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Watch PBS’s “The Rise of RFK Jr.” Learn Who He Is.

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2025 //
2

Last night I watched a PBS Frontline documentary: The Rise of RFK Jr.

This documentary is fascinating. It shows young Bobby’s idyllic childhood at the family’s sprawling, luxurious compound in Virginia. He grew up in a world of joy, fun, and privilege.

You can see how deeply he was scarred by the murder of his father, with whom he was very close. This was an experience no child should endure.

He is sent away to a boarding school, where he is soon kicked out. Then another, then Harvard, which was a given, in light of his name. At Harvard, he becomes addicted to drugs and a drug dealer. Pot, cocaine, heroin.

He goes to law school, flunks the bar exam, but eventually passes. He marries an eligible young woman, has children, divorces her. Still a drug addict. Meets a beautiful Catholic girl, marries her, has four children. He begins to find his niche as an environmental lawyer. Life is looking up. But he’s a sex addict and he keeps a record of his conquests–at least 37. His wife finds the record and hangs herself.

He believes he is destined for greatness. He is a Kennedy so he keeps looking for the vehicle that will catapult him to fame. He discovers angry mothers who are looking for the cause of their children’s autism. He latches on to the issue and becomes their champion. He also becomes a prominent anti-Vaxxer and conspiracy theorist.

He briefly runs for president in 2024 but soon realizes that his prospects are nil. Trump offers a big job if he joins his campaign. Bobby accepts his offer, to the dismay of his family.

Bobby speaks to large, adoring crowds. He loves it.

Trump appoints him to lead the government’s public health agency–Health and Human Services. His family is appalled. They know he is unqualified. They know he has no respect for science. He promises the Senate committee that he won’t stop vaccines, despite his long history as a critic of them. He wins approval.

He begins to fire prominent scientists and thousands of experienced employees. He throws the agency into turmoil.

So here we are.

Categories Accountability, Character, Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Health, Safety, Science, Shame, Trump

Hegseth and Trump Are Greeted with Stony Silence by Military Leaders

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2025 //
16

Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, summoned hundreds of generals and admirals to an in-person meeting to lecture them. Hegseth spoke to them condescendingly to remind them that he is Secretary of War, not Secretary of Defense (which is not true because only Congress can rename a Department). He spoke about raising standards for height and weight and said he didn’t want “fat generals” in command (does that crack about weight apply to the Commander-in-Chief?). He wants regular tests of physical strength for all members of the service set to male standards and if women can’t meet them, tough.

Hegseth ignored the reality that wars today are not won by brute strength but by intelligence, wisdom, experience, and training. Warriors are flying incredibly complex airplanes that require technological skills and mental sharpness. Battles are fought by soldiers operating computers, shooting down drones and missiles, and guiding weapons with precision to their target. The hand-to-hand combat that Hegseth imagines is obsolete.

The generals and admirals must have been seething to be talked down to by Hegseth, whose highest rank in the Army National Guard was major.

He lavished praise on the Trump policy of banning diversity, inclusion, and equity, ignoring the fact that the military is a prime exemplar of the success of DEI. Just recently, he abolished a program that has recruited women into the military with great success for decades.

When he finished his speech, he waited for applause but the audience didn’t put their hands together.

Trump gave a frightening speech, saying that the greatest threat was “the enemy within.” Shades of Joe McCarthy! Trump, of course, never wore his nation’s uniform, nor have his sons. He managed to get five draft deferments based on a letter from a podiatrist who rented space in one of his father’s shopping malls. In other words, he is a draft dodger.

The military is supposed to protect our nation from hostile foreign enemies but Trump believes that the worst enemies today, the worst threats to the nation, are what he calls “radical left lunatics.” He told the military brass that America’s military should use its big cities as “training grounds” for the troops.

That sounds like martial law to me.

No other President has gone before the leaders of the military to ridicule his predecessor, to rail against his political foes, and to praise himself lavishly.

What’s frightening is that Trump seems eager to use the troops to put down domestic protests. If he can manufacture domestic violence, he has telegraphed that he will not hesitate to send in the military with orders to use “full force,” that is, to gun down civilians. Shoot to kill.

Many viewers must have thought of the brave farewell speech of General Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Trump’s first term. A week before he gave this speech, Trump said he should be put to death.

Milley said:

“We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”

“Every soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, guardian and Coast Guardsman, each of us commits our very life to protect and defend that document, regardless of personal price. And we are not easily intimidated.”

A warning to people in big cities. Protest peacefully. Wave signs. Sing songs. Chant. Don’t bring weapons to protests. Do not disrespect the troops. Do not provoke them into using their weapons.

Trump wants you to fight with the troops. Don’t take the bait. He wants you to throw rocks and draw fire from them. He wants a Reichstag fire to use as a pretext to suspend elections.

Don’t play into his small hands.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Safety, Trump

Michael Hiltzik: RFK Jr. is a Danger to Public Health

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2025 //
1

Michael Hiltzik, columnist for The Los Angeles Times, explains why Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is himself a danger to public health. Why did Trump pick him? RFK Jr. is neither a medical nor a scientific researcher. He has made his mark in public as a conspiracy theorist and a publicist for the idea that vaccines cause autism and other illnesses.

Hiltzik writes:

Americans have become woefully familiar with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the purveyor of flagrant misinformation about medical treatments. And with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the minimizer of health crises such as the spreading measles outbreak. And with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the antivaccine crusader.

Now let’s meet Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the promoter of a costly, time-consuming and distinctly unethical order for testing vaccines. “All new vaccines will undergo safety testing in placebo-controlled trials prior to licensure — a radical departure from past practices,” HHS announced in a May 1 statement. What it didn’t say was that the “departure” is “radical” because it’s shunned by medical authorities as a bad thing.

Just this week, Kennedy’s agency doubled down on this order with the appointment of Vinay Prasad, an oncologist at UC San Francisco, as head of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, the division at the Food and Drug Administration that oversees vaccine testing.

Prasad was a strident critic of the Biden administration’s approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the COVID vaccines. In a blog post in late April, he called for clinical testing of COVID boosters, along the lines of Kennedy’s order. Prasad succeeds Peter Marks, a widely respected expert who resigned from the FDA in March after clashing with Kennedy.

“I was willing to work to address [Kennedy’s] concerns regarding vaccine safety and transparency,” Marks wrote in his resignation letter. “However, it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”

The HHS announcement about Kennedy’s demand for placebo-controlled trials was unclear about how it defined “new vaccines.” But his previous claims about vaccine safety have made clear that he’s referring not only to first-generation vaccines for diseases, but also boosters and expanded formulations. That’s an important point, as I’ll cover in a moment.

The antivaccine camp, of which Kennedy has long been a leader, has pushed the claim that most childhood vaccines haven’t been adequately tested for safety because they haven’t been subjected to placebo-controlled trials — and therefore may be unsafe.

“Except for the COVID vaccine, none of the vaccines on the CDC’s childhood recommended schedule was tested against an inert placebo, meaning we know very little about the actual risk profiles of these products,” Kennedy’s spokesman at HHS, Andrew Nixon, asserted in connection with the order.

Both components of that claim are misrepresentations.

Let’s take a closer look, starting with some rudimentary points.

The testing that Kennedy and Prasad advocate are randomized control trials. They’re correct in asserting that so-called RCTs are the gold standard in clinical testing of drugs and vaccines.

RCTs typically involve at least two groups of subjects: One receives the medicine in question and another — a control group — receives something else, such as a placebo, a concoction that’s designed to resemble the medicine but is essentially inert, with no evident effect on the disease. The placebo may be an injectable saline solution, or water, or a sugar pill.

Kennedy, like other antivaxxers, is deceptive in saying that the safety of vaccines should be questioned if it hasn’t been tested against an “inert placebo.”

That brings us to the ethics of clinical testing, and why Kennedy’s policy is so dangerous.

Testing a vaccine against a true placebo is ethical and proper when it’s the first treatment for a disease for which no other safe and effective treatment exists. That’s not the case, however, when a known treatment does exist — say after a vaccine has been shown to be safe and effective and has become the standard of care.

As vaccine specialist Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has explained, subjecting new versions of those vaccines to placebo-controlled testing — giving some subjects the new vaccine and the control subjects no treatment, would be unethical, because it would require depriving the placebo group access to a known treatment. That was the conclusion of an expert panel assembled by the World Health Organization in 2014.

Offit, in a 2023 rejoinder to Kennedy’s appearance on a Joe Rogan podcast, in which he claimed that drug companies “never do placebo-controlled trials,” pointed to what may be the most famous vaccine trial to illustrate this point.
That was the nationwide trial of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine. In 1954, 420,000 first- and second-graders were given the Salk shot, and 200,000 got a shot of salt water. Salk objected to the trial’s design. Smaller trials had established the safety and efficacy of his vaccine, so the plan meant depriving 200,000 children of immunity to a disease that was paralyzing 50,000 children a year and killing 1,500.


As Offit noted, in the full trial 16 children died from polio; all were in the placebo group. So were 34 of the 36 children paralyzed in the course of the trial. “These are the gentle heroes we leave behind,” Offit wrote.


Now let’s examine Kennedy’s order as it applies to modern vaccines. As the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski has pointed out, contrary to the assertion by Kennedy’s spokesman, almost none of the vaccines on the current childhood vaccination list is a first-generation vaccine warranting placebo testing. (An exception is Gardasil, which safeguards against human papilloma virus.)

They’re upgraded preparations of vaccines that themselves underwent placebo-controlled trials, or formulations aimed at new variants of the targeted disease, or shots that inoculate against several diseases all at once.

To demand that every new formulation be tested against an inert placebo would mean turning back the clock to reproduce trials that may have taken place decades ago, but resulted in the licensing of the original vaccine after safety and efficacy were established.

That means it would have been unethical to test the new version against a saline control, because the control group would be deprived of any effective treatment. “The bottom line,” Gorski writes, “is that, if you trace back the history of the vaccines developed for a disease like, say, measles, you will eventually find the RCT testing the first effective vaccine against it and that vaccine will have had a placebo control.”
He’s right. In a tweet thread, vaccinologist Peter Hotez traced back the history of several vaccines to their initial RCTs.

What makes Kennedy’s order especially cynical is that designing and implementing a clinical trial is an extraordinarily complex, costly and time-consuming process. As a team of Canadian researchers observed in a 2018 Nature article, a full-scale Phase 3 clinical trial — the level at which drugs and vaccines are studied for safety, efficacy and dosing — requires as many as 3,000 participants and can take as long as four years.

In an online posting last month, Prasad ridiculed “the mainstream media” for being upset about the idea that COVID boosters should in effect receive full randomized clinical trials before approval. He took particular issue with an article by Helen Braswell of STAT asserting that such a requirement might well delay approval of a vaccine targeting a new COVID variant until it was too late to protect users from that variant. Prasad called the argument false because “the virus spreads year round.”

Is that so? At the height of the pandemic, new COVID variants sometimes appeared within months of one another. The virulent Delta variant, for example, appeared in the spring of 2021 and was overtaken by the Omicron variant, which also caused severe disease, that November.

Delays in rolling out vaccines to combat newly emergent disease strains and variants could cost millions of lives. Under existing vaccine approval protocols, the COVID vaccines prevented as many as 20 million deaths globally within a year after they were introduced early in 2021.

Prasad’s new job will put him in charge of developing vaccine testing policies and overseeing the design and approval of clinical trials. I asked him via email what policies he would pursue, whether he was in alignment with Kennedy’s approach, and how he expected vaccine developers to reconcile the costs and time constraints of undertaking clinical trials on the scale he advocates with the imperatives of public health. I didn’t receive a reply.

So far, the Kennedy regime at HHS has lived down to the worst expectations of his critics. His devotion to unnecessary testing of vaccines that have already shown their safety and efficacy is only one aspect of a comprehensive assault on public confidence in science-based medicine.

In a recent appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, Kennedy dismissed the severity of the current measles outbreak and denigrated the effectiveness of the measles vaccine. The current outbreak of 935 cases is by far the worst in the U.S. since 2019, when 1,274 cases were recorded; at the current rate, we are on the path to nearly 3,000 this year.

Kennedy has promoted almost useless nostrums against measles, such as vitamin A, while describing vaccination as a personal choice. That’s devastatingly wrongheaded. Kennedy confuses “medicine” and “public health.” The former concerns itself with the individual; the latter with the community. Vaccine policy belongs in the latter category because vaccines are most effective when the effort is communitywide.

Measles is among the most contagious diseases known to humankind, which means that communal vaccination is crucial. Professionals have concluded that a 95% vaccination rate is the minimum required to protect the most vulnerable, such as infants, from infection; as of 2024, the U.S. vaccination rate among kindergartners had fallen from 95.2% in 2019-20 to 92.7%.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which falls within Kennedy’s jurisdiction, says the decline in measles vaccinations leaves 280,000 kindergartners at risk. Two children in the U.S. already have died from a disease that was thought to have been eradicated in the U.S. in 2020; Kennedy doesn’t seem concerned that the toll on his watch is poised to get much worse.

Categories Health, Safety, Science, Trump

The Trouble with Tesla

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2025 //
5

Two years ago, two friends were driving to their weekend getaway in Orient, Long Island, in New York. Both were doctors. One was a noted pulmonologist who had saved my life in 1998 when I had a dangerous pulmonary embolism. His wife was a surgeon in an emergency room at a public hospital, who saved lives every day. They were driving a Ford Explorer.

It was late, about 11:30 pm on a Friday night. They were close to their home, and the highway was nearly deserted.

For reasons that no one knows, they collided with a new Tesla, driven by a man who was showing it to his friend, a visitor. The Tesla exploded. The local fire department arrived soon after. Their poured water on the two burning cars, but the water could not douse the Tesla’s lithium battery. The fire burned out hours later. The four people in the two cars burned to death.

Since then, I have read about electric bicycles with lithium batteries that exploded spontaneously. They should never be stowed indoors.

Then I googled “Tesla exploding,” and I saw a pattern. Beware. Safety matters most.

Categories Failure, Musk, Elon, Safety

Heather Cox Richardson: Which Matters More: Voting Rights or Gun Rights?

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2025 //
19

Heather Cox Richardson brilliantly identifies the signal flaw of the MAGA movement. Trump described the Second Amendment right to bear arms as “foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.” (Of course, Trump’s lawyers–not Trump himself– wrote those words as raw meat for his base.)

Richardson replied that “it is the right to vote for the lawmakers who make up our government that is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.”

On Friday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “protecting Second Amendment rights.” The order calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine all gun regulations in the U.S. to make sure they don’t infringe on any citizen’s right to bear arms. The executive order says that the Second Amendment “is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.”

In fact, it is the right to vote for the lawmakers who make up our government that is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.

The United States Constitution that establishes the framework for our democratic government sets out how the American people will write the laws that govern us. We elect members to a Congress, which consists of the House of Representatives and the Senate. That congress of our representatives holds “all legislative powers”; that is, Congress alone has the right to make laws. It alone has the power to levy taxes on the American people, borrow money, regulate commerce, coin money, declare war, “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper.”

After Congress writes, debates, and passes a measure, the Constitution establishes that it goes to the president, who is also elected, through “electors,” by the people. The president can either sign a measure into law or veto it, returning it to Congress where members can either repass it over his veto or rewrite it. But once a law is on the books, the president must enforce it. The men who framed the Constitution wrote that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” When President Richard Nixon tried to alter laws passed by Congress by withholding the funding Congress had appropriated to put them into effect, Congress shut that down quickly, passing a law explicitly making such “The impoundment” illegal.

Since the Supreme Court’s 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision, the federal courts have taken on the duty of “judicial review,” the process of determining whether a law falls within the rules of the Constitution.

Right now, the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. They have the power to change any laws they want to change according to the formula Americans have used since 1789 when the Constitution went into effect.

But they are not doing that. Instead, officials in the Trump administration, as well as billionaire Elon Musk— who put $290 million into electing Trump and Republicans, and whose actual role in the governmentu remains unclear— are making unilateral changes to programs established by Congress. Through executive orders and announcements from Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” they have sidelined Congress, and Republicans are largely mum about the seizure of their power.

Now MAGA Republicans are trying to neuter the judiciary.

After yet another federal judge stopped the Musk/Trump onslaught by temporarily blocking Musk and his team from accessing Americans’ records from Treasury Department computers, MAGA Republicans attacked judges. “Outrageous,” Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) posted, spreading the lie that the judge barred the Secretary of the Treasury from accessing the information, although in fact he temporarily barred Treasury Secretary Bessent from granting access to others. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) said the decision had “the feel of…a judicial” coup. Right-wing legal scholar Adrian Vermeule called it “[j]udicial interference with legitimate acts of state.”

Vice President J.D. Vance, who would take over the office of the presidency if the 78-year-old Trump can no longer perform the duties of the office, posted: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

As legal scholar Steve Vladeck noted: “Just to say the quiet part out loud, the point of having unelected judges in a democracy is so that *whether* acts of state are ‘legitimate’ can be decided by someone other than the people who are undertaking them. Vermeule knows this, of course. So does Vance.” Of Vance’s statement, Aaron Rupar of Public Notice added: “this is the sort of thing you post when you’re ramping up to defying lawful court orders.”

The Republicans have the power to make the changes they want through the exercise of their constitutional power, but they are not doing so. This seems in part because Trump and his MAGA supporters want to establish the idea that the president cannot be checked. And this dovetails with the fact they are fully aware that most Americans oppose their plans. Voters were so opposed to the plan outlined in Project 2025—the plan now in operation—that Trump ran from it during the campaign. Popular support for Musk’s participation in the government has plummeted as well. A poll from The Economist/YouGov released February 5 says that only 13% of adult Americans want him to have “a lot” of influence, while 96% of respondents said that jobs and the economy were important to them and 41% said they thought the economy was getting worse.

Trump’s MAGA Republicans know they cannot get the extreme changes they wanted through Congress, so they are, instead, dictating them. And Musk began his focus at the Treasury, establishing control over the payment system that manages the money American taxpayers pay to our government.

Musk and MAGA officials claim they are combating waste and fraud, but in fact, when Judge Carl Nichols stopped Trump from shutting down USAID, he specifically said that government lawyers had offered no support for that argument in court. Indeed, the U.S. government already has the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent, nonpartisan agency that audits, evaluates and investigates government programs for Congress. In 2023 the GAO returned about $84 for every $1 invested in it, in addition to suggesting improvements across the government.

According to Musk’s own Grok artificial intelligence tool on X, the investigative departments of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as well as USAID, have all launched investigations into the practices and violations of Elon Musk’s companies.

The vision they are enacting rips predictability, as well as economic security, away from farmers, who are already protesting the loss of their markets with the attempted destruction of USAID. It hurts the states—especially Republican-dominated states—that depend on funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Education. Their vision excludes consumers, who are set to lose the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as well as protections put in place by President Joe Biden. Their vision takes away protections for racial, ethnic, religious, and gender minorities, as well as from women, and kills funding for the programs that protect all of us, such as cancer research and hospitals.

Musk and Trump appear to be concentrating the extraordinary wealth of the American people, along with the power that wealth brings, into their own hands, for their own ends. Trump has championed further tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, while Musk seems to want to make sure his companies, especially SpaceX, win as many government contracts as possible to fund his plan to colonize Mars.

But the mission of the United States of America is not, and has never been, to return huge profits to a few leaders.

The mission of the United States of America is stated in the Constitution. It is a government designed by “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Far from being designed to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a single man, it was formed to do the opposite: spread wealth and power throughout the country’s citizenry and enable them to protect their rights by voting for those who would represent them in Congress and the presidency, then holding them accountable at the ballot box.

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Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Guns, Justice, Safety

Georgia: Another School Shooting; 14-Year-Old Student in Custody

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2024 //
17

A 14-year-old boy is in custody after a mass shooting at Apalachee High School in northern Georgia. Four people are dead, two students and two teachers. At least nine were injured. The boy was a student in the school. At this time, no information has been released about his identity or motive, what kind of gun was used or how the boy got the gun.

Governor Brian Kemp signed legislation weakening the state’s gun laws while sitting in a gun shop, surrounded by gun enthusiasts. Since 2022, Georgia has allowed individuals to carry guns without a permit, although public opinion polls showed that almost 70% of Georgians opposed permitless carry.

In 2022, Kemp proudly signed the new gun law:

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp on Tuesday signed a law allowing residents to carry handguns in public without a license or background check.

Kemp, a Republican, backed a similar proposal when he ran for governor in 2018, and expanding gun rights was a key part of his platform. He urged the legislature to take up the issue at a press conference earlier this year. 

“(This bill) makes sure that law-abiding Georgians, including our daughters and your family too, can protect themselves without having to have permission from your state government,” Kemp said Tuesday before signing the bill into law. “This is an issue that I campaigned on in 2018 alongside so many members that are standing with us today. And by working together, we have gotten it across the finish line.”

A pro-gun control group called Everytown for Gun Safety ranked Georgia as one of the worst states in the nation (46th of 50). It described Georgia’s gun laws:

Georgia has some of the weakest gun laws in the country. The legislature passed a law requiring colleges and universities to allow guns on campus in 2017, and in 2022, Georgia repealed its last foundational policy by passing permitless carry legislation. Though Georgia repealed its Citizen’s Arrest law in 2021, the state still has a dangerous Shoot First law that allows a person to kill another in a public area, even when they can safely walk away from the danger.

If Georgia had the gun death rate of our National Leaders—the eight states with the strongest gun safety laws—we could save 17,987 lives in the next decade.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Extremism, Georgia, Guns, Guns in Schools, Safety

Forbes: It’s Easy to Crack Your Passwords

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2024 //
5

Davey Winder, senior contributor to Forbes, writes about how to keep your passwords safe.

With just a few dollars, a little time, and a smart brute-force guessing algorithm, most passwords can be cracked in much less time than you might imagine. According to a new analysis from the experts at Kaspersky, 59% of 193 million actual passwords were cracked in less than 60 minutes, and 45% were cracked in less than 60 seconds.

The basis of a brute-force attack is where the perpetrator iterates all possible combinations in order to find a match for the password in question. However, Antonov explained, “smart guessing algorithms are trained on a passwords data-set to calculate the frequency of various character combinations and make selections first from the most common combinations and down to the rarest ones.”

Brute Force And Smart-Guessing Combine To Quickly Crack Passwords

Although very popular due to the point-and-fire simplicity of a brute-force attack, it remains suboptimal as far as password-cracking algorithms are concerned. When you consider that the vast majority of passwords in daily use contain similar characteristics involving the combination of dates, names, dictionary words and keyboard sequences, adding these to the guessing-game mix speeds things up considerably.

The Kaspersky study revealed that when it comes to the percentage of passwords crackable in any timeframe using each method, while 10% of the password list analyzed was broken in under a minute by brute force, that increased to 45% when smart-guessing was added to the algorithm. Allowing for between a minute and an hour, the difference was 20% compared to 59%.

The Smart-Guessing Algorithm Advantage Explained

Because humans are creatures of habit, we make for very poor password creators. The truth is that the passwords we choose for ourselves are rarely, if ever, truly random. We rely upon all the things that smart-guessing algorithms are designed to detect: common names and phrases, important dates both personal and historical, and patterns, lots of patterns. To give you an idea of how predictable we are, one YouTube channel took a sample of more than 200,000 people and asked them to choose a ‘random’ number between 1 and 100. Most people gravitated towards the same relatively small set: 7, 37, 42, 69, 73, and 77. Even when trying to be random with character strings, we fail as most people will favor the center of the keyboard for their selection, according to Kaspersky.

“Smart algorithms make short work of most passwords that contain dictionary sequences,” Antonov said, “and they even catch character substitutions.” In other words, using p@ssw0rd instead of password won’t slow the algorithm down that much at all.

How To Strengthen Your Accounts Against Smart-Guessing Algorithm Attack

Kaspersky recommends the following password usage strategy:

Generate strong and truly random passwords using a password manager.

Don’t reuse passwords across sites and services or hacking one basket will enable access to many more eggs.

If you don’t, or won’t, use a password manager, then use mnemonic passphrases rather than dictionary words and numeric combinations.

Don’t save passwords in web browsers.

Use a password manager protected by a strong master password.

Use two-factor authentication for all accounts that support it.

Categories Fraud, Safety, Technology, Computers

Justice Thomas Stands Up For the 2nd Amendment Rights of Violent Spousal Abusers

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2024 //
38

Lucien V. Truscott IV explains Justice Clarence Thomas’ devotion to gun owners.

He writes:

Well, I guess somebody has to stand up for the rights of spousal killers, wife beaters, child abusers, and the Second Amendment, and I’ll just bet you can guess who it is.  Today, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas stepped up and took one for the team, voting alone against the 8-1 decision in United States v. Rahimi that bars people from possessing firearms while they are under domestic violence restraining orders.  Not stripping them of the right to own guns, mind you, but only suspending that right under the Second Amendment until such an asshole can get the restraining order straightened out so he can get his guns back. 


Thomas must be spending so much time in the history stacks in the Fairfax County library, where he lives in Virginia, that they’re probably considering buying a cot for him to take naps on during his long hours of study of our laws in the 1700’s and 1800’s, not to mention old English law and a few ancient Greek statutes he quoted in his Bruen gun rights decision.  Perusing the laws that were in existence at the time of our nation’s founding, Thomas wrote in his dissent in today’s case that “Not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue.”  The “statute at issue” suspends the right of those under domestic violence restraining orders from possessing guns.


Chief Justice John Roberts appears to be the one who convinced four of the other six gun nuts on the court, all of whom voted to allow bump stock equipped machine guns earlier in the week, to join him in at least temporarily coming to their senses.  Roberts was able to somehow resurrect enough common sense on the court that he got enough votes to rule, as the author of the decision, that “an individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.”  I mean, whoop-de-fucking-doo, but I guess we are in the position of taking them when we can get them, right?

The plaintiff in the case, one Zacky Rahimi, is a convicted drug dealer who had beaten his girlfriend to the ground in a parking lot and was dragging her back to his car when a bystander intervened.  Rahimi fired a shot at the bystander, and the girlfriend took that opportunity to escape.  Rahimi called her later and threatened violence – specifically, he said he would “shoot” her – if she told anyone about the incident. The girlfriend asked a Texas court to issue a restraining order and amazingly they agreed, finding that Rahimi had committed “family violence” and suspended his right to possess guns while the restraining order was in effect. 

Rahimi managed to hang onto enough firearms that he was involved in five shootings in the following months, according to the Supreme Court brief filed by the Biden Department of Justice.  Rahimi was charged with illegal possession of a firearm, was convicted in federal court and sentenced to six years in prison.  But Rahimi continued to argue that his rights under the Second Amendment had been violated.  The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Rahimi at his first hearing, but after Justice Thomas wrote the decision in Bruen, ruling that laws restricting firearms had to be rooted in the “history and tradition” of this country, the Fifth Circuit reheard the case and, incredibly, ruled for Rahimi.  Citing the Bruen case a Trump appointee on the court wrote that while the federal law banning people under restraining orders from possessing firearms was “meant to protect vulnerable people in our society…our ancestors would never have accepted” laws against domestic violence.

The decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals was unanimous, so Rahimi’s right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment was restored.

The case was appealed by the DOJ to the Supreme Court, where many legal experts feared it would hit the “history and tradition” brick wall of Thomas’ Bruen decision.  Chief Justice Roberts, however, appeared to back the court away from that decision a bit today.  “Some courts have misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases. These precedents were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber,” Roberts wrote. “The Second Amendment permits more than just those regulations identical to ones that could be found in 1791.”  Roberts cautioned that if courts hearing gun cases were to consider only laws in existence at the founding of the country, they would find laws dealing with “muskets and sabers.”  Instead, Roberts urged courts that will interpret his decision in the future to consider whether a gun regulation at issue is “relatively similar” to regulations that were in effect closer to the nation’s founding.  “For example,” Roberts wrote, “if laws at the founding regulated firearm use to address particular problems, that will be a strong indicator that contemporary laws imposing similar restrictions for similar reasons fall within a permissible category of regulations.”

In the amazingly dull and nearly impenetrable language of the Supreme Court, that comes as close as we will ever get to a relaxation of the Thomas decision in Bruen, which courts like the Fifth Circuit have interpreted as turning back the clock to the way guns were regulated in 1791, which is to say not at all.

That may be why Thomas was the lone dissenter in the decision today, because it took some of the edges off his celebration of guns-for-everybody in the Bruen decision.  Or maybe Thomas, in his history-stacks-diving on domestic violence laws discovered, as he has before, a favorite old English construction of what husbands and domestic partners are permitted to do to the women in their lives:  the “Rule of Thumb.” 

It’s not like this subject hasn’t been dealt with before.  In January of 1982, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report that was entitled “Under the Rule of Thumb:  Battered Women and the Administration of Justice.”  The Commission found that when it came to domestic violence, “American law is built on the British Common Law that condoned wife beating and even prescribed the weapon to be used.  This ‘rule of thumb’ stipulated that a man could only beat his wife with ‘a rod not thicker than his thumb.’” 

The Commission noted that William Blackstone, who “greatly influenced the making of law in the American colonies,” commented thusly on the rule of thumb:  “For as the husband is to answer for her misbehavior, the law thought it reasonable to entrust him with this power of chastisement, in the same moderation that a man is allow to correct his apprentices or children.”

American courts, bless their bleeding hearts, can be said to have taken up the rod passed to them by the Brits.  Have a look at this from an 1864 court in a case of a man who choked his wife:  “The law permits him to use towards his wife such a degree of force, as is necessary to control an unruly temper, and make her behave herself; and unless some permanent injury be inflicted, or there be an excess of violence, or such a degree of cruelty as shows that it is inflicted to gratify his own bad passions, the law will not invade the domestic forum, or go behind the curtain. It prefers to leave the parties to themselves.”  The Civil Rights Commission quoted a Mississippi Supreme Court case from 1824: “Let the husband be permitted to exercise the right of moderate chastisement, in cases of great emergency, and use salutary restraints in every case of misbehaviour, without being subjected to vexatious prosecutions, resulting in the mutual discredit and shame of all parties concerned.”

After an Alabama court had rescinded the right of a man to beat his wife in 1871, a North Carolina court came along and provided some relief to all those poor men who had to deal with those damn recalcitrant women: “If no permanent injury has been inflicted, nor malice, cruelty nor dangerous violence shown by the husband, it is better to draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze, and leave the parties to forget and forgive.”

Thomas, in his dissent that would allow abusive husbands and male partners under court restraining orders to own guns, would appear to smile upon Ye Ole Rule of Thumb as well.  It’s history and tradition, you understand — Thomas’ favorite harkening back to the good old days when a man was allowed to own not only a gun, but a stick big enough to beat his wife with.

Categories Extremism, Gender, Guns, Injustice, Safety

Robert Hubbell: The Supreme Court’s Wacky Spin on Gun Control

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2024 //
15

Robert Hubbell understands that the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority would like to remove all limits on gun ownership. But even this group of extremists couldn’t find a way to justify allowing a man with a history of domestic abuse and violent threats to exercise Second Amendnent rights. So they got tangled up in knots trying to find common ground to say that some people should not own guns.

Note that Justice Clarence Thomas dissented and was willing to allow a man who had threatened his girlfriend’s life and fired a gun at others to have a gun. Justice Thomas complained that Mr. Rahimi had lost his right to own a gun without due process.

In the odd world of Republican ideology, it is perfectly reasonable to defend both “the right to life” and the right for everyone to own and carry a gun in the open. Except this particular person, Mr. Rahimi.

Hubbell wrote:

On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that a domestic abuser with a demonstrated history of gun violence could have his right to possess a firearm suspended pending a hearing on a restraining order. See US v. Rahimi. The result was the only rational outcome in a case with horrific facts. As described by Mark Joseph Stern in Slate,

Zackey Rahimi, who beat his girlfriend, then fired shots at either her or a witness as she fled his abuse. His girlfriend subsequently obtained a restraining order from a state court that found that he posed “a credible threat” to her “physical safety.” Rahimi, however, continued harassing her, threatened a different woman with a firearm, and was identified as the suspect in at least five additional shootings. When the police searched his apartment, they found a pistol, a rifle, ammunition, and a copy of the restraining order.

Although we should celebrate the outcome, the fact that that case made it to the Supreme Court is emblematic of the extremism that the Court’s prior Second Amendment decisions have unleashed. Worse, in attempting to walk back from the precipice of the absurd absolutist position adopted by the Court in an earlier case (Bruen), the justices needed seven different opinions to explain how their ruling in Bruen applied to the facts in Rahimi.

In short, the opinion in Rahimi is a hot mess that leaves lower courts with no meaningful guidance on how to apply the nonsensical rule of Bruen to the real world of a society under siege by gun violence. There is an old saying in law that “Hard cases make bad law.” That saying is true of today’s ruling in Rahimi, as explained below.

It is important to reflect on how we arrived at this moment—one in which rational people heaved a sigh of relief that the Court did not adopt an insane result. The fact that we are grateful for the crumbs that fall from the table of the reactionary majority is a sign of the urgent need to reform the Court.

Background on Supreme Court Second Amendment cases

The Second Amendment was ratified in 1791. Between 1791 and 2008, the Supreme Court interpreted the language of the Second Amendment as protecting a collective right to bear arms, as was made plain by the language of the amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

But in 2008, the Supreme Court overthrew two centuries of jurisprudence to rule in District of Columbia v. Heller, that the right to bear arms belongs to individuals seeking self-defense in their homes. In 2010, the Court ruled that the provisions of the Second Amendment apply to states and municipalities. Finally, in 2022, in NY State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the Court ruled that the “ability to carry a pistol in public was a constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment.”

See how fast that happened? For two centuries, the right to bear arms was a collective right grounded in state militias. In the 14 years from 2008 to 2022, the right quickly morphed from a right to self-defense in homes to the right pack a pistol in public. And last week, the Supreme Court ruled that right extended to private ownership of machine guns.

The problem with Justice Thomas’ majority opinion in Bruen (2022)

Justice Thomas wrote the opinion in Bruce upholding the right to carry a pistol in public. He adopted an “originalist” approach, holding that laws regulating guns were presumptively unconstitutional and that regulations could pass muster only if they were “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Because most modern firearms were not in existence when the Second Amendment was ratified, virtually all restrictions on gun possession would be ruled unconstitutional under the originalist test in Bruen.

In short, Bruen was an absolutist nightmare that would lead to absurd results. District and appellate courts were quickly mired in rulings leading to nonsensical results—such as the Fifth Circuit’s ruling that Rahimi could not be deprived of his guns despite his demonstrated history of actual and threatened use of firearms against domestic partners.

The ruling in Rahimi (2024)

In Rahimi, issued on Friday, the majority ruled (8 to 1) that temporarily suspending a respondent’s gun ownership in a domestic violence proceeding was constitutional, notwithstanding the holding in Bruen. Justice Thomas dissented, writing (correctly) that applying the holding in Bruen to the facts of the case in Rahimi should have resulted in a ruling declaring the temporary suspension unconstitutional.

But the majority in Rahimi understood that the facts in that case were horrific and that it would be ludicrous to apply their earlier ruling in Bruen as written. In a just universe, the majority should have declared Justice Thomas’ opinion in Bruen a mistake and adopted a new rule. Sadly, the majority did not overrule Bruen. Instead, it came up with an exception to Bruen, which was crafted by Chief Justice Roberts.  

The exception created by Roberts is as nonsensical as Justice Thomas’s original rule. Or, as Ian Millhiser writes in Vox, Justice Roberts’ opinion is “incoherent gobbledygook.” See Vox, The Supreme Court refuses to accept blame for its worst guns decision, in US v. Rahimi.

Justice Roberts narrowed Bruen by writing that some gun regulations would be constitutional if they were based on “analogous regulations that existed when the Constitution was framed.” Okay, so far. What “analogous regulations” existed in 1791 that were similar to depriving a domestic abuser of his firearms? Answer: There were no such regulations. (A point made by Justice Thomas.)

Instead, Justice Roberts pointed to “surety laws” that required some people to post a bond if it could be shown they might engage in dangerous activity. But posting money is nothing like being deprived of a firearm (a point made by Justice Thomas). Nonetheless, Justice Roberts ruled that posting a surety bond was “relevantly similar” to depriving someone of gun ownership. Uh, okay. If you say so, Justice Roberts.

Don’t get me wrong. I am happy with the outcome. But Justice Roberts’ test of finding “relevantly similar analogous regulations” is pure mush—especially if posting a money bond is “analogous” to being deprived of gun ownership. The test provides no guidance and casts lower courts adrift on a sea of challenges to local gun regulations.

But it gets worse. Justice Roberts left the door open for future challenges from plaintiffs like Rahami. Why? Because Rahami claimed that the statute in question was invalid on its face as applied to everyone. This distinction is explained by Ian Millhiser in his Vox article, cited above:

Facial challenges allege that a particular law is unconstitutional in all of its applications, meaning that a court must effectively strike it from the books. They stand in contrast to weaker “as-applied” challenges, which allege that a law is unconstitutional only when enforced against a particular party. As Roberts explains, facial challenges are notoriously difficult to win — the party challenging the law must “establish that no set of circumstances exists under which the Act would be valid.”

So, it is possible that if Rahami had simply said, “The law is invalid as applied to me,” he might have won under Justice Roberts’ approach.

In the end, the Supreme Court has anointed itself as the final arbiter of every challenge to a gun regulation because no lower court can be certain that it has divined whether a regulation is “relevantly similar” to an “analogous regulation” that existed in 1791. Lower courts are effectively consigned to playing a game of Twenty Questions with the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court’s inability to set forth a coherent, predictable, interpretable rule for lower courts is due to its rushing headlong to overturn long-established, settled precedent—as it did in Heller, Bruen, and Dobbs.

Again, in the words of Ian Millhiser,

Rahimi, in other words, is a monument to this Court’s arrogance, and its inability to admit its own mistakes. Bruen is an unworkable disaster that has caused mass confusion within the lower courts. It should be overruled in its entirety.

To similar effect, with a slightly more positive view of the opinion in Rahimi, see Mark Joseph Stern in Slate, The Supreme Court Walks Back Clarence Thomas’ Guns Extremism. Stern writes,

By replacing Thomas’ hard-line views with a more malleable standard, SCOTUS has ended one battle over guns. But by remaining in this area, where it has no right to be in the first place, the court has invited a thousand more.

Finally, for a review of the various concurring opinions, see Chris Geidner’s Substack, Law Dork, What the justices are writing about when they write about Rahimi. Geidner includes the following excerpt of Justice Sotomayor’s concurring opinion, which will be the final word on the subject for today’s edition:

The Court today clarifies Bruen’s historical inquiry and rejects the dissent’s exacting historical test. I welcome that development.

That being said, I remain troubled by Bruen’s myopic focus on history and tradition, which fails to give full consideration to the real and present stakes of the problems facing our society today.

In my view, the Second Amendment allows legislators “to take account of the serious problems posed by gun violence” not merely by asking what their predecessors at the time of the founding or Reconstruction thought, but by listening to their constituents and crafting new and appropriately tailored solutions.

Categories Guns, Safety

NYC Prosecutors Seek to Extend Trump Gag Order Because Of Death Threats

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2024 //
17

Anyone who stands up to Trump puts their life at risk. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has received hundreds of death threats since his prosecution began. Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies because of his rigging the election by paying off porn star Stormy Daniels to keep his sexual encounter with her out of the news before the vote in 2016. While he throws around claims that Democrats “would rig the election” in 2016 and claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” and “stolen,” it was he who rigged the election by paying Daniels for her silence.

Trump claims that his inability to attack the jurors and prosecutors violates his First Amendment rights. He is vile.

The New York Times reported today:

Prosecutors in Manhattan said on Friday that a judge should keep in place major elements of a gag order that was imposed on Donald J. Trump, citing dozens of threats that have been made against officials connected to the case.

The order, issued before Mr. Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial began in mid-April, bars him from attacking witnesses, jurors, court staff and relatives of the judge who presided over the trial, Juan M. Merchan.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have sought to have the order lifted since Mr. Trump’s conviction in late May. But in a 19-page filing on Friday, prosecutors argued that while Justice Merchan no longer needed to enforce the portion of the gag order relating to trial witnesses, he should keep in place the provisions protecting jurors, prosecutors, court staff and their families.

The New York Police Department has logged 56 “actionable threats” since the beginning of April directed against Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who brought the case, and against his family and employees, according to an affidavit provided with the filing.

Such threats, evidently made by supporters of Mr. Trump, included a post disclosing the home address of an employee at the district attorney’s office, and bomb threats made on the first day of the trial directed at two people involved in the case.

The 56 threats that were logged, prosecutors said, did not include the hundreds of “threatening emails and phone calls” that were received by Mr. Bragg’s office in recent months, which the police are “not tracking as threat cases.”

Mr. Trump was convicted on May 30 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 payoff made to the porn star Stormy Daniels. The money was meant to cover up a sexual tryst she says she had with Mr. Trump in 2006, a decade before he was elected president. (Mr. Trump, 78, has continued to deny ever having had sex with Ms. Daniels.)

If he didn’t have sex with Daniels, why did he pay her $130,000?

Categories Democracy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Safety, Trump
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