Today's Today

A Thanksgiving Day classic.

L👁👁K
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A Short One

Rocky Mountain Mike - I'd Really Love Impeachment Tonight

The Fog

‘I don’t know what to believe’ is an unpatriotic cop-out. Do better, Americans.

WaPo, Margaret Sullivan:

Since I became The Washington Post’s media columnist in 2016, I’ve developed a habit of asking people, wherever I travel, how they get their news.

In keeping with that, I had a brief chat last weekend in Sarasota, Fla., with a middle-aged man (a local used-car salesman, he said).

“Pretty much just from here,” was how he answered my question, indicating his smartphone. When I dug for specifics, he mentioned Fox News.

The impeachment hearings, which that day had offered riveting testimony from diplomat Marie Yovanovitch? He merely shrugged: Didn’t know, didn’t care.

That plenty of Americans share this apathy about what’s happening in their government is appalling, but hardly shocking.

Many clearly do care, as the movement of public opinion favoring impeachment suggests, but there’s a whole category that pollsters and pundits call “low-information voters.”

The New York Times published a story Monday with this headline: “ ‘No one believes anything’: Voters Worn Out by a Fog of Political News.” The reporters quoted a Wisconsin woman who said she didn’t know what to think of the various conflicting claims she’d heard about President Trump’s apparent abuse of power.

“You have to go in and really research it,” she said, and she doubted that many people cared enough to do that.

David Roberts, writing in Vox this week, explored “tribal epistemology” — the idea that “what’s good for our tribe” has become more important than facts, evidence, and documentation. He identifies a crisis that “involves Americans’ growing inability, not just to cooperate, but even to learn and know the same things, to have a shared understanding of reality.”

Roberts, the Times article and Florida Man all point to the same thing: A lot of Americans don’t know much and won’t exert themselves beyond their echo chambers to find out.

This is the way a democracy self-destructs.

And what’s more, it’s not that difficult for American citizens to do much, much better.

Granted, the flow of news is unending — exhausting, even. And granted, there’s a lot of disinformation out there.

But apathy — or giving in to confusion — is dangerous.

“I’m terrified that the idea that it is all too much and it is okay to tune out is getting socialized as an acceptable response,” said Dru Menaker, chief operating officer of PEN America, the free-expression advocacy organization.

“Our country is being challenged to its very core, and we have an obligation to pay attention precisely because things are so overwhelming,” she told me by email.

I couldn’t agree more. And it’s not really all that hard to develop some constructive news habits.

It doesn’t take a research project into every claim and counterclaim.

If every American did any two of the following things, the “who knows?” club could be swiftly disbanded.

Subscribe to a national newspaper and go beyond the headlines into the substance of the main articles; subscribe to your local newspaper and read it thoroughly — in print, if possible; watch the top of “PBS NewsHour” every night; watch the first 15 minutes of the half-hour broadcast nightly news; tune in to a public-radio news broadcast; do a simple fact-check search when you hear conflicting claims.

For those who can’t afford to subscribe to newspapers, almost all public libraries can provide access.

“Whatever the president wants us to believe, there are tested and reliable news sources,” Menaker noted. “There are even more firsthand sources than ever where you can judge yourself — links to documents, video clips, hours of televised testimony.”

I would also offer this small list of things to stop doing: Stop getting your news and opinions from social media. Stop watching Fox News, especially the prime-time shows, which are increasingly untethered to reality.

If every American gave 30 minutes a day to an earnest and open-minded effort to stay on top of the news, we might actually find our way out of this crisis.

As Walter Shaub, former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, noted Tuesday on Twitter, it was on Nov. 19, 1863, that President Lincoln challenged his fellow citizens to rise to a “great task.”

Americans must dedicate themselves to ensuring, Lincoln urged in the Gettysburg Address, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

So, too, in this historic moment.

After all, authoritarianism loves nothing more than a know-nothing vacuum: people who throw up their hands and say they can’t tell facts from lies.

And democracy needs news consumers — let’s call them patriotic citizens — who stay informed and act accordingly.

Flag-waving is fine. But truth-seeking is what really matters.

Not For Nothing - I Hope

It would be nice if we could put this part of it to bed now.

WaPo - 11-22-2019:

The Justice Department’s internal watchdog is expected to find in a forthcoming report that political bias did not taint top officials running the FBI investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016, while at the same time criticizing the bureau for systemic failures in its handling of surveillance applications, according to two U.S. officials.

The much-anticipated report due out Dec. 9 from Inspector General Michael Horowitz will allege that a low-level FBI lawyer inappropriately altered a document that was used during the process to renew a controversial warrant for electronic surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser, the officials said. The inspector general referred that finding to U.S. Attorney John Durham, and the lawyer involved is being investigated criminally for possibly making a false statement, they said.

But Horowitz will conclude that the application still had a proper legal and factual basis, and, more broadly, that FBI officials did not act improperly in opening the Russia investigation, according to the officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive report.

Today's Tweet

And if Giuliani has evidence of wrong-doing - that he's been sitting on it the whole time - it should raise a few questions that go beyond "What is it?"

Where did he get it from, and how did he get it?
How is he not guilty of withholding evidence, and isn't that pretty classic Obstruction?

There's more than a baseline probability that it's nothing but the usual bluff and bluster, but we oughta be trying to find out.

my dude, your Manic Big-Eyed Butt-Dialing Free TV Lawyer™ says he has dirt he'll use on you if you throw him under the bus, which I'm sure is totally the kind of thing that the lawyers of innocent people say all the time

— Jeff Tiedrich (@itsJeffTiedrich) November 24, 2019

Today's Colbert

The Late Show - Stephen Colbert

Fuck Zuck

Sacha Baron Cohen - ADL Awards Speech

Today's Tweet

Republicans act like they're invisible or something. Like we can't see the shit they try to pull.

Or maybe it's just that they know the rubes will swallow every little turd that floats by, and guys like Nunes has begun to swallow his own turds(?)

"If I say it out loud, the rubes believe it, so maybe if I say it out loud it's magically true."(?)

An indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani is willing to tell Congress about meetings in Vienna between Devin Nunes and a former Ukrainian prosecutor. As @VickyPJWard tells @ChrisCuomo, the purpose of the meetings was to discuss digging up dirt on Joe Biden.https://t.co/gT7O3mdbX7 pic.twitter.com/36zQipJ9vO

— Cuomo Prime Time (@CuomoPrimeTime) November 23, 2019

OK, Boomer

Here's a great little treatise chock full of insight.

From the comments:

Self care is also not arguing with people who are committed to misunderstanding you.

There are big problems with this kind of thing, of course, and they grow out of an evolutionary feature in our firmware - Pattern Seeking.

A million years ago, we had to start with sorting the world into easily recognizable binary chunks: The stuff that helps us versus the stuff that hurts us.

But then we had to figure out the duality thing.

• Fire helps us by keeping us warm and making our food easier to digest, but it can kill us too
• We have to have water to drink and to grow the plants we need to eat, but we can drown in it, and that's where the crocodiles live
• A flint knife is an excellent tool for acquiring and processing food, as well as being a deadly weapon that avails us the means to murder each other.

We dearly love sorting things. Oh how we do love it so.

But just as with water and fire and tools, the need to sort, in and of itself, can be both helpful and harmful.

We sort people according to physical traits, and we get racism
We sort people according to spiritual belief, and we get religious wars and genocide
We sort people according to their wealth, and we get class struggles and bloody revolution

So none of this is particularly new, but I need to write it down - to reiterate it to myself before it slips away.

Fast rewind to the early 20th century, when Bernays taps into Freudian concepts in order to synthesize a new kind of marketing, which of course turns out to be both a good tool to get the word out to people about good things, and an excellent weapon to divide and conquer.

A short course:

A bit longer:

And with each advancement in Mass Media, we've seen an amplifying effect of both the positive and the negative aspects of communications vis-à-vis news, advertising and propaganda.

What's new for me is the thought that so-called Artificial Intelligence (an oxymoron if ever there was one) has grown up so quickly and become so pervasive that the bad guys can run their scams in stealth mode so that by the time most of us become aware of what's being done to us, we figure it's too late to do anything about it.

(the 2016 election comes to mind - duh)

Anyway, Blunty's video popped a couple things into my brain.

First is the marketing/propaganda stuff: the slicing and dicing of demographics info to the point where micro-targeting gets so fucking granular as to make it possible to generate very specific hot-button items at very specific, and ever smaller sectors of the populace.

Second - growing out of the first (as usual) - is that there is practically no such thing as "shared experience" on any large scale that isn't being manufactured and custom fit to the biases that have also been manufactured and custom fit to us.

Divide-n-Conquer works. 

The practitioners are very good at it, and getting better as we go along.

for good or ill

the world is 

what we make it

Today's Oy

At the hearing yesterday:

Pretty sure that sign actually means Schiff always follows the rules - doesn't it?

So I guess that's why the Repubs are always so pissed off(?)

Yeah, we can fuck that up.

Of course we can fuck that up.

We're the GOP.