Echoes of Electromagnetism Found in Number Theory

 At www.quantamagazine.org

I needed a little humility, so I read this. Now I need an improved self-image.

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In 2018, as he prepared to be awarded the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor, Akshay Venkatesh carried a piece of paper in his pocket. On it, he had written a table of mathematical expressions that for centuries have played a key role in number theory.

Though the expressions had featured prominently in Venkatesh’s own research over the last decade, he carried them around not as a memento of what he’d accomplished, but as a reminder of something he still didn’t understand.

The columns of the table were filled with cryptic-looking mathematical expressions: On the far left were objects called periods, and on the right, objects called L-functions, which might be the key to answering some of the most important questions in modern mathematics. The table suggested some kind of relationship between the two. In a 2012 book with Yiannis Sakellaridis of Johns Hopkins University, Venkatesh had worked out one direction of it: If they were handed a period, they could determine whether it had an associated L-function.

But they couldn’t yet understand the relationship in reverse. It was impossible to predict whether a given L-function had a matching period. When they looked at L-functions, they largely saw disorder.

That’s why Venkatesh kept the paper in his pocket. He hoped that if he stared at the list long enough, the common traits in this seemingly random collection of L-functions would become clear to him. After a year of toting it around, they hadn’t.

“I couldn’t understand what the principle behind this table was,” he said.

2018 was a big year for Venkatesh in more ways than one. In addition to receiving the Fields Medal, he also moved from Stanford University, where he’d been for the previous decade, to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

He and Sakellaridis also started talking with David Ben-Zvi, a mathematician at the University of Texas, Austin who was spending the semester at the institute. Ben-Zvi had built his career in a parallel area of math, investigating the same kinds of questions about numbers that Sakellaridis and Venkatesh were interested in, but from a geometric point of view. When he heard Venkatesh give a talk about this mystery table he carried with him everywhere, Ben-Zvi almost immediately began to see a new way to make periods and L-functions communicate with each other.

That moment of recognition instigated a multiyear collaboration that came to fruition this past July, when Ben-Zvi, Sakellaridis and Venkatesh posted a 451-page manuscript. The paper creates a two-way translation between periods and L-functions by recasting periods and L-functions in terms of a pair of geometric spaces used to study basic questions in physics.

In doing so, it makes progress on a long-held dream within a sweeping research initiative in mathematics called the Langlands program. Mathematicians working on questions in the program seek to build bridges between disparate areas to show how advanced forms of calculus (where periods originate) can be used to answer fundamental open questions in number theory (the home of L-functions), or how geometry can be brought to bear on basic questions in arithmetic.

They hope that once those bridges are established, techniques can be ported from one area of math to another in order to answer important questions that seem intractable within their own domains.

The new paper is one of the first to link the geometric and arithmetic sides of the program, which for decades have advanced largely in isolation from each other. By creating this link, and effectively enlarging the scope of the Langlands program as it was originally conceived, the new paper provides a single conceptual framework for a slew of mathematical connections.

“It unifies a lot of previous disparate-looking phenomena, and that’s always a happy thing for mathematicians,” said Minhyong Kim, director of the International Center for Mathematical Sciences in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Only Connect

The Langlands program was initiated by Robert Langlands, now a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study. It started in 1967 as a 17-page handwritten letter from Langlands, then a young professor at Princeton University, to Andre Weil, who was one of the best-known mathematicians in the world. Langlands proposed that there should be a way of pairing important objects from calculus called automorphic forms with objects from algebra called Galois groups. Automorphic forms are a generalization of periodic functions like the sine in trigonometry, whose outputs endlessly repeat as inputs grow. Galois groups are mathematical objects that describe how entities called fields (like the real or rational numbers) change when they are extended with new elements.

Pairings like that between automorphic forms and Galois groups are called dualities. They suggest that different classes of objects mirror each other, which allows mathematicians to study either one in terms of the other.

Generations of mathematicians have worked to prove the existence of Langlands’ hypothesized duality. Though they have only managed to establish it for limited cases, even those limited cases have often yielded spectacular results. For example, in 1994, when Andrew Wiles showed that Langlands’ proposed duality holds for a particular class of examples, the result was his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, among the most celebrated results in the history of mathematics.

As mathematicians have pursued the Langlands program, they have also expanded it in many directions.

One such line has been to study dualities between arithmetic objects that are related to, but distinct from, the ones Langlands was interested in. In their 2012 book, Sakellaridis and Venkatesh studied a duality between periods, which are closely related to automorphic forms, and L-functions, which are infinite sums that attach to Galois groups. From a mathematical point of view, periods and L-functions are entirely different species of objects with no obvious common traits.

Periods emerged as objects of mathematical interest in the work of Erich Hecke in the 1930s.

L-functions are infinite sums that have been used since the work of Leonhard Euler in the mid-18th century to investigate basic questions about numbers. The most famous L-function, the Riemann zeta function, is at the heart of the Riemann hypothesis, which can be viewed as a prediction about how prime numbers are distributed. The Riemann hypothesis is arguably the most important unsolved problem in math.

Langlands was aware of possible connections between L-functions and periods, but he viewed them as a secondary matter in his scheme of joining different areas of math.

“In one paper, [Langlands] considered this study of periods and L-functions as something not worth studying,” Sakellaridis said.
Welcome to the Machine

Though Robert Langlands did not emphasize the connection between periods and L-functions, Sakellaridis and Venkatesh viewed them as central to broadening and deepening the connections between seemingly distant areas of mathematics that Langlands had proposed.

In their 2012 book, they developed a machine of sorts, which took a period as an input, performed a long computation, and output an L-function. Not all periods produce corresponding L-functions, though, and the main theoretical advance of their book was to understand which ones do. (This built on earlier work by Atsushi Ichino and Tamotsu Ikeda at Kyoto University.)

But their approach had two limitations. First, it did not explain why a given period yields a given L-function. The machine that turned one into the other was a black box. It was as if they’d constructed a vending machine that often reliably yielded something to eat each time you put in money, only there was no telling what it would be in advance, or if the machine would eat the money without dispensing a snack.

For any given case, you’d put in your money — your period — then “go and do a long computation and see which among a zoo of L-functions you got,” Venkatesh said.

The second thing they didn’t manage to accomplish in their book was to come to an understanding of which L-functions have associated periods. Some do. Others don’t. They couldn’t figure out why.

They kept working after the book came out, trying to figure out why the connection worked and how to run the machine in both directions — not only getting an L-function from a period, but also the other way around.

In other words, they wanted to know that if they put $1.50 into the vending machine, it meant they were going to get a bag of Cheetos. Moreover, they wanted to be able to tell that if they were holding a bag of Cheetos, it meant they’d put $1.50 into the vending machine.

Because they link objects that, on their face, have nothing in common, dualities are powerful. You could stare at a lineup of mathematical objects forever and not perceive how L-functions and periods match up.

“The way they are defined and given, this period and L-function, there’s no obvious relation,” said Wee Teck Gan of the National University of Singapore.

To translate between superficially incommensurate things, you need to find common ground. One way to do that for objects like L-functions and periods, which originate in number theory, is to associate them with geometric objects.

To take a toy example, imagine you have a triangle. Measure the length of each side, and you can produce a set of numbers that tells you how to write down an L-function. Look at another triangle, and rather than the lengths, look at the three interior angles — you can use those angles to define a period. So instead of comparing L-functions and periods directly, you can compare their associated triangles. The triangles can be said to “index” the L-functions and periods — if a period matches with a triangle with certain angles, then the lengths of that triangle match up with a corresponding L-function.

“This period and L-function, there’s no obvious relation in the way they’re given to you. So the point was, however, if you could understand each of them in another way, a different way … you [might] find they are very comparable,” Gan said.

In their 2012 book, Sakellaridis and Venkatesh achieved some of this translation. They found a satisfactory way to index periods using a certain type of geometric object. But they couldn’t find a similar way to think about L-functions.

Ben-Zvi thought he could.
Maxwell’s Dual Hammer

While Sakellaridis and Venkatesh’s work was slightly to the side of Langlands’ vision, Ben-Zvi worked in an area of math that was in a whole different universe — a geometric version of the Langlands program.

The geometric Langlands program began in the early 1980s when Vladimir Drinfeld and Alexander Beilinson suggested a kind of second-order duality. Drinfeld and Beilinson proposed that Langlands’ duality between Galois groups and automorphic forms could be interpreted as an analogous duality between two kinds of geometric objects. But when Ben-Zvi began working in the geometric Langlands program as a graduate student at Harvard University in the 1990s, the link between the geometric and original Langlands programs was somewhat aspirational.

“When geometric Langlands was first introduced, it was a sequence of psychological steps to get from the [original] Langlands program to this [geometric] statement that felt like a different beast,” Ben-Zvi said.

By 2018, when Ben-Zvi had a sabbatical year at the Institute for Advanced Study, the two sides had inched closer together, most notably in work released that same year by Vincent Lafforgue, a researcher at the Fourier Institute in Grenoble. Still, Ben-Zvi planned to use his 2018 sabbatical visit to the IAS for research squarely on the geometric side of the Langlands program. His plan was disrupted when he went to listen to a talk by Venkatesh.

“My son and Akshay’s daughter were playmates, and we were friends socially, and I thought I should go to some of the talks Akshay gave at the beginning of the semester,” Ben-Zvi said.

At one of those early talks, Venkatesh explained the need to find a type of geometric object that could index both periods and L-functions, and he described some of his recent progress in that direction. It involved trying to use geometric spaces from an area of math called symplectic geometry, which Ben-Zvi was familiar with from his work in the geometric Langlands program.

“[Akshay and Yiannis] had been pushing in a direction where they’d started to see things in symplectic geometry, and that rang various bells for me,” Ben-Zvi said.

The next step came from physics.

For decades, physicists and mathematicians have used dualities to come up with new descriptions of how the forces of nature work. The first and most famous example comes from Maxwell’s equations, first written down in the late 19th century, which connect electric and magnetic fields. The equations describe how a changing electric field creates a magnetic field, and how a changing magnetic field in turn creates an electric field. They can jointly be described as a single electromagnetic field. In a vacuum, “these equations have this wonderful symmetry,” Ben-Zvi said. Mathematically, electricity and magnetism can switch places without changing the behavior of the joint electromagnetic field.

Sometimes researchers take inspiration from physics to prove purely mathematical results. For example, in a 2008 paper, the physicists Davide Gaiotto and Edward Witten showed how geometric spaces related to quantum field theories of electromagnetism fit into the geometric Langlands program. These spaces come in pairs, one for each side of the electromagnetic duality: Hamiltonian G-spaces and their dual: Hamiltonian Ğ-spaces (pronounced G-hat spaces).

Ben-Zvi had absorbed the Gaiotto-Witten paper when it came out, and he had used the physics framework they provided to think about questions in geometric Langlands. But that work — let alone the physics paper that helped motivate it — had no connection at all to the original Langlands program.

That is, until Ben-Zvi found himself in the audience at the IAS listening to Venkatesh. He heard Venkatesh explain that following their 2012 book, he and Sakellaridis had come to believe that the correct geometric way to think about periods was in terms of Hamiltonian G-spaces. But Venkatesh allowed that they didn’t know what kind of geometric object to pair with L-functions.

That set off bells for Ben-Zvi. Once Sakellaridis and Venkatesh had connected periods with Hamiltonian G-spaces, it became immediately clear what the dual geometric objects for L-functions should be: those Ğ-spaces that Gaiotto and Witten had said were the dual of G-spaces. For Ben-Zvi, all these dualities, between arithmetic, geometry and physics, seemed to be converging. Even though he didn’t understand all the number theory, he was convinced it was all part of “one big, beautiful picture.”
To G or Not to Ğ

In the spring of 2018, Ben-Zvi, Sakellaridis and Venkatesh met regularly at the restaurant on the campus of the Institute for Advanced Study; over the course of a couple months they worked out how to interpret data extracted from L-functions as a recipe for constructing Hamiltonian Ğ-spaces. In the picture they established, the duality between periods and L-functions translates into a geometric duality that makes sense within the geometric Langlands program and originates in the duality between electricity and magnetism. Physics and arithmetic become echoes of each other, in a way that echoes across the Langlands program.

“You might say that the original Langlands setting is now a special case of this new framework,” Gan said.

By unifying disparate phenomena, the three mathematicians have brought some of the order that’s intrinsic to the relationship between electricity and magnetism to the relationship between periods and L-functions.

“The physics interpretation of the geometric Langlands correspondence makes it much more natural; it fits into this general picture of dualities,” Kim said. “In a way, what [this new work is] doing is a way towards interpreting the arithmetic correspondence using the same kind of language.”

The work has limitations. In particular, the three mathematicians prove the duality between periods and L-functions over number systems that arise in geometry called function fields, rather than over number fields — like the real numbers — which are the true home of the Langlands program.

“The basic picture is meant to go over number fields. I think all this will eventually be developed for number fields,” Venkatesh said.

Even over function fields, the work brings order to the relationship between periods and L-functions. For the months that Venkatesh carried around a printout in his pocket, he and Sakellaridis had no idea why those L-functions should be the ones that are associated with periods. Now the relationship makes sense in both directions. They can translate freely across it using a common language.

“I’ve known all these periods and I’ve suddenly learned I can turn each one around and it turns into another one I also knew. It’s a very shocking realization,” Venkatesh said.

Hamas and amoral clarity

 Victor Davis Hanson is on target.

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One unexpected blowback from the medieval Hamas's barbaric murdering of hundreds of Israeli civilians is the revelation of current global amorality.

More than 20 Harvard university identity politics groups pledged their support to the Hamas murderers — to the utter silence for days of Harvard President Claudine Gay.

Americans knew higher education practiced racist admission policies. It has long promoted racially segregated dorms and graduations. And de facto it has destroyed the First Amendment.

But the overt support for Hamas killers by the diversity, equity, and inclusion crowd on a lot of campuses exposes to Americans the real moral and intellectual rot in higher education.

Democratic Socialist members of the new woke Democrat Party openly expressed ecstatic support for Hamas's bloodwork.

Their biggest fears were not dead fellow Americans or hostages, or some 1,000 butchered Jewish civilians. Instead they were fearful that righteous Israeli retaliation might destroy the Hamas death machine.

Palestinians for years fooled naïfs in Europe and the Obama and Biden administrations into sending billions of dollars into Gaza.

These monies were channeled to tunnel into Israel, to obtain a huge rocket arsenal, and to craft plans to wipe out Jews.

The Biden administration has blood on its hands.

As soon as President Joe Biden took power, he resumed massive subsidies to radical Palestinians, canceled by the prior Trump administration.

He ignored warnings from his own state Department that such fungible moneys would soon fuel Hamas terrorism.

His administration dropped sanctions against Iran, ensuring that Tehran would enjoy a multi-billion-dollar windfall to be distributed to Israel's existential enemies — another fact well known to the Biden administration.

If the Biden administration had announced overtly that it was rabidly anti-Israel, it would be hard to imagine anything it could have done differently from its present nihilist behavior.

Biden and company quickly restarted the defunct Iran appeasement deal — a leftover from the anti-Israeli Obama administration. No surprise, they appointed radical pro-Iranian activist Robert Malley to head the negotiations.

Malley allegedly has leaked American classified documents to Iranian officials and is under investigation by the FBI. He did his best to place pro-Iranian, anti-American activists into the high echelons of the U.S. government.

Biden was intent on forcing South Korea to release to Iran $6 billion in sanctioned frozen money.

That expectation of cash ensured Iran would be reimbursed for its present terrorist arming spree.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken shamefully tweeted that Israel should settle for an immediate ceasefire. No wonder he soon withdrew his unhinged posting.

That idiocy would be the moral equivalent of an American ally in December 1941 urging the U.S. to seek negotiations with imperial Japan after its surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor — to avoid a "cycle of violence."

The Biden team has drained strategic arms stockpiles in Israel, designed to help the Jewish state in extremis.

It recklessly abandoned a multibillion-dollar arms trove in Kabul, some of which reportedly made its way from Taliban killers to the Hamas murderers.

Once the mass murdering started, the amoral clarity of our "allies" was stunning.

NATO partner Turkey openly sided with the killers. It — along with Blinken — called for a cease fire — at the moment the Hamas death squads had finished, and Israel was ready to hold Hamas to account.

Qatar, where the U.S. Central Command is based, proved little more than a Hamas front.

It offers sanctuary to the architects of Hamas killing. And Qatar ensures a safe financial pipeline to Hamas from Iran and the radical Arab world.

Some of the most vehement current supporters of the Hamas death squads were immigrants to America from the Middle East.

Oddly, they apparently had fled just such illiberal Middle East regimes to reach a tolerant, democratic, and secure United States.

Yet they now endorse the Hamas butchering of Jewish civilians. Its savagery is aimed at executing, raping, and beheading Jews, and then mutilating their bodies.

Hamas apparently hopes to shock the Israeli government into voluntarily committing suicide — in line with the ancient Hamas agenda to destroy the Jewish state.

In a strange way, this reign of death has become a touchstone, an acid test of sorts that has revealed the utter amorality of enemies abroad and quite dangerous people at home.

It is past time that Americans deal with the medieval world that was revealed this week rather than keep dreaming in the fantasy world of our government.

Americans need to stop illegal immigration and restore their southern border, while ceasing all immigration from unhinged, hostile nations.

The military must return to its deterrent role and fire its woke commissariat.

Our leaders must accept that in the last three years of the Biden administration, serial American appeasement abroad, disunity at home, and social chaos have encouraged an entire host of enemies — China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Middle East illiberal regimes, and former friends like Turkey and Qatar.

And our enemies dream of doing to us what we just saw in Israel.

The Impact of Public School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles’ Zone of Choice

 From the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Here is the link.

Here is the abstract.

A simple test of whether or not the Teachers' Union, and teachers' primary interest is helping students is whether they are for or against school choice and charter schools.

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Does a school district that expands school choice provide better outcomes for students than a neighborhood-based assignment system? This paper studies the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program, a school choice initiative of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left attendance zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study market-level impacts of choice on student achievement and college enrollment using a differences-in-differences design. Student outcomes in ZOC markets increased markedly, narrowing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. The effects of ZOC are larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel. Demand estimates suggest families place substantial weight on schools’ academic quality, providing schools with competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. The evidence demonstrates that public school choice programs have the potential to improve school quality and reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity.

Leon Panetta – Appearance is not a reliable indicator of trustworthiness

 Jonathan Turley is on target again.

A soft-spoken, seemingly sincere demeanor does not imply trustworthy.

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“Denial Ain’t Just a River in Egypt”: Panetta Repeats Debunked Russian Disinformation Claims on Laptop

Last night, many of us responded to the statement of Leon Panetta, former CIA Director in the Obama Administration, that he “has no regrets” about signing the now infamous letter of 51 former intelligence officials suggesting that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Even more unsettling was his comments that he believes it could still be Russian disinformation. It turns out that even with American intelligence, the media, and Hunter Biden himself acknowledging authenticity, it can still be Russian disinformation. Panetta has become the personification of the economic theory of path dependence. No matter how much countervailing evidence is presented to Panetta, he still refuses to accept the authenticity of the laptop.

In his interview on “Special Report,” Panetta was asked by Bret Baier if he had any regrets about signing the letter, which was then used by Joe Biden in the debate to avoid answering questions about influence peddling by his family (and a virtual blackout of coverage before the election).

Panetta insisted that he had no regrets and then added that he has seen no intelligence that would make him change his mind.

“You don’t think it was real?” Baier asked him.

Panetta responded “I think disinformation is involved here.”

This was the man in charge of our CIA.

Panetta simply refused to acknowledge (1) American intelligence quickly debunked the claim and said that there was no evidence of Russian disinformation behind the laptop, (2) the emails contained in the laptop were quickly authenticated by the other parties, (3) the FBI authenticated the laptop, (4) Hunter Biden has since sued over the use of his laptop, and (5) the media has independently authenticated the laptop.

It has also been shown that the Biden campaign and associates coordinated the letter.

It was then used by an enabling media as an excuse not to investigate or report on the contents. What is striking is that Panetta can not cite any basis to believe that it was Russian disinformation. The laptop details an influence peddling scheme by a family that has long been known for such corruption. More importantly, there was not a single fact cited in the letter (or now years later) that supported this claim. It was simply embarrassing to the Bidens before a close presidential election.

However, in order to admit to these facts, Panetta would have had to admit that he was a willing or unwitting dupe of the campaign. It is easier to simply continue to claim that this could all be the invention of the Russians. Yet, Panetta is still sought for his advice on other intelligence matters as he continues to repeat disproven claims because the truth is simply too costly on a personal level to acknowledge.

What do we call false claims that are repeated despite being repeatedly debunked and disproven? Oh, yea, disinformation.

Selective treatment at the DOJ

 From Jonathan Turley.

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How About Hunter? Justice Department Adds FARA Charge to Menendez Prosecution.

Below is my column in the New York Post on issuance of superseding indictments for Sen. Bob Menendez, his wife, and associates to include new charges related to his alleged work as unregistered foreign agents. The new charges not only highlight the alleged corrupt practices of Sen. Menendez, but also the absence of such charges for Hunter Biden.

Here is the column:

The Justice Department this week hit Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) with a superseding indictment including a new but all-too-familiar charge: being an unregistered foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

I cannot recall another sitting member of Congress being criminally charged as a foreign agent.

Yet even if this is the first such case, the charge has been freely used by the Justice Department in all but one case: Hunter Biden.

The indictment accuses Menendez of being a foreign agent on behalf of Egypt.

Also charged under the law is Menendez’s wife, Nadine, and Egyptian American businessman Wael Hana.

After they discussed various foreign policy priorities at one dinner, Nadine is quoted as asking her Egyptian counterparts, “What else can the love of my life do for you?”

The government alleges that the couple agreed to have Menendez “use his power and authority to facilitate such sales and financing to Egypt.” In addition to other benefits, the government alleges that Hana promised to put Nadine on the payroll of his company in a “low-or-no-show job.”

The indictment further alleges that the senator disclosed “nonpublic information about the United States’s provision of military aid to Egypt” during a dinner with Hana in 2018.

It also claims that the senator “secretly edited and ghost-wrote” a letter “on behalf of Egypt” trying to convince other senators to release a hold on $300 million in aid to the country.

The inclusion of the FARA charge against Menendez, his wife and his associate only highlights the absence of any such charge against President Biden’s son Hunter.

For years, some of us have raised the glaring contradiction in how the Justice Department has approached the Hunter Biden case with its treatment of past defendants like Donald Trump associate Paul Manafort.

The Justice Department has been quick to indictment Manafort and others on FARA charges, but continues to prevaricate over such a charge for the president’s son.

Indeed, when Menendez was charged, I wrote about the striking similarities in the cases, including the gifts and benefits showered on both men.

They remain similar in every way except the charges.

FARA covers anyone acting as “agent of a foreign principal,” including but not limited to (1) attempting to influence federal officials or the public on domestic or foreign policy or the political or public interests in favor of a foreign country; (2) collecting or disbursing money and or other things of value within the United States; or (3) representing the interests of the foreign principal before U.S. Government officials or agencies.

It is sweeping. So is the definition of what a “foreign principal” encompasses, including “a foreign government, a foreign political party, any person outside the United States (except U.S. citizens who are domiciled within the United States), and any entity organized under the laws of a foreign country or having its principal place of business in a foreign country.”

It is easy to see why FARA charges have been quickly brought in cases ranging from Manafort to Menendez. It is less clear why such charges remains strikingly absent from the Hunter case.

In Hunter’s case, he was selling what associate Devon Archer called the “Biden brand” and asking, to paraphrase Nadine Menendez, “What else can [my dad] do for you?”

The House committees have confirmed not only millions transferred to Hunter and other Biden family members, but direct contacts made by Hunter with federal officials and agencies in relation to his foreign clients.

Archer described how Burisma executives told Hunter that they were worried about the anti-corruption investigation of Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin.

Archer testified that Hunter immediately “called D.C.” in response to the plea.

Shokin was later fired at Vice President Joe Biden’s demand.

In shaking down a Chinese source for more money, Hunter reportedly sent a WhatsApp message that reminded him that “The Bidens are the best at doing exactly what Chairman wants.”

The message was to Gongwen (“Kevin”) Dong, a CEFC China Energy executive with close ties to the Chinese government, and included a threat that “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled … I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”

Throughout his open influence-peddling, emails show Hunter was fully aware of the risk of being charged under FARA.

The problem with FARA is that it would require the Bidens to publicly acknowledge their work as foreign agents and, by extension, their massive influence-peddling operation.

In one message, Hunter addressed his work for the Chinese CEFC energy company and warned:

“No matter what it will need to be a US company at some level in order for us to make bids on federal and state funded projects. Also We [sic] don’t want to have to register as foreign agents under the FCPA which is much more expansive than people who should know choose not to know. James has very particular opinions about this so I would ask him about the foreign entity.”

“James” is his uncle Jim Biden, who has also been regularly accused of corrupt influence-peddling tied to Joe Biden.

In the message, Hunter gets it. The law is indeed “expansive.”

His uncle clearly gets it. The question is why the Justice Department gets it in every case except those with targets named Biden.

For many, the question is not whether Hunter has acted as an agent of foreign principals but whether the Justice Department is acting as an agent of the principal Biden.

The Biden Family Tree and the Influence -Peddling Dynasty

 Jonathan Turley is on target again.

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The Biden Family Tree: How Investigations are Exposing the Bidens’ Influence-Peddling Dynasty

Below is my column in The Hill on the exposure of the Biden family and its long-standing business of influence peddling. Newly released evidence from the House Committee on Ways and Means reveals over $20 million coming from 23 separate countries on four continents to at least nine Biden family members. Not only are the Biden transfers becoming clear, so is the Biden family tree in this lucrative form of corruption.

Here is the column:

President Joe Biden once famously told a state official that “no one f—s with a Biden.” It was a statement that made more sense a few years ago than it does today.

These days, it seems like everyone is…well, messing with the Bidens. The president’s son, Hunter Biden, is facing federal charges on gun violations under a law that his father has heralded. He is also looking at possible additional charges on taxes.

Joe Biden’s brother James Biden was just subpoenaed alongside his nephew over millions of dollars sent by foreign figures as part of an influence-peddling operation.

Joe Biden is now formally under investigation for possible impeachment with at least four articles of impeachment under consideration.

Finally, a media that has long shielded the Bidens is now starting to acknowledge that Hunter and others were engaged in corrupt influence peddling.

All of this scrutiny is not simply threatening the Biden sense of invincibility. It is also revealing more about the Bidens behind the scenes in an unvarnished and unflattering light.

Prosecutors often build narratives around the conspicuous consumption and the lifestyle demands of targets. Trump’s personal and financial dealings have featured greatly in litigation. The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus and others have written about how the evidence exposed a “stunning display of Trump’s narcissism.”

The same may be true with Biden. There is a sharp disconnect between the public persona long maintained by the press and what is becoming more apparent to the public now.

Although the image of a “unifier-in-chief” quickly collapsed, the most lasting portrayal is that Joe Biden cares. Unlike Trump, he is portrayed as acting not out of greed, but an overwhelming desire to do good. In a typical article, a contributor to Forbes gushed about “How Empathy Defines Joe Biden.” The article explained that “Biden feels empathetic because that is who he is.”

That is not the image that emerges from the growing evidence about Biden and his family. The Bidens are suffering from legal exposure in actions concerning everything from withholding child support to peddling influence to federal felonies.

The investigations and inquiries often turn on questions of intent for actions taken by Biden family members, including the president himself. The motive is often all too apparent.

Hunter Biden left a long trail of emails and texts seeking millions in exchange for access to his father. He is shown in messages invoking his father’s power, threatening foreign figures to send him money. In one message, he allegedly makes a demand for an immediate transfer of cash from a Chinese businessman by saying that his father is sitting next to him to make sure the payment comes through.

Hunter Biden was burning through a fortune on drugs, prostitutes and high living. There were many eager to have the son of the vice president dependent on their largesse.

While Hunter is often portrayed as a human wreck, salvaged by influence-seekers, his uncles generated their own controversies. James has been a well-known figure among alleged influence peddlers for years in cashing in on access to his brother, Joe. Joe’s younger brother, Frank, has also been long identified as involved in the family influence peddling. Like Hunter, Frank appears to have been in dire financial straits due to his careening lifestyle and lack of any appreciable skills.

Frank’s need for money was not only great but known to his brother. In 1999, at age 43, Frank was involved in a car crash in Cardiff-by-the-Sea near Encinitas, California. He was accused of responsibility for the death of single father Michael Albano and then of evading service and responsibility in lawsuits by Albano’s surviving children. He only recently began paying what he owes.

Having had his driver’s license suspended in Florida, Frank nonetheless rented a Jaguar and had a younger man whom he had met at a Whole Foods driving him. Biden, sitting in the passenger seat, reportedly shifted the car into manual gear and encouraged Jason Turton, 25, to “punch it,” at which point he hit 80 miles per hour in a 35 mph zone.

Turton was later reportedly found to have twice the allowed level of alcohol in his system. Witnesses said everyone in the car was drinking that day and Frank was accused of telling Turton to “keep driving” after killing Albano. Frank would ultimately remain at the scene after Turton ran off by foot.

The police report suggested Frank was uncooperative with police on key points of the investigation.

Frank Biden defaulted in the action brought by Albano’s daughters, but he left California and spent decades evading payments. When attorney John F. Hayter, representing the daughters, garnished Biden’s Wells Fargo bank account in February, he found it virtually empty.

It took 20 years to get him to pay any of the $1 million he owed in damages. He was also reportedly dodging creditors.

The daughters had repeatedly asked Joe Biden to intervene, but nothing occurred for years until he was running for the vice presidency and the media began to pick up on his brother’s evasion of liability.

When Biden was still a senator, Albano’s daughter did finally get a response from Joe Biden’s staff that explained, “As you are aware, however, Frank has no assets with which to satisfy the judgment. The senator regrets that this is where matters stand and that he cannot be more helpful.”

That appeared to change just when Joe was running for the vice presidency. It was also when the Biden influence peddling efforts seemed to take off in earnest.

These cases reveal not just a family committed to corrupt influence peddling, but also strikingly similar patterns of legal and financial evasion. It also shows a family whose members had an insatiable thirst for cash and few skills beyond monetizing government service.

It is a familiar narrative in federal prosecutions. Prosecutors focused on such lifestyle demands in Paul Manafort’s prosecution, including highlighting his famous Ostrich coat.

The same is true in impeachments. When I served as lead counsel in the last judicial impeachment trial, my client, Judge Thomas Porteous, faced allegations of receiving gifts from those seeking to influence him. The House managers focused on Porteous’s lifestyle and gambling expenses to explain his seeking gifts from those with business in his court.

The Bidens had only one family business. They did not make furniture or sell groceries. They sold influence and, as Biden associate Devon Archer explained, Joe was their “brand.”

As these investigations and prosecutions continue, the public may conclude that it is not empathy but avarice that defines the Bidens.

Working toward a shootdown of a commercial airliner

 From aviationweek.com

Note that most of the reported incidents occurred near the Iraq-Iranian border.

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A serious threat to the safety of air navigation has emerged in recent weeks, occurring to a wide range of civilian transport aircraft while traversing airspace in which deviations would lead to intrusions into Iranian airspace without a clearance. The culprit appears to be fake GPS signals which are causing complete navigation failure.

OpsGroup, a membership organization specializing in international flight operations, has collected 20 separate incident reports as of September 28, 2023. The number of incidents and the geographic focus of these recent incidents make this more than a mere coincidence.

Nefarious (though yet to be identified) forces are likely behind this, and the consequences could turn into an international crisis and possibly the loss of an innocent civilian aircraft in a region that is already a high-risk area near an active conflict zone.

The name of this new menace is “GPS Spoofing”, which is different from GPS jamming. GPS jamming means that one’s aircraft is unable to receive standard GPS signals and the aircraft’s navigation system must rely on other inputs to determine its position. Aircraft equipped with advanced Inertia Reference Systems (“IRS”) are able to continue operating sufficiently when GPS signals are jammed, but GPS Spoofing is a new threat which found a hidden back-door through the navigation software to completely disable the entire navigation system.

The Flight Management System (FMS) uses a hierarchy for its navigational information, beginning with GPS, then in subsequent order it uses the IRS, DME/DME, VOR/DME, and finally Dead Reckoning modes. An IRS uses a combination of gyroscopes, accelerometers and electronics to provide precise attitude, trajectory and navigation information. One advantage of inertia navigation is that it can work in all environments. However, inertia navigation “drift” errors accumulate of time, and if they are not updated at sufficient intervals with correct positional data, this can lead to large position errors. When GPS signals are not available, such as during GPS jamming, the sensor fusion software utilizes the other sources of information to provide precise navigation continuously.

These latest incidents involve “Spoofing” in which the false GPS signals trick the aircraft’s FMS into indicating that the aircraft is more than 60 nm off-track, and then completely disables the aircraft’s Inertia Reference System (IRS). Since the IRS utilizes GPS signals to continuously update the position information, the navigation system software assumes that the fake GPS is correct, causing the IRS to fail. When the navigation system compares the (fake) GPS signals to other navigation inputs such as from ground-based nav-aids, the software is unable to comprehend the gross error, and all of the navigation systems end up being corrupted.
These recent incidents are indicative of an active attack on an aircraft’s total navigation system. Furthermore, current IRS systems were not designed to counter this type of attack. All of the reported “GPS Spoofing” events experienced an unusable IRS and, in many cases, all navigation capability was lost.

One of the reports in the OpsGroup database occurred on Sept. 9 to a Challenger 604 while on a flight from Europe to Qatar. The route of flight went through Turkey and Iraq. The aircraft experienced minor jamming while transitioning from Bulgarian to Turkish airspace. As they neared the Turkey/Iraq border, they lost both GPS sensors but continued the flight with the back-up navigational input in the IRS. North of Baghdad, the flight crew lost anything related to the navigation system, and the IRS indicated that they had drifted 70-90 miles off track. Furthermore, the avionics indicated a ground speed of zero and 250 knots of wind. The FMS’s reverted to the dead reckoning mode, but with no accurate update of their position, the flight crew had no reliable navigation information. At this point, the flight crew relied on ATC vectors to their destination.

On Sept. 15, an Embraer Legacy 650 operating on Airway UM688 experienced a similar set of failures and nearly entered Iran airspace with no clearance. Other aircraft involved in similar incidents include the Challenger CL650, Dassault Falcon 8X and Bombardier Global Express.

Has Your Aircraft Been Targeted?

Clues that your aircraft has been targeted by spoofing include a large Estimated Position Uncertainty (“EPU”), incorrect display of the UTC, a large shift in the GPS position, nav page or PFD warnings about position error, as well as other aircraft transmitting comparable errors.

There is potential for this type of event to be seen elsewhere. While the reports in recent weeks are concentrated near the Iranian border, the risk of inadvertently flying through another sovereign nation’s airspace without permission has resulted in severe reaction in the past. Civilian transports have no defensive capability against sophisticated surface-to-air missile system.

This was evidenced on Aug. 29, 1999, when Eritrean air traffic control (ATC) reported loss of contact with a Learjet 35A while en route from Luxor, Egypt, to Nairobi, Kenya. Ethiopia had posted a warning that flights directly from Eritrea over Ethiopia were prohibited. The flight plan was filed through Djibouti to avoid an Eritrean/Ethiopian border crossing. The airplane was later found crashed near Adwa, Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Defense Force reported a shoot-down of an aircraft in the vicinity. Both pilots were fatally injured, and the airplane was destroyed. There were no passengers.

If the sneak signals are entering through the infected GPS signal, is it possible to erect a “firewall” from allowing these to get into the IRS? Hopefully. Since this is a rapidly emerging new threat, much work must now be done to detect how these menacing signals are able to sneak through the software. This will likely require a multi-layered solution to include a software fix from the manufacturers to find the sneak circuit and erect the equivalent of a firewall.

Recommended Actions

In the meantime, are there any recommendations on what flight crews can do in flight if the aircraft appears to be the victim of spoofing? Mark Zee of OpsGroup recommended de-selecting the GPS on the sensor page. This will cause the NAV system to revert to signals from the DME/DME and VOR/DME modes if nearby navaids are available. Alternatively, the NAV will degrade to a dead reckoning mode. This latter step is completely dependent upon the navigation unit having an accurate last update on location. Zee also recommends using conventional ground base navaids (VOR/DME/NDB).

Zee pointed out that FBW aircraft have extensively integrated GPS into their designs to such an extent that the FAA has issued warnings to these aircraft to avoid areas where GPS spoofing or jamming may be active.

Manufacturers of military navigation systems have been developing a multi-layered approach to combat the problem of GPS disruptions. For instance, Honeywell has introduced a multitude of alternative navigation systems to augment the availability, integrity and performance of inertia navigation. They have developed a Vision Aided Navigation System using a live camera (optical and/or IR) which compares the image with maps to provide an un-jammable position with a horizontal position accuracy of 10 meters. Their Celestial Aided Navigation system utilizes a star tracker. It is likewise un-jammable and recently demonstrated an accuracy of 30 m. An Embraer 170 was recently used as a test platform to demonstrate the effectiveness of Honeywell’s Magnetic Anomaly Aided system which measures the earth’s magnetic strength to compare with magnetic maps to identify a vehicle’s position. Honeywell’s Radar Aided system uses radars to measure velocity and provide this information to the INS, thus improving the INS’s accuracy.

While some of the avionics manufacturers already have this in-house expertise to provide military aircraft with alternative navigation in GPS-denied environments, will these methods be readily adapted for civilian use? Perhaps not due to their complexity and expense, however, their in-house expertise likely has already done extensive studies trying to solve this problem for the military. The knowledge learned from those studies may be useful solving this new threat in the civilian sector.

Clearly the avionics manufacturers will be scrambling their sneak circuit specialists to find out how these nefarious GPS signals are entering into the navigation system, and then fix these holes.

This problem will also require specific air crew training to help them detect these errors, understand the error messages on the FMS, PFD and ND, as well as being informed on recommendations to resolve these in-flight, especially for flight crews transiting high-risk flight regions. Many of us will be standing by for official guidance from authoritative sources on this emerging threat.

FactCheck.org – how to mislead with the facts

 According to FactCheck.org: “We found no support for Trump’s claim that the proposed rules would kill 40% of the auto industry’s jobs. Instead, Ford’s CEO said EVs take 40% less labor to make, but the company would offset job losses by making its own EV parts.”

Hmmm, isn’t 40% less labor 40% less labor? Does it matter which 40% lose their jobs?

The Chicago Disaster

 George Will at the Washington Post.

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In the disaster that is Chicago, its teachers union plays a starring role

Stacy Davis Gates, president of what is, in effect, Chicago’s government — the Chicago Teachers Union — has at last done something helpful. Having denounced school choice as fascist (Mussolini favored it? Who knew?) and, of course, racist (what isn’t?), she has enrolled her son in a private school. This is so that (she recently explained to her union members) “he could live out his dream of being a soccer player while also having a curriculum that can meet his social and emotional needs.”

Davis Gates has erased the patina of idealism that cloaks the CTU’s sacrifice of students on the altar of its avarice. By diminishing her union, her hypocrisy might benefit its victims, who include K-12 students imprisoned in dysfunctional public schools. Other victims are the rest of the city’s shrinking population, buffeted by progressive policies implemented by politicians who are the CTU’s poodles.

The union’s current crusade is to kill the Invest in Kids Act, Illinois’ school choice program, which serves 9,600 children from low-income families and had a waiting list of 26,000 children as of July. Unless renewed by the state legislature, it will expire Dec. 31. Davis Gates earns 483 percent more than the average family that received a scholarship through Empower Illinois, the state’s largest scholarship-granting organization.

Mayor Brandon Johnson was a paid CTU lobbyist, whose salary averaged nearly $90,000, before his April election, which was fueled by an $8-a-month CTU assessment from its members. Although Johnson taught for only four years in Chicago’s public schools, he is eligible for union benefits (among others) totaling $1.1 million over his expected lifetime.

Think of the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund’s unfunded liability ($13.8 billion and rising), part of the city’s total pension liability (at least $48 billion and rising), as deferred taxation: The public will pay, eventually. Chicagoans should book interstate moving vans after digesting data assembled by the Illinois Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization:

Minority pupils compose 89 percent of Chicago’s public-school student body. In third through eighth grades, the percentage of Black students proficient in reading and math are 11 percent and 6 percent. Hispanics 17 percent, 11 percent. The percentage of 11th-graders proficient on the SAT in reading and math: Black students 10 and 8; Hispanics: 16 and 17. In 22 schools, not a single student can read at grade level; in 33, not a single student can do math at grade level. Even the supposedly good news is disgusting: Last year, the graduation rate was a record-high 82.9 percent — even though chronic absenteeism is 49 percent among low-income students.

These are the results of public-school operational spending increasing 58 percent in a decade, to $26,356 per pupil. Mostly this funds teachers’ salaries and benefits. Teachers praising “socialism” and prating about “social justice” thrive while their students’ futures are stunted.

The society in which the schools are situated is fraying. A neighborhood group pleads for people to refrain from gunfire between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. Serious crime increased 41 percent from 2021 to 2022 and is up 29 percent in the first nine months of this year. Since 2019, the number of police officers is down more than 1,700, and shoplifting, essentially decriminalized by police incapacity (1,000 police positions are unfilled), is causing grocery store closures in crime-plagued neighborhoods. The mayor, unfazed by presiding over failures regarding fundamentals — education and public safety — suggests government grocery stores. What could go wrong?

To Chicagoans, “the Loop” denotes the downtown section circled by elevated train tracks. Now the city is caught in the vortex of a “doom loop.”

Progressive politicians produce high tax rates. (Among U.S. cities, Chicago has the second-highest commercial property taxes and, as of 2021, the highest combined state and local sales taxes.) Progressive prosecutors produce demoralized police and high crime rates. (Arrests were made in just 12 percent of crimes in 2021, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.) Crime and taxes cause renters to abandon commercial real estate leases. (Kroll Bond Rating Agency says the rate of delinquent or otherwise distressed commercial real estate loans in August, in the single digits nationally, was 22.7 percent in Chicago, the worst among major U.S. cities.) Nearby retail and restaurant enterprises struggle and fail. Homeowners’ taxes rise to compensate for plunging commercial property valuations. Residents flee. Decline accelerates.

Chicago has had Democratic mayors for 92 consecutive years. The 50-member City Council has no Republicans. The “toddlin’ town” Frank Sinatra celebrated is a tottering town. And a warning to the nation about governments on short leashes tightly held by their employees’ unions.

West Nile Virus Outpacing Awareness, Testing, and Reporting in the US

 Here is a link to the paper.

Here are some excerpts.

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Late this August, researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that almost every US state experienced cases of West Nile virus disease in 2021. Of the nearly 3000 cases logged that year, 69% were neuroinvasive. More than 2000 people were hospitalized and more than 200 died.
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According to the CDC, about 20% of people who are infected with West Nile virus develop a fever and flu-like symptoms, with fatigue and weakness sometimes persisting for weeks or months. Less than 1% of people with West Nile infections develop neuroinvasive disease, usually meningitis, encephalitis, or acute flaccid paralysis. Older adults and people who have certain comorbidities or are immunocompromised are most at risk for severe disease.
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The consistently high numbers of disease and death each year from West Nile virus have led researchers to call for an all-out push to develop a vaccine. “We’re not making headway with other prevention strategies in reducing the burden of disease and the number of deaths,” said Carolyn V. Gould, MD, a medical epidemiologist at the CDC’s Arboviral Diseases Branch, adding that vector control strategies and personal protective measures are challenging to implement. In addition, patients receiving the monoclonal antibody rituximab can develop severe neuroinvasive complications from West Nile virus infection, tick-borne encephalitis, and other arboviral diseases.