Today's Reddit

It's gotta peak here pretty quick now, doesn't it?

Today's Reddit

Data is beautiful

Data Is Beautiful

Reminder

A Lesson In Perception

An awful lot of what we see and hear, is what we're taught to see and hear.

We usually don't even know it's happening - we don't know we're being programmed to think a certain way.

This is not representative of the way we vote:

This is what is actually looks like:

Because it says "We the people", not "we the acreage".

The Dems' wins in the 2018 midterms should go a long way in fixing the gerrymandering problem on the House side. But we still have a very long haul to figure out what to do about the ratfuckery that can (and does) happen because of the way we do the Senate and the Electoral College.

Odds Are Good

But first:

DON'T GET HAPPY

From FiveThirtyEight:

We've been here before. I spent a lot of time and energy saying the same thing in 2016 - don't get fucking happy. 

Get together. 

Get busy. 

Get shit done.

Today's Chart

From Pew Research:

Events unique to the history of individual countries cannot be ignored when considering why publics are more positive or negative about how the present compares with 50 years ago. However, our analysis also indicates that views of the current economy are a strong indicator of whether people say life for people like them is better today than it was 50 years ago, even when controlling for the demographic factors of income, education, gender and age. Indeed, across the countries analyzed, people with positive views of the current economy are 30 percentage points more likely than those with negative views to say life has improved for people like them.1

In general, countries that are more upbeat about their national economy are more likely to say life today is better compared with the past. For example, in Vietnam, where 91% say economic conditions are good, a corresponding 88% say life is better for people like them compared with 50 years ago. And in Venezuela, where only 20% say conditions are good, 10% say life is better for people like them. Overall, the correlation between economic assessments and views of the past is quite strong (+0.68).

I got ridiculously lucky, but almost 50 years ago, my high school diploma was enough to start me on a 40-year trip thru a career that put me in the top 3% of income-earners.

My kids will probably never know such things firsthand.

I don't know how to fix it. And there's never a guarantee that it can be fixed. But the one thing that will never fix it is allowing government to remain in the hands of people who are determined to keep us from even trying to fix it.

The System

Politicians and political consultants all know this. The Russkies figured it out and applied it in order to put Cult45 in power.

Dangerously Online

If you buy into a poker game with 5 or 6 strangers, you don't have to wonder who the patsy is - because you're the patsy.

When you're part of a Social Media community that's free, you don't have to wonder how they make their money when their "product" is delivered at no cost - because you're the product.

Denise Anthony and Luke Stark, The Conversation:

Is it time to give up on social media? Many people are thinking about that in the wake of revelations regarding Cambridge Analytica’s questionable use of personal data from over 50 million Facebook users to support the Trump campaign. Not to mention the troubles with data theft, trolling, harassment, the proliferation of fake news, conspiracy theories and Russian bots.

The real societal problem might be Facebook’s business model. Along with other social media platforms, it makes money by nudging users to provide their data (without understanding the potential consequences), and then using that data in ways well beyond what people may expect.

As researchers who study social media and the impact of new technologies on society in both the past and the present, we share these concerns. However, we’re not ready to give up on the idea of social media just yet. A main reason is that, like all forms of once “new” media (including everything from the telegraph to the internet), social media has become an essential conduit for interacting with other people. We don’t think it’s reasonable for users to be told their only hope of avoiding exploitation is to isolate themselves. And for many vulnerable people, including members of impoverished, marginalized or activist communities, leaving Facebook is simply not possible anyway.

- and -

Was users’ trust in Facebook misplaced in the first place? Unfortunately, we think so. Social media companies have never been transparent about what they’re up to with users’ data. Without full information about what happens to their personal data once it’s gathered, we recommend people default to not trusting companies until they’re convinced they should. Yet neither regulations nor third-party institutions currently exist to ensure that social media companies are trustworthy.

Turnout

I was a little worried that this year's Women's March numbers might be down, and it would indicate that we're sliding into normalization due to Trump Fatigue.

Looks like I didn't have to be concerned at all - except that I haven't seen a great level of solid confirmation, but that could be a priority conflict with the Press Poodles having to decide between the protests and the shutdown.

Still, marches went off as planned, and (apparently) exceeded my expectations.

Vox:

Crowd estimates from Women’s Marches on Saturday now tally over 4 million and political scientists think we may have just witnessed the largest day of demonstrations in American history.

According to data collected by Erica Chenoweth at the University of Denver and Jeremy Pressman at the University of Connecticut, marches held in more than 600 US cities were attended by at least 4.2 million people.

- and -

The turnout at events outside the US was significant, too. Chenoweth and Pressman have recorded over 200 international Women’s Marches with an estimated attendance of more than 307,000.

Half the town of Stanley, Idaho (pop. 63) came out in a snowstorm to march in peace & solidarity w/ men, women, & children on 7 continents. pic.twitter.com/tLPCognu2t

— Carole King (@Carole_King) January 22, 2017

The Nation, John Nichols (pay wall):

A review of the president’s approval ratings from the states that provided Trump with the narrow margin he gained in the Electoral College found across-the-board evidence of decay in enthusiasm. With 55 percent disapproval of Trump in Michigan, 53 percent disapproval in Wisconsin, and 51 percent disapproval in Pennsylvania, a credible case could be made that, were Trump on the ballot today, he would lose both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote by considerable margins.

But Trump is not on the ballot today, or even this year.

If Trump is ever on the ballot again, it will not be until 2020.

What matters now is who else is on the ballot. The 2018 mid-term elections will be a critical test for the president’s Republican Party and, if patterns hold, they could see a turn in the electoral math sufficient to check and balance the president in Washington while removing his allies in the states. That’s an essential combination because it is not just Trump but Trumpism–as practiced by presidential allies such as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker–that must be addressed if the crisis of conservative hegemony is going to ease.

Today's Bamboozle

45* knows he can feed dis-information to the rubes directly, so most of them won't ever hear anything that runs counter to what he needs them to hear - what they already believe anyway - which is what he continues to reinforce, and why he's working so hard trying to freeze out traditional corporate media.

Vox:

What you’re looking at is a massive cut in Medicaid spending. In 2026, the Better Care Reconciliation Act would cut Medicaid spending by about $160 billion, and end Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid to low-income Americans.

As my colleague Sarah Kliff writes:

The Senate bill begins to phase out the Medicaid expansion in 2021 — and cuts the rest of the program’s budget too. The Senate bill would end the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid to millions of low-income Americans. This program has provided coverage to more Americans than the private marketplaces

It would also cut the rest of the public insurance program. Better Care would also limit government spending on the rest of the Medicaid program, giving states a set amount to spend per person rather than the insurance program’s currently open-ended funding commitment.

Ultimately, the Congressional Budget Office projects 15 million people would lose coverage with the repeal of Medicaid expansion.

So it’s incredibly misleading for the president to claim that Senate Republicans are increasing funding for Medicaid.

This is pretty typical of the Faux Conservative crapola they've been peddling for a long time. It's a variation on one of their favorite themes - "tax revenue goes up when tax rates come down".  So it follows that the rubes will internalize this new crapola and adopt it as part of their catechism - "cutting Medicaid funding now increases Medicaid spending in the long term."

Yeah, OK. And the best way to fill a bath tub is to open the drain and turn one of the faucets off.

A smiling hyena will still eat your children

These people have no soul and no honor.

Well Well

Vox:

A majority of Americans, 51 percent, have a favorable view of the Affordable Care Act, the law’s highest mark ever in the seven-year tracking poll; 41 percent said they had an unfavorable view.
--and--

Half of Americans also said they thought they would be better off if Obamacare remained the law of the land, versus 36 percent who thought they would be better off under the Republican bill.

I'll make one radical assumption by saying: Maybe a bunch of the Leftie Purists managed to get their heads outa their asses long enough to stop insisting that "fucked over completely" is somehow better than "fucked over a little (or even a lot)".

The main thing here, Lefties, is that you don't get to prescribe punishment for me in order to pressure me into serving your political goals.

There is nothing good about losing what we gained with Obamacare because it just doesn't go far enough to satisfy your pixie-dusted dreams of unicorns and universality.

There is no silver lining in having 45* as POTUS. Damage is being done to our institutions that will take decades (if not generations) to repair.

So if you think the shit we're going thru now, and the shit yet to come, is all good in the end because it's sure to transform the voting public into good little Liberals, then y'all can go fuck yourself with a horny toad.

Like Mother Blue Gal always tells us:

When you win, you chop wood and carry water.

When you lose, you chop wood and carry water.

(I'll add my bit to the end of that):

When you get some of what you want, but not everything,

You chop the fucking wood and you carry the fucking water.

Trouble With The Numbers

Quinnipiac:

So I'm wondering about 45*'s obsession over his Ratings and his Poll numbers (knowing of course, he'll just lie his ass off if they're not good etc etc), but he is in fact obsessed with such things, and it's interesting to connect that up with the usual GOP mantra about how they don't pay attention to the polling and they make their decisions according to good old fashioned Republican values and blah blah fucking blah.

The GOP always loved slagging Hillary (esp) because she was so "Poll-Driven" and "She never says anything that hasn't been focus-grouped to within an inch of its life". 

But btw - when you see a focus group on your liberal TV box these days, isn't it almost always Frank Luntz? 

How do they reconcile any of that?  Is it even necessary to try, especially in light of the pretty simple fact that we rarely hear about any of it anymore, even from the Repubs?

And then also too - 82% of people self-identifying as Republican say the approve of 45*'s performance?

First off: What the actual fuck, Repubs?

But: It seems like that could easily indicate just how down-to-the-bottom-of-the-barrel the GOP has gotten.  If 45* is driving supporters away (as it sure as hell looks like he's doing), then the only folks left are those die-hard rubes who're still with him even as he is obviously in the run-up to when he starts shooting people on 5th Avenue.

Anyway, it's a wonderment.

On The Budget

WaPo:

On Thursday, the Trump administration released a preliminary 2018 budget proposal, which details many of the changes the president wants to make to the federal government’s spending. The proposal covers only discretionary, not mandatory, spending.

To pay for an increase in defense spending, a down payment on the border wall and school voucher programs, among other things, funding was cut from the discretionary budgets of other executive departments and agencies. The Environmental Protection Agency, the State Department and the Agriculture Department took the hardest hits. The proposal also eliminates funding for these 19 agencies.

 

The piece lets you focus in on recaps for individual departments, like Agriculture (eg):

Info And Academics

Spark at CBC Radio: (I have a hard time getting the embed thing to work sometimes, so if you don't see anything in the space below, just follow the link)



Here's the only infographic I've been able to find so far. It's supposed to show how the websites interlock, which Albright hypothesizes is driven by analytics and the bots that grab little bits of info about where you go on the web and uses that info to feed similar info to you.

eg: Use Google to search for widgets and you'll see ads for widgets the next time you go to Facebook.

Or follow a link to Breitbart on your Twitter feed, and guess what's going to pop up as a Promoted Tweet when you go back. And then, you'll start getting links to other similar websites on Facebook, and before you know it, you're in a silo.

There's not a lot there that's brand spanking new, but now we're getting some research that begins to prove out the problems of confirmation bias and propaganda in the Information Age. 

The Guardian:

Here’s what you don’t want to do late on a Sunday night. You do not want to type seven letters into Google. That’s all I did. I typed: “a-r-e”. And then “j-e-w-s”. Since 2008, Google has attempted to predict what question you might be asking and offers you a choice. And this is what it did. It offered me a choice of potential questions it thought I might want to ask: “are jews a race?”, “are jews white?”, “are jews christians?”, and finally, “are jews evil?”

Are Jews evil? It’s not a question I’ve ever thought of asking. I hadn’t gone looking for it. But there it was. I press enter. A page of results appears. This was Google’s question. And this was Google’s answer: Jews are evil. Because there, on my screen, was the proof: an entire page of results, nine out of 10 of which “confirm” this. The top result, from a site called Listovative, has the headline: “Top 10 Major Reasons Why People Hate Jews.” I click on it: “Jews today have taken over marketing, militia, medicinal, technological, media, industrial, cinema challenges etc and continue to face the worlds [sic] envy through unexplained success stories given their inglorious past and vermin like repression all over Europe.”

Google is search. It’s the verb, to Google. It’s what we all do, all the time, whenever we want to know anything. We Google it. The site handles at least 63,000 searches a second, 5.5 billion a day. Its mission as a company, the one-line overview that has informed the company since its foundation and is still the banner headline on its corporate website today, is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. It strives to give you the best, most relevant results. And in this instance the third-best, most relevant result to the search query “are Jews… ” is a link to an article from stormfront.org, a neo-Nazi website. The fifth is a YouTube video: “Why the Jews are Evil. Why we are against them.”

The sixth is from Yahoo Answers: “Why are Jews so evil?” The seventh result is: “Jews are demonic souls from a different world.” And the 10th is from jesus-is-saviour.com: “Judaism is Satanic!”

There’s one result in the 10 that offers a different point of view. It’s a link to a rather dense, scholarly book review from thetabletmag.com, a Jewish magazine, with the unfortunately misleading headline: “Why Literally Everybody In the World Hates Jews.”

I feel like I’ve fallen down a wormhole, entered some parallel universe where black is white, and good is bad. Though later, I think that perhaps what I’ve actually done is scraped the topsoil off the surface of 2016 and found one of the underground springs that has been quietly nurturing it. It’s been there all the time, of course. Just a few keystrokes away… on our laptops, our tablets, our phones. This isn’t a secret Nazi cell lurking in the shadows. It’s hiding in plain sight.

 

The Media Cloud

Any surprises here?

Today's Internet Poll

I voted - and it's an online thing, so there's no accounting for anything, and it's Fox Nation where they can turn on a dime.

At least with this one, the numbers add up - more or less.

The Cost Of Things

Jeff Scon at Moyers & Company

After the most recent Super Bowl, I read an article that estimated it cost employers $1 billion in lost productivity on the Monday afterward — a mix of people calling in sick, showing up late and spending time discussing the top commercials (46 percent), the halftime show (12 percent), and the game play and strategy (12 percent).

Ask yourself: How much time during the last week did you spend ‘on’ Trump?

This article got me thinking about how much the Trump presidency will cost the US economy during the next four years due to similar losses in productivity.

Trump’s narcissistic behavior — manifested in his unfiltered and uncontrolled Twitter communications and his preoccupation with being the center of attention — has created an unrelenting daily media frenzy. Every day brings a new crisis, new accusations, insults and lies that suck us into spending time “on” Trump.

Ask yourself: How much time during the last week did you spend “on” Trump?

Here's a snapshot of Schon's quickie pass at the math:

 

And what do you think we might be able to do with that kinda money? Go check the end of his piece.

Pushing Back

WaPo:

A new poll from Quinnipiac University suggests that while people may be broadly unhappy with the mainstream media, they still think it's more credible than Trump. The president regularly accuses the press of “fake news,” but people see more “fake news” coming out of his own mouth.

The poll asked who registered voters “trust more to tell you the truth about important issues.” A majority — 52 percent — picked the media. Just 37 percent picked Trump.

The poll did find that registered voters by a narrow margin think the media has treated Trump unfairly, with 50 percent saying they disapproved of the coverage of Trump and 45 percent approving. But voters are even more critical of Trump's treatment of the media, with 61 percent disapproving and 35 percent approving.

Even 23 percent of Republicans say Trump is mistreating the media, and independents disapprove 59-35.

And in case you missed it, WaPo quietly added a little something to it's banner:

 

Which brings us to Three Things About The Daddy State

1. Every government needs to do certain things without telling us about it, but the Daddy State needs the dark more than any other. There are way too many things they can't afford to let us see - a lot more than in anything resembling a democracy. Leakers and the Press are light-shiners; Daddy Staters hate them, and spend a shitload of time and energy covering their own asses and fighting disclosure - because they're always up to no good, and they know it.
2. The greatest threat to the Daddy State is anybody with a functioning memory. 45* is always carping about the Press because they write things down and compare what he says today with what he said before - sometimes moments before.  Creating the illusion of near-infallibility is a key element in any cult. Pointing out mistakes and contradictions makes you their enemy. And boy oh boy do they love having enemies.
3. Citizens who insist on being involved in the decision-making process comprise the best possible preventative measure and the best remedy.

That last one sounds like a very old and very tired cliché because we always assume we get to make up our minds and freely express our opinions and go out and vote once in a while.

But we've internalized the Rent-Seeker's ambition - sit on your ass enjoying the benefits while everybody else does the work.  Anywhere from 40% to 60% of the people who could vote don't vote.

Because we've also internalized the bullshit (fed to us all the time) that government sucks; they're all the same anyway; both parties are corrupt; the major candidates are just two sides of the same coin so why bother blah blah fuckin' blah.

Get past it.

You want better choices? Get your ass out to a Caucus; or vote in the primary.  And take somebody with you. And stop being so damned polite to people who won't help. When you refuse to be part of the solution you become part of the problem. ie: If you think it's shitty but you refuse to make even the simplest effort to improve it, then you're helping the buttheads who're making it shitty. Silence implies consent.

Or you could run for office yourself.  Have you not seen some of these bozos? Look who's in the White House right now.  It is - for all practical purposes and by every modern standard - impossible for you to be any worse than what we've got now.

Cutting to the chase: Bullet point 3a is real simple. When everybody votes, the Daddy State loses - by definition the Daddy State loses and Democracy wins when we all take part in this little experiment called Self-Government.

Feel The Love

This world map shows who feels most threatened by whom.

hat tip = Facebook bud Doug R