In India, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has warned that those who celebrate Pakistan's win over India in a recent T20 World Cup cricket match could be charged with sedition. Police in Uttar Pradesh have already arrested five people, including three college students, for celebrating the win. India's sedition law bars "words either spoken or written, or by signs or visible representation" that attempt to cause "hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection" toward the government.
With 60% of the vote tabulated–a big caveat, I am not sure how the mostly-Democrat early voting figures in those numbers–Glenn Youngkin has what normally would be considered an insuperable 11-point lead over Terry McAuliffe. It is too early to pop the champagne corks, but things are looking very good. Maybe the earthquake is beginning sooner than I expected.
Comfortably Smug explains:
It’s wild.
When people can’t buy groceries, gas costs double, and you call their children racist, they come out to vote.
I do think that the insanity of Critical Race Theory is the key issue. Staying with optimism for the moment, CRT is no more popular anywhere else in the country than it is in Virginia.
UPDATE: There appears to be funny business going on in heavily Democratic Fairfax, as they are re-scanning ballots. And Marc Elias, the Democrats’ fraudster in chief, is in the mix. Elise Stefanik is concerned:
Why are reporters allowing McAuliffe’s behind the scenes election fraudster @marceelias to dictate Fairfax County counting timelines and protocols?!?
As always, Youngkin’s win–assuming the numbers continue to come in as they have so far–needs to be outside the margin of fraud.
MORE: It looks like Republicans will win all three statewide Virginia races. The GOP Lieutenant Governor candidate is being acknowledged as the winner:
First black woman elected statewide in Virginia is conservative Winsome Sears. https://t.co/eU7ETvH9fp
MORE: The far Left, i.e. MSNBC, is making excuses. Critical Race Theory? It doesn’t exist! (But it’s awesome!) And those Republican winners? They’re insurrectionists!
This is INSANE.
MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace: "Critical Race Theory, which isn’t real, turned the suburbs 15 points to the Trump insurrection endorsed Republican." pic.twitter.com/ARppUNUuGy
UPDATE: With 74% of the ballots counted, Youngkin is up by 9%.
MORE: Youngkin is up by 7% with 80% reporting.
ANOTHER THING: The Republican candidate for Governor of New Jersey has pulled ahead with 34% of precincts reporting. I have no idea what ballots have been counted or not counted, but it would be another earthquake if Republicans win in blue New Jersey.
ONE MORE: Some have been wondering, what is wrong with white women? Here are some numbers:
Virginia 2020 —> White women 50% Biden (D), 49% Trump (R)
Virginia 2021 —> White women 57% Youngkin (R), 43% McAuliffe (D)
CRT does not play well with mothers, but another important point is that Glenn Youngkin turned out to be a very good candidate. There is nothing new here: candidate selection is obviously important. But Youngkin, whom I had never heard of, turned out to be a more skilled politician than we could reasonably have expected. That probably made the difference in tonight’s race, and it cannot be taken for granted in races in other states going forward.
When California Gov. Gray Davis faced a recall vote in 2003, then–Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante—like Davis a Democrat—presented himself as a potential new governor should Davis be recalled. The voters recalled Davis, and Bustamante was soundly beaten as a replacement by Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Now another Democratic governor is facing a recall election in California. This time party leaders don't seem eager even to hint that they lack confidence in Gavin Newsom's future as governor. According to NBC, no major Democrats within the state are considering doing what Bustamante did and running as a potential replacement:
Newsom can't run to replace himself. And he's pushing that no Democrat run as a "just in case" candidate.
"No and no," said Newsom senior adviser Dan Newman when asked if there will be or should be another Democrat in the race as an insurance policy. "Every significant Democrat has endorsed the governor and opposes the recall. There's little interest or support for it beyond that hardcore Trumpian base. So there's little need for a Plan B."
Perhaps a Newsom adviser is not the best choice to answer the question of whether any Dems are thinking of running. But Newman is correct that, at the moment, Democrats are locking arms and decrying the recall. That's an easy and risk-free decision at the moment, since the most recent polling shows only 36 percent of voters supporting Newsom's ouster.
When voters get their recall ballots, they'll have the option to vote on whether they want to keep or recall Newsom. Regardless of whether they vote for the recall, they'll still get to vote for a replacement, so the decision not to run a big-name Democrat could present a challenge should Newsom's numbers start to plunge or if the polls are off.
As the temperature heats up in California, there's a high likelihood of summer heat waves leading to rolling blackouts, both for safety reasons to prevent wildfires (given that the state has successfully held power companies liable for wildfire deaths) and because of environmental mandates that have made the state's power grid unreliable under stress. California has had an extremely dry year so far, and rain levels are far below normal all across the state.
If and when those blackouts come, the pundits may pay more attention to how it affects Newsom's poll numbers than how it affects the people who lose power. The Los Angeles Timesnotes that Newsom has said that these blackouts are the "new normal" due to the need to prevent wildfires—but when the backlash hit, he changed his tune and blamed the power companies for not clearing out fire hazards near power lines.
The Times also downplays a bit the effect that these power outages have while not completely dismissing them:
Shut-offs are a key tool to protect Californians and their homes from the threat of utility-caused blazes. But the practice creates other risks to public safety and problems for people who rely on electricity for medical needs. Prolonged outages also aggravate residents as basic services and simple luxuries, such as a cold refrigerator and an air-conditioned home in the sweltering summer heat, are taken away.
There are parts of California where temperatures will hover around 108 when these outages come. Dismissing a refrigerator and air conditioning as a "simple luxury" is a bizarre way of describing the potentially dangerous consequences for people who live in the state's deserts and not the breezy, milder coasts.
In any event, it's not actually the party's call if a candidate decides to run as a Democrat. The recall is essentially a big free-for-all. Any California citizen who meets the requirements to run for office may do so. Wikipedia lists six people who have already declared their intent to run as Democrats. None are remotely notable.
According to the same poll that shows low support for recalling Newsom, 48 percent of registered Democrats say they would like the party to put up an alternative candidates in the event Newsom is recalled. Only 29 percent oppose presenting Democratic alternatives.
The top candidates who have announced thus far aren't exactly burning up the polls. Republicans Kevin Faulconer and John Cox are sitting at 22 percent support each. Caitlyn Jenner's announcement has landed with a massive thud—only 6 percent said they were inclined to support her candidacy. Libertarian candidate Jeff Hewitt was not included in the poll.
Schwarzenegger had higher numbers in the months leading up to the Davis recall. Even so, only 31 percent said they'd consider voting for the actor three months before voters actually decided to vote Davis out. So those summer months matter.
Power Line doesn’t actually have—yet—an official Hero of the Week, but if we did, it would have to start with Braden Ellis, a student at Cypress College in southern California, who had the temerity to stick up for the police in a class presentation, indeed, suggesting police officers deserve to be regarded as heroes. His professor then spouts the ignorant nonsense that policing began and grew out of slave patrols, and then berates the student for his views.
This video of the exchange is only three minutes long, but the stupidity and arrogance of the professor makes it seem much longer—it is an example, surely replicable on a wide scale on our campuses today, of just how low academia has sunk:
Observations: Braden Ellis is more professorial than the supposed professor here. Which gives me hope in a certain way.
Second, The Daily Wire story for some reason does not identify the professor, and the Cypress College website is rather spare. (There don’t seem to be any portals or emails for administrators where one might ask about this travesty.) I think I have divined the identity of the professor, but want to confirm it before posting a name.
Prediction: Braden Ellis is headed for great things. I hope he has the opportunity to transfer to a college that will offer him a real education, like Hillsdale.
I am very excited to announce the completion of a project I've been working on for the past couple months: THE BEST OF DEATHMOLE. I picked 12 of my favorite songs I wrote from years past, re-recorded them, and have now put them out on my Bandcamp page. If you like what you hear, I'd greatly appreciate you buying a copy. Thank you for listening.
If you were jolted awake at 5 a.m. by an angry clamor in front of your house, followed by a ring of the doorbell, you probably would be alarmed. You might even grab a gun. That's what David Lacey, husband of Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey, did on March 2, when Black Lives Matter activists came to the couple's home for a predawn protest. But what he did next resulted in three misdemeanor assault charges that California Attorney General Xavier Becerra's office announced this week: Lacey pointed the gun at three protesters, told them to get off his porch, and threatened to shoot them if they didn't.
The incident is broadly similar to the June 28 encounter that led to felony charges against Mark and Patricia McCloskey, who brandished guns in response to Black Lives Matter protesters passing by their house in a private neighborhood of St. Louis. In both cases, the gun wielders claim to have acted in self-defense based on fears that were reasonable in the circumstances. But since the Laceys are black, the Los Angeles incident does not fit the easy narrative of privileged white people who are irrationally fearful of dark-skinned demonstrators. It is therefore a useful opportunity to consider the legal principles that distinguish between assault and self-defense, uncolored by charges of racial prejudice.
Unlike the McCloskeys, who happened to live along the shortcut that protesters took on the way to St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson's house, Jackie Lacey was the intended target of the demonstrators in Los Angeles, who say they were at her home to demand a meeting about her handling of excessive force allegations against police officers. But unlike the St. Louis protesters, who were trespassing on a private street, the vast majority of the 30 or so drum-banging, bullhorn-amplified L.A. protesters stayed on public property as three of them approached the front door of the Laceys' house and rang the bell. Such an unsolicited visit, while obnoxious given the hour, is not inherently illegal.
Once David Lacey opened the door, he had every right to demand that the activists leave, just as any homeowner would have the right to turn away an unwanted salesman, missionary, or propagandist. The question is whether he had a right to point his gun at the people on his porch and threaten to shoot them. "Get off of my porch," he says in the cellphone video of the incident while pointing a handgun at the protesters. "Are you gonna shoot me?" asks Melina Abdullah, co-founder the local Black Lives Matter chapter. "I will shoot you," Lacey replies. "Get off of my porch."
According to California's jury instructions regarding assault with a deadly weapon, a defendant cannot be convicted if he acted "in self-defense" or "in defense of another." That exception applies when the defendant used or threatened force because he "reasonably believed" he or someone else was "in imminent danger of suffering bodily injury"; "reasonably believed that the immediate use of force was necessary to defend against that danger"; and "used no more force than was reasonably necessary." California does not require someone who faces such a threat to retreat from the confrontation, and deadly force is presumptively legitimate when used against someone who "unlawfully and forcibly" entered one's home (which, assuming the protesters did nothing more than ring the bell and ask to speak with the D.A., does not describe this case).
Jackie Lacey, who is in the midst of a heated re-election race against former San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón and has been the target of weekly demonstrations at her office by protesters demanding her resignation, says her husband's reaction was understandable in light of the "harassment" the couple had suffered prior to the incident. "My husband acted in fear for my safety after we were subjected to months of harassment that included a death threat no less than a week earlier," she said on Tuesday in a statement from her re-election campaign. "Protesters arrived at my house shortly after 5 a.m. while I was upstairs. My husband felt that we were in danger and acted out of genuine concern for our well-being."
Carl Douglas, an attorney representing Abdullah, says that explanation is "laughable" because the Laceys could see via their doorbell camera that the protesters were unarmed. Abdullah, who chairs the Department of Pan-African Studies at Cal State L.A., adds that Jackie Lacey knew her and the two other protesters, although it's not clear whether her husband recognized them. "I would think that if you're afraid you would stay in the house and call the police because you were in fear," Abdullah told the Los Angeles Times. "They weren't in fear. They were agitated."
While the case does hinge partly on the distinction between anger and fear, the Laceys, assuming they were reasonably afraid, were under no obligation to cower in their house and wait for the police. David Lacey might have thought that pointing his gun at the uninvited guests was necessary to eliminate the threat he perceived. The question is whether a jury will agree that his perception was not only sincere but reasonable.
Abdullah notes that state prosecutors, who are handling the case to avoid a conflict of interest, could have charged David Lacey with felonies rather than misdemeanors. Assault with a firearm is a "wobbler" offense that can be charged as a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail or as a felony punishable by up to four years in prison. Abdullah says the choice of misdemeanor charges suggests that Lacey is receiving preferential treatment because his wife is the D.A.
Loyola law professor Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor, disagrees. Although she does not condone Lacey's behavior, she thinks felony charges would be excessive in this case.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Levenson noted several mitigating factors—including the earlier threats against Lacey's wife, the fact that he was confronted at his home, and his clean criminal record—that might have influenced the decision to file misdemeanor charges. "I don't know whether he is thinking particularly clearly at 5 a.m. when people are on his doorstep and there has been increasing harassment of his wife," she said. "It's easy to say he shouldn't have been so afraid, he should have called the police, he made an unwise decision. But making an unwise decision doesn't always end up with a felony or even a criminal charge."
I blogged about this lawsuit (Wash. League for Increased Transparency & Ethics[WASHLITE] v. Fox News) when it was filed last month; my view is that the suit is based on constitutionally protected expressions of opinion, and therefore barred by the First Amendment. But the plaintiff's response to Fox's motion to dismiss did much more than just argue that Fox's statements were factually false—among other things, it claimed that cable television channels just aren't protected by the First Amendment:
Fox cites to no Washington case or federal case which confirms that a cable television programmer/content provider has an independent First Amendment right when using a system owned and operated by a cable operator. Nor has it cited to a case that equates a content provider on a cable system to that of a newspaper or broadcast television station. In fact, the law is just the opposite: cable programmers, such as Fox is, have no such rights when using a cable system owned by a separate entity.
Denver Area Educ. Telcoms. Consortium, v. FCC, 518 U.S. 727 (1996) is instructive. There, the Supreme Court was asked to decide upon the constitutionality of certain provisions of the Cable Act which contained provisions requiring access to cable television systems for public access channels and restricted programming which "depicted sexual or excretory activities or organs in a patently offensive manner." The Court concluded that portions of the challenged provisions were constitutional, and others were not.
Justices Thomas, Rehnquist and Scalia concurred in part and dissented in part and filed a separate opinion. By way of a summary, these Justices stated that cable programmers using a private cable system owned by another have no independent constitutional right to speak through the cable medium as recognized by the progression of the law through a number of cases. Justice Thomas stated:
"We implicitly recognized in Turner that the programmer's right to compete for channel space is derivative of, and subordinate to, the operator's editorial discretion. Like a free-lance writer seeking a paper in which to publish newspaper editorials, a programmer is protected in searching for an outlet for cable programming, but has no free-standing First Amendment right to have that programming transmitted."
This statement is consistent with other cases which hold that First Amendment rights do not exist on private property. Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, 407 U.S. 551 (1972) (First Amendment rights not applicable to a shopping mall which is not dedicated to public use). In Lloyd, the court stated:
"We hold that there has been no such dedication of Lloyd's privately owned and operated shopping center to public use as to entitle respondents to exercise therein the asserted First Amendment rights. Here, the same is true: there is no evidence that any cable operator operating in Washington State has dedicated any portion of their cable systems to public use. Given this, noFirst Amendment rights exist on them."
There is no discernable difference between the cable systems operated by AT&T, Comcast, Spectrum and other cable operators and the owner of a shopping mall—both constitute private property. Further, Fox is not a "cable operator" under the Cable Act…. There is no evidence in this record that Fox owns and operates a cable service over a cable system in Washington State…. Fox … operates as a cable programmer as that term is used in case law as above cited. As such, it does not have First Amendment protections on the cable medium.
But this is flat wrong: Cable channels generally have no First Amendment rights against the private cable operators that choose whether or not to allow them, but they have full First Amendment rights vis-à-vis the government. (See, e.g., U.S. v. Playboy Entertainment Group (2000)). Indeed, that's the same as in many other media: The First Amendment doesn't protect me against Reason's deciding to kick us off their site (or even Reason's deleting posts it doesn't like, not that it's ever tried to do that). But the First Amendment does protect me against the government imposing liability on my posts (unless my posts fall within one of the standard First Amendment exceptions, such as the libel exception).
Book publishers have no First Amendment right to shelf space in privately owned bookstores, but they do have a First Amendment right against the government. (See, e.g., Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan (1963).) The submitters of the political ad in New York Times v. Sullivan (who were sued together with the Times) would have had no First Amendment claim against the newspaper if the newspaper had rejected the ad—but they did have a First Amendment right not to be held legally liable for their ad. Likewise, lawsuits against cable programmers are subject to normal First Amendment analysis, even though a cable system's decision to eject a cable programmer wouldn't be, since the cable system isn't a government actor.
This is pretty basic stuff, and highlights, I think, how weak WASHLITE's lawsuit is. For more, read Fox's motion to dismiss, WASHLITE's response, and Fox's reply, which also discuss various other First Amendment arguments.
According to Apple's COVID-19 Mobility Trends report, traffic in the U.S. and other European countries has nearly doubled in the past three weeks, a sign that citizens are becoming restless and increasingly unwilling to abide by government stay-at-home orders.
Police in Victoria, Australia, fined Jazz and Gary Mot $1,652 ($1,052 U.S.) each for violating coronavirus restrictions on non-essential travel after someone reported seeing their vacation photos on social media. Just one little problem. The photos were from their 2019 vacation. After being contacted by local media, a Victoria Police spokesman said "the decision has been made to withdraw the infringement notice."
HuffPost reports that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the head of the “Democratic socialist” movement in Congress and once a star surrogate for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), has “backed away” from the Sanders campaign and is refusing to stump for the Senator amid a disagreement over podcast host Joe Rogan.
Ocasio-Cortez hit the trail for Sanders in Iowa, stumping for Sanders in college towns where Democratic socialism is a major draw and, some experts contend, could have been responsible for Sanders’ narrow Iowa win. But after Sanders’ team touted a clip from Rogan’s show, in which the controversial host said he’d likely cast his Democratic primary vote for Sanders, things got frosty.
“After the Iowa caucuses, Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir asked Ocasio-Cortez to stump for Sanders in New Hampshire, according to the sources,” per HuffPo. “The campaign prepared a model schedule to highlight the kind of popular support she would expect if she attended, one of the people familiar with the talks said.”
The campaign was ultimately able to drag Ocasio-Cortez out to New Hampshire for an apperance alongside the rock band, The Strokes, but a person familiar with the negotiations told HuffPo that it was like “pulling teeth” to get the New York Democrat to agree to the trip.
After New Hampshire, Ocasio-Cortez took a three-week vacation from the Sanders campaign, reappearing only last week at a Sanders rally at the University of Michigan.
“The absence of the popular progressive lawmaker on the trail in the weeks that followed was even more notable. In nearly a month that passed from Feb. 11 until March 8 ― two days before the Michigan primary ― Ocasio-Cortez declined multiple invitations from Sanders’ campaign to speak on his behalf in Nevada, South Carolina and the 14 states that voted on Super Tuesday,” Huffpo said.
She appeared on cable news the day after the Michigan primary to help deflect blame from Sanders over his loss, suggesting to Fox News that young voters had been “suppressed” because they were forced to wait in line, even though many of them waited until the day of the primary to register to vote.
Ocasio-Cortez’s chief complaint seems to be that Sanders’ team won’t disavow Rogan, whom she claims is hostile towards LGBT causes and is “transphobic.” She, along with other progressives, felt that the Sanders campaign’s attempt to welcome supporters into a “big tent” was misguided and that Democrats should narrow their focus, pressing progressive bona fides as a way of determining Sanders’ true supporters.
All was not well from Sanders’ side of the equation, though. Although Ocasio-Cortez was a powerful surrogate for the Vermont socialist, the Sanders’ campaign was reportedly concerned she was focused on raising her own profile and not Bernie’s.
“Shakir apparently communicated to Ocasio-Cortez his dissatisfaction over her remarks about alerting the presence of immigration authorities,” HuffPo reported. “While Sanders has sought to scrap and restructure the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in its current form, his campaign has been trying to avoid the impression that it was encouraging noncooperation with federal law as it exists, according to one source.”
They were also concerned that, at one Iowa rally, she never actually mentioned Sanders by name.
The Sanders campaign denied that they were ill-at-ease with Ocasio-Cortez, however, and that Shakir ever spoke to Ocasio-Cortez about changing her approach.
For the last couple of years, I've wanted to spend some time with an Acura NSX. After all, it's a hybrid, which I like, and a supercar, which I also like. Despite a strong suspicion that I'd like a car that combined both of those things, for one reason or another the stars never aligned save for a brief 20 minutes back in 2017, which was not long enough to really form an impression. But in January, Acura asked me and three other journalists to ferry four NSXes from Ohio, where these mid-engined hybrid supercars are built, down to Florida. The only catch: we had just two days to get there—a distance of about 1,200 miles (1,931km), according to the route we were to take.
It's not like the first one
Honda, which owns the Acura brand and uses it for high-end US vehicles, introduced the NSX in 1990, and it really did shake up the established order. Until then, the mid-engined sports car had mainly been the preserve of small European outfits, most notably Ferrari. The cars looked great and sometimes handled well, but they were expensive to buy and expensive to maintain. The NSX proved you could have your cake and eat it, too. It looked the part, with relatively simple but elegant lines that left no doubt as to where the engine was in relation to the driver, along with a black roof meant to evoke the canopy of an F-16 fighter jet.
The car was a technological tour de force, with a lightweight aluminum construction and a high-revving, naturally aspirated 3.0L V6 engine mounted sideways behind the cabin. It made more expensive cars like the Ferrari 348 look positively antiquarian by comparison. In addition to the car's F1-inspired tech, Honda even recruited F1 drivers Ayrton Senna and Satoru Nakajima to help hone the car's handling on track. The first-generation NSX lived on until 2005, and while it never sold in massive numbers, it became a cult favorite thanks to video games like Gran Turismo.
In GOP circles, one of the most prominent names showing up in current debates is former Vice President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden. That's not because there's a lack of valid news. Hunter has clearly been involved in a number of activities that call his more famous father's influence into]]
During a town hall event Thursday, Rep. Ilhan Omar was asked if she would support a home guarantee and make a commitment to “building millions of social housing units.”
Ilhan Omar replied that when she first came to America she was shocked to see homeless people. “It is a moral stain on our country that we have half-a-million or more people facing homelessness,” Omar said. She added, “In a few weeks, we are going to introduce our Homes For All legislation, which will, hopefully, guarantee a home for everyone by investing federal dollars in the creation of millions of homes.”
Omar went on to explain that the Squad would be rolling out a coordinated effort regarding Homes for All: “We collectively in the progressive caucus, mainly the Squad…are going to be rolling out a Homes for All package, each one of us, that will deal with many of the systematic problems that we have in our housing.”
I guess it was inevitable that the party of free college and free health care would get around to promising free homes for all. Obviously, there aren’t a lot of details here yet but Omar says there are half a million homeless people in the US, which is in line with recent government reports that found about that many people were homeless on a given night in 2017:
On a single night in 2017, 553,742 people were experiencing homelessness in the United States. For every 10,000 people in the country, 17 were experiencing homelessness. Approximately twothirds (65%) were staying in emergency shelters or transitional housing programs, and about onethird (35%) were in unsheltered locations.
The number of homeless in a given year is much higher because most people are only homeless temporarily. They either find a place to live (with friends or family) or they find a new job, etc. The long term homeless who you see living on the street in tents are a different population, a majority of whom have mental problems or drug problems that prevent them from reintegrating into society. So if Omar’s plan is to provide free homes to the people she saw on the streets then she’s necessarily going to be giving those homes to a lot of people who have other serious problems that go beyond a lack of affordable housing.
I’m also curious about the cost of all of this. In 2016, LA residents passed proposition HHH which raised $1.2 billion to create just 10,000 new housing units for the homeless. But 2 1/2 years later the plan is looking like a debacle:
Today the ten-year goal to build 10,000 units of homeless housing is in serious jeopardy, beset by delays, losses in federal tax credit funding, and skyrocketing construction costs. Not a single HHH unit was completed by the end of 2018…
The city has committed $311,672,673 of the $1.2 billion voter-approved bond money to 33 development projects to build a total of 2,133 units of affordable housing, including 1,643 with supportive services for the chronically homeless. It has broken ground on eight projects and approved construction loans for five more, which are slated to launch within a month.
But even if all goes according to plan, no more than 239 of the affordable units are expected to be completed by the end of this year, including 164 for permanent supportive housing.
Maybe a nationwide approach will be more successful, but ultimately, no matter who provides the money, this is going to boil down to city bureaucracies that have to actually make these projects happen. Anyone who thinks that is going to go smoothly, efficiently, or cheaply, hasn’t been paying attention.
Pro-China groups are now involved in the violence consuming Hong Kong. Hong Kong Free Pressreported Saturday a large demonstration brawled with democracy protesters at a Kowloon Bay mall while also damaging pro-democracy placards set up across the island. RTHK confirmed the clashes between the two groups before police officers became involved.
The caveat is who it appeared HKPD targeted. RTHK reported officers were accused of being lenient towards pro-Beijing advocates while only arresting anti-extradition bill demonstrators. Stand News, which is pro-democracy, supported the report and noted officers pushed a photojournalist out of the way and into a wall.
A pro-China protester was also injured after police left the area. RTHK reported the attack happened because he was spotted taking pictures of anti-government protesters. There’s no defense of violence but it’s likely there was fear he was an undercover cop sent to blend in with those who are against the government. The anxiety is understandable given the fact protesters have been arrested by police at their homes. It doesn’t justify the violence but provides a bit of a lens into a possible motive.
Violence broke out again today as demonstrators clogged the streets near the Hong Kong government offices in support of International Democracy Day. The march was originally canceled by police but thousands showed up anyway.
“Even though the police rejected our march today we will still come out because it is our right to do it,” a registered nurse called ‘Ms. Chow’ by Hong Kong Free Pressstated while holding a sign vowing protesters would not surrender to Hong Kong. “I think the majority of Hong Kong people are not afraid of coming out.”
The sentiment was shared by others taking part in the gathering.
“This is the first rally since the withdrawal of the extradition bill,” protester Terence Pang toldSouth China Morning Post while he sat in a wheelchair. “That’s important because we need to let the government know that our other demands have not been met. I’m most concerned about having universal suffrage – that’s the root of all our problems.”
How the violence started is up for debate. South China Morning Postput the blame for the clashes on what they called “radical protesters” writing the group lobbed Molotov cocktails at police before they were struck with tear gas and rubber bullets. Hong Kong Free Pressseemed to suggest the bombs and tear gas happened almost simultaneously. The truth may be somewhere in between.
What happened next isn’t debatable. Bricks and rubber bullets flew through the air as the pitched battle began between both sides. Police used water cannons and tear gas and HKFP reported some journalists ended up being struck by a tear gas canister. There are multiple reports one police water cannon truck was hit by a Molotov cocktail although no injuries were reported.
One curious thing is why pro-democracy demonstrators claim to be using petrol bombs. One person told RTHK they didn’t want to hurt officers but just keep them away from gatherings. “I don’t think they are trying to aim for the police or anyone, they just throw it in the stairs.” the 21-year-old claimed. “Give us some time to retreat or something.”
The night brought about more fights and arrests. Police took Democratic Party legislator Ted Hui into custody on claims he obstructed their operations. The crime? Telling officers to not abuse their power when they arrested a couple in black shirts walking in the streets. The female in the couple told officers she was just going home but police said she’d been yelling. Odd reasons for an arrest.
Journalists were also assaulted. SCMP reported two of their reporters were attacked by men wearing white. One female Apple Daily reporter suffered a hand injury when a white-clad man tried to take her phone. RTHK reported later the white-clad gang, for lack of a better term, went after anti-government demonstrators all while police watched and did nothing. A witness to a separate brawl claimed police broke up the fight but did not arrest any of the white-clad attackers.
The common refrain of observers of the Hong Kong situation is the island is headed towards destruction. George Will wrote in his syndicated column this weekend he believes China and the Hong Kong government made an error in judgment by not withdrawing the extradition bill immediately after the protests broke out. One Civic Party leader told Will some protesters carry their will in case the police kill them.
It would be too easy to blame the hardline protesters for not backing down with their demands. They seek five things: kill the extradition bill, drop all charges against protesters, classify the demonstrations as “protests,” not riots, look into possible police brutality, and universal suffrage. The extradition bill is dead, thankfully, while the other four demands aren’t necessarily untenable. Universal suffrage will take the longest to attain although it’s still a worthy goal for the future.
Hong Kong burns. It can still be saved if everyone is willing. However, that time may have already passed.
I’m confused. Didn’t Twitter suspend the AOC satire account? The idea that the US Postal Service is a good model for any kind of “public option, let alone banking, is an absolute riot. Get a load of the Bernie Sanders look-alike the producers used here too, nodding along and saying “that’s right” to this nonsense. Whatever else is wrong with our politics, at least it produces first-rate comic acts.
Just how successful is the USPS in its “public option” model for the mail? It lost money for at least the twelfth straight year in 2018, with losses increasing by nearly a third from 2017. Those losses came despite a revenue increase and a significant uptick in its package-delivery service:
The U.S. Postal Service on Wednesday reported a financial loss for the 12th straight year, citing declines in mail volume and the costs of its pension and health care obligations, as the agency braces for an upcoming report ordered by President Donald Trump to address its “unsustainable financial path.” …
The Postal Service reported a loss of $3.9 billion for the budget year that ended Sept. 30, compared with a $2.7 billion loss the year before.
A nearly 7 percent increase in package delivery was unable to offset drop-offs in letter mail, which makes up more than 70 percent of total revenue. First-class mail volume fell by roughly 2.1 billion pieces, or 3.6 percent, as people in the digital age rely more on email for online bill payments.
Revenue was $70.7 billion, compared with $69.6 billion last year, but there were higher transportation and labor costs from delivering more packages.
Note well the irony in the explanation for the decline in first-class mail. More people would rather go online to do their banking and bill-paying than rely on the Post Office. How many of those people would expect to get better banking services in a USPS model?
The suggestion came during an event in which Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders proposed tighter caps on credit-card interest rates, supposedly to trim consumer debt. They called the current average credit-card rate “loan sharking”:
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced on Thursday a plan to rein in the profit banks can collect from consumers, proposing to cap credit card interest rates at 15%.
“Despite the fact that banks can borrow money today at less than 2.5% from the Federal Reserve, the average credit card interest rate today for consumers is a record-breaking 17.71%,” the Vermont Senator and freshman Queens Congresswoman said in a statement about the plan. …
“At a time when the American people hold a record $1 trillion in credit card debt and desperately need relief, we need to establish a national maximum interest rate of 15 percent on credit cards and other consumer loans,” Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez said in their statement.
They added that credit card companies that charge over 20% interest on credit cards are “involved in extortion and loan sharking.”
Bear in mind that there is a significant difference in the type of lending between banks borrowing from the Federal Reserve and credit-card debt. The former is secured lending, made stronger by FDIC insurance that protects depositors of banks and to some extent its creditors as well. The latter is unsecured debt, liquidity provided on trust alone and usually not intended for long-term debt balances. It’s the riskiest credit to extend and the interest rates reflect the overall risk. That’s why it’s best to avoid credit cards at all, or to pay them off every month.
At least this part of the proposal falls within rational policymaking. The FTC already regulates caps on interest rates to prevent usury and “loan-sharking,” so to speak, so negotiating the caps on those regulations is fair game. Even that is tricky, though; if the government does not allow lenders to price in the risks of unsecured credit, we will see access to credit cards dry up for all but the safest risks — who probably won’t use credit cards heavily either.
What we don’t need is government to compete in yet another industry it also regulates. A “public option” for banking is ludicrous on its own, even without suggesting that it be modeled on the perpetual red-ink Post Office model.
Facebook and Twitter have acquired reputations as the Boris and Natasha of our day, spreading fake news the way British colonists handed out smallpox-infested blankets to Indians. Yet disinformation is a lot older than social media.
Modern Americans could also be forgiven for thinking the 2016 election was the first time a foreign country made an organized attempt to affect a stateside political outcome. But in fact, we've spent decades swimming in false stories spread by governments from Moscow to London (and, for that matter, Washington). Journalists have frequently served as those governments' partners in their propaganda and espionage efforts—sometimes unwittingly and other times with full intent.
Bits and pieces of this reality have emerged via news reports, particularly some 1970s stories by John Crewdson in The New York Times and Carl Bernstein in Rolling Stone. Last year, just before Thanksgiving, the Louisville Courier-Journal had an unusual scoop: One of its own reporters in the mid-1960s had been a full-time CIA officer, hired by a newsroom boss with full knowledge that his new city desk inkslinger had a secret identity. But nobody has pried as many horrifying, hilarious details out of Washington journalism's secret cloak-and-dagger side as Steven T. Usdin in his new book, Bureau of Spies: The Secret Connections Between Espionage and Journalism in Washington (Prometheus Books).
It turns out American reporters spied for the CIA. They spied for the Soviets. And they spied for the British—boy, did they spy for the British, helping them nudge us into World War II, unseat an isolationist congressman, and riddle the U.S. media with fake news.
Usdin has written a good bit about espionage, including 2005's Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley, the story of a couple of members of the Rosenberg atomic spy ring. With Bureau of Spies, he's not just written history but established a broader context for the accusations of fake news that fly around Washington today—a context that a lot of journalists may not find entirely pleasant.
Though it covers seven decades of clandestine journalistic hoodoo, Bureau of Spies is at its liveliest in the 10 or 15 years around World War II, a time when the National Press Building—and especially its bar—"came to resemble Humphrey Bogart's Casablanca," Usdin writes. Reporters, spooks, and spook-reporters from Japan, Great Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, and the U.S. would slink through the halls and huddle over drinks, swapping and stealing secrets.
In 1940, the British—already at war with Germany and not faring well—set up an intelligence office in Washington intended to nudge the United States away from neutrality and into open support for London. It did so mainly by planting falsified stories in the mainstream American news media. The British Security Co-ordination (BSC) was the Russian troll farm of its day—in Usdin's words, a place where government agents could "craft lies, inject them into news feeds, and then track them as they fly around the globe" (or as the young folks say, post clickbait).
England's spooks were far from operating on their own. In addition to a wink and a nod from President Franklin Roosevelt, who knew about the BSC and ordered the FBI to leave it alone, the Brits benefited from a compliant Washington press corps.
"Scores—perhaps hundreds—of American journalists who believed that fighting fascism justified unethical and, at times, illegal behavior, cooperated with British intelligence in 1940 and '41," Usdin writes. They filled U.S. newspapers and radio stations with fake stories, many of them about anti-interventionist U.S. politicians. One congressman, Republican Hamilton Fish of New York's Hudson Valley, lost his seat after four years of dirty tricks and fabricated stories. Fish, in an angry concession speech, said his loss "should largely be credited to Communists and Red forces from New York City." As the author of a secret history of BSC operations in America noted, "he might—with more accuracy—have blamed BSC."
The journalists in the BSC's pocket were by no means scuffling freelancers or marginal hacks. Some of the fake stories the Brits used to batter Hamilton Fish were written by Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, whose syndicated column ("The Washington Merry-Go-Round") was among the most widely read in America. Another British beguilee, Edgar Ansel Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News, had won a Pulitzer in 1933 for covering Hitler's rise to power. By 1940 he was writing, at British behest, a wildly paranoid series of stories suggesting there were German spies hiding under every bed west of Berlin.
Eventually, the BSC's journalistic adventures grew so extensive that the Brits needed a more sophisticated cover for them. Thus was born in 1940 the Overseas News Agency (ONA), a corporate cousin to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency wire service. The ONA ostensibly covered Europe's ethnic-minority communities in a straight-arrow, just-the-facts fashion. Actually, it was substantially bankrolled by British intelligence, and many of its reporters were BSC spies. They gathered intel for their London bosses (who offered to share their reports with the FBI, which wasn't interested) and wrote lurid propaganda for their editors, notably including that the German army was rounding up women by the trainload in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and sending them back to the Reich, where "they will be entrusted with the important work of amusing German soldiers, in order to keep up the morale of the troops."
One of the ONA's biggest guns was a syndicated anti-Nazi columnist named Harry Hart Frank. When the war was over, he adopted the pen name Pat Frank and wrote a series of marvelously paranoid Cold War novels, including Alas, Babylon (small Florida town struggles to survive a nuclear war) and Forbidden Area (Russian moles plot to ground the U.S. Air Force and enable a Soviet nuclear first strike). His work for the ONA was just as compulsively readable and just as thoroughly fictional, including stories that France's Vichy government was turning Martinique and Haiti into Nazi military strongholds from which raids could be launched on the Panama Canal, Puerto Rico, and even Miami.
Other ONA stories were more optimistic, particularly one in which Free World astrologers confirmed that the death of a 130-year-old Bedouin fortune-teller was "a sign of a coming defeat for Hitler." (The Brits also sponsored a 1941 U.S. tour by the Hungarian "astro-philosopher" Louis de Wohl, who passed along signs from the stars that Hitler was on a downhill slide. De Wohl came with an impressive résumé—he was chums with Goebbels' personal astrologer.)
Some of the disinformation spread by the ONA and other British intelligence organs would echo through history. BSC files show it spent a lot of time manufacturing the first rumors about Hitler's supposedly crumbling sanity, including "an uncontrollable fear that his mustache is growing more and more like Stalin's, and he has it shaved every morning much closer than usual."
Soon the New York Post printed a story saying Hitler's doctors were in Switzerland consulting with Carl Jung. The Soviet news agency TASS picked up the story, which caught the eye of British papers, and a United Press International (UPI) reporter in London sent it back to Washington. Multiple-source confirmation that Hitler was barking mad! Though Usdin doesn't say so, it's easy to imagine that the bit about the mustache inspired, a quarter of a century later, one of the CIA's signature works: an attempt to discredit Fidel Castro by making his beard fall out. (Somewhat less effective: a BSC attempt to spread a rumor that military rations were causing a wave of impotence among German soldiers.)
In 1940, the British set up an intelligence office in Washington intended to nudge the U.S. away from neutrality in the war by planting falsified stories in the American media.
Useful as the ONA was for getting stories into the U.S. media, there often was no need for cutouts or shell games to trick American reporters into doing the Brits' work. The BSC wrote up an entire series of stories on France's alleged espionage activities in the United States, then gave it to New York Herald Tribune reporter Ansel E. Talbert. The series, published under his name, appeared in about a hundred American papers and won Talbert a congratulatory letter from Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. "Talbert didn't tell him that his biggest contribution to the series was lending his byline," notes Usdin.
The British were not the only ones who found reporters an easy way into American secrets. Using its wire service TASS as a (very thin) front, Usdin writes, Soviet intelligence by 1941 had recruited 22 U.S. journalists into espionage. Only engineers, crucial to Russian efforts to acquire U.S. military technology, were a more fertile source for Moscow.
Among the 22 was Robert Allen, who with partner Drew Pearson would later plant British-manufactured fake news in their popular column. Even if you think that realpolitik justified Allen's work for the Brits, his collaboration with the Soviets cannot be explained as anything other than pure venality.
Allen began passing secrets to the USSR in 1933, long before they became U.S. wartime allies. (The Russian agency he worked with was known then as OGPU, the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. It's one of several names Soviet intelligence used and abandoned: Cheka, GPU, NKVD, KGB—a malign alphabet soup that even Vanna White couldn't have kept up with. I'll use KGB for all of them, since the grim essence of their work never changed, even if their names did.) KGB records show that Allen made $100 a month from Moscow, which sounds like peanuts but was actually double what he took home from his syndicated column. For that, he supplied the Soviets with early tips on news he was reporting, including the fact that the newly elected Roosevelt planned to extend formal diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union for the first time.
Such political gossip, even if not top secret, was extremely useful to Stalin's regime—and a pre-CIA Washington had no comparable source on what was going on in the far more secretive Kremlin. "At a time when the United States had almost no capacity to collect or analyze foreign political intelligence and the Kremlin was a black box to American policy makers, men in the [KGB headquarters] were privy to a private conversation between two U.S. senators revealing a controversial, secret policy decision made by America's next president," Usdin writes.
Allen passed along more than just Capitol chatter. He was well-sourced at the Office of Naval Investigations, then the leading U.S. military intelligence outfit, and he kept the Soviets up to date on American spying against Moscow's enemy Japan, including the news that four U.S. agents disguised as Malayan fishermen had discovered extensive Japanese military fortifications in the Marshall Islands.
The last known evidence of Allen's espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union dates to February 1933. But it would have been easy for the Soviets, holding enough blackmail ammunition to ruin his career and even put him in jail, to forcibly reactivate Allen at any time—including the years during World War II when he left journalism to serve as an intelligence officer for General George Patton in Europe.
Other well-known names in American journalism flirted with the KGB, sometimes without even knowing it. The relationship between reporter and source is peculiar and multidimensional—each side is, to some extent, extracting information from the other—and when the source is a spy, it can be extremely difficult to figure out who is getting the better of the deal.
I speak from experience here. Working on a story about a rogue Texas cop who may also have been a narcotrafficker, I some years back called the CIA to ask if it had ever worked with an Indonesian air-cargo service that once employed him. Well, let me see what I can do for you, said the public information officer. But first, let me just get some information so I know we're all on the same page. This cop you're writing about: What's his name? What's his age? What's his last known address? The questions went on for 20 minutes or so, until the CIA man said, "I think that about covers it. So, the CIA doesn't comment on possible intelligence matters. Thanks for offering us the opportunity, though." After that, I'm more than willing to believe Usdin's conclusion that Washington columnist and New Republic co-founder Walter Lippman was never a witting KGB agent, despite considerable appearances to the contrary.
Any discussion of Lippman and the KGB needs to start with some caveats. The first and most obvious is that it's neither a crime nor bad journalism for a reporter to talk to a spy. Spies may lie to you and almost certainly will try to spin you, but that's true of practically anybody who works for a government. Spies have a lot of information—collecting it is their job, after all—and it makes good sense to try to get them to share some of it. Second, it is entirely possible for a reporter, no matter how good, to talk to an intelligence operative without being aware of it. In 20 years covering Latin America, only once or twice did I meet anybody who announced, "Hi, I'm a spy." Mostly they are under a cover carefully constructed to fool people like journalists. Largely, they succeed.
So the fact that Lippman fluttered around KGB men in Washington doesn't necessarily imply anything negative. He would have been interested in their knowledgeable commentary on Soviet foreign policy, and they would have found almost anything he had to say extremely useful. Lippman was not only an influential journalist but a courtier to Washington's foreign policy establishment, and he was an obvious target for Soviet cultivation on just about any level. Nuggets about his close association with Russian spooks have been emerging for years, and Bureau of Spies piles them higher than ever.
The KGB in 1941 recruited Lippman's secretary, Mary Price, who applied herself to espionage with Stakhanovite zeal. "For two years, she rifled his files, eavesdropped on his conversations and scanned his correspondence, passing on anything of interest" to Moscow, Usdin writes. When an exhausted Price quit the clandestine life to become an open Communist, the KGB kept in close touch with Lippman through Vladimir Pravdin, the TASS Washington bureau chief and, in Usdin's description, "a trained and hardened intelligence operative." The two men met so frequently that Pravdin, in his reports back to his KGB bosses, referred to their conversations as their "usual talks."
The bureau chief's cables to Moscow make it clear that Lippman didn't know he was talking to a KGB officer; he just thought he was chatting up a good source on the Soviet Union. And indeed, Pravdin could have delivered some thrilling scoops had Lippman known the right questions to ask. Among Pravdin's previous assignments were stalking Stalin's enemy Trotsky and murdering an old Bolshevik who had fallen from Stalin's favor.
But Lippman was less concerned with his workaday newspaper readers than his foreign policy chums, to whom he reported as least as slavishly as Pravdin did to the KGB. After one long meeting between the two in May 1944, Lippman passed along what he had learned about Soviet territorial ambitions in Manchuria to senior State Department officials, while Pravdin cabled Moscow about squabbles between Churchill and Roosevelt over the forthcoming Allied invasion of France, U.S. military progress in Asia, and senior FDR adviser Averill Harriman's thinking about Soviet plans for Japan.
Soviet intelligence by 1941 had recruited 22 U.S. journalists into espionage. Only engineers, crucial to Russian efforts to acquire U.S. military technology, were a more fertile source.
Pravdin was just one of several KGB men with press cards offering blandishments to American journalists. It's not exactly shocking that Vladimir Romm, a reporter in the Washington bureau of the official Soviet daily Izvestia, was working for Russian intelligence. What is a little surprising is how easily he mesmerized American journalists, who had no clue at all that Romm was a spy, much less that he had helped administer the Stalin-engineered famine in the Ukraine that starved millions of peasants to death.
"Romm was a living embodiment of Americans' fantasy of Soviet Man: erudite, charming and selfless," writes Usdin. Even the everyman columnist Ernie Pyle was spellbound. "He speaks softly in a low voice," Pyle told his readers. "He doesn't try to sell Russia to you."
The columnist was, no doubt, one of the many Washington newsmen who were shocked when Romm, two years later, was arrested as a Trotskyite saboteur who was plotting to overthrow Stalin. Revealing their utter cluelessness about the way the Soviet Union worked, a group of American reporters, including some from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press, cabled Moscow to explain that there must be some mistake: "He did more than any other Soviet envoy to popularize the Stalin regime in this country."
Romm soon confessed to everything he was charged with—he would eventually be executed, his wife sent to a Siberian work camp, and his son sent to an orphanage—and then testified in one of the show trials in which Stalin was purging all his enemies, real and imagined. Walter Duranty, the notoriously fawning and bafflingly influential Moscow correspondent of The New York Times (who won a Pulitzer for dispatches denying the existence of that 1933 Ukrainian famine that Romm and his colleagues helped create), was stunned by the treachery of his ex-friend. "It is still a mystery," Duranty wrote, that men like Romm "should continue to follow Trotsky" when it was obvious that "Stalin was the man Russia needed."
Duranty's piece was not, Usdin notes in a tone of wonder, the stupidest thing to come from an American in Moscow during the trial. "Duranty was a cynical Stalinist," Usdin observes, "but the American ambassador, Joseph Davies, was something worse: a complete fool." Davies wrote to the Times imploring the editors to stop suggesting improprieties in the trial. Romm didn't have any bruises, Davies declared, so "his testimony bore the hallmarks of credibility."
Some American journalists agreed. The New York Post said it was hard to believe that the show trials were not just, because "not one of the 33 [defendants who confessed] had the courage to let out a protest before the assembled representatives of foreign powers and the foreign press. Not one."
Usdin does not label this editorial stupid, because it was born not of ignorance but of astounding mendacity. Its author was a reporter named Isidor Feinstein, better known in the United States as I.F. Stone. In Moscow, Soviet spymasters referred to him as Blin ("Pancake"), his KGB code name.
Stone was a rabble-rousing left-wing journalist whose I.F. Stone's Weekly newsletter was an inspiration to newspapermen who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s. Many remember his sometimes extraordinary investigative reporting (he was one of the few reporters to challenge the U.S. government's claims of a North Vietnamese naval attack in the Tonkin Gulf) while conveniently forgetting his idiocies (he was the only reporter to produce an entire book arguing that the Korean War was started by the South). Stone undoubtedly wrote what he believed, however ludicrous that sometimes was. But Bureau of Spies makes it clear that he was also a knowing Soviet agent for a decade or more.
Pravdin and his associates worked arduously to talk to Stone several times in September 1944. It took a month to get a private meeting where they made a pitch. Stone asked for a lot of money—a sufficiently large sum that Pravdin had to check it with Moscow. Whether Stone got it isn't clear from the available records, but "it is certain that he stayed in touch with Pravdin after the Russian indicated he was an intelligence officer seeking secret information," Usdin writes. "Washington's loudest whistleblower, a man who made a career ferreting out malfeasance and hypocrisy, felt no need to inform his readers that the Soviet Union was trying to recruit him and other journalists as spies."
As with the suspicious personages that dot the media landscape today, many of the characters in Usdin's book are not really spies at all, just ideological wingnuts pushing propaganda for causes that are creepy or crazy or both. James True, who published anti-Semitic newsletters and had patented a wooden club shaped like a cutlass that he called the Kike Killer (in those days before gallantry died, there was even a smaller ladies' version available), may have shared the Nazis' racial views, but he wasn't an informer.
One of his most implacable enemies was, though. John Spivak, a correspondent for the INS wire service (later absorbed by UPI), wrote a brutal exposé of True for the lefty magazine New Masses. The story failed to mention that Spivak was a paid Soviet agent who used his reporting trips as a cover for tracking down Trotskyites for Moscow. His intelligence reports were far more colorful than his newspaper stories; one dispatch to his handlers on a missing German aristocrat claimed that the man was castrated and his wife was a hermaphrodite.
That report also would have been welcome at the White House, where Roosevelt had a yen for sexually outré spy tales. He used syndicated newspaper columnist John Franklin Carter, who moonlighted as a novelist, as his personal spook, dashing hither and yon to collect the sort of stuff that the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the CIA, just couldn't come up with, including the news that the USO's donut dollies were riddled with Nazi agents.
Carter's best source was Putzi Hanfstaengl, a Harvard grad and Nazi defector whose accomplishments included inventing the Sieg Heil chant. (His wife supposedly talked Hitler out of suicide in his youth, a surprisingly undercelebrated achievement in mental health circles.) Hanfstaengl deluged FDR with sexual gossip, including supposed details about Hitler's fetish for whips, his infection with the clap by a Jewish prostitute in Vienna, and his inability to attain "real and complete sexual fulfillment." Women had to do something special to get Hitler off, Hanfstaengl confided, "the exact nature of which is a state secret." Roosevelt read this stuff in his White House bed at night, then locked it in his personal safe.
Alas, in those unenlightened times, Hanfstaengl fell under suspicion of being gay. ("While Carter was happy to associate with a racist anti-Semitic Nazi, he was wary of homosexuals," Usdin notes drily.) The president's journalist pal Clare Boothe Luce, valiantly trying to restore the credibility of a key intelligence source, suggested leaving the defector alone with Somerset Maugham's gay German secretary to see if they would jump on one another. But when the two were introduced, Hanfstaengl begged Carter to get rid of the secretary.
"One of the things I couldn't stand about Hitler," he explained, "was all the fairies he had around him." Case closed.
I rarely agree with Jonathan Capehart but I think he’s a capable writer and has shown in the past that he’s willing to buck his own tribe, so to speak, when he believes it’s the right thing to do and that goes a long way with me. Today, Capehart has a piece about the smirk heard round the world, the Covington smirk as he calls it. He says people defending Nick Sandmann need to recognize that a lot of people see something powerful and painful in that smirk:
When it comes to “the smirk,” Sandmann, the Covington kids and their defenders must understand why my reaction and the reaction of untold others was so strong. Sandmann’s smirk struck me as the inverse of the Kavanaugh scowl. Now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s “the world is mine” smugness revealed itself during his confirmation hearings last September. His petulant display came after Christine Blasey Ford testified that she was sexually assaulted by Kavanaugh at a party when they were in high school…
Ask just about anyone who is not straight, white and male what they see in that smirk and you’ll most likely open up a world of hurt. Memories of continual bullying and other abuse at the hands of entitled men and boys who weren’t or never feared being held accountable. For my friend Jeff Krehely, executive vice president of the Roosevelt Institute and an openly gay white man whom I consider one of the generals of the LGBTQ civil rights movement, ‘the smirk” was too much.
“I knew since the story broke last week that his face is that of many young white men who get the benefit of the doubt, who are able to shrug off their bad behavior with a wink and a nod, whose parents and teachers protect them when they do all sorts of wrong (or at worst the adults in their lives simply look away),” Krehely wrote on Medium on Jan. 23. “Last night I realized that his face is one I saw a lot in sixth grade, toward the end of the school year when I became the boy most of the other boys decided was a fag.”
I have no intention of crapping over other people’s pain because, frankly, I had friends in high school, girls and boys, who were gay and I know that pain was real for them. So let’s stipulate up front that kids can be tough on their peers and that’s especially true for those that are different in some notable way.
But here’s what I think Capehart is missing. Just because a kid is white and straight and male does not mean that he’s part of some club where everything is easy and fitting in is always a given. I was all of those things and I can tell you I was not accepted or even known by my peers in high school. I was a nerdy GATE kid who loved Star Wars and went voluntarily to summer school to study astronomy before my freshman year of high school. I was interested in art and music. I liked to read science fiction novels and cosmology non-fiction. And I was shy and over six feet tall which made me impossible to ignore even when I felt like blending into the carpet.
My best friends were a kid down the street with a difficult family life and another kid whose parents had immigrated from Vietnam. I won’t go into detail on some of the issues they faced, but suffice it to say one of them had parents who drank a lot. The other had a conflict with a step-parent that spilled over into violence occasionally. My blended family of 6 kids (mom remarried) and going to see my dad every other weekend seemed better but wasn’t always easy. My dad and step-father got in a fist fight once at my house. It was a one-time thing but it gives you a sense of the under-currents that were there.
All of that to say, my friends and I did not enter high school each morning with the sense we were the masters of the universe. The fact that all of us were straight and male (and two of us were white) didn’t mean we passed through that time on top of the world smirking down on anyone. Far from it.
And what I take from all of that is not that Capehart’s pain or that of his friend growing up don’t matter. It does matter. But they weren’t the only kids struggling with real problems and feeling smirked at by their peers, for wont of a better word. When you assume that all the white, straight males had it easy or at least easier, you’re generalizing in a way that doesn’t hold up to reality. It’s simplistic thinking, which is one reason I think it’s so popular. In reality, people are individuals and you don’t really know how hard they have it by looking at them for a minute or two. You’d have to know them to really know that. And yes, that even goes for the kids doing the smirking some of whom are probably suffering more than you know.
With that in mind, I’d return to Capehart’s claims about Justice Kavanaugh. Calling him “petulant” may work for some, but a lot of us saw a man who was being publicly abused and shamed for something it’s not clear he did. Certainly several of the allegations against him didn’t have any support. How is a man supposed to act when he’s publicly accused of gang-rape without evidence? Should he be calm and restrained? I’m not sure that makes much sense unless you assume he’s guilty. Not just guilty of this one act as a teen but guilty in the broader sense Capehart is raising. Guilty of being a smirker who has gone through life hurting people for his own amusement. I don’t think that’s what the record showed about Brett Kavanaugh.
The same goes for Nick Sandmann. When a stranger comes up to beat a drum in your face and his friend is telling you and your friends to “Go back to Europe!” should you fold like a cheap suit or should you demonstrate a little defiance at being singled out and challenged in this racist way? Capehart doesn’t know the first thing about Sandmann. There’s no evidence he’s a bad kid who goes around hurting gay people or minorities. No one involved in the online shaming and death threats against his school and family knows anything about him. They’re just channeling their own pain into a kid’s smirk (which isn’t even clearly a smirk the whole time).
You can’t assume Sandmann is the equivalent of your childhood tormentor because he’s white, straight and male or even because he stands up for himself (peacefully) when confronted. Don’t make this kid a target because he reminds you of someone else from 30 years ago. You don’t know him or whether he’s had it easy or hard thus far. And beause you don’t know, you shouldn’t assume.
Addendum: One last thought. One thing we do know about Sandmann is that he seems to be the kid willing to stand up for other kids being bullied. How do we know? Because that’s what he was doing here. His group was being racially bullied by the Black Hebrew Israelites and also by the guy who walked over with Nathan Phillips. He was right to want it to stop and I think in a quiet, peaceful way he was trying to stop it.
The good news: The victims of the worst mass shooting in US history may finally get their day in court. The bad news: It’s because the conglomerate that owned the resort where it took place is suing them. Yes, you read that correctly:
MGM Resorts International has filed federal lawsuits against more than 1,000 Las Vegas mass shooting victims in an effort to avoid liability.
The company, which owns Mandalay Bay and the Route 91 Harvest festival venue, argues that it cannot be held liable for Oct. 1 deaths, injuries or other damages, adding that any claims against MGM parties “must be dismissed,” according to complaints filed Friday in Nevada and California.
“Plaintiffs have no liability of any kind to defendants,” the complaints argue.
Needless to say, the victims — the families of the dead, the injured, and those others present at the targeted concert — are rather astounded at this turn of events:
“I’ve never seen such callous, reprehensible behavior,” Robert Eglet, a Las Vegas attorney who said he represents about 1,000 survivors, told CBS News. “They’re victimizing these poor people twice.”
Muhammad Aziz, a Houston attorney who said he represents about 1,400 survivors, called the lawsuits “unprecedented” and said his clients were “surprised, shocked, angered.”
It’s ugly. But do they have a case? Legally, maybe, but …
Last year’s mass shooting in Las Vegas killed 58 people and injured more than 850 others. The shooter rained down fire from a room at the Mandalay Bay casino and hotel complex before killing himself as police arrived to put an end to the massacre. To this day, no one knows the motive behind the shooting, nor has any credible proposal emerged that would have prevented it from occurring. In that sense, it’s going to be tough to find ways to hold the resort liable, not unless due diligence requires regular room inspections whether hotel customers want it or not.
MGM’s lawyers also argue that a 2002 federal law relieves them of responsibility in cases of terrorism:
MGM cites a federal act from 2002 that says companies are protected from liability if they use “anti-terrorism” services to help prevent and respond to “mass violence.” MGM says the security company it hired for the festival, Contemporary Services Corp., was protected from liability and certified by the Department of Homeland Security to handle “acts of mass injury and destruction.” The hotel company says this should protect MGM from liability as well.
The 2002 act broadly defines terrorism as an act that causes mass destruction, injury or other loss. The shooting has not been ruled as a terror attack and authorities said Paddock appeared to have no terrorist connections or political motive. The FBI and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department have not determined Paddock’s motive and are still investigating.
As legal defenses go, this seems like a well-thought-out strategy. But why is MGM employing it to sue the victims? Because they don’t want to wait for them to sue, that’s why. They’d rather get a federal court to pre-empt all of the different pathways to lawsuits up front rather than wait to have to make this argument piecemeal. And they argue that they have the best interests of the victims in mind:
According to the statement, “The Federal Court is an appropriate venue for these cases and provides those affected with the opportunity for a timely resolution. Years of drawn out litigation and hearings are not in the best interest of victims, the community and those still healing.”
Er … suuuuuuuure. They’re suing the victims to promote healing.
Eglet told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the move won’t work anyway. MGM is incorporated in Nevada, which means that federal court isn’t the correct jurisdiction. The 2002 law doesn’t apply in state court, Eglet argues, and accuses MGM of “judge shopping” that “quite frankly verges on unethical.”
It certainly comes close to public-relations disaster. How many people will want to patronize a resort that sues victims of a massacre, no matter how much spin they put on those intentions? MGM better hope its attorneys win this lawsuit, because otherwise they’ll be paying in all sorts of ways.
I have come to the conclusion that a lot of people don’t understand that the First Amendment, which protects free speech, doesn’t then entitle you to escape the consequences of your words.
The controversy began after Durden’s appearance, during which she defended the Black Lives Matter movement’s decision to host a Memorial Day celebration in New York City to which only black people were invited. On the show, Durden’s comments included, “You white people are angry because you couldn’t use your white privilege card to get invited to the Black Lives Matter’s all-black Memorial Day Celebration,” and “We want to celebrate today. We don’t want anybody going against us today.”
The college at which she is employed was not pleased. They fired her. Why? Because .. well, I’ll let the college explain:
“The college was immediately inundated with feedback from students, faculty and prospective students and their families expressing frustration, concern and even fear that the views expressed by a college employee (with influence over students) would negatively impact their experience on the campus,” Munroe said in the statement.
“I fully believe that institutions of higher learning must provide a safe space for students… The character of this institution mandates that we embrace diversity, inclusion, and unity. Racism cannot be fought with more racism.”
This statement is important for a couple of reasons. One – it identifies a closed mind influencing the minds of its students and identified it as a danger. Two – the college took into consideration the feedback from its students, families, etc. Three – it never said her speech was “hate speech” or that she wasn’t free to express herself. It did, however, properly identify her speech as racist and found that it did not support the ideals and principles the school is founded upon.
Or said more succinctly, she exercised her right to free speech and then suffered the consequences of that speech. She wasn’t shut down, shouted down or refused a platform. She said exactly what she wanted to say … freely. The First Amendment is satisfied.
But being one of the “entitled”, she’s convinced she’s due a “get out of jail free” card as a part of that right.
In a phone interview Friday, Durden said she has received a lot of support from other staff members and students, but compared her experience to a rape victim who is blamed for the crime, and a person who returns from war to a hostile environment. The Newark resident said she thought living in a “black and brown city” and working for a “black and brown college,” she would be supported after a trying appearance on Fox News.
“It should be a safe place for me,” she said of Essex County College. “I thought when I came home from war, I would be safe.” Instead, she said, “I was fired.”
These statements too are instructive. She likens her experience to going to “war”. Really? She also likens her experience afterward to that of a rape victim. Really?!
She clearly figured that since she lives in a “black and brown city” and teaches at a “black and brown college” that being a racist and saying racist things would be “safe” and, in fact, it is also clear she expected to be treated as a hero returning from the “war”. She was hardly “raped” in this situation (unless “surprised” is now a synonym for rape), she instead completely misjudged the climate in which she worked and what was acceptable and unacceptable as far as conduct. There are no “get out of jail free” cards for racists.
It also puts to rest, or at least fatally cripples, the meme that says “black people can’t be racists.” Of course they can. It defies logic to look at her statements and then make that claim. Essex County College certainly had no problem coming to that conclusion.
Sadly her lawyer isn’t any more savvy than Durden:
“I believe their first suspending and then firing her was directly because of her appearing on the Tucker Carlson TV show, and is a violation of her federal and state constitutional rights to free speech,” Farber said.
No, Ms. Farber. No it’s not. Not at all. Because …
The public school, Farber said, “can’t prevent (employees) from speaking out on something, whether politics or other subjects.”
… she was never prevented from speaking out on “something”. She had her say as she is entitled to do under the First Amendment.
What she isn’t entitled too is to dodge any consequences from her speech. With rights come both responsibilities and consequences.
An official said the visit “made relations with the intelligence community worse” and described the visit as “uncomfortable.”
Authorities are also pushing back against the perception that the CIA workforce was cheering for the president. They say the first three rows in front of the president were largely made up of supporters of Mr. Trump’s campaign.
An official with knowledge of the make-up of the crowd says that there were about 40 people who’d been invited by the Trump, Mike Pence and Rep. Mike Pompeo teams....There were about 400 members of the workforce who RSVP’d for the event out of thousands who received an invitation in their email late last week. Officials dismiss White House claims that there were people waiting to get into the event.
We now have a president who travels with his own private cheering section and allows the press to film his events only from approved angles that hide this fact. People keep comparing Trump to Mussolini, but I'm beginning to think this might be unfair to Il Duce.
My son is six-months-old, but my daughter is almost fully grown. She’s a homemaker, which is fine, but it’s not what I had in mind when god bestowed the child upon me. I spent all our money on magic lessons, after all.
This is how most of my experiences go in Princess Maker 2, a life simulator from 1993 that’s by turns moreish, compellingly daft, and creepy. Previously the only way to play it outside of Japan has been by grabbing it from an abandonware site and applying an unofficial translation patch, but 23 years later it’s getting an English and HD rerelease on Steam called Princess Maker 2: Refine [official site].
You didn’t see any updates for the results of the Nevada caucuses from me last night because… I’m old and I don’t stay up until one in the morning. Because of that, I found out about the results this morning along with many of you early to bed, early to rise types. Having gone over the numbers with my morning coffee there isn’t much to say beyond the fact that Donald Trump quite simply owned everyone. The theory that Trump has a ceiling somewhere the thirties took yet another beating as he outperformed even the most optimistic polls, taking 46% of the vote total. In a rerun of the anti-Trump contingent’s worst nightmares, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz slugged it out for second place, with Rubio holding a slim edge of roughly 24% with a bit more than 90% of the votes counted this morning. If you were expecting either of them to drop out before leaving Las Vegas, your hopes have been dashed.
There’s not that much in the way of reading the tea leaves on this one. Over at The Hill, the analysis seems to boil down to pretty much the same scenario we had after South Carolina.
Donald Trump is now the presumptive Republican nominee.
Yes, there is a long way to go. But if a more conventional candidate than Trump had won three of the first four contests by such emphatic margins, there would be broad consensus that they were on their way to becoming the party’s standard-bearer.
Tuesday night’s result could hardly have been more clear-cut. Several news organizations called the race for the business mogul the moment the caucuses ended. With 24 percent of returns in shortly after 2 a.m. Eastern time, Trump had about 44 percent support, putting a significant hole in the theory that there is a ceiling to his appeal in the mid-30s.
There is only a week to go before Super Tuesday, when Republicans in 11 states vote. It is difficult to imagine what could happen at this stage to blunt Trump’s momentum.
We could sit here and go through the entry polls and demographics, but it would quickly become repetitive. Trump won with younger voters, older voters, richer and poorer, well educated and less educated. But among all of those pigeonholes, there’s one figure which should really jump out at you. Trump received 45% of the Hispanic vote, only a couple of points less than the combined total of the two actual Hispanic candidates running against him. (Well, unless you ask the New York Times, of course.) I will now offer you the rational explanation of how that happened:
Beats me.
Before we wrap, I wanted to take a quick look at the projections for Super Tuesday and the way the “proportional” voting will play out in all those states that are on the line next week. We were batting this around on Twitter last night and there seems to be some confusion as to how the delegate math will work. Trump should take 12 delegates from Nevada (with Rubio and Cruz each getting 5) but there are quite a few states where the split will not be nearly as equitable. The rules are different from state to state, and we should remember that Trump got pretty much all the delegates from South Carolina, even though it’s a “proportional” delegate state.
Here’s a little collection I put together which covers it. The key things to watch for are the thresholds in each state which are required to get any delegates and how the spread is covered for second and third place. (Apologies if the text is a little rough.)
Only three states are really close to being truly “proportional” based on the statewide results, with Virginia (49 delegates) being the single state which awards delegates across the board in that fashion. Alaska (28) rewards them proportional to the state vote, but only to candidates who reach a 13% threshold, so the top three winners are amplified. Massachusetts (42) does the same as Alaska, but the threshold is only 5% to receive delegates.
Several states chop up their delegate count between the winners of each congressional district in the state with some bonus delegates awarded differently. In these states, candidates usually get 3 delegates for each CD where they prevail, but some break it up with 2 delegates to the winner and 1 to 2nd place if they don’t break 50% in any given district. These include:
Arkansas:
3 delegates to winner of each of 4 CDs if they reach 50% there. If a plurality win in any CD, 2 delegates to 1st place, 1 to 2nd. There are 28 bonus delegates. Each candidate above 15% statewide gets 1 bonus delegate. If the winner gets more than 50% he gets the rest of the 28. If the winner has a plurality, all candidates above 15% split the 28 proportionally.
Georgia:
48 delegates assigned to CD winners the same as Arkansas. 20% threshold to receive delegates. 34 bonus delegates to state wide winner if above 50%. If none above 50%, proportional allocation to all above 20%.
Minnesota:
3 delegates proportionately assigned by results in each of 8 CDs, 10 % threshold. 14 bonus delegates awarded proportional to statewide results for all who get more than 10%.
Oklahoma:
3 delegates for each of 5 CDs divided the same as Arkansas. 15% threshold. 28 bonus delegates awarded same as Arkansas.
Tennessee:
27 delegates, 3 for each of 9 CDs. Need 2/3 vote to get all 3, else proportional. 20% threshold. 31 bonus delegates. If one candidate takes 2/3 of the state vote they take all 31. Else proportional for all >20%.
Texas:
108 delegates, 3 for each of 36 CDs. 20% threshold. Same as Arkansas. 47 bonus delegates awarded same as Arkansas to all above 20%.
Then we come to a couple of real wild cards. In Alabama, they award 3 to the winner of each of 7 CDs. 29 bonus delegates go to overall winner. But if one candidate comes in 1st in all CDs by even one vote, it’s winner take all.
In Vermont, (16 delegates) if any candidate reaches 50% statewide they get all 16. If the winner only has a plurality, all candidates above 20% divide all 16 proportionally.
As you can see, those thresholds can really warp the delegate count toward the top performers rather than allowing single digit candidates (or even those in the teens) to nibble away at the frontrunner. Quite a few of these could wind up being winner take all and Donald Trump is currently in the lead in most of those states according to this week’s polls. (Texas may be an exception.) I noticed that Erick Erickson has come out and asked all of you Cruz and Rubio supporters to put aside your differences and simply vote against Trump for whichever other candidate is doing better. Looking at those rules for Super Tuesday, it may be too late for that.
Well, enough boring math. Here’s Trump’s victory speech in case you missed it.
The latest Pew report on illegal immigration from Mexico shows that the flow of people across the southern border continues to slow. There are fewer immigrants coming to the US and there are fewer going back to Mexico. In total, the flow of people across the border has declined by a third over the past five years, and there are now more people leaving than coming. Pew estimates that the total population of unauthorized Mexican immigrants in the US has declined by 1.3 million since 2007.
Why? The slowing American economy, especially in border communities, is one reason. A desire to reunite with family members is another. Fewer connections in the US is yet another. And in terms of total immigration, Mexico is now only barely ahead of other countries, according to a question used in the American Community Survey:
Under this measure, 246,000 Mexicans, 195,000 Chinese and 199,000 Indians arrived in the U.S. in 2013 and 2012....Regardless of the exact number of new immigrants from each country arriving in the U.S. each year, the trends are clear: Over the past decade, immigration from China and India to the U.S. has increased steadily, while immigration from Mexico has declined sharply.
Keep this in mind the next time you hear Donald Trump or another Republican demagoging about walls and rapists and all the rest. Illegal immigration from Mexico is down substantially, and it's becoming a smaller problem every year, not a bigger one.
About half of all surgeries involve some kind of medication error or unintended drug side effects, if a new study done at one of America’s most prestigious academic medical centers is any indication.
The rate, calculated by researchers from the anesthesiology department at Massachusetts General Hospital who observed 277 procedures there, is startlingly high compared with those in the few earlier studies. Those earlier studies relied mostly on self-reported data from clinicians, rather than directly watching operations, and found errors to be exceedingly rare.
“There is a substantial potential for medication-related harm and a number of opportunities to improve safety,” according to the new study, published today in the journal Anesthesiology. More than one-third of the observed errors led to some kind of harm to the patient.
Note: This article is a rewrite of the original from March 2015. Recently Wizards of the Coast released a new Unearthed Arcana encounter building rules which gives us a new way to build encounters on top of the rules in the Dungeon Master's Guide. Consider these guidelines a third alternative for fast, simple, and loose encounter building.
The following guidelines aim to help dungeon masters running the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons build combat encounters quickly and easily. This article begins with a set of quick encounter building guidelines and then get into the design considerations later in this article.
These guidelines are intended to give us a rough idea what number and challenge rating of monster equates to a "hard" encounter so we can tune our own battles from that baseline depending on the story and our goals. These guidelines, like the underlying challenge rating of monsters, is not an exact science and will not build perfectly balanced encounters. Nor will any other system. Instead, it gives us an easy-to-remember guideline for determining the rough balance of monsters to characters for challenging encounters.
Start with the story. What encounter and monsters make sense?
Select story-appropriate monsters with a challenge rating (CR) roughly equivalent to the characters's level or below.
Choose the number of monsters by comparing the monster's challenge rating to the character's level. Note, these ratios assume a "hard" encounter.
For monsters with a challenge rating of 1/4 the character's level, use two monsters per character.
For monsters with a challenge rating of 1/3 the character's level, use one monster per character.
For monsters with a challenge rating of 3/4 the character's level, use one monster per two characters.
For monsters with a challenge rating equal to or above the character's level, use one monster per four characters.
Adjust difficulty by adding or subtracting monsters or adjusting hit points.
Evaluate the action economy. Too few monsters will make the battle much easier. Aim for at least one monster for the first four characters plus one creature for each additional character.
A Deeper Dive Into the Encounter Guidelines
The following is a more detailed look at the guidelines above. Note, these are intended to help you understand what a "hard" encounter looks like so you have the freedom to tune the battle to make it easier or harder depending on the story and your goals for the encounter.
1. Start with the story. What type of encounter makes sense for the current location and direction of this story? You might know this ahead of time or might want to build a quick encounter right at the table. When designing an encounter, start with the story first and the mechanics second.
2. Choose appropriate monsters. Use the monsters by challenge rating index or the excellent Monsters by Environment list in appendix B of the Dungeon Master's Guide to help you choose the right monsters for the encounter you want to build. Aim for creatures with a challenge rating roughly equivalent to 3/4 the level of the characters or less. If you're aiming to have them fight a single monster, the challenge rating should be at the character's level or up to two ratings higher.
3. Determine the number of monsters. Choose a number of monsters based on the monsters' challenge rating compared to the characters' level. For monsters with a challenge rating of 1/4 the character's level, use two monsters per character. For monsters with a challenge rating of 1/3 the character's level, use one monster per character. For monsters with a challenge rating of 3/4 the character's level, use one monster per two characters. For monsters with a challenge rating equal to or above the character's level, use one monster per four characters.
Here's a quick lookup table. Note that this table better follows the encounter guidance in the Dungeon Master's Guide than the simple equations.
Character level
CR for two monsters per character
CR for one monster per character
CR for one monster per two characters
CR for one monster per four characters
1
Too hard
1/4
1/2
1
2
1/8
1/4
1
3
3
1/4
1
2
4
4
1/2
1
3
5
5
1
2
4
6
6
1
2
5
7
7
1
3
5
8
8
2
3
6
9
9
2
4
7
10
10
2
4
7
11
11
3
5
8
12
12
3
5
9
13
13
3
5
10
14
14
4
6
11
15
15
4
6
11
16
16
4
7
12
17
17
4
8
13
18
18
5
8
14
19
19
5
9
15
20
20
6
10
16
21
4. Adjust difficulty. These guidelines aim for a "hard" encounter as described on page 82 of the Dungeon Master's Guide. Increase or decrease the difficulty by adding or subtracting monsters, choosing monsters with higher or lower challenge ratings, or by increasing or decreasing the monsters' hit points.
5. Evaluate the action economy. Compare the number of monsters to the number of characters. Too many creatures on one side or the other will have a big effect on the difficulty. Big monsters that fight by themselves are much easier to defeat than a somewhat big monsters with a couple of lackeys to keep the wizards busy. In general, when facing a large "boss" monster, add one or two monsters of a CR roughly 1/4 to 1/3 the character's level for each character above four.
Design Considerations
The rest of this article discusses the design philosophy behind these guidelines. You need not read further unless you wish to understand how and why these guidelines were put in place.
Mix and Match Monster Types
The guidelines above let you mix and match a bunch of different monsters in a single battle by matching monsters with different challenge ratings with the level of the characters. For example, if you have a group of five level 7 characters, you can build an encounter with one challenge 5 troll (the equivalant of two level 7 characters), two challenge 2 ogres (the equivalant of two additional level 7 characters) and two challenge 1 bugbears (the equivalant of the one remaining level 7 character).
The math isn't perfect since 1/3 of level 7 and 1/4 of level 7 both round out to challenge 2. Theoretically you could have five ogres and a troll instead of two ogres, a troll, and two bugbears. That's certainly a harder battle but it still falls within the guidelines.
Loose Guidelines for an Imperfect System
"Once you analyze, it's obvious CR is imprecise, and any precision it has diminishes the higher the character level." - Chris Sims, D&D Monster Manual developer.
The challenge of any encounter in 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons cannot be easily measured or quantified. There are too many variables to know how any battle is really going to go. Some of these include variance between monsters at the same challenge rating, the class mixture of characters, the particular spells a character group has access to, who wins initiative, circumstantial or environmental considerations, and the skills and proficiency of the players. The Dungeon Bastard reminds us that whether a group is fully rested or worn down will have a huge effect on how easily they can overcome the next battle.
Thus, all systems to determine the difficulty of an encounter in 5e will lack precision.
Due to the complexity of the encounter building rules in the D&D 5e Dungeon Master's Guide and the lack of precision in any encounter building system, we aim for a faster system that gives dungeon masters loose guidelines to balance encounters while acknowledging that the actual difficulty will still vary.
A Guideline for "Hard" Encounters
The encounter building tables in the Dungeon Master's Guide or the DM Basic Rules offer four levels of difficulty: easy, medium, hard, and deadly. As a rule of thumb, however, we really only need to worry about the "hard" battle. If we use fewer or lower challenge monsters than the "hard" budget allows, the battle is easier. If we use more or bigger monsters, the battle will be harder. This gives us a single baseline we use to balance each encounter instead of worrying where it fits within a range of four imprecise difficulties.
We calculated these guidelines using the traditional encounter building rules aimed at a "hard" encounter and using the multiplier for the number of monsters assuming that the number of monsters will be roughly comparable to the number of characters. We make the assumption that most battles will have a roughly equal number of monsters to characters. Adjusting the difficulty from this baseline is easily done by removing monsters, choosing lower challenge monsters, or increasing or decreasing hit points.
We intend for these encounter building guidelines to be easy enough to keep in our head and usable right at the table when we want to build an encounter right now. We intend for these rules to aid in improvisational DMing with very little, if any, preparation required before the game is run.
On the Action Economy
There's a good reason the Dungeon Master's Guide has two tables we must cross reference to put together an encounter. Regardless of the individual power of a monster, the difficulty goes up every time we add another combatant to the battle field. Regardless of how hard they swing a sword, two knights get twice as many actions as one.
We call this the action economy. The more total actions on one side of a battle, the stronger that side is. The multiplier in the standard encounter building guidelines intends to account for this. If there are three to six monsters, they are significantly more effective than if there is only one. Thus we have a 2x multiplier on their experience point budget when we include them into an encounter. This increase in the action economy is why the rules for encounter building are so complicated. As Benjamin Reinheart often points out, the overall threat in combat increases at a geometric rate as you add more combatants to a fight.
For this reason, you likely want to have no fewer than one monster for the first four characters plus one additional monster for each character above four. Even an ancient red dragon is going to have trouble handling six high level characters and all of the things they can do in a round.
Not All Encounters Need Be Balanced
The intent of these guidelines isn't to ensure that every encounter our characters face is balanced. There should be many times our characters face small groups of easily defeated monsters and a few occasions where they might run into a foe they simply cannot defeat with straight-on combat. Instead, these guidelines are intended to give us a gauge to help us understand how any given battle might go. If we're way above the baseline, we know things are going to be rough and can help our players see that. If we're going way below, we know it will probably be an easy fight. Varying difficulty is a good way to ensure the story and the game feel fresh.
Modifying the Guidelines for Individual Groups
As we begin to understand our group's actual power, we can alter these guidelines to face them and D&D 5e's speed of combat makes it easy to do so. If a group of experienced players is running a strong group of well-coordinated and well-built characters, we can increase the challenge dramatically by increasing the challenge rating of the monsters we choose, increasing the number of monsters in the battle, increasing the hit points of those monsters, or increasing their damage. We can also go in the opposite direction with groups who aren't as experienced or well-coordinated. Fewer monsters, monsters of a lower challenge rating, or both will make battles easier for less optimized groups of players.
Again, these are loose guidelines meant to give us a starting point. As DMs, we are free to tweak these guidelines depending on our goals and the actual results we see at the table.
Breaks Down at Higher Levels
As Chris Sims stated above, the higher level the characters, the more the standard encounter building rules break down. Strong groups of characters played by experienced players can fight deadly battles far outside of the baseline for a "hard" encounter and still win. Other less experienced groups will have a harder time with such battles.
As DMs, we can start by using these guidelines and then tweak them as we need once we know more about the actual strength of our groups.
A Simple and Powerful Tool for Easy Game Preparation
We built these encounter building guidelines to make your life easier when putting together a battle. Keep these numbers in your head: For monsters with a challenge rating of 1/4 the character's level, use two monsters per character. For monsters with a challenge rating of 1/3 the character's level, use one monster per character. For monsters with a challenge rating of 3/4 the character's level, use one monster per two characters. For monsters with a challenge rating equal to or above the character's level, use one monster per four characters. With that in your head you can quickly build a roughly balanced encounter for a challenging fight. Tweak to suit these guidelines to match the skills of your players and the power of your characters and focus your attention on the grand story of the game you share together.
Are you struggling to play Netflix on a 2Mbps Internet connection? A new cloud-connected router using the same type of multipath technology that Apple put in the iPhone might solve your problem.
Launched this week on Indiegogo, the $199-$289 system from Multipath Networks in Ireland combines connections such as DSL, cable, 3G, and 4G into one pipe. Up to four connections can be used at once.
The idea of aggregating mobile and wired signals in the home is an old one. But it certainly hasn't become commonplace, and Multipath Networks takes advantage of the new Multipath TCP protocol that's used in the iPhone to let Siri switch between Wi-Fi, 3G, and LTE quickly and seamlessly.
While reading through my Twitter feed today I saw that Rodney Thompson (@wotc_rodney) a professional game designer and developer at Wizards of the Coast had shared a link to a short D&D documentary. Naturally I clicked on it and watch to see how D&D was being portrayed in the media this time. I was extremely happy to see a fair and reasonable depiction of the hobby I love so much. If you’re into tabletop RPGs, and D&D specifically I recommend you take 7 minutes and watch it.
The documentary is called Dungeons & Dragons and the Influence of Tabletop RPGs. It’s part of the PBS series Off Book. This episode hasn’t yet been posted to the PBS website but it was posted to YouTube on June 20, 2013. Here’s the synopsis of the documentary.
Since their growth in popularity in the 1970s, RPGs have had a huge influence not just on players, but on everything from Hollywood to the development of video games. Now, in a world dominated by video games and social media, there remains an enduring interest in gathering around a table and playing games face to face. Beyond cards and board games, Role Playing Games allow not just for interaction and play, but the creativity of storytelling, world creation, and engagement with ideas. The adaptability of D&D and other tabletop RPGs can satisfy players in a way that our digital world still cannot, with unique game mechanics and engagement and limitless use of imagination. As tabletop RPGs enjoy a cultural resurgence, more and more people are discovering the freedom and interactivity that makes them unique.
I actually had to watch this twice because the first time through I saw myself in the documentary. I was not expecting that at all. A lot of the scenes that show people playing D&D were shot at one of my FLGS, Dueling Grounds in Toronto, during our weekly D&D Encounters sessions in 2011. The video clips were originally part of a weekly web recap series one of the other DMs was putting together. Unfortunately the web series didn’t last very long, but the footage is readily available on YouTube. Looks like the folks who made the documentary borrowed some of it. If showing our group playing will help sell the message, I have no problems being included in this, even it’s it’s only for a few seconds at a time.
For more information about the Off Book series visit the PBS website. Off Book is a web-original series from PBS Arts that explores cutting edge arts and the artists that make it. Episodes range from video games to typography, internet memes to steampunk culture.
While I was surfing the PBS website looking for an official link to the D&D documentary I stumbled across another D&D documentary you might enjoy. This one can be found in the Idea Channel section and is called Can Dungeons & Dragons Make You Confident & Successful?
There are some deeply ingrained stereotypes about Dungeons & Dragons, and those stereotypes usually begin and end with people shouting “NERD!!!” But the reality of the D&D universe is a whole lot more complex. Rather than being an escape from reality, D&D is actually a way to enhance some important real life skills, including problem solving, visualization, interaction, organization, and others.
the flow of people across the border has declined by a third over the past five years, and there are now more people leaving than coming. Pew estimates that the total population of unauthorized Mexican immigrants in the US has declined by 1.3 million since 2007.
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