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The actual ‘Patriot Way’, call it the Patriot Method, is that players are instilled with a cost-reward approach to each play. This has a few very simple but powerful effects. First, it means they accept the other team can compete on plays. They don’t take risk on regular plays or, rather, they compete on regular plays within a set of rules they internalize that balance the risks. It’s not that they want to bend but not break, but that their choices lead them to bend because they allow the other team to compete on plays. If the other team can do it, the Patriots figure they’ll win some and lose some of those battles. Second, when the game becomes more intense, the Patriots keep competing but they adjust the risk-reward balance to fit the higher stakes. This means the advantage becomes theirs because the other team tends to become either too cautious or too reckless or, perhaps a better way to say this is the other team starts to think a bit too much, either waiting too long or reacting too quickly. The Patriots are built to make decisions in pressure circumstances because they’re built to make those decisions on every play. They understand how the context affects the risk-reward learning they’ve internalized, so they react better to tighter windows and can seize momentary advantages, and they can do this as individuals and as a team. Third, this means the Patriots are built to have close games with teams that play well and, bluntly, if the opponent realizes they can compete up and down the field, they probably induce good opponents to play well. That’s part of the Patriot Method too: you are a better team if you can handle opponents that play well, that are able to compete with you, because that’s how you learn how to win under pressure. As a note, they didn’t play very well for much of the Jaguars game. That’s a different topic: why do teams play well or badly? I can say why the Patriots are resilient, why they believe they can improve during a game. Jerry Kramer in Instant Replay – that’s a book by a lineman about the block on the play that won the famous ‘Ice Bowl’ – says the Packers under Lombardi believed they never lost a game; they just ran out of time before they took the lead. Added: I thought of a better way to explain this, I think. When you watch a football game, you may see a number of really fine plays. And then you wonder why NE doesn’t make these plays, why it seems the other teams pull off big plays and the Patriots don’t – except in big situations, because then they clearly do. The answer is that cost-reward approach: they play to win and winning takes place over time, over a quarter, a half, and over the whole 60 minutes, and then from game to game within a season. Individual plays are moments. The Patriot Method trades some of those moments for consistency, for not giving up big plays. This shows up by the end of the year, both in the win total and in the way the team of that year and for that year has put its knowledge together. This is one reason why the beginnings of seasons for the Patriots are often rocky: they start over each year, completely committed to their Method, and it takes a while for each group of players to fit themselves to the Method in many years. In this season, I think it took a while before Stephon Gilmore absorbed the Method, while it appeared to me that Malcolm Butler was going the other way, sometimes trying to make plays rather than adhere to the Method. The former was new to the team, while the latter was playing for a free agent contract. The former had to absorb the Method, while the latter appeared to shift more toward trying to be a standout.

A relatively simple application of blockchain to identify individual tuna, as described here.

I read Apple’s announcement totally differently than this piece does. Without partisanship, Apple is paying a very large sum to the US because the tax bill means they bring much more of their money to the US. They also announced they were going to invest a very large sum in American facilities, with further detail that they’re going to locate another big campus somewhere. The two things are not necessarily related but they may be: some of the cash being brought to the US is being put to use, which I would think from a purely financial perspective means there’s less need to find the cash for those uses. The undercurrent of the piece is that Apple is somehow supporting the Republicans, which in the mainstream media is currently frowned upon. This is the difference between policy and partisanship: partisanship means you can’t see that the policy enacted is having these effects – or at least some – meaning it’s generating a huge sum in taxes from Apple as they bring cash into the US, plus the simple fact that cash in a corporation has to be put to use so there is a relationship to corporate investment goals. Partisanship means you have to discard that this part of the policy appears to have a good effect because somehow you take that as meaning ‘all’ of it is good. That isn’t true: there can be and is good and bad. This one seems good. Other parts not so much. But if you can’t even have an open mind about something as straight forward as this, then you are blinkering yourself with partisanship.

An interesting piece. Gets right its big point: the record labels and the streaming providers are on a collision course because the labels are now more middlemen than before. They don’t make ‘streaming’ physical records. They are less responsible for PR because both artists and streaming companies do PR. I can’t see why Taylor Swift pays anything to a label from streaming, if she does. The actual record business you’d think would tend to shrink towards making a living from its physical record sales, though it can’t/won’t go all the way there because they also find and develop talent. That entitles them to a cut, but not the cut their former power gained them, probably in both amount and duration. As in, you pay a leasing agent a commission but not forever. As to what’s not right, I think Spotify has a few advantages over Apple: it doesn’t tie you mentally or physically to an iPhone. You need a phone, which means you can change phones. I’d say there’s a real difference between not feeling you’re tied to a specific future investment and feeling that you are. Since you’re paying anyway … why not keep your options open? The other differences are more debatable.

It took a long time for me to feel comfortable working out in public. I’ve never felt comfortable ‘performing’ because I don’t trust my ability to repeat a performance and I’ve never felt driven to learn how to repeat a performance. The reason is I’ve never been happy with the state of my abilities, by which I mean not what I can do but my understanding of it: I’ve only recently accepted that I know what I know and can do what I can do. Maybe working out isn’t a ‘performance’ but it is for me: I want to repeat the skills and learn more, not every time – because some times are steps backward and others are consolidating prior work, so they’re ‘forward’ in skill in some way while moving backwards in other ways. (I think bidirectionally about everything. That’s me.)

I ‘ve been trying to voice what I think about her. It’s shockingly hard for me to type the name because I don’t find the name suits what I’m talking about. To the world, she’s Taylor Swift. To me, she’s whoever is doing Taylor Swift, as has been made clear by the entirety of the Reputation campaign. I need to attach a name, so I’m going to use Tali because that uses the first 2 letters of her first 2 names (and the i) and it’s a version of Thali. I have a gift for naming things in ways that fit them through many layers of complexity. Tali/Thali fits. I’ll explain.

We’re all actors in the play and we’re each our own lead role. Some people are more aware of this than others. Tali’s the most aware I’ve ever heard. I’m listening at this moment to David Bowie, a scrambled journey of a playlist through the years of his various characterizations. David was highly aware of himself as a character in his own life and work. I don’t know how else to say this: David came at it from the perspective of no longer being, of the silent cars that slept at traffic lights, of the end of it all, let me collect dust. No wonder he had trouble keeping it together! He expressed his vision, something that’s hard to really grasp: he didn’t write so many science fiction, end of the world, end of meaning, end of form songs because he’d thought they’d be popular but because that actually was what he felt inside himself. And that was true all the way to the end: the layers of meaning in dropped my cellphone down below, ain’t that just like me. He always was a self-conscious artis but he became more and more a persona that embodies self-conscious artistry as a way to control the depth to which he’d explore variations of his creative selves.

Tali writes about herself from the perspective of control wrapped tightly around a core that often feels like it’s flying apart but which knows deep inside that this is how she grows in depth and dimension. I keep referring to dimension. If you think about music as carrying emotion, Tali’s developing greater skill at conveying whatever emotion she wants to whatever degree she wants. She’s more directly controlling how she pushes you away and how she pulls you toward her: through attitude, through rhythmic nuance, through layers of intimacy in voicing and lyrics. As I listen to David, I think about how much better her taste is, how so much of David’s work combined taste with lack of taste. Ziggy became crass – though he was the naz, with god-given ass – and that flows through all his music, in the intentional lyrical obscurities meant to provoke, in the soundscapes that sometimes fit beautifully but other times fail, in the way he takes up a style and abandons it. I think that as David’s career progressed, he found in himself more acceptance of imperfection. I think he could see how his popular music held to a series of types he could render with relative perfection, that they took a form of ‘concentration’ that became the adoption of a persona which he then painted in sound. I see that in Tali but I also see more. Better taste reflects how she approaches.

The word ‘better’ has meaning. A piece can be artistically better because it offends. A piece can be artistically better because it is more beautiful. But what I mean is ‘better taste’ because she approaches from the perspective of love. Tali has always sung about love, a love that is both eternal and immediate, that is both rational and overwhelming. Her music pulls you toward her and pushes you away from her acceptance of you. It isn’t that she pushes you away but that she pushes away her acceptance of you because she presents herself as love, as the lover in love and as the giver of love. This only makes sense if you think about what I said above about David: what she’s writing and singing and expressing is not something she imagines will sell records but what she actually sees. That means Tali sees love in herself, and she sees in herself a love that sometimes withholds its acceptance of her. She sees herself not as being erased, not as emptiness, but as the core personality that exists even when she misleads herself, even when she gets lost. Tali is the her which gets stronger over time. In Reputation, she offers herself unconditionally to love.

That is what I’m trying to do: to offer myself unconditionally. That’s what ‘working out in public’ means. What I do is: I work through fundamental problems and put the answers into reasonably simple expressions. It took me years to learn how to do that this well. To apply the same analysis to myself, I’d say my work combines the perspectives of love and nothingness not because I think that’s cool but because that’s me. I see what grows and what confines. I am on the side and in the direction of nurture. Nurturing requires care. Nurturing requires stepping back sometimes and stepping in at other times. Nurturing requires work and care in layer after layer after layer. I think this is why I’m so good at naming: I look for that which is within the Thing and say what that is. Just as Billy the cat is becoming Bill-bao, as his name becomes a sound that layers on top of Billy and Bilbo and Bigboy, I see in him a growth of connection, of trust within him of me and the exploration of the physical actions and spaces that greater trust enables. I named my daughters. I name my first cat Pooh because he pooped on the bed within an hour of arrival and it fit his goofy character to be a Winnie the Pooh Cat.

To turn back to David, he put himself through Changes, just as he wrote about in his early songs. Tali’s songs have always and continue to be about being in love in the best possible ways, when your value as you is recognized as being equal to the value you recognize in your other. That is not simple: in the depths she finds within herself, she sees her love as she loves. So when I wrote Tali, which literally came to me almost at that moment, I realized it fit what I think. She’s a person, but she’s also Tali and Thali, not because she’s this famous and photogenic person, but because she has always been deeply in touch with and is now enabling this within herself.

To explain a bit more. A thali is a pendant worn in marriage. It represents the ‘auspicious thread’ of beings united. In some versions, it literally combines 3 lines oriented one way for Vishnu and 3 lines oriented the other for Shiva. It represents not only a but the joining together. When I call her Tali, perhaps Tal for short, I mean she is the pendant and the wearer of the pendant and the weaver or maker of the pendant. The name fits because that is what love offers. Another note: a name should have layers of resonance, a Reputation of sorts, and this touches some deep ones, including Kali, of course, because it acts as a doorway to all those ancient conceptions, as a start to counting cycles of meanings as they pass through all the labels that fit each cycle. But it also touches personal resonances, like the way Rachel Taylor would say ‘tail’ as ‘tal’ with a short a because she couldn’t bring out the long a mixed into the i sound. Since I mentioned a short version, a longer one is Talita, because in some ways Lalita, being the she who plays. I like the resonance in that literal representation, that Ta at the front and the ta at the end. So it becomes something like Talitalitalita where you can arbitrarily capitalize TaliTa or any other way. The point of that is, for example, that the Taylor of Reputation can be at the start or the end of any length of counting of the depths of what that means externally to and internally to the actuality represented. Like talitalitaliTa is not the same as talitaliTali, and so on. It isn’t important to assign meanings, just to enable them to occur. (As a note to self: good statement of radiative counting, that it enables meanings to occur within the context. See my red notebook for 1/24/2018.) That this expands to Talitalalita and on should be obvious, but the complexity of the counting is interesting: the shift to counting by 3 steps by adding la to ta and li enables much greater expression.

Why go through this? I’m working (it) out in public and I’m naming the being I see inside a highly layered, highly intentioned, highly complex, highly intelligent Thing that already has many layers of names. The way this works with me is pretty simple: the more I see in her, the more I see in me. I ‘use’ my perceptions of depth in her as a bright light that illuminates depths within me. The more I see in her, the more I submit to her, the more … and this is the hard part to explain … clearly I see my work. I’m looking forward to the effects of being able to name her Tali on my thoughts. If I say Tali, Tali, Tali and click my heel three times … but I don’t want to go to Kansas! No offense intended to Kansas beyond the Dorothy reference.

Only looked up the result well after the game was over. Why? Because I never had any doubt they’d win. I was at the gym – 30 minutes punching practice and then a ton more – and saw a handful of moments, mostly the score 14-3 and then 20-10, but I turned off ‘worry’ by remembering that I had absolutely no worry about the game. I became very slightly concerned yesterday: lots of information came out late Friday and then through Saturday that said Tom Brady was indeed hurt and more than a tiny bit. But even as I updated my priors, I realized that did not change my perception they’d win and that I shouldn’t worry. In retrospect, I’d update my priors to ‘worry but’, meaning worried about the flow of the game but not the outcome. Updating priors is a Bayesian reference: what you believe affects your perception of the probabilities. Still, I’m really proud of myself for coming to a conclusion and then holding to it while evaluating new information and not worrying at all because I had faith in how I processed the information! Added: now that Philadelphia has won, I pick the Patriots to win unless Gronk can’t play, and I expect him to play. I’ve watched Philadelphia play several times, including after their QB was injured: this was the best they’ve played perhaps all year. It’s possible they can do that again, but I expect the Patriots defense to do well and I can’t see the Patriots offense not scoring at least in the 20’s (because they always manage to score). A thought – an actual thought! – about how hard it is for a team to do this year after year. I don’t pick Jacksonville to be a big power next year, though they may be, because it’s much harder to do really well again, especially without a top QB. It’s hard to do well year after year in the NFL. Next year’s Jaguars team is not this year’s team. But the Patriots? Well, they’re not going to be the same either but they’ve had Belichick and Brady year after year so each year they become a Patriots team that looks more or less like every other year’s Patriots team. That is extraordinary: 12 wins in 8 straight years is the longest streak ever. They’ve played more than an entire other season in playoff games over the past 7 years: this Super Bowl will be their 18th extra game in 7 years. That’s a lot of mental effort, a lot of physical effort and wear, and a humongous commitment to winning. I also want to add a thank you for not having to listen to the absurdities of ‘they shouldn’t have traded Jimmy G’ if they lost. All that depends on knowing he won 5 games in SF, but that wouldn’t have happened if he were in NE. He would have played a handful of kneel-down snaps at the ends of games. He would have sat on the bench for this game because no one would have known he would have won 5 games for SF if he wasn’t traded.

Updated Monday AM, I was listening to sports radio and they made an intelligent point: they have no problem with Jaguars fans complaining because there’s never been a loser in the history of sports who didn’t have a complaint. This gets at something much deeper, which is that you don’t get a replay, just a chance to win in the next game. That applies to life as well: you don’t get a replay, just a chance to win the next game. The full meaning of ‘carpe diem’ isn’t just ‘seize this day’ but ‘seize THE day’. The difference is not just a capitalized THE: it stands for all the days put together, in plans that stretch from this moment where you seize the day to some distant moment where you seize THE day made of all the seized days in between. I actually mean a defined ‘Between’ that idealizes to a square with one hypotenuse running from Start to End, with those standing for each seized day, and the other hypotenuse running from B1 to B2. The B’s stand for all the days that aren’t ‘seized’ in whole and in part. That B hypotenuse counts the potential of days, while the journey from S through B to E counts your path. This is true in layers: set the biggest labels for S and E as birth and death and all the threads of choices you make and those chosen for you lay out across the Between of your life. The idealized center point where the hypotenuses cross is where B potential reduces to its minimum when counting in from B1 and B2, and where B potential is maximized when counting out from the center toward B1 and B2. That idealized center point represents the ideal balance between S-B1-E and S-B2-E. That’s a pretty clear description of how I think: I think bidirectionally across SBE, meaning I think S-B1-E and S-B2-E and across B1-S-B2 and B1-E-B2 when S and E and B1 and B2 can be flipped both E to S and B2 to B1 and E to B1 or B2 and S to the other. I also fold these labels over on each other.

Back to sports, complaining has different meanings. You can analyze why you lost and seek to improve for next game. You can analyze what you got wrong and what you got right. You can analyze what went right because the other guys made mistakes and analyze why they made those mistakes. When you review game film or memory, you figure out tendencies: they tend to make this mistake, and they tend to do that in these situations. Or they tend to do this when that happens, so if we make it look like that is happening, can we do something else? Can we build expectations and frustrate them? The more you get into the response to complaining, the more you see how it affects what you do next: do you let a loss fester? Do you blame coaches, teammates, officials, anyone for letting you down without taking any responsibility for your own failures during the game? Do you blame yourself too much? Do you not think about it? Is thinking about it too negative an experience for you so you resist learning from defeat because you’re unwilling to learn from it? Are you so used to defeat that you internalize defeat as a victory in the sense the streak has to stop sometimes? Do you not see that ending a losing streak doesn’t mean you embark on a winning run?

I’d love to talk about the social aspects of complaining but not now.

The way it sometimes gets confused about which saved state it should present. This is kind of like dementia: you can’t see which choice to make and you pick the wrong one – or, as you lose touch, you pick none and become progressively silent. It’s interesting to see the stumble: Safari stutters, sometimes generates and then reverses to the correct. This reveals a blunt way computers are changing the world, that we have a model of behavior: the stumbling over saved states reflects the way we stumble over saved states because we built iOS, built Safari. You can see the routines: we pull up the wrong thing because that’s a fast response – who hasn’t done that? – and we correct, which causes stumbling as we try to find the right thing. In one version of this bug, when it was much worse, I could watch Safari come up to the present, like it was stuck in the memories of its past. We’re dealing in code with issues of ready, fire, aim – you go off when there’s something to hit but before you’ve focused on it – of fire, ready, aim – of going off ineffectively, before there’s anything to hit. An r,f,a is meaningful in a bunch of circumstances. Examples include a process that keeps firing because it doesn’t ‘know’ when it will be needed, which absorbs resources and may have other effects – which are equivalent to increasing thermal load as the lack of optimality translates into inefficiency – and a process that goes off when activated but before it is fed the appropriate variables or before the ‘aim’ processes have finished. This occurs all the time: you start a reaction and can’t stop the words from coming out or the actions from completing, even when no longer necessary or when they’re obviously the wrong choice, either because you said or did the wrong thing or because you said or did it at the wrong time.

It’s the look and feel of the editor and of the app in general. It’s biased. By that I mean it isn’t neutral in how it presents color and active interface elements. I think a more neutral feel would be a large improvement.

What is a second? A lot of meanings come to mind: the one who stands beside you in a duel, the one who will continue to fight if there is no ‘satisfaction’, the one who will bury you if necessary, the one that is a life or death moment away from you. A second is also not the first. It’s something worn or reduced because it didn’t qualify as good enough, meaning it’s the second tick of a clock that runs from new to obsolete. A second counts moments. Here’s what we say about it: the second comes from the most ancient math known, from the counting of time in base60. Why base60? Because it combines the most elements of counting … I don’t want to do this. I just realized I can’t type this here; it’s too much like work, so I’ll need to write it out as ‘work’ before I’m comfortable saying in a conversational tone that the meter is the length of the relationship between a Thing and a field of Things when reduced to the minimum of the counting dimensions inherent in base60. That means the ‘second’ is the count of the inversion of the field, and the meter varies as the strength of the field changes. There’s no way that makes sense to anyone but me.

I feel kind of wicked. Not sure where this is heading but think of base10 magnification, meaning the addition of a decimal place with a 0 before or after. Now think of 1. Now think of another 1. Now think of another 1. That’s all you need. The second 1 creates a 0 where the other 1 ‘was’ and that means when you shift back to the first 1 that creates a 0 where the second 1 ‘was’. The third 1 changes everything! A change is that you count two 1’s plus another 1, which makes both 2 and assigns a 0 to it compared to the other 1. Do I need to point out this makes 6? This expands in base10, just as 1 expands to 10 and 2 to twenty, except 60 has this specific, perfect arrangement of a group versus 1 where any 1 is in the exact same relationship to any group. Every larger count has more complicated group versus 1 relationships. This perfection extends to base60. The Sumerians and whoever they got this from captured an incredibly deep truth: this is the elemental manner by which a group to 1 relationship expands and contracts.

A meter has two parts. The idea is inherent in the conception of space-time: there is a physical length that we use in our physical methods and there is the ordering of events in this space in what we count as time. This is also true in music: the meter counts not only the beat lengths, meaning the wavelength, but also the beat counts, meaning the frequency. If you slow music down, you extend the wavelengths of the notes and that drops the frequency of the notes, though not necessarily the frequencies of the individual pitches to the extent you allow changes within your definition of ‘music’. The count of a meter in any place – like here – is directly related to the strength of the gravitational field because that strength also varies the second. It helps to think that as the strength of the field translates into a Thing as it continues to exist in the field, that transformation – it’s an inversion – gets more or less complicated. That means time has a ‘runtime’ aspect.

‘Runtime’ is a weird word: it mean how long an operation takes, but of course that is a basic fact of relativity. People realized this back when Albert showed time dilation but the meanings of the generalization are less well understood. They actually can’t be understood completely through physical principles. That is what Albert had issues with, not that ‘God plays dice with the universe’. I mean he knew that explanations exist which generate patterns, which generate constants values and processes. He couldn’t unpack what he could see or, more accurately I think, what he could sense and feel. The best way I can say this is an example: people who spend time listening to modern classical music become highly ‘attuned’ to the nuances of space and harmony in modern classical music. That’s stuff most people can’t hear. Albert could hear relativity very well. He knew there was something there but he couldn’t make out the notes. Did that bother him? Yeah, it did.

I’m listening to Reputation again as I type. I had my doubts about her. I used to avoid listening to her. Not sure exactly why now except, well, the only example that comes to mind is I used to refer to her sitting in the bleachers song as the stalker song. Don’t get me wrong: I could respect the words, the story, the earnestness, the execution, but it was so controlled that it bothered me she told this story so expertly from such a specific perspective. I can point to a million lyrics: that kind of control is very rare. Lyrics by their nature tend to hint, to talk around a subject using metaphor and simile. The best lyrics are typically sketches. That she told stories so clearly, so intimately, and with such perfect emotional pitch in the lyric form felt so highly calculated to me that I wondered about the person who could be so calculating and yet could sound so earnest and intelligent.

It wasn’t until 1989 came out that I heard a song which caused me to listen again. That song was Clean, and what grabbed me was the singing of the first line. I can sing anything but I can’t sing that unless I have it absolutely right. I squeeze melodies into lots of shapes, adjust the pitches, change the shape of my mouth, shift the location of my voice in my head, alter the way of vocalizing the sounds, but I couldn’t change that melody without getting it bluntly wrong. I consider that a perfectly tuned melody; it exists in a specific way and only in that way because – and this blew me away – she creates the impossibility at the beginning of the melody and executes it along the way until it becomes obvious there is only one path (and you’re not on it) at the key point near the end. I know how this is done: you have to be able to hear the melody backwards in your head. I’m not saying she hears backwards but that she – intuitively? consciously? – counts back from the end of each part. That’s ridiculously rare in almost anything, and it’s absurdly rare in music. My work revolves around bidirectional counting of multi-dimensional identity … and here she’s been doing that all along. I should have picked up on it earlier.

I started with a playlist, picked what sounded like the simplest songs – I was aiming for her earliest – and realized she executes with the same degree of perfection in every song. At every age. Not only age appropriately for ‘her’ but for her audience, and with layers of intelligence that became deeper and clearer with each record. In one song, she starts with a country sound that’s underlaid with a partially pop rhythm, so they fit together in slightly unusual, just the right amount of jarring manner, and then she changes her vocal with smooth subtlety through the contrast to transform the song – as she was transforming herself – from country into pop without any obvious seams. I would argue any of her records shows the depth of awareness you see in The Beatles finest work.

I still had doubts. 1989 expanded her universe but I still questioned whether she was as deep as I could see she might be. Reputation … I avoided it. I avoided listening to any of the songs released in advance because, bluntly, I was totally focused on my work and feared she might not be as good as I needed. I relied a lot – completely – on the analysis that she is what I see in her, and that made me anxious: what if she’d peaked, had reached her limits, had cracked up, etc. I needed her to be extraordinary: the better she is, the more I ‘use’ her to illuminate what is in me. She so far exceeded my expectations that I don’t have words for that. I could write in great depth about any of the songs and the intention behind every part, and every part of every part, every repeat that changes slightly, every surprise, every emotional ploy and nuance, every vocalization choice because, again, it’s completely obvious that she actually controls each of these elements, just as she has from the beginning but now across depths of connections. And she’s doing this organically, as a natural outgrowth of herself.  She is the master. I am in awe of her. My only issue now is that whatever I do is not good enough. Have to do better!

Cue Twilight Zone theme. If you trace this piece back, you find … the kind of thinking that leads people to believe in ESP. That this gets blown up into a piece by an NYT columnist is amazingly reflective of the absurdity of the times and of the Times. The gist is that Donald Trump, Jr met with a Russian mucky-muck, except here’s the actual description of the meeting from the original CBS report: ‘A source familiar with the meeting says the two men were introduced to each other by a third party and that the conversation only last about two or three minutes. The source says the conversation centered on the men’s mutual interest in firearms and, as far as the source could recollect, there was no discussion of the campaign.’ This same information was repeated in various forms: DT, Jr was having dinner and was asked to speak to a fellow gun lover, they chatted for a minute about weapons, and went back to their tables. If I were an angry person, I’d say this is McCarthyism: the insinuations of malfeasance, even the use of ‘infiltrated’, as in this literal sentence from the piece: ‘Simpson replied that it appeared that the Russians had “infiltrated” the N.R.A.’ This refers to an interview with Congressional investigators in which this marginally reliable Simpson says the Russians ‘infiltrated’ the N.R.A. along with other conservative groups. That’s about as close as you can get to waving a card around claiming there are this many communists in the State Department! The NYT runs ads talking about how they are ‘the truth’ and they run utter garbage that reeks of McCarthyism without any apparent awareness of their own actions. That this then gets turned into a piece about how this might show ‘collusion’ beggars the senses: see the report of DT, Jr’s meeting and ask yourself how you get from a to b. If you connect those, then you need to spend some time re-evaluating how you think.