Missouri Priorities and Andrew Bailey

Missouri once again is providing a perfect illustration of the insanity and cruelty of Republican priorities across the entire United States.

In 1991, Christopher Dunn was falsely prosecuted and convicted of a murder that took place in St. Louis in 1990 and sentenced to life plus 90 years. Years later, the teens whose testimony helped convict him recanted their testimony and a judge reviewed the case in 2020 and ruled there was "significant evidence of his innocence." In 2023, the current St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner filed a motion for Dunn's release but left office days later in scandal. Her replacement created a special "conviction integrity unit" to review a collection of cases including that of Dunn and later concluded Dunn should be released as well. The Dunn case was presented to a judge in May of 2024 and on July 22, 2024, the judge issued a 37-page decision granting the motion to vacate the original conviction and release Dunn.

Yet, Missouri State Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican appointed to the position in late 2022 after then Attorney General Eric Schmitt won election to the US Senate, is fighting the order through the Missouri State Supreme Court, which bizarrely issued a stay on the order to release Dunn pending some review it would provide to Bailey's motions to stop the release.

The word bizarre applies here for many reasons.

• the wrongful conviction is not the fault of any current actor in this drama
• a court has not only found original testimony failed to provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt of GUILT, a court has ruled there is ample proof of actual INNOCENCE
• yet the Attorney General and staff are arguing they are working to uphold the decision of the original jury who reached a guilty verdict "fair and square" with the information they had
• and the Attorney General seems to be arguing that Missouri law only allows vacating of a verdict and release if the defendant faces the death penalty -- short of the death penalty, you can rot in jail
• yet a state law passed in 2021 to address these situations gives the State Attorney General no role in this appeals process -- he isn't a party to the process and has no right to appeal it, yet the Missouri Supreme Court is acting as though he does

It's actually no surprise at all that this legal circus would occur in Missouri, and certainly not a surprise with Andrew Bailey as Attorney General. This is the same Attorney General who just filed a brief with the US Supreme Court arguing they should overturn Donald Trump's STATE criminal convictions for fraud in New York because those STATE convictions in New York are somehow depriving Missouri citizens of their rights...

Andrew Bailey scored his undergrad degree and his JD from the University of Missouri ("Mizzou"). I'm not familiar with the exact curriculum at Mizzou's law school but would hope it covered the concepts of equal protection and equal sovereignty between the states. The concept of equal protection holds that no state can arbitrarily curtail a freedom or immunity granted to a US citizen and must equally enforce laws across all citizens. The concept of equal sovereignty holds that no state can arbitrarily undermine another state's ability to enforce its laws within its territory. If State A wants to enforce a maximum speed limit of 50 mph on A's state roads and State B wants to allow a 65mph limit on B's state roads, State B does NOT have the power to block A from enforcing its lower limit on roads within State A nor does State A have the authority to send its police into State B and enforce A's lower limit on State B roads, even on State A drivers.

Yet Andrew Bailey is spending Missouri tax dollars to interfere all the way up to the Supreme Court to block the attempt of another sovereign state to enforce its criminal statutes against a one-time resident of its state. And Bailey's sole motivation for doing so is to curry favor with Donald Trump for Bailey's own political career and shore up support among Republicans while trying to win a primary to retain his current job.

Stop and ponder the crassness and hypocrisy of this situation. An attorney general simultaneously tampering with another state's conviction of another state's citizen while IGNORING court orders to RELEASE a man that has already spent thirty three years in jail for a crime a COURT has ruled he DID NOT COMMIT. Under any normal circumstance in any normal state, Andrew Bailey's actions would be deserving of impeachment and removal from office, for actual legal incompetence and corruption. Yet, this is just another day in modern Republican civics.

WTH

This Week in Computing News

It has not been a fun week for users and owners of computers. First the news, then the observations.

CrowdStrike

The basics are by now well understood. A security monitoring application called Falcon sold by CrowdStrike to at least half of the Fortune 1000 attempted to push an update for new virus signatures from its centralized control system to millions of its client's machines and wound up "bricking" every one of those clients, requiring a human administrator with a special USB disk image to reboot the machine into a "safe" mode to then delete one corrupt file then reboot the macine to restore normal operation.

The problem was caused by a flawed software testing and deployment process. The actual corrupt file was populated with all-zero values rather than actual signature data expected by the Falcon code. The Falcon code actually runs as a kernel driver within the Windows operating system's "inner sanctum" of trust (ring 0) so if ANYTHING goes wrong with code running at kernel level, the system has no choice but to "blue screen" to prevent further corruption of user data or the operating system.

Due to the criticality of code running in the kernel, Microsoft requires any vendor delivering "code" that runs in the kernel to undergo explicit testing and certification to obtain a digitial signature that is checked when that code is loaded into the kernel to prevent corrupted / unexpected code from running. The Falcon "CODE" **was** signed . But the actual file that CRASHED the Falcon code was considered DATA and wasn't individually signed via the Microsoft certification process. However, the DATA in that corrupt file caused the rest of the Falcon code to crash, triggering the "blue screen" lockup.

This failure apparently bricked nearly ten million machines before CrowdStrike stopped its push. That points out a variety of problems for CrowdStrike and its corporate customers.

First, CrowdStrike clearly has glaring flaws in its quality control and testing processes at development time. There is no way a "build" of "code + data" that created this behavior should have escaped detection in testing and a block in build automation that combined the code and data into a final release.

Second, CrowdStrike's operations and monitoring systems collecting data from all of those millions of client machines clearly lacks any logic that puts a short circuit in place for unexpected events. If you operate a software product that CONTINUOUSLY collects status / forensic data from MILLIOINS of endpoints and also PUSHES updates to those MILLIONS of machines, any time you push a release and the recipient "disappears" off the network and never comes back with a new status update, you have a problem. When EVERY client you've pushed an update to has disappeared and never reached out to the mother ship, you should have logic that immediately halts all outbound software pushes. It seems CrowdStrike had to rely on customers physically contacting them to stop this software push.

Third, this type of "supply chain" vulnerability needs an operational and legal re-think, both on the part of software companies using this operating model and customers agreeing to pay for this type of service. In most IT and network departments, most competent veterans are wary of instantly loading the latest release from ANY vendor. "Let the vendor do their R&D and beta testing on someone else's network." That's the normal mindset.

For SECURITY software, most IT and network administrators have been forced to override that default caution. BY DEFINITION, updates to security software are supposed to be supplying new "signatures" that allow your baseline anti-virus and malware detection software to detect and stop newly identified threats to your systems. The whole point of these cloud based systems is that they can detect odd patterns of behavior seen across thousands of customers, correlate it to some new piece of malware , then release a "signature" that tells the client agent how to find that malware and neutralize it before it infects a system. You are SUPPOSED to accept those new signatures as soon as possible to minimize infection risk.

The problem is that those signature files are just data. And bad data read by flawed software, even if the software itself is unaltered and digitally signed for trustworthiness, can crash in unexpected ways and, in some cases, unrecoverable ways. Yet many large companies use products like CrowdStrike partly as a means of mitigating their legal risk to thier own customers. If you are operating a Fortune 500 firm WITHOUT these types of tools then get hacked and shutdown with ransomware, your stockholders will inevitably sue your board, CEO and CIO for incompetence and failure to protect the ability of the company's assets to produce income for stockholders. Your customers may also likely sue you for failing to deliver expected services that a reasonable customer would have the expectation of being delivered, be it hospital care, electricy, internet service, etc.

Corporate IT leaders are clearly going to need to re-think the operational controls in place around their systems. Anti-virus and malware systems will always be required but it may be the case that NO VENDOR will ever be selected and deployed if the corporate customer doesn't have control over how software updates are pushed out in "waves" to ensure a "brick" problem can be spotted after a few dozen machines rather than allowing the vendor on their own to push to 100% of all covered machines without intervention.

In the case of CrowdStrike, this isn't apparently a "pattern of one." CrowdStrike released an update for its client running on Debian Linux machines in April 2024 that created a nearly identical brick problem. They did the same think for an update for Rocky Linux machines in May 2024. But the pattern goes back further than that. Much further.

In 2010, McAfee had a similar "signature update" for its AV software that corrupted the host service on Windows machines and prevented them from communicating with any other system after reboot. The CIO at the time at McAffee? George Kurz. The current CEO of CrowdStrike? Same George Kurz.

Microsoft Patch Woes

Not to be confused with the CrowdStrike issue above which INVOLVED Windows operating system computers but was not the direct cause of Microsoft itself, Microsoft itself DOES have a new problem with software updates it began pushing in July 2024. A patch for Windows 11 machines incurred a bug which resulted in machines with its BitLocker disk encryption software enabled to prompt the user for their unencryption password after rebooting. This would affect both individal and corporate users. The problem is that many users might have enabled BitLocker without thinking about it too much or understanding what they were doing at all. As such, they may have no idea how to get their unencryption password.

The unencryption password can be obtained by logging into the Microsoft cloud account owning the operating system, finding the machine listed as a device, then drilling down into that machine to find the BitLocker password to supply to the machine. It's not the end of the world since recovery doesn't require a physical visit to the machine by an administrator and adoption of WIndows 11 is still low, both for consumer and corporate users. However, in a corporate setting, each fix will probably be a 3-5 minute phone call to an IT helpdesk and it's a complete halt to productivity until each user gets their unencryption password entered. For consumer users, it could take hours trying to understand the problem , find help online on exactly how to log into their online account, wade through the screens and find the magic unencryption password.

Fatal Intel Hardware Design Flaw

After months of speculation by various experts outside Intel, Intel itself now seems to be confirming at least part of an emerging design flaw in its latest 13th and 14th generation "Raptor Lake" architecture CPU chips. The problem is fatal... Fatal to the chip itself. In a nutshell, circuitry within the chip seems to be overdriving voltages delivered to chip internals, triggering damage that ultimately reduces voltage and current delivered to the chip, triggering functional failures between the chip and other components like memory, bus controllers, expensive graphics cards, etc.

At a more detailed level, all modern chips have circuitry called "vias" evenly distributed across the entire area of the chip to deliver voltage and current to the billions of transistors making up the chip. To optimize the chip to minimize power consumption, minimize heat generation and maximize processing when needed, logic in the chip monitors work loads in the chip and makes small adjustments to the voltages delivered to each core, raising the voltages (and heat / power consumption) under heavy load and lowering voltages under lighter processing demands.

The problem with the new Intel chips appears to be that microcode logic running within the chip that optimizes these voltage levels based on load has a flaw which results in the code running the chip with HIGHER voltages than either needed or expected by the overall design. In effect, these chips are essentially cooking themselves to death.

This isn't a code problem that causes faulty mathematical calculations in certain corner cases (like the Pentium issue in the 1990s) or security vulnerabilities that allow other code to intercept "pipelines" and steal data or alter instructions. As described by those outside Intel who have been investigating this issue, this problem will ultimately physcally destroy the chip.

Among the first to find the problem were game developers, who began seeing their own applications crash. Games are among THE most intenstive users of computing power and it is common for game applications to run CPUs at nearly 100% continuously . This usage would obviously cause the CPU chip to run "hotter" closer to its limits. However, game developers investigating their own code quickly found their failures began occuring even when NOT running their game. They then began realizing machines they were using for testing began crashing at nearly any other task within about three or four months of heavy use.

Intel has begun commenting on this issue, though curiously not initially on its own website. At the moment, Intel is conveying the failures are being caused by the microcode problem summarized above. This seems to indicate Intel believes that corrections to that microcode via a firmware patch might eliminate the problem.

Others are not so sure. One fear mentioned online is that if the problem is "influenced" by the microcode flaw but not ENTIRELY due to that microcode flaw, Intel might attempt to release a patch to the microcode to simply lower core voltages far below previously designed levels as a means to keep the chips as cool as possible...

...while the warranty period elapses before the other remaining design flaws continue to drive the chip toward failure when it is out of warranty. For chips costing between $550 and $670 dollars each, it's easy to question Intel's motives on possible fixes for this problem. Stepping up to provide a replacement CPU for every affected unit would cost not just the value of the new chip but the time by the consumer to swap the chip out, something many customers would not be comfortable doing on their own.

The release dates of the two chip series were October 2022 for the 13th gen and October 2023 for the 14th gen. Overall chip share is split roughly 78 / 13 / 8 between Intel, AMD and Apple. Intel's revenue from PC chips was about $40 billion for 2023 so even if these bleeding edge chips are only 15% of Intel's volume, this problem poses a threat to roughly $6 billion in revenue.

In the interest of full disclosure, I just bought a brand new deeeee-luxe system in April 2024 for $2900 to replace a pair of older machines dating from 2010 and 2011. At the heart of that new machine? An Intel i9 14900KF processor, one affected by this design flaw. I don't run it 24x7 and am not a gamer (at all) but it is on probably 8-10 hours per day and is running three or four virtual machines as various Linux images. So far, I have not experienced any crashes of any kind. I also have zero financial position in Intel stock.

---

As mentioned at the outset, this has not been a fun week for computer users or computer owners. These stories point out that the level of market concentration in hardware and software industries poses unique challenges. Businesses enjoy many economies of scale by only having one or two predominate desktop operating systems for employees to master to be productive. Businesses creating software benefit from only having to write their code for a very limited number of operating systems. It would seem individual owners enjoy the price reductions on such complex products only possible with massive scale and reduced variety.

However, all three of these failures are examples of "mono-culture" problems that are vulnerable to massive, expensive failures with little predictability beforehand. WIth technologies as complex as these, there's no magic wand to wave to prevent such issues. However, it's not clear that current regulations, market incentives and legal norms can ensure equitable outcomes when multi-billion dollar failures like these crop up.

WTH

Kinda Crazy

One man murdered, another three shot and injured and a gunman killed by law enforcement personnel at an outdoor event at a fair ground in a small town. It is more accurate to describe this as a routine event in 2024 America -- one that happens weekly or monthly -- than it is to describe it as a rare or unheard of or UNIMAGINABLE event.

But wait, one of the people shot by the gunman happened to be an ex-President of the United States who happens to be running to become the President of the United States again. Surely that makes this event far more out of the ordinary, somehow far less acceptable than the idea of four random people being shot at an outdoor community event. This tears at the very fabric of our nation and its traditions of peaceful transfers of power between Administrations and the settling of political disagreements with ballots instead of bullets.

Right? RIGHT?

Well, WRONG.

In two hundred and thirty five years of operation as America 2.0 under the current Constitution, the country has seen a fairly consistent pattern of assassinations and attempted assassinations on Presidents and Presidential candidates:

• 1835 - attempt on President Andrew Jackson
• 1864 - attempt on President Abraham Lincoln
• 1865 - assassination of President Abraham Lincoln
• 1881 - assassination of President Garfield
• 1901 - assassination of President McKinley
• 1912 - attempt on former President Theodore Roosevelt
• 1933 - attempt on President-Elect Franklin Roosevelt
• 1950 - attempt on President Harry Truman
• 1963 - assassination of President John Kennedy
• 1968 - assassination of Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy
• 1968 - attempt on Presidential candidate George Wallace
• 1975 - September 5 attempt on President Gerald Ford
• 1975 - September22 attempt on President Gerald Ford
• 1981 - attempt on President Ronald Reagan
• 1994 - attempt on President Bill Clinton by shooter outside the White House

NOTE: These only reflect situations where the President or candidate actually came under fire or physical threat. There are obviously hundreds of other plots that were disrupted or averted by Secret Service and law enforcement officials.)

NOTE: For extra coincidental bonus points, guess the city where the assassination attempt on Theodore Roosevelt took place...

Now a sixteenth incident has been added to that list. Statistically speaking, the reality averages out to a much worse history than Americans likely understand or care to contemplate. Sixteen incidents over two hundred thirty five years is an average of one event every 14.68 years. Given the last incident was thirty years ago in 1994, it seems the LACK of incidents over that period was the anomaly, not the fact that a new incident occurred. In hindsight, it seems even more of an anomaly that America went forty-six years, from 1789 to 1835, before any such incident transpired.

The above list is not presented to downplay the danger posed to our political process by the assassination attempt against Donald Trump on July 13, 2024. None of it is intended to cynically chalk it up as inevitable and a reflection of "modern America" unworthy of attempts to understand the causes and unworthy of attempts to correct them. Indeed, one immediate consideration that should come to mind after reading the above list of violent attacks is how it might compare to a list of similar violent events in other modern industrial democracies. A bit of Google searching turns up something like this:

• 1605 -- attempted assassination of British King James I
• 1820 -- assassination plot targeting British PM Liverpool
• 1887 - assassination plot of British Queen Victoria by Irish nationalists
• 1945 - attempted assassination of French provisional government chair Charles de Gaulle
• 1961 - attempted assassination of French PM Charles de Gaulle
• 1962 - attempted assassination of French PM Charles de Gaulle
• 1973 - assassination via car bombing of Spanish PM Luis Blanco
• 1984 - assassination attempt of British PM Margaret Thatcher in Brighton (IRA)
• 1986 - assassination of Swedish PM Olaf Palme
• 1991 - assassination attempt of British PM John Major at 10 Downing (IRA)
• 1994 - assassination of Mexican Presidential candidate Luis Colosio
• 1995 - attempted assassination of Canadian PM Jean Chretien
• 2011 - assassination attempt via bombing of Norway PM Jens Stoltenberg

I won't claim this to be a complete list but spending an extra sixty seconds reading each search result that came up points out a key distinction between these incidents in other countries and those in the US. In these other countries, the majority of these events were OVERTLY political or terroristic in nature. In the American events, the EVENTS may have taken place during periods the rest of us might think were fraught with politics but the actual motivations of the assailants were rarely grounded in any concrete association of their act to some multi-step chain of events leading to a rationally expected outcome related to their political view. Instead, their motivations were predominately -- in a word -- crazy. While most of these US assailants were convicted of various attempted murder charges, most also seemed paranoid, delusional or outright insane. Few (notable exception being John Wilkes Booth) were found to have acted in concert with anyone else.

So America's actual political history is more consistently tainted with violence than we understood or cared to admit. Does knowing that help unite people in a better direction to avoid such violence going forward? The answer to that question is tied to how Americans think about guns, rights and public safety. It's useful to divide such thinking into two binary choices to allow each to be boiled down to its reductio ad absurdom argument to better highlight the truthfulness or fallacy of each.

On one extreme, much of the discussion after this recent event could be boiled down to this:

Whatever our problems are, we MUST keep violence out of our politics to ensure politicians do not scare away from public office and ensure they feel they can rationally debate the great issues involved and lead us. Our leaders simply MUST be protected from this violence.

Lurking as a parenthetical thought after that position is an additional caveat... Our leaders simply MUST be protected from this violence, even as the rest of us dodge gunfire every day at school, on the roads, in grocery stores and at open-air music festivals.

Isn't that a little crazy?

The argument there is that essentially, some people, like important government figures, are more important than others in our society. We've been conditioned by seventy years of cold war history to believe this, at least in regards to the President, to ensure someone is there to answer the "red phone" or green light a nuclear missile counter-strike.

Is any President MORE deserving of protection than ONE average citizen? Ummmmm. Proooooooobably. Is the President more deserving of protection than a classroom full of children? No. Is the President more deserving of protection than hundreds of people being sprayed with automatic weapon fire at an outdoor country music festival? No. I don't know where the line is between those yes and no answers but the fact that we have encountered dozens of the latter scenarios with no rational political reaction to those horrors indicates a model focused on uber-protection at the top doesn't break political logjams that block progress needed by the rest of us.

The opposite extreme might be this:

This is a reminder we can't be perfectly free and free from risk at the same time and a world of gun rights makes possible freedom from tyranny. I prefer a world free of tryanny protected by guns over a world of reduced gun rights and reduced gun violence that I think is more at risk to tyranny. The only effort compatible with maintaining gun freedoms and attempting to reduce violence is to ensure everyone is a tactically trained sharp shooter to take out the crazies before too many get killed in any one incident and let that be a lesson to the rest of the crazies to think before they go crazy.

Isn't THAT kinda crazy?

That's a philosophy that depends upon the criminally insane, paranoid or suicidal to correctly process a higher risk of getting killed in the act of committing their crime and decide NOT to commit their crime because they can follow that logic and value their own life. Such expectations of "rational thought" on the part of murderers not only fly in the face of not only our history of political assassinations and attempts but our larger history of gun violence and mass murderers.

Between those two extremes is another "thought space..."

In a country with mass shootings certainly every week and shooting deaths every day, why would any American expect the resulting carnage to somehow magically avoid any event featuring a politician? Even the President or an ex-President? Imagine for a moment the Secret Service and law enforcement officials could deliver PERFECT protection for some designated portion of federal and state leaders. Now ask the "Get Shorty" question? What's my motivation? What's my motivation to solve a problem affecting other people's safety when I am immune to those safety risks and I've perfected a political position based on the status quo that assures my re-election and/or my financial well-being?

Now ask the really important question.

If the government was able to perfectly protect the leaders in charge from the risk of harm directly attributable to problems they not only refuse to correct but are exacerbating with additional extremist laws and legal rulings, is a goal of providing perfect protection for them while accepting the inevitability of violence for the rest of us as we literally dodge gunfire every day an ethical strategy?

That's not kinda crazy. That's nuts.

WTH

Republicans Battling... Republicans

Yes, the stakes in 2024 couldn't be higher. Marauders streaming across the border to steal lettuce picking jobs from more deserving Americans... Chinese buying up farmland around American missile silos as part of some diabolical military-industrial-agro spying scheme...

At least that's what Republicans are pushing as top concerns in millions of dollars of recent ad spending.

But what are Republicans ACTUALLY pre-occupied about?

Well, in "Mizzourah", the local variety of Republican mental weed seems particularly fixated on fighting its own kind as part of some ritualistic effort to claim credit for being the strongest backer of Trump and / or being the most crazy and racist in general. So much so, the attempts are resulting in a string of court battles between various GOP entities within the state and battles between state officials and the national GOP party apparatus.

Here are some recent stories from Missouri Independent:

https://missouriindependent.com/briefs/appeals-court-dashes-missouri-gop-hopes-of-blocking-honorary-kkk-member-from-ballot/

An appeals court tossed out two different cases related to candidates appearing on the upcoming August Republican primary ballot. One case involved a Republican candidate for Governor who some were working to remove from the ballot on account of him being an honorary member of the Ku Klux Klan. Note that yer humble obedient scrivner is not exactly clear what honorary membership in the KKK actually involves. Clearly, there's no honor in being a member of the KKK so it isn't clear what the objection was in this case. Were those attempting to remove the candidate upset by the membership or were they upset because he apparently didn't actually make an effort to join, buy the hoodie merch and chip in monthly dues for cross burning expenses?

The second case tosseed by the same court involved an attempt by one county's Republican party to block eight candidates from appearing on its county ballot because they had refused to submit to that county Republican committe sufficient information required by that body to convince itself they were Republican enough. None of the stories involving this case delved into exactly what information is currently deemed suitable for proving one's Republicanism. Stealing candy from children? A trail of personal and business lawsuits? Prior campaign ads featuring automatic weapons and gunsight images?

It isn't clear what the underlying legal merits were in these cases because the appeals court made its decision to toss both cases on the simplest and least informative grounds available to it. It ruled those filing the suits had simply run out of time and that ballots cannot be changed in the last eight weeks prior to the election day.

The real concern with this ruling is that with this wider set of crazies appearing on the Republican primary ballot in a state that is HEAVILY Republican, it is very possible that an even crazier strain of Republicanism may find its way into county or state offices and the public may only find out who the true crazies are after they begin exercising power.

https://missouriindependent.com/2024/07/06/missouri-gop-snubs-state-convention-results-in-new-presidential-delegate-selections/

It isn't just local and statewide office contests bringing out the crazy in the Mizzourah GOP. Republicans at the national and state levels have also been doing battle with each other over the process used to choose delegates to the upcoming national Republican convention. Previously, a failure by the Republican controlled Missouri State legislature to fund costs related to conducting a statewide primary election for President required the Democratic and Republican state parties to conduct their own Presidential caucuses in early 2024.

The Democratic party managed to devise an online registration flow that sent a paper ballot for voters to mail in, making its "caucus" far less of a hassle and more participatory than a conventional caucus. The Republicans opted for the least convenient, most anti-participatory style of caucus possible. Real caucus meetings in each county held on a Saturday that required participants to spend possibly hours for the process to complete, all as a means of ensuring the Oblate Orange One emerged as the winner.

The outcome of the Republican Presidential primary was never in doubt but that didn't stop Republicans from leveraging the process as a means to further demonstrate fealty to Trump and thus further demonstrate their own insanity and incompetence. After the actual caucus on March 2, the state Republican party met on May 4 to select the delegates who would attend the national convention. In the May 4 convention, the final list of delegates actually selected all self-identified as members of a "Truly Grassroots for Trump" slate. At some point after the May 4 convention, party officials apparently became confused about how these fifty-three individuals (27 at-large delegates and 26 alternates) wound up selected. It seems a different collection of individuals had been assumed to be "the" list of delegates yet the State Republican Chairman Nick Myers never introduced that slate for a vote and this "Grassroots" slate was put up and voted in instead.

The national Republican party had a sub-committee review the process and on July 6, that sub-committee tossed out the original slate "elected" on May 4 and instated a new slate with only five delegates from the May 4 slate appearing in the replacement slate. Said the sub-committee:

The contests committee ruled that “alarming irregularities” plagued the election at the Republican state convention in Springfield. It focused on a five-hour credentialing process that it said undermined confidence that the delegates on hand were those selected to attend the convention at county mass meetings.

ALARMING IRREGULARITIES. Really? What exactly did the national committee find alarming? The FIVE HOUR "credentialing process?" Or the fact that after a five hour credentialing process to admit delegates, the party still couldn't explain how slate B even came to a vote or identify after the fact who actually voted?

While totally on-brand for the current Republican Party anywhere in the country, the fact that a party so incompetent and possibly corrupt that it cannot manage security to access its own convention and cannot manage an open ballot for a process related to selecting a Presidential candidate should give pause for anyone. This is just a hint at the level of infighting to come as a corrupt Republican Party, already insulated from moderating ideas by years of gerrymandering, becomes more extreme as it pursues ever higher levels of ideological purity in its own ranks and spends less time focusing on ANYTHING that matters to the public at large.

WTH

Civil Service Cynicism

As Americans prepare to hold their nose through four months of non-stop negative ad campaigns for the November 2024 election, Americans still have a responsibility to properly differentiate between issues merely framed as odious for political purposes versus those involving policy goals that are TRULY odious and dangerous. Dangerous to the nation certainly, but dangerous to individuals as well.

The best example of this is the laundry list of policies being circulated among uber-conservatives as Project 2025. Project 2025 is a manifesto of immediate -- often unilateral -- initiatives that will be undertaken by a Trump Administration to complete their destruction of the Deep State and return America to a prior golden age of "freedom" from chronic, stifling government regulation by the nanny state that is preventing every 'Murican from becoming a billionaire pillow entrepreneur. (Uh huh...)

In reality, the Project 2025 laundry list itemizes a set of actions with a coherent goal -- a goal to instantly eliminate over one hundred years of learning about workplace safety, public health, public safety and financial protections against billion-dollar scale frauds. All of which can be lumped together under one overarching theme... The "gut" of any individual conservative is more worthy of trust than decades of expertise baked into building codes, safety regulations and professional standards enforced by conscientious civil employees who are protected from persecution for doing their job to protect the rest of us.

But rather than talking in general platitudes, it might help if people on the fence about the wisdom of Project 2025 could instead look at a few examples of the value provided by civil servants. Or, more appropriately, examples of the potential harm created when true professionals aren't sufficiently involved when the public's welfare is at stake.

Flint, Michigan Water

One of the most famous failures of government to protect the public is the operation of the municipal water supply in Flint, Michigan. Amid an existing financial crisis that placed the city under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager, that emergency manager, the mayor and Flint city council voted to contract with a different entity to supply water to the city via new pipeline from Lake Huron, switching away from the existing contract with Detroit's municipal water and sewer system. While waiting thirty months for the construction of that new pipeline, those same city managers decided to switch Flint away from the Detroit source to Flint's existing backup source, the Flint River itself. Thought those in charge: It's already in place as our backup, it will save us $5 million in two years while waiting for the new pipeline, what's to lose?

Turns out there was plenty to lose. The Flint River water was not treated with the same chemicals as the Detroit source. The Detroit source included an anti-corrosion chemical that prevented flowing water from stripping away a layer within the piping that prevented lead from the pipes from leaching into the water. Shortly after switching to the backup supply to save money, residents began complaining of poor taste and cloudy water almost immediately. More tellingly, a local GM plant stopped using Flint municipal water after six months because it was traced to premature corrosion on parts being made in the plant.

In less than a year, the city council voted to return to the prior Detroit source but their vote was rejected by the city's appointed emergency manager. The city remained on the contaminated source for eighteen months until October 2015 when the Michigan Governor allocated $9 million dollars in funding for switch-back costs.

As a result of the change, over 100,000 citizens including children were exposed to lead levels far exceeding EPA limits. By 2020 the costs to correct the infrastructure and pay civil damages resulting from the episode totaled $641 million dollars.

Flint was particularly bad but there are more recent examples of situations where the public is being put in a position of having to trust elected and appointed government officials who are likely far beyond their skis in terms of decision making authority versus actual expertise.

Highway Safety

On June 8 of 2024, an elevated loop section of State Highway 22 connecting Jackson Hole to nearby Victor in Wyoming was completely wiped out after water pooling on the inner loop side of the road seeped down, then underneath the road then undermined an even steeper embankment on the outer loop side, triggering a collapse of the seventy foot embankment. Officials had seen signs of pending failure in the road and no vehicles were on the road when it washed out. The road and elevated embankment were constructed in the early 1960s so while the original design might have turned out to be insufficient by modern understanding of soil structures and behavior, the design seemed to do okay for work sixty years ago.

The problem lies in the recovery work led by the Wyoming Department of Transportation. That road segment is apparently vital to the state economy. Or at least it is vital to the wealthy citizens of Jackson Hole who rely on the ability of residents in Victor to be able to get to Jackson Hole to work in local businesses -- none can actually afford to LIVE in Jackson Hole. As such, re-opening this route was a top priority for Wyoming state officials. The embankment required for the road was temporarily shored up and a new asphalt road paved within three weeks to re-open the route to traffic.

Unfortunately, civil engineers on the outside looking into the re-opening effort have identified concerns. As one civil engineer Casey Jones summarized on his YouTube channel, WyDOT engineers and their spokesman:

• cited a minimum 1.2 factor of safety in federal guidelines for temporary construction related to gradings, etc.
• claimed the new road exceeds that minimum 1.2 factor
• would not publicly share their actual calculated safety factor of the new embankment
• in further rationalizing their work, stated that each decimal point of the safety factor is a 100% increase in safety

Civil engineer Casey Jones and others like him are raising concern about these statements from WyDOT because they CLEARLY indicate the leadership of WyDOT and the contractors it hired for the reconstruction don't understand the applicable regulations and don't understand the engineering mathematics involved.

Specifically...

The federal highway standard cited regarding factor of safety requires a MINIMUM 1.2 factor of safety for "temporary construction" on "low risk slopes." That doesn't mean a temporary arrangement that is carrying TRAFFIC. That means temporary construction DURING CONSTRUCTION to ensure worker safety. And a slope with a seventy foot height does not qualify as a low-risk slope. Actual factor of safety levels are typically 2x to 3x and beyond.

Second, numbers in factor of safety calculations are RATIOS, not logarithmic numbers. A design with a factor of safety of 1.3 is NOT one hundred percent greater than one of 1.2. It is only 8.3 percent greater. Any engineer working in this field who performs this design work or signs off on it knows that. Were these numbers and the spokesman's comments not reviewed by ANYONE within WyDOT or its contractors who knew better?

Finally, multiple engineers who have seen video of the original collapsed roadway and the "temporary" workaround have noticed the temporary arrangement seems to replicate the flaw that triggered the original failure. The inside portion of the loop has more fill and a gentler slope than the prior incarnation but it can still pool water that runs off the road or lands on the fill. That means it can still seep down, then under the road then through the fill on the other side and trigger sudden shifts in that fill. Casey Jones made the point that it is highly unlikely a engineering firm could have completed a design for rebuilding the embankments on both sides, much less submitted them to another firm for review, much less completed collection of new soil samples required to evaluate the underlying layers of soil, sand, sediment and rock that would have to factor into those new designs -- all in three weeks. Yet the road is open for traffic and permitting twenty thousand pound vehicles at forty miles per hour on a TURN.

Dam Safety

Meanwhile, recent heavy rains have triggered concern in Houston, Texas after officials found water releases from Livingston Dam on the Trinity River north of the city earlier in June damaged the spillway of the dam. The dam provides some flood control and power generation for the larger area but its flood prevention capability is not terribly great. It lacks the height to allow operators to arbitrarily retain much more water than its normal watershed collects every day. That's a concern for two reasons. First, fixing the damage to spillways will require an extended period where the spillways are NOT used yet hurricane season has arrived and Hurricane Beryl is headed for Houston. This has triggered operators to attempt to lower water levels by one foot behind the dam with a release the night of July 6 into July 7.

Second, even prior to the early June release that appeared to cause damage that was noticed by the media, the dam's operators were already having meetings with federal regulators who oversee the dam's power plant operation regarding the dam's operating condition. Earlier bouts of heavy rain between March and May also required unusually large releases of water which shifted rip rap (large rocks at the bottom of spillways used to slow down water and block erosion) and began serious erosion at the dam's base. Damage to the spillway and risks to the dam's foundation were already being addressed prior to the June incident via letters from external engineering firms hired by federal regulators.

It is possible the dam exists in a state where its spillway cannot sustain the erosion that will be created by pre-emptive efforts to lower reservoir levels ahead of an expected hurricane yet not enough space exists in the reservoir to absorb the precipitation from a hurricane to avoid overtopping the dam. That puts thousands of residents near the dam and downstream of it along the Trinity River in a stressful position. Should they trust local and state officials to provide them an evacuation order if further risks at the dam become apparent? Have local and state officials earned that trust via honest communications with residents in the past?

---------------------------

If you talk to anyone who deals with construction, manufacturing, transportation or maritime businesses, they will often state that the codes governing their profession are written in blood. This is a dramatic way of reminding those responsible for FOLLOWING those codes or certifying the work of others that every character in every sentence in those codes exists because, at some point in the past, someone probably died in an accident that could have (should have) been avoided that resulted in that new rule being added to the code. The saying is intended to cut through the complacency and arrogance that can take root with people doing complicated work over and over who may think they know better or don't need to follow the code "this time."

The larger universe of government regulation is the equivalent of these professional codes over a wider scope of activities. Because government regulations are created by actors selected via political processes, there are ABSOLUTELY cases where regulations exist to favor one group over another or preserve some special advantage unfairly. However, it is ABSOLUTELY the case that the MAJORITY of regulations exist because of prior abuses of economic power or prior incidents where public health and safety were ignored in favor of individuals or firms.

Any organization publicly claiming it will

1. systematically ELIMINATE most government regulation and
2. cut budgets of agencies enforcing crucial government regulation and
3. eliminate protections of civil servants attempting to enforce regulations

is essentially claiming they are smarter than over one hundred years of accumulated history in industrial society. Anyone supporting such actions is claiming they believe that every man, woman or child is equal in power to the wealthiest billionaire or largest multi-national corporation.

Of course, none of those beliefs are true. In reality, people advocating for the Project 2025 agenda are selfish cynics who believe there is money for them to pocket by helping the already-powerful further subjugate average citizens and that those average citizens are stupid enough to take the bait, vote against their own interest and expedite the process of these cynics gathering their cut.

WTH

Twenty Weeks to Topple a Republic

Since February 12, 2024, the United States Supreme Court has had its finger in the pie of the effort to prosecute Donald Trump for actions prior to and on January 6 to subvert the 2020 election and retain power. On February 12, Trump's attorneys bypassed the normal appeals court flow and filed a motion directly with the USSC to halt his prosecution. Sixteen days later, on February 28, the USSC announced its decision to hear Trump's appeal. On April 25, the USSC heard oral arguments from the Trump team and from federal prosecutors regarding Trump's immunity claims. Finally, on July 1, 2024 --- TWENTY WEEKS -- ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY DAYS LATER -- the USSC announced its decision in the case.

What on earth could the members of the USSC have been doing for ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY DAYS in a case that should have been so easy to decide? Now we know.

The 6-3 conservative majority on the court was spending that time carefully crafting an opinion to further promote a ultra-conservative Unitary Executive theory of Presidential power, pretend to retain some semblance of prosecutorial threat to Presidents committing "private" crimes while explicitly stating a new principle of "presumptive criminal immunity" for "official" acts as President which appears NOWHERE in America's history nor in 250 years of legal precedent.

Here is the core of the decision, the entire second paragraph of the ruling.

Held: Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.

Everything else after that paragraph in the forty three page ruling is frankly a smoke screen aimed at making this radical ruling appear reasoned and cautious.

How intellectually, historically and morally flawed is this ruling?

The majority opinion explicitly ignores 250 years of history and legal precedent to invent a concept of presidential immunity for official acts which has no basis in ANY of writings of the founders who crafted the Constitution, much less the ACTUAL CONSTITUTION itself.

The majority opinion explicitly ignores concessions made in oral arguments by Trump's counsel about acts which were PRIVATE acts and instead, attempts to reference those amid other distracting language conveying "we're not trying to decide everything for all scenarios now, those issues can be litigated in the future." As a result, even conduct Trump's own lawyer conceded had NO claim to immunity has been taken out of the settled column and placed back into jeopardy, requiring more litigation and delay that benefits Trump and delays the point at which the American public will see facts laid out in a trial. This approach also doesn't rule out having THOSE determinations appealed all the way back to the Supreme Court to trigger a future decision further cementing immunity protections of a President.

The majority opinion defines a completely new evidentiary shield that prevents any communication of a President in his official capacity (speaking with Administration officials or speaking publicly) from being used to prove the President's state of mind or thinking, even in prosecution for "private" acts not protected by the Court's new "official act" immunity. This eliminates VAST amounts of evidence involved with current charges for "private" acts regarding Trump -- possibly crippling the remaining "private" act cases against Trump. It also provides ANY future President a clear rule to follow to attach further safeguards against criminal prosecution. Just announce your crime and intent publicly speaking as President. Per this court decision, any such communication is excluded from use in prosecution.

The majority opinion attempts to appear to make a distinction between official acts where the President is performing unique Constitutional functions such as providing direction to the military and more mundane acts as if to say their ruling is not nearly as slanted to executive power as it sounds. Yet, the ruling says this:

But the breadth of the President’s “discretionary responsibilities” under the Constitution and laws of the United States frequently makes it “difficult to determine which of [his] innumerable ‘functions’ encompassed a particular action.” Id., at 756. The immunity the Court has recognized therefore extends to the “outer perimeter” of the President’s official responsibilities, covering actions so long as they are “not manifestly or palpably beyond [his] authority.” Blassingame v. Trump, 87 F. 4th 1, 13 (CADC).

That reference to "discretionary responsibilities" seems to cast a very ambiguous net around nearly any action a President might take while justifying it as vital to national security. And any leeway in such determinations that lean TOWARDS whatever the President claims to be "official" acts and those unique to the Constitutional powers of the President then attach that evidentiary cloak, limiting the ability and likelihood of turning up other information to prosecute acts still exempt from such sweeping immunity protections.

This ruling spends considerable time attempting to provide a big picture view avoiding hypotheticals about the potential abuses of some future theoretical President. At the same time, the ruling discounts all of the facts regarding an actual President who led multiple criminal efforts to manipulate events completely outside his role as President by filing knowingly false documents in sixty one state courts as CANDIDATE Trump and leading a conspiracy to alter electoral vote slates from five different states to reverse a loss and retain power.

So again... How intellectually, historically and morally flawed is this ruling?

Congratulations John Roberts. Your signature now appears on the single most destructive Supreme Court ruling in the history of the United States of America. Ahead of Plessy vs Ferguson, the "separate but equal" case of 1896. Ahead of Dred Scott vs. Sanford, the "slaves aren't citizens and have no standing to sue" case of 1857 that cemented the eventual moral grounding of the Civil War. You were already in the running for worst court decision for Citizens United vs. FEC that held that "money is speech" and billion dollar corporations have an "equal" right to speak as individuals with their billions of dollars but Trump vs. United States is now at the top of the list with everything else a distant second.

This decision is worse than than Dred Scott vs Sandford because it cannot be argued to merely reflect the unevolved morals of a society still selling slaves. This decision is worse than Plessy vs Ferguson which publicly reiterated a racist bias still held by a majority of citizens at the time. This decision is WORSE because it ignores 250 years of legal and moral evolution, rejects that entire realm of progress and lays out a roadmap for any current or future President to completely circumvent every check and balanced devised by the founding fathers these conservatives claim to worship in a naked exercise of power in the present. Because they have the votes to do it and "their guy" and "their party" benefits.

WTH