"If we undermine or destroy [the free press] we do it at our own peril."— Fusion (@Fusion) March 5, 2017
Former VP Joe Biden has a powerful message about the media: pic.twitter.com/pzCckA5cpp
Mar 9, 2017
Joe Biden
Podcast
There's no more haystack - only needles.
Intercepted with Jeremy Scahill
It's scary to find out that someone you don't even know exists can find out everything there is to know about you with a few clicks of his mouse.
That's a bit Sci-Fi for me right now, but the spooks are into some shit we'll prob'ly never hear about. And that can make it more scary, but it's a good thing to remember that every new "age" has brought along it's own set of scary things, and we have to learn how adapt to them and/or otherwise deal with it so we can keep moving.
The last block with James Risen is a little less than fully convincing, but it does some good in educating me more about the balance between my right to know what my government's doing and the need for some secrets to stay secret - which will be a bone of contention for as long as we have politics.
You may have noticed I'm bouncing back and forth on most of it - that's what makes me like this kinda shit.
Anyway.
Sometimes awareness is your armor. Sometimes it's all you'll get. And sometimes it's enough.
Sweet dreams, kids. Hope you don't talk in your sleep.
Intercepted with Jeremy Scahill
It's scary to find out that someone you don't even know exists can find out everything there is to know about you with a few clicks of his mouse.
That's a bit Sci-Fi for me right now, but the spooks are into some shit we'll prob'ly never hear about. And that can make it more scary, but it's a good thing to remember that every new "age" has brought along it's own set of scary things, and we have to learn how adapt to them and/or otherwise deal with it so we can keep moving.
The last block with James Risen is a little less than fully convincing, but it does some good in educating me more about the balance between my right to know what my government's doing and the need for some secrets to stay secret - which will be a bone of contention for as long as we have politics.
You may have noticed I'm bouncing back and forth on most of it - that's what makes me like this kinda shit.
Anyway.
Sometimes awareness is your armor. Sometimes it's all you'll get. And sometimes it's enough.
Sweet dreams, kids. Hope you don't talk in your sleep.
Mar 8, 2017
Duck Before You Drown
Charlie Pierce at Esquire:
The folks at Camp Runamuck, and their auxiliary down at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, have yet another present for those economically insecure folks who didn't want the lady to replace the black guy because Mexicans and ISIS and telling-it-like-it-is. And economic insecurity. You can die on the job now and not burden your boss with unnecessary paperwork. From The Washington Post:
In a narrow result that divided along party lines, the Senate voted 49 to 48 to eliminate the regulation, dubbed the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule. Finalized in August and blocked by a court order in October, the rule would limit the ability of companies with recent safety problems to complete for government contracts unless they agreed to remedies. The measure to abolish it had already cleared the House. The next step after the Senate vote will be the White House, where Trump is expected to sign it. A half-dozen other worker safety regulations are in Republican crosshairs, with one headed to the Senate floor as soon as this week. Many are directed at companies with federal contracts. Such companies employ 1 in 5 American workers — meaning the effort could have wide-ranging effects.Chipping away at the protections - the institutions that are there to help us push back.
It's A Big Deal
Noah Feldman at Bloomberg:
45* is failing again.
The sitting president has accused his predecessor of an act that could have gotten the past president impeached. That’s not your ordinary exercise of free speech. If the accusation were true, and President Barack Obama ordered a warrantless wiretap of Donald Trump during the campaign, the scandal would be of Watergate-level proportions.
But if the allegation is not true and is unsupported by evidence, that too should be a scandal on a major scale. This is the kind of accusation that, taken as part of a broader course of conduct, could get the current president impeached. We shouldn’t care that the allegation was made early on a Saturday morning on Twitter.I confess a degree of ignorance on this one. My initial reaction was that it's mostly just Trump being Trump, but Feldman makes a good point. Once you're inaugurated, the pivot to being the top guy - and behaving like the top guy - is necessary. You become not just the guy, but the office as well. And you have to step up to that higher standard.
45* is failing again.
Today's Tweet
Let's put the GOP in charge and be done with it - it's not like it'll make difference.
— Bad Hombre JP (@MeMySylvanEye) March 7, 2017
Mar 7, 2017
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.
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.
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.
Here It Comes
Grease up and bend over, America - the GOP's back in town.
The two committees will be working on the bills even though the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has not completed its analysis; as a result, estimates of the plan’s cost and how many people could lose coverage will not be immediately available.
Sources said previous versions of the plan faced unfavorable coverage numbers from the CBO.
The tax credit under the GOP plan ranges from $2,000 to $4,000 a year per individual, increasing with someone’s age. That system would provide less financial assistance for low-income and older people than ObamaCare, but could give more assistance to younger people and those with somewhat higher incomes.
Democrats warn that between the phasing out of ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion and the smaller tax credit for poorer people, the 20 million people who gained coverage in recent years will be put at risk.So let's see - the GOP has long contended that 47% of us don't pay federal taxes, so obviously, the best way to help us with this healthcare insurance thing is to give everybody a federal tax break.
Why do I always get the feeling that there's no vision or imagination in the GOP that isn't aimed at fucking us over in another attempt to advance a bogus economic theory, even when every one of those attempts turns out to be further proof that it doesn't fucking work?
And let's not lose sight of the high probability that guys like Ryan would engineer the "collapse" of Obamacare as a political maneuver just so they could use it to bully their way thru with this new bullshit plan (which is nothing new at all).
- Fuck it up
- Point at it and say, "Oh look - it's fucked up"
- Sell your ideology-driven bullshit as the only solution that can possibly help
- Collect campaign contributions from the cronies who get richer from that solution
- Enjoy our re-election
- Find something else you can "fix" and start again at step 1
Today's Tweet
"Holy fuck, I'm lucky to be alive!" - Every patient operated on by Ben Carson.— David Hines (@dbh1ne2) March 6, 2017
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