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.

 

Here It Comes

Grease up and bend over, America - the GOP's back in town.

The Hill:

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).

1. Fuck it up
2. Point at it and say, "Oh look - it's fucked up"
3. Sell your ideology-driven bullshit as the only solution that can possibly help
4. Collect campaign contributions from the cronies who get richer from that solution
5. Enjoy our re-election
6. 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

Today's Pix

Some Questions

In case you're among the folks who support the idea that federal  funds shouldn't go to states supporting "Sanctuary Cities", I need to know 2 things.

First, where do think that money comes from in the first place?

Second, how did you get to be as old as you are without knowing one goddamned thing about how this joint works?

OK, 3 things: What the fuck is wrong with you?

Mr Agrievement

Some points to keep in mind:

• Every accusation is a confession
• Every time he warns of dire consequences, he's making a statement of his goals

It's become pretty much the Republican Way - they're installing this top-down Daddy State authoritarianism as their operating system.  They want the government to be run more like a business because rules are for chumps and losers and cucks. Eat or be eaten. Killers are the ones who prevail. Fuck your due process. Muscle, force, dominance - it's the only thing that matters. So don't worry your pretty little head, Daddy will protect you - even if he has to protect you to death.

He was complaining about - and warning about - organized crime. And gee golly, now it would seem he's pretty mobbed up.

Also, it looks a lot like he was trying to wield the power of government to beat down on his competition.  He tries to sell it as leveling the playing field, but the field has been tilted in his favor since forever, so we've got a guy in a position of privilege and power bitchin' about what a poor defenseless victim he is - as always - and blaming people who just want a square deal for everybody. Playing the Opposites Game.

Newsweek: (updated piece from Fall 2016)

Donald Trump was thundering about a minority group, linking its members to murderers and what he predicted would be an epic crime wave in America. His opponents raged in response—some slamming him as a racist—but Trump dismissed them as blind, ignorant of the real world.

No, this is not a scene from a recent rally in which the Republican nominee for president stoked fears of violence from immigrants or Muslims. The year was 1993, and his target was Native Americans, particularly those running casinos who, Trump was telling a congressional hearing, were sucking up to criminals.

- and -

As Trump was denigrating Native Americans before Congress, other casino magnates were striking management agreements with them. Trump knew the business was there even when he was testifying; despite denying under oath that he had ever tried to arrange deals with Indian casinos, he had done just that a few months earlier, according to an affidavit from Richard Milanovich, the official from the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians who met with Trump, letters from the Trump Organization and phone records. The deal for the Agua Caliente casino instead went to Caesars World. (In 2000, Trump won a contract to manage the casino for the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians, but after Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts declared bankruptcy in 2004, the tribe paid Trump $6 million to go away.) And in his purposeless, false and inflammatory statements before Congress, Trump alienated politicians from around the country, including some who had the power to influence construction contracts—problems that could have been avoided if he had simply read his prepared speech rather than ad-libbing.

Lost contracts, bankruptcies, defaults, deceptions and indifference to investors—Trump’s business career is a long, long list of such troubles, according to regulatory, corporate and court records, as well as sworn testimony and government investigative reports. Call it the art of the bad deal, one created by the arrogance and recklessness of a businessman whose main talent is self-promotion.

- and -

Trump boasted when he announced his candidacy last year that he had made his money “the old-fashioned way,” but he is no Bill Gates or Michael Bloomberg, self-made billionaires who were mavericks, innovators in their fields. Instead, the Republican nominee’s wealth is Daddy-made. Almost all of his best-known successes are attributable to family ties or money given to him by his father.

The thing that sticks for me is that 45* has spent his whole life failing up. Because he was born into a network of the kind of people who are (eg) regular attendees at Davos, there's always somebody to bail him out, or the next bunch of suckers who can be talked into thinking he'll owe them something big if they prop him up, or some Coin-Operated Politician who can't resist the chance to play at a level he's only dreamed about - or whatever.

Anyway, he's acting like there's still some headroom for him - that he can bomb out in the White House, and get to another higher destination.

That one really scares me.

Now maybe it's just that he's Russkied up to the extent he seems to be, but if we don't get a good look at his tax and finance documents, we don't ever get to know.

PS) I wondered if a FISA warrant could've been aimed at some IRS records instead of signal surveillance, so I looked it up. Turns out the government can do that, but only if it's aimed at something owned or controlled entirely by a foreign entity, and I don't think even Obama's lawyers are clever enough to stretch it to 45*'s tax records. Damn.

Pushing Back

There's a bunch of unprecedented shit flying around, and I think we all know the 45 administration is the asshole it's flying out of.

One of the big ones for me is the fact that we won't be seeing Obama retire quietly to some nice joint on Lake Shore Drive.  He intends to stay in the fight, and that's not just unheard of for a former POTUS, it's a strong indicator that Obama and his crew know something's really going wrong and they're gearing up to countervail it as best they can.

Politico:

"President Obama has said repeatedly that his lawyers deserve a lot of credit for helping his Administration go eight years without a major scandal,” said Danielle Gray, one of Obama’s former secretaries of the Cabinet. “The leaders of this effort will bring that experience to protecting and preserving accountable and democratic government.”

Bassin “has managed to gain the support of a lot of very serious people,” said Karen Dunn, another former associate White House counsel best known for helping run debate prep for Obama and Hillary Clinton, and called her former colleague the “perfect person for this particular organization at this particular moment.”

“It’s really important for a bunch of people to shine the light on this question, to make very clear when autocrats are starting in any way to detract from democratic institutions,” said Yascha Mounk, a Harvard Law lecturer who specializes in the rise of authoritarianism and has been having high level strategic advisory conversations with the group.

But it’s more than just the smaller encroachments that are on Bassin’s mind. Trump’s attack on the judge who halted his immigration ban already has him building a plan for what might happen if the White House directly defies a judicial ruling, and what they’d need to do in the potential constitutional crisis that would follow. Existing nonprofits, he said, have not been structured to deal with the kind of unprecedented, norm-breaking threats that he believes are coming from Trump and his aides.

“We need an organization that is specifically and holistically focused on that worst-case scenario,” Bassin said.

 

Nothing Sucks More

Scott Dworkin's analysis of the Dossier

Go look - this is a tiny little taste:

Another Tweet

I'd bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

I get the feeling he doesn't quite realize he's the president.

If he wanted to talk that shit in a way that it would make it stick, he could just tell somebody to get the evidence and then tweet it. Or he could put together a quick address from wherever he happens to be and every news outlet on the planet would break in on their programming. Or whatever. 

He owns the FBI for fuck's sake - he should know things.

So if this isn't just more Obama-As-Evil-Genius, or a diversionary tactic to cover his ass on the Russian thing, or Trump The Breitbart Chump-In-Chief, what the fuck is it?

Today's Tweet

Sign of the day.#Trumprussia #AMJoy pic.twitter.com/i3QgtDwcAn

— ImpeachTrump (@dumptrump33) March 5, 2017

The Media Cloud

Any surprises here?

How Great I Art

First time I've ever been up over a thousand hits in a day.

You knuckleheads are fucking awesome. Thank you.

The Silo Effect

Columbia Journalism Review:

While concerns about political and media polarization online are longstanding, our study suggests that polarization was asymmetric. Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites. But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.

Attacks on the integrity and professionalism of opposing media were also a central theme of right-wing media. Rather than “fake news” in the sense of wholly fabricated falsities, many of the most-shared stories can more accurately be understood as disinformation: the purposeful construction of true or partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core, misleading. Over the course of the election, this turned the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenged it. The prevalence of such material has created an environment in which the President can tell supporters about events in Sweden that never happened, or a presidential advisor can reference a non-existent “Bowling Green massacre.”

It's the narrow-mindedness, stupid.

While you're trying to see country and party and candidates from a perspective that includes as many aspects as possible, Alt-Right Conservatives (eg) are being fed a steady diet of binary purity, narrowing the perspective down to some pretty ridiculous bumper sticker sloganeering that sometimes contradicts itself.

"My guys are always and only good which means your guys can't be anything but always and only bad."

But there's a kind of Orwellian contradiction to it too. If I start with that binary, but then apply the negative component to "the system of a corrupt duopoly" (eg), then the benefit of the smear accrues to whoever I can make you believe is standing against whatever's being smeared. So while the overall approval for Congress is low and constantly beat down by relentless generalized attacks on "idiots in da gubmint", I can condition you at the same time to see "our guys" as fighting the noble fight to hold back the onslaught of the ruinous agenda of tax-n-spend libruls and blah blah blah.

Remember that while the approval numbers for Congress as a whole are dismal, 90-95% of these people get re-elected. A big bunch of the reason for  that on the GOP side is gerrymandering and voter suppression, but let's put all that together with a message of "they all suck, but my guy's one of the good ones - he's lookin' out for me".  Now we have that the cult thing - isolation and indoctrination, which is where that thing about The Breitbart Sphere comes in.

And not to get all Both-Sides-ey on ya, but it's become a lot more visible on the left as well. The big myth being peddled the hardest is that Hillary didn't win because "she's not Democrat enough". "She's a creature of Neo-Liberalism." "She abandoned traditional Democratic Party values". None of that is flat-out untrue, but it illustrates for me that the Purity Warriors are revving up, and I'm not going along with that because I see it as having full potential to be translated to little more than fulfillment of the Both-Sides prophesy.

Analogy Alert

We're almost completely off the pavement on the righthand shoulder, and we have to steer  to the left to keep from hitting the bridge abutment up ahead. But if we yank the wheel and over-correct, we run just as big a risk of veering all the way over into the left lane and being smushed head-on by a cement truck.

The point being that The Logical Extreme is where good ideas go to die. Keeping it down the middle isn't sexy and it's not terribly satisfying and it can feel just like losing, but it's what we have to do in order to sustain this little experiment in self-government.

In the end it all depends on factual information, and the ability to test the information so we can make accurate assessments of its veracity.

Let's review:

In the presence of confirming evidence

and

the absence of conflicting evidence,

the statement is more likely to be true

I the presence of conflicting evidence

or

the absence of confirming evidence,

the statement is more likely to be false

A Quick Refresher

No matter what else, pretend it's all normal - it happens all the time - nothing to see here - it doesn't concern you - Obama did it too - everything's fine - don't get hysterical - the status quo is the problem - revolution is the only thing that brings peace...

Be Here Now

Wish You Were Here --David Gilmour

So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from hell
Blue skies from pain
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?

How I wish, how I wish you were here
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl
Year after year
Running over the same old ground
And how we found
The same old fears
Wish you were here

Don't take the training. Don't believe what they tell you without question. Don't go along to get along. Don't let them gaslight you. Stay woke and in the moment.