Daily Bafflements

• Midasing, cookie-grubbing, and gish galloping are just a few of the rhetorical moves embraced by Trump, as The Week helpfully explains.  

• Chris Inglis, former deputy director of the National Security Agency, has taken to NPR to dub Oliver Stone’s Snowden as a “gross mischaracterisation of what NSA’s purposes are.” One has to wonder—in what way? As other whistleblowers have demonstrated—including Bill Binney, the NSA’s former technical director who left in October 2001 after the Bush administration chose bulk data collection—the agency’s post-9/11 purpose has always been to expand federal power while raking in big money in the process. As Binney told Kade Crockford in an interview for The Baffler, “I keep saying that the NSA vision statement is ‘Keep the problem going so the money keeps flowing.’ So every time an attack happens and people get killed, they say, ‘We need more money.’”

• “He was giving this exaggerated sense of his neighborhood because he knew that was what she wanted. He became an ambassador of black poverty in a way that made me uncomfortable.”