It Gets Worse

The Daddy State approacheth.

“A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila.” 

--Mitch Ratcliffe

Quincy Larson at Free Code Camp:

Soon every mistake you’ve ever made online will not only be available to your internet service provider (ISP) — it will be available to any corporation or foreign government who wants to see those mistakes.

Thanks to last week’s US Senate decision (update March 28: and today’s House decision), ISPs can sell your entire web browsing history to literally anyone without your permission. The only rules that prevented this are all being repealed, and won’t be reinstated any time soon (it would take an act of congress).

ISPs can also sell any information they want from your online activity and mobile app usage — financial information, medical information, your children’s information, your social security number — even the contents of your emails.

They can even sell your geolocation information. That’s right, ISPs can take your exact physical location from minute to minute and sell it to a third party.

You might be wondering: who benefits from repealing these protections? Other than those four monopoly ISPs that control America’s “last mile” of internet cables and cell towers?

No one. No one else benefits in any way. Our privacy — and our nation’s security — have been diminished, just so a few mega-corporations can make a little extra cash.

I'll take exception to that last bit - about how nobody benefits in any way.  My basic skepticism (ie: my cynical - tho' perfectly justifiable - paranoia) is waving flags like it's laundry day at Redneck Central Headquarters.

This looks a whole lot like standard Political Duplicity - privacy snoops disguised as profiteers to give the illusion of separation from Officialdom, so nobody in government is accountable to voters for the inevitable fuckery.

And the bonus is that the ISP cartel can peddle our information to Da Gubmint (aka: the Lunker Customer everybody's always gunnin' for, so you know it'll happen), which will confer upon us the supreme privilege of paying them to fuck us over - again.

Cronies get richer

Congress Critters get re-elected

We get fucked

'Twas ever thus with the Radical Right, and ever thus 'twill be.

Anyway, privacy is pretty much the whole banana in a free state, and there seems to an even fuckier fuckery afoot.

Roe v Wade is based on the concept of a Consitutional Right To Privacy. If this ISP thing stands up to challenge in the courts, kiss that one good-bye. And then it's really open season on everybody's rights across the board.

Now, I realize I'm pretty close to the Slippery Slope Fallacy, but these things happen step-by-step, so I'm just trying to follow it out to the logical extreme. And it's not like we haven't seen some of this shit already. The bullshit SCOTUS ruling on Voting Rights comes to mind.

So how's that Gorsuch appointment looking now?

Today's Tweet

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over.

This is the weirdest thing I've ever seen pic.twitter.com/EF6Hk3Y3ai

— Ali Segel (@OnlineAlison) March 27, 2017

Nature Is Kinda Scary Sometimes

It's a sea slug.

Melibe viridis

Today's Pix

Keith

Watch this video on The Scene.

Color Me Unsurprised

...again.

The Atlantic:

In 1990, President George H. W. Bush raised taxes, and GDP growth increased over the next five years. In 1993, President Bill Clinton raised the top marginal tax rate, and GDP growth increased over the next five years. In 2001 and 2003, President Bush cut taxes, and we faced a disappointing expansion followed by a Great Recession.

Does this story prove that raising taxes helps GDP? No. Does it prove that cutting taxes hurts GDP? No.

But it does suggest that there is a lot more to an economy than taxes, and that slashing taxes is not a guaranteed way to accelerate economic growth.

And there's still that nagging little finding from years ago - repeatedly reaffirmed to reach or exceed the 95% certainty threshold - that for every $1 solely in tax cuts, we get about 59¢ in Net Economic Stimulus and for every $1 solely in direct government spending (eg: infrastructure) we can count on $1.19 in Net Economic Stimulus.

Call me crazy, but if my broker comes to me trying to sell me on the idea that making 60¢ (kinda the same as losing 40¢) is a better deal than making $1.20, I'm gonna bounce that butthead outa my office so fast his feet won't even touch the ground.

Good old-fashioned Keynesian economics - cuz it works, dummy.

Tax policy is an important piece of an economic strategy, but we've let it get out of balance.

Water the roots, not the leaves.

Today's Tweet

Good thing Obamacare wasn't repealed. Now all these Trump team members can get treatment for their tragic memory loss. #TrumpRussia

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) March 27, 2017

Professional Left Podcast

Donald Trump had a very bad week. 

Jury is still out as to whether it was worse for Devin Nunes and Paul Ryan. 

Where's Vladimir? 

Local News connects nearly always to national politics, and vice versa.

The Professional Left

Amazon link

Yow

45* lies. A lot. Everybody knows that, and about 20% of us are still with him, while the rest of us are wondering what it's gonna take to peel the rubes away.

Prob'ly not likely to happen.

Scientific American, working out the differences between White Lies, Black Lies, and Blue Lies:

Blue lies are a different category altogether, simultaneously selfish and beneficial to others—but only to those who belong to your group. As University of Toronto psychologist Kang Lee explains, blue lies fall in between generous white lies and selfish “black” ones. “You can tell a blue lie against another group,” he says, which makes it simultaneously selfless and self-serving. “For example, you can lie about your team's cheating in a game, which is antisocial, but helps your team.”

- and -

Around the world, children grow up hearing stories of heroes who engage in deception and violence on behalf of their in-groups. In Star Wars, for example, Princess Leia lies about the location of the “secret rebel base.” In the Harry Potter novels (spoiler alert!), the entire life of double-agent Severus Snape is a lie, albeit a “blue” one, in the service of something bigger than himself.

That explains why most Americans seem to accept that our intelligence agencies lie in the interests of national security, and we laud our spies as heroes. From this perspective, blue lies are weapons in intergroup conflict. As Swedish philosopher Sissela Bok once said, “Deceit and violence—these are the two forms of deliberate assault on human beings.” Lying and bloodshed are often framed as crimes when committed inside a group—but as virtues in a state of war.

This research—and those stories—highlight a difficult truth about our species: We are intensely social creatures, but we’re prone to divide ourselves into competitive groups, largely for the purpose of allocating resources. People can be prosocial—compassionate, empathic, generous, honest—in their groups, and aggressively antisocial toward out-groups. When we divide people into groups, we open the door to competition, dehumanization, violence—and socially sanctioned deceit.

“People condone lying against enemy nations, and since many people now see those on the other side of American politics as enemies, they may feel that lies, when they recognize them, are appropriate means of warfare,” says George Edwards, a Texas A&M political scientist and one of the country’s leading scholars of the presidency.

When we see each other as enemies - you and your team over there, trying to fuck things up for me and my team over here - it gets pretty easy to rationalize doing whatever it takes to "win". Because in that bumper-sticker-binary mindset, winning means everybody else has to lose.

Today's Atheism

If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense.

If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

--Penn Jillette

Michael Franks

On a dreary dripping Monday

The Art Of Tea --Michael Franks

Fucked Up Bigly

Via Joy Reid on Twitter (@JoyAnnReid):

Not a whole lot of the Steele Dossier has been officially corroborated yet, but some pretty solid suspicions are being reinforced almost every day.

And some of the players still seem to be more or less unaware of just how enormous this thing could get.

Mr Jefferson Speaks

"The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper." 

--Thomas Jefferson to GK van Hogendorp, 1785

"I am persuaded myself that the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves. The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, & to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them."

--Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787

Today's Tweet

rarely does the headline get weirder *after* the nudity, drugs, and murder pic.twitter.com/XGUh6b43TE

— Emma Baccellieri (@emmabaccellieri) March 23, 2017

That Pesky Constitution

  Nikolas Bowie at Take Care

In its first fifty days, the Trump administration has done a magnificent job—the best job—teaching Americans about the Constitution. Who among us could distinguish an emolument from a peppermint before 2016? In that spirit, as we learn more about the employees President Trump has hired to run the executive branch, it’s worth asking whether his administration is violating another under-the-radar provision: The Appointments Clause.

The Appointments Clause is the one that requires the president to get the “Advice and Consent of the Senate” before he can hire certain “Officers of the United States.” It’s the reason we know what Betsy DeVos thinks about bears or that the Russian ambassador is easily forgettable. The eighteenth-century authors of the clause anticipated that no president could run the executive branch by himself, but they wanted a “check” to ensure that he didn’t appoint “unfit characters,” “family connection[s],” or “obsequious instruments of his pleasure.” They decided that Senate debates on the merits of nominees would provide much-needed accountability for the most important members of a president’s team.

- and -

Over the years, these “assistants to the president” have grown in number and in status to take on some of the most important advisory responsibilities in the White House. But even though these assistants now wield tremendous informal clout, they have always remained “employees” for constitutional purposes. And every president since Roosevelt has generally adhered to the Appointments Clause by restraining their employees from exceeding the constitutional limits on their statutory authority.

Until now.

When President Trump issued his first travel ban, for instance, employees Bannon and Miller interposed themselves between the president and the Department of Homeland Security by overruling its interpretation of whether the ban applied to green-card holders. That weekend, employee Miller reportedly called a Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorney to dictate how he should defend the ban in court. In addition, employee Miller also “effectively ran” a meeting of the National Security Council despite Congress’s requirement that the council “shall be composed” only of people “appointed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.”

More recently, employee McGhan has given “authoritative guidance” to Senate-confirmed officers in the Department of Homeland Security about how to interpret President Trump’s inscrutable executive orders. He’s also the employee responsible for directing Senate-confirmed officers in the Department of Justice to turn over any warrants regarding the president’s wild accusations that he was wiretapped.

Employee Preibus reportedly directed the Senate-confirmed FBI director to “knock down” stories that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia.

And the president has appointed at least one of his 400 “beachhead” employees, Stephen Vaughn, to serve in a Senate-confirmable position as acting U.S. Trade Representative, even though federal law expressly prohibits that sort of appointment.

Notice a pattern?
hat tip = Lawrence Tribe @tribelaw