Spying Appliances

#KellyanneConway

I thought the whole microwaves spying on us was bunk till I caught my stove & microwave battling it out this morning... pic.twitter.com/NzzdsVBW3X

— The Anti-Trump (@IMPL0RABLE) March 13, 2017

Today's Today

Nerd porn alert - it's Pi Day (𝛑 🌞) so here's one you've prob'ly seen already but I don't care because I never get tired of hearing something about stuff.

And yes, I know it's not really about Pi - shut up. My porn, my rules.

Pimping The Obvious

WaPo:

The nation’s opioid epidemic is changing the way law enforcement does its job, with police officers acting as drug counselors and medical workers and shifting from law-and-order tactics to approaches more akin to social work.

Departments accustomed to arresting drug abusers are spearheading programs to get them into treatment, convinced that their old strategies weren’t working. They’re administering medication that reverses overdoses, allowing users to turn in drugs in exchange for treatment, and partnering with hospitals to intervene before abuse turns fatal.

“A lot of the officers are resistant to what we call social work. They want to go out and fight crime, put people in jail,” said Capt. Ron Meyers of the police department in Chillicothe, Ohio, a 21-year veteran who is convinced that punitive tactics no longer work against drugs. “We need to make sure the officers understand this is what is going to stop the epidemic.”

Officers are finding children who were barricaded in rooms while their parents got high, and they are responding to the same homes for the same problems. Feelings of exasperation course through some departments in which officers are interacting with the same drug users over and over again, sometimes saving their lives repeatedly with naloxone, a drug that reverses an opiate overdose.

How much more are we going to expect the cops to do? I like it better that they're helping people instead of shooting them, but we can't just keep piling more tasks on them because we're not willing to be inconvenienced by it all.

Anyway, isn't it amazing how "the drug problem" can move so suddenly from, "government handouts and mollycoddling won't make up for the moral deficiency of those people", to something more like, "maybe we should start looking at this as a public health issue".

And gee - it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the enormously powerful circle jerk of Coin-Operated Politicians, and their buddies in the Rent-a-Prison bidness, and the DEA as an organization of Confiscation For Fun and Profit with guns and permission to fuck you out of everything you own.

The truly obvious though, is simply that the drug thing really hasn't mattered as long as it was "an urban problem", and we were just fucking over the brown people. Now that it's come to the great American Cracker Barrel, we should try something that might be a better approach? Something we could've been doing this whole time? Because it works better? And we've always known that?

Two things:

1. I wonder how many well-connected leeches will suddenly discover their life-long passion for providing Re-Hab services - as a proper Market-Based solution, you understand -  and of course financed by taxpayers.
2. This is another one of those things the hippies have been trying to get the cement heads to understand for a very long time.

And you can color me un-fucking-surprised.

Wow - Look Who Just Caught Up

Raw Story:

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.

Trae Crowder

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.

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

The Big And The Small

About That Memory Thing

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.

Today's Pix

Pro Left Podcast

Don't miss the bit on Angus Deaton starting at about 54:00.

You can help out by doing a little shopping at their Amazon link

The Professional Left

Run It Like A Business

A smart guy told us back in the 90s that the 21st century would be about privacy.

I hate the notion of "prophesy fulfilled" and so I'll just ignore it because it's inconvenient, but damn, son - kinda looks like that's what's happening.

Sharon Begley at STAT

A little-noticed bill moving through Congress would allow companies to require employees to undergo genetic testing or risk paying a penalty of thousands of dollars, and would let employers see that genetic and other health information.

Giving employers such power is now prohibited by legislation including the 2008 genetic privacy and nondiscrimination law known as GINA. The new bill gets around that landmark law by stating explicitly that GINA and other protections do not apply when genetic tests are part of a “workplace wellness” program.

The bill, HR 1313, was approved by a House committee on Wednesday, with all 22 Republicans supporting it and all 17 Democrats opposed. It has been overshadowed by the debate over the House GOP proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, but the genetic testing bill is expected to be folded into a second ACA-related measure containing a grab-bag of provisions that do not affect federal spending, as the main bill does.

- and -

Rigorous studies by researchers not tied to the $8 billion wellness industry have shown that the programs improve employee health little if at all. An industry group recently concluded that they save so little on medical costs that, on average, the programs lose money. But employers continue to embrace them, partly as a way to shift more health care costs to workers, including by penalizing them financially.

So what's it actually about? It has great potential to be about shenanigans and fuckery.

But in the context of the 4th amendment, it's about none of your goddamned business.

Amendment 4:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Work at Home

A professor's BBC interview has been hilariously gatecrashed by children. Wait for the moment when the second child arrives... pic.twitter.com/oGiULof67X

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) March 10, 2017