eVille Times

Mar 13, 2017

Wow - Look Who Just Caught Up

Professional presidential campaign staff for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) confirmed to the Huffington Post that Russian trolls were responsible for pushing out anti-Hillary Clinton memes and social media content.

The shocking series of interviews revealed large Facebook groups supporting Sanders were inundated with content from people with no ties to the regions in which the pages were located. Former reporter John Mattes explained that his San Diego page became overwhelmed with anti-Clinton memes with messages he’d never heard coming out of the Sanders campaign. Instead, they were memes alleging Clinton used body doubles and murdered political opponents.

He initially suspected the posts were coming from anti-Clinton sites run by 1990s Clinton opponents, but he quickly found out that domain names were registered in Macedonia and Albania. Websites like WorldPoliticus.com, TrumpVision365.com, USConservativeToday.com, DonaldTrumpNews.co and USADailyPolitics.com are just a few of the sites that trafficked in fake news against Clinton. By the end of October he traced at least 40 percent of the domain registrations of the fake news sites on pro-Sanders pages back to Eastern Europe. Some others were based in Panama and the U.S. or untraceable.

In the context of Divide-n-Conquer tactics, this happens a lot under normal circumstances. But these are not normal circumstances. This shit at this level is killing this republic.

Today's Tweet

As addiction ravages the (white) heartland, sympathy tends toward treatment - and away from moral condemnation. https://t.co/X3xbkZhHRj
— Brent Staples (@BrentNYT) March 12, 2017

And in case you're at all confused by that -

@BrentNYT @nytimes Crack did the same thing to Black communities 30 yrs ago. We got SWAT teams and mandatory minimums. Funny how that works.
— BPearson (@BCP72) March 13, 2017

It'd be nice if I could be more comfortable thinking this is a signal that we're starting to understand there are way more facets to the "drug problem" than we've been conditioned to believe.

On Tyranny

Resist

If NPR is catching up with it, you know there's an increasing probability that it's true.

Mar 12, 2017

Retribution

POTUS is not supposed to be calling U.S. Attorneys.

Trump broke protocol—and Bharara responded accordingly: https://t.co/PWJUB6t5Fo pic.twitter.com/VebnNLHGLt
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) March 12, 2017

Mar 11, 2017

Knowing more about Acquired Memory and Altered Memory gets me a little closer to understanding small pieces of how advertising and propaganda work on our little simian brains to produce something of a cult-like adherence to a particular brand of ideology.

Dr Elizabeth Loftus on the Thinking Atheist podcast:

Now if I could find someone who's published a study telling me I'm really not so crazy thinking I can make a solid link from all that memory stuff to things like the Etch-A-Sketch effect, I might have something.

The search for intelligent life (inside my own head) continues.

Fresh Info

From an interview with Annie Lowrey at The Atlantic:

Angus Deaton studies the grand questions not just of economics but of life. What makes people happy? How should we measure well-being? Should countries give foreign aid? What can and should experiments do? Is inequality increasing or decreasing? Is the world getting better or worse?

Better, he believes, truly better. But not everywhere or for everyone. This week, in a speech at a conference held by the National Association for Business Economics, Deaton, the Nobel laureate and emeritus Princeton economist, pointed out that inequality among countries is decreasing, while inequality within countries is increasing. China and India are making dramatic economic improvements, while parts of sub-Saharan Africa are seeing much more modest gains. In developed countries, the rich have gotten much richer while the middle class has shriveled. A study he coauthored with the famed Princeton economist Anne Case highlights one particularly dire outcome: Mortality is actually increasing for middle-aged white Americans, due in no small part to overdoses and suicides—so-called “deaths of despair.” (Case also happens to be Deaton’s wife. More on that later.)

(This is what Blue Gal refers to in The Professional Left podcast this week - click that link or scroll down a little to listen)

Lowrey: You have made the argument that OxyContin deaths are deaths caused by rent-seeking. Talk me through it.

Deaton: I don’t know if you read Sam Quinones’ book, which is terrific, called Dreamland. It’s a wonderful book and he spent a lot of time in some obscure part of Mexico where a bunch of people had not been selling drugs before and took to selling drugs and had a much better delivery system. Sort of like Walmart of drugs! They’d deliver to your house and give you discounts, and they wouldn’t use guns. At the same time, he’s contrasting this with OxyContin and the pharmaceutical companies. The parallel is that here are two sorts of drug dealers. And one of them is doing it under the license of the United States government.

A lot of the drugs that were pushed in the early phase were being prescribed to people who were poor enough to be on Medicaid. A lot of these people were addicted to OxyContin—Sam actually describes a town in Indiana where the currency is OxyContin units. They’ve stopped using money and they’re using grams of OxyContin!

Lowrey: It’s not a bad currency, right? Easy to carry around. Stable price. Fluid market.

Deaton: There’s enough of this being prescribed for every American to have a supply for a month! So it’s not like it’s scarce. Nicholas Eberstadt makes this very cute remark about how this gave a whole new meaning to “dependence on government.” It’s a very nice essay. Eberstadt tries to be the nicest of the AEI guys.

There's also a piece of the puzzle that fits well, and reinforces part of the argument of "The Forgotten American" as a driver in the election.