catherine was reared according to the rituals and practices her parents had observed in their fieldwork, including being breastfed on demand; her mother would consult with Dr. Spock. So committed was Dr. Mead to record-keeping that when Mary Catherine was in college and wanted to throw out her childhood artwork, her mother declared that she had no right to do so.

Mary Catherine grew up in Manhattan, mostly in the ground floor apartments of two townhouses in Greenwich Village that Dr. Mead shared in succession with friends who lived on the upper floors. As Dr. Mead was often away from home for work or, when at home, working full-time it was a convenient living arrangement: Mary Catherine could be looked after when necessary by a full bench of unofficial siblings and their parents, as well as an English nanny and her adolescent daughter.

Dr. Meads housekeeping techniques were also novel: When home, she cooked and ate dinner with her daughter but eschewed dishwashing, so as not to waste time that could be better spent with Mary Catherine or on her work. Day after day, dishes piled up in dizzying verticals like a Chinese puzzle, awaiting a maid who would arrive on Mondays, as Dr. Bateson recalled in an earlier book, With a Daughters Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson (1984).

The memoir is an affectionate yet sober portrait of two very complicated people. One of the premises of the household in which I grew up, Dr. Bateson wrote diplomatically, was that there was no clear line between objectivity and subjectivity, that observation does not preclude involvement.

In his review of the book in The Times, Anatole Broyard noted that Dr. Bateson had brought almost as much sophistication to bear on the picture of her childhood and her parents as they did on her.

We are used to novelists and poets giving us their highly colored or hyperbolic versions of their fathers and mothers," he went on, but Miss Bateson, who was born in 1939, is a behavioral scientist as well as a writer with considerable literary skill.

Her parents were married for 14 years before divorcing. Dr. Mead died in 1978 at 76. Gregory Bateson died in 1980 at 76.

Mary Catherine attended the private Brearley School in Manhattan. At 16, after accompanying her mother on a trip to Israel for one of Dr. Meads lectures, she stayed behind and spent part of that year on a kibbutz, where she learned Hebrew. Over the years she would also learn classical Arabic, Armenian, Turkish, Tagalog, Farsi and Georgian, the latter because she thought it would be fun.

She entered Radcliffe at 17, studied Semitic languages and history, and graduated in two and a half years. She had already met Dr. Kassarjian, a Harvard graduate student at the time, but promised her mother that she would not marry until she finished college. She earned her Ph.D. in linguistics and Middle Eastern languages at Harvard in 1963; her husband earned his there in business administration.

Early in their marriage, she and Dr. Kassarjian lived in the Philippines and then Iran, following his career running Harvard-related graduate institutes in those countries. Dr. Bateson found work as an academic and an anthropologist, learning Tagalog in the Philippines and Farsi in Iran to do so. They lived in Iran for seven years, until they were forced out in the late 1970s by the revolution there, having to leave most of their possessions behind.

Dr. Bateson taught at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brandeis University and Spelman College in Atlanta, among other institutions. At her death, she was professor emerita of anthropology and English at George Mason University in Virginia and a visiting scholar at the Center on Aging & Work at Boston College.

Her husband is a professor emeritus of management at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., and professor emeritus of strategy and organization at the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Dr. Bateson published a number of books on human development, creativity and spirituality, including Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom (2010).

In addition to her husband, she is survived by their daughter, Sevanne Kassarjian; her half sister, Nora Bateson; and two grandsons.

At her death, Dr. Bateson was working on a book titled Love Across Difference, about how diversity of all stripes gender, culture and nationality can be a source of insight, collaboration and creativity.

Original post:
Mary Catherine Bateson Dies at 81; Anthropologist on Lives of Women - The New York Times

Michael Gribble, a film music student, dons an appropriate wig to perform Hamilton lyrics written by AI. Gribble put the words to music.

Hardcore fans of the musical Hamilton can't get enough of the catchy soundtrack (I speak from experience). So they may be happy to know there's a new Hamilton earworm in the world. Lin-Manuel Miranda, the musical's creator, had nothing to do with this one, though. The lyrics were written entirely by AI.

To come up with the song's lyrics, Eli Weiss, a film production student at California's Chapman University, used Shortly Read, an AI application designed for writing that incorporates GPT-3, the powerful third-generation machine learning language model used by OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research group backed by Elon Musk.

GPT-3 has been supplied with 45TB of text data, presumably including the full lyrics to Hamilton, and can generate a range of written content with simple inputs.

Weiss and team entered this one sentence: "Here are the lyrics to a new song from the hit musical Hamilton: An American Musical." The program then created lyrics to a tune with four verses, a chorus and a bridge that correctly identifies characters in the story and their relationships to each other.

"It messes up a few times, like when Hillary Clinton makes a brief appearance," says Weiss, a huge Hamilton fan, "but overall it's incredibly convincing."

Indeed, most of the lyrics, both in words and cadence, feel like they'd fit right in to the musical, which tells the story of American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, largely through hip-hop. "I wrote my way out of hell, I wrote 6 feet past the grave. I wrote a song about you, the only thing that kept me safe," the AI lyrics go.

Entertain your brain with the coolest news from streaming to superheroes, memes to video games.

GPT-3 produces word sequences that are often amazingly human-like, but can also contain some amusing surprises.

In the case of the new Hamilton song, Hamilton's devoted wife gives him a most unwelcome gift: "I met a certain young lady called Eliza and I'm 90% sure she gave me syphilis. But I hope I gave it back to you."

Then there's the reference to Hillary Clinton as "my new Eliza." The machine learning tool likely linked the former secretary of state to Hamilton lyrics referencing that government post. How Clinton becomes Hamilton's new love is anyone's AI guess.

Weiss' friend Michael Gribble, a film music student, put the AI-written song to music and performs it in the video above. This isn't the first time AI has written a new Hamilton song, however. A few years ago, creative Max Deutsch trained a neural network on the musical's lyrics and asked it to come up with a new tune.

AI is becoming an increasingly visible player in the creative space, doing everything from generating Katy Perry and Elvis songs to painting nude portraits and crafting poetry in the style of the classics. Sometimes the results genuinely connect to the human experience. Other times, they're downright creepy.

Weiss and his creative partner Jacob Vaus are among those fascinated by AI's creative potential and have tapped it to write scripts and compose other songs.

"Right now, most of that work still has this comedic charm to it, but I think somewhere in the middle of that spectrum is what we will start to see a lot of in the years to come," Weiss says. "AI being used here and there in the creative process to fill in gaps and make adjustments."

History has its eyes on you, AI.

Read the original post:
Hamilton song written by AI features odd reference to Hillary Clinton - CNET

I wonder what the response from Donald Trump and his supporters would have been if following the 2016 general election, defeated opponent Hillary Clinton had engaged in a constant drumbeat of condemning the election process, telling the American people that she had won.

What if she had repeatedly gone to state and federal court to try to have millions of legally cast votes in areas of the country that favored Trump thrown out and if she had blasted Democratic officials who failed to nullify the election as hapless and enemies of the people?

What if her comments had caused the duly elected president and his family to be the recipients of death threats and if when challenged for her incendiary rhetoric, she doubled down on it, continuing to tell her followers that the contest was rigged?

The president and the shameless cowards within his party who stand by him are attempting to shred our democracy, to force minority rule on our country, and even worse, their actions are causing honorable elected and appointed officials who do not toe the Trump line to fear for their lives.

In the short term, they are menaces to our country, its people, and our democracy. In the years to come, they will land on the scrapheap of history.

Oren Spiegler, Peters Township Pa.

The rest is here:
Imagine if Hillary Clinton had acted like President Trump after she lost the 2016 election | PennLive letters - pennlive.com