Thursday, December 28, 2017

Semantics ARE Optics

The Christian Koran


A local school is being threatened with a lawsuit because they will only allow religion to be taught in the context of the humanities, and not as part of the science curriculum. How are we still dealing with this issue?

Now that we're done with the War on Christmas, and back to the War on Science, Reason, Logic and Facts, can I make a request? Instead of using the word "Bible" in speech or writing, replace that with "Christian Koran." Is it not correct to answer "What is the Koran?" with "Why, it's the Muslim equivalent of The Bible!"? It's identical in significance -- i.e. our holy book, which some of us believe contains the actual words of our Sky Friend -- but it makes a nod to the fact that the facts of the book are not facts the way REAL facts are facts ... they're opinions, particular to a region, like whether to use Miracle Whip or Hellman's (I'm sure Pence is more of a "it's got the word miracle in it!" than "the brand that looks both satanic and humanist" kind of guy). Refusing to do this would be to come right out and say "I know it's religion, and we have no evidence for any of it, but I am certain that these beliefs are 100% right and any other belief is 100% wrong, even if the other guy feels the exact same way, and I don't need evidence to rely on my gut and what I want to be true, no matter how much reason or evidence contradicts my adopted bias." At least you'll know where they stand on any debate about anything that might smite their biases, or put them on equal footing with the less-Reborn ... or even prove helpful to them, but be counter-intuitive ... and you will know they would want to make faith-based and data-free guesses about, say, existential threats to our country and planet. In other words, you'll know they shouldn't be let anywhere near policy.

Likewise, "Muslim Bible" works, and can be substituted -- in your own head if the speaker refuses to adopt this reasonable (hrrrm?) standard -- when you hear someone talking about denying rights based on religious preference, or bombing a part of the world because those people just don't count as much as we do because they are, simply, wrong about everything.

This concept genericizes. So when Betsy DeVos says that we should take away money from non-denomination public education to give to unaccredited faith-based schools, similarly unvetted telestudy programs, and home schooling ... what you should be hearing is: We want to replace fact-based education with Christian Madrassas, Online Radicalization, and Multigenerational Indoctrination.

Or, "No Arab Churches at Ground Zero." Or, "We forced Abu Ghraib prisoners to wipe their butts with the Muslim Old Testament (a.k.a. the Old Testament)." Or "Muhammed, people! Clearly, The False Lord of the Heathens wouldn't put the oil in the ground (with the 6000-year-old fossils ... um, I mean, Joseph Smith's Gold Tablets), if Vishnu didn't want us to Frack the Purgatory out of it!" Or, "I bet home schools come
with a world religion course consisting of every Bible Belt Buddhist's favorite BC Christians: Jesus and Uzi."

Or simply, "I don't understand why we can't teach the Christian Koran as a science, side by side with actual documented events and demonstrable science." It's still semantically identical to "let us force-teach the Bible in schools" aside from taking away the "... because if you don't you're denying my first amendment rights to religious freedom" part, which is what these arguments so often devolve into. It intrinsically opens the door for teaching other religions on an equal footing, which is clearly not part of what these Pontif-icating-or-Protestant-ing Pastafarians (see what I did there?) are agitating for. It's clear that it's not simply "all religions are on an equal footing with science" they want, but rather "our religion trumps both science and other religions in truthiness." It's a harmless insanity, right until it gets control of the reins of government, and these semantic substitutions will help make the fnords audible.

Since the South is extra touchy about this subject, but not so concerned about traditional book learnin', I will permit them to refer to their Book as the Korrect Kristian Koran.


Remember: (A) Life (of gullibility, control-lust, illogic, sanctimony, and hypocrisy) begins at (the Immaculate) Conception. Please abort the coup of the born-again.

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

What's it Going to Take for You to Distrust Our Orange Overlord? (Tax 'Cut' Edition)

One of the reasons cons work is because the marks don't ever want to admit they've been conned

This is really addressed to the population of Republicants making less than 7 figures and with less than 8 figures of income to pass down ... in short, probably none of my (3) readers, but probably nearly the entire party.

If there were any question that this administration doesn't have the best interest of the people they appear to be representing, it's this graphic (courtesy of 538):


This "tax cut" is so wildly unpopular that it's less popular than the last two tax HIKES. And you can't tell me that the middle-class Republican base in the audience were happier about Evil Slick Willie's Huckster Tax Increase (which led to just about the only surplus in decades, yet again disproving Voodoo Economics, but we won't go there) then they are about anyone's tax cut.

But the point is not whether this tax cut will help you in the long run (it won't), or trickle-shrink the deficit (it won't), or even temporarily grow the economy (any more than printing $1.5T would). It's not even whether or not you've been con(vinc)ed into thinking it's good for you. The entire point is to hand out money to the people this administration is actually representing, which is the poor, put-upon Dagny Taggart types who go home and shower in clean, sequential bills every night, and would like to hire a few extra man-servants to vacuum up the dirty bills when they're done. This is nothing more than a pay-back for campaign contributions (and a promise of fresh ones) from the unfathomably rich, and an effective pay raise for the multimillionaires "representin'" you in DC.

Quick questions: what happened to "tax reform" and "code simplification"? Where's that postcard I'm going to be able to file my two (Mar-a-Lago golf course and Napa winery) deductions on? Tax reform and simplification sound like good ideas ... but that's never what this was actually about, and it's not even the optics any longer. And where are the Republicant deficit hawks that shut down the government(!) -- trashing our credit rating, costing us credit interest, and risking our standing as holders of the universal reserve currency -- over the debt ceiling debate (using that evil Democrat tool, the filibuster)? Once this bloats the deficit, I can bet those cockroaches will come back out of their cracks and start stripping away far more than they've given you, even if you're in the 6-figure bracket. Moral of the story: 100% of you simply need to shove your way into the top 1%, and then this government has your back (if you don't care about things like health, safety, public space, or existential threats to this country from a damn Twitter account).

But don't think you can't benefit from the new tax code (once you learn an entirely new tax code, which is not in any way "simplification"). For example, the Failing NYT makes this suggestion:

Imagine that you’re a wealthy person in the top tax bracket, and you own a genuine Rothko that has become worth millions more than you bought it for. Selling, you’d have to pay a huge tax on the painting’s increase in value. Instead, you could exchange the painting with a company you own for shares, a transaction that wouldn’t be taxed. Then, have the company sell the painting, paying only the new, low 21 percent corporate rate. If you pass the shares onto your heirs, they won’t have to pay any taxes on them.

Monday, May 22, 2017

The Ducks are on the Pond


I haven't posted in a while because I keep re-approaching the Trumpoiska story, but the story is moving too fast to keep up with. Suffice it to say that there's no good reason for an entire cross-section of government -- from the Justice Department to military personnel to the spy services to foreign services (I'm looking at you in particular, Rex Tillerson) to presidential top aids, advisers, and campaigners, to family and business associates of the president -- to have so many ties to any one foreign government, never mind an enemy. Or to need to recuse themselves from investigation or plead the 5th or lie about their foreign ties. If you're OK with the president handing over state secrets about an organization in Syria (ISIS) to our military opponents in Syria, which is intel received from our "best friends" in Israel -- who are actually great at spywork but will think twice before they share any more info with us -- on the day he fires the head of the FBI without justifiable cause ("lock her up" and "he shouldn't have said anything bad about Hillary" don't fit in the same healthy cranium) while all of his cronies (and possibly him -- remember, he was wiretapped!) are under investigation for ties to Russia, and Russia's influence in the election which he won ... well, I'm not OK with you. Clearly, it's more about your side winning than the country and democracy winning, and I can't respect that political position. You can't burn it all down and call yourself a patriot, no matter how white and angry you are.

So, in the interest of posting something, here's some audio I captured from a local duck and goose farm. In the second half of the 15s track, you'll hear more geese being made. Insert your own Sitting Duck, Lame Duck, Goose is Cooked, etc. pun here.

Saturday, April 29, 2017

Sunday, April 16, 2017

Ruski Business, Part 2 of TBD

But What Do I Know, I'm Just a Cow

In the mold of his other appointments (e.g. most outspoken critic of any agency to head that agency), it appears Trump has found a replacement for Nunes on the House committee investigating Team Trump's manifold Russia connections.

unhappy cow says moo hoo

Trump spokesperson, campaign contributor, and lead investigator Bovine McBeevesface when asked "Is there anything suspicious here?"


 

Saturday, April 8, 2017

Ruski Business, Part 1 of TBD

Here are some dots, do what you like with them. If you connect them in just the right order, you draw a bear wearing a ushanka with 'MAGA' written on it!


  • It seems like only yesterday Russia was our greatest enemy. Because, it was yesterday (and still is today). They regularly use their Security Council veto to thwart our efforts in the UN, and are on opposite sides of the fence from us in actual (Syria, where both the US and Russia have troops on the ground and in the air) and proxy (Iran, Afghanistan) wars and conflicts (Cuba, Korea). They DO hack our systems on a regular basis: commercial, governmental, and civilian (that includes the Yahoo hacks ... out of 1B accounts, which includes passwords re-used on multiple sites, there has to be at least one lever into some government system or individual they want access to). They fund a network of agitprop trolls which have warped the universe of reality, not only creating entire fake news ecosystems, but pulling real news -- the kind that fights autocracies -- down into the mud with them. Their press has been completely co-opted, and typically spews anti-American invective. NATO basically exists to oppose Russia ... that's the greatest military alliance in the history of the world on one side of the fence, and just one country on the other. They recently seized territory in two sovereign nations, by force. It is in no way a free country; their response to FIFA when asked about gay tourists at the Russian World Cup was to suggest they stay home if they don't want to get thrown in jail or worse. They almost certainly scored that World Cup with bribery, blackmail and shenanigans, and their Olympic doping scandal makes MLB look like a NA meeting. Please remember, these are not the good guys, and while North Korea may be more comic-book villian-ous, they're largely ineffective, and while China is dangerous and not our friend, at least we can talk things out with them, at least for now. Russia is a unique combination of powerful, expansionist, and virulently anti-American. In short, we have met the enemy, and they write in Cyrillic.

  • There are so many threads to this story that it would take forever just to synopsize ... there's even the chance this story will move faster than it can be documented; it certainly shows no sign of slowing down in spite of the Benghazi Brigade showing little appetite for looking into a foreign power influencing our elections, which should completely freak out anyone who cares about free and fair elections (i.e. Democracy), which this crowd clearly does not. So, I'll try to focus on the under-reported stories, with just a soupçon of speculation. Let's start with the Donald and one of his more obvious "tells": he doesn't wait until he gets caught doing something wrong to start spinning the story -- should it eventually come out -- in his favor. And the Republicant Talking Points Parrots and the Fox & Friends & Friends echo chamber has no issue with beating this spin into Alt-Truth on his behalf (for their benefit, I hope that vengeful deity they claim to believe in doesn't exist, cause they're building some significant karmic debt by selling out their principals for short-term gains). So, how is Russia being spun domestically, in order to mitigate damage should the truth come to light?

  • Trump refuses to bad-mouth Putin (who is a killer:
    http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39364542
    Voronenkov was no crook but an investigator who was deadly dangerous for the Russian siloviki [security services]) and frequently heaps praise on him.

  • This may be the primary reason that Putin's favorability among Republicans had risen 20 points in just two years, as any question about one's opinion of Russia can now become a proxy for your opinion of Trump (and everyone seems to be OK with that, even hard-line Republic hawks, which in of itself is mind-blowing).
    In fact, on the issue of Russia cyber-meddling in the U.S. elections, Republican public opinion more closely resembles public opinion in Russia than overall opinion in the United States.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/02/16/republicans-used-to-fear-russians-heres-what-they-think-now/

    50% of Republicans, 73% of young Republicans see Russia as an "ally" or "friendly":
    http://hotair.com/archives/2017/02/22/nbc-poll-50-of-republicans-73-of-young-republicans-see-russia-as-an-ally-or-friendly/
  • But it's more likely that the Talking Points Parade has been trying to soften the urgency of looking into collusion with what may the closest thing we have to a "hot war" enemy. It would be as if the US funded Saddam Hussein then sold him chemical weapons to be used on his own people, or provided arms to the Taliban or warlords aligned with Al Qaida in Afghanistan, or armed Iranians with guns bought with drugs sold by Central American warlords we armed and trained, or placed fascist killers in offices previously won in democratic elections in allied nations. OK, bad examples ... but why this isn't being treated like Benedict Arnold got elected president is inconceivable (and yes, that word means what I think it means). The difference between this collusion and all the other manifold examples of impeachable, aiding-and-abetting the enemy kinds of behavior we've practiced was that the previous offenses were sat on or considered part of "American Exceptionalism" ... how Trump gets to basically say "well, we're killers too" -- in a government where forgetting to wear your flag pin is headline news -- is beyond my powers of understanding.

  • Of course, the existential (threat) question is: What is Donny Hiding? I don't believe in first principals as a rule; you could say it's raining because the moisture content of the air is higher than the air can support, but you also need to have air, gravity, moisture, something like water that's vaguely ionic and bondy, something akin to a Big Bang, etc. So, Trump is someone who realizes that it's Russian-sourced false stories that he was able to drag into the mainstream by way of Alt Right media that fueled his populism. Praising a tyrant aids his goals of being a tyrant, and he's vain enough that he'll take praise from anywhere, and Putin is Machiavellian enough to use a tool as trivial as praise on any fool it works on. We can't forget Trump is a businessman, as he insists on reminding us, and that a huge chunk of his money comes from Russians, and that he has an eye on expanding into Russia; or that his regulatory policies show that externalizing costs (in the form of normalizing the kleptocracy in the Kremlin, with all the world-wide blow-back that will bring) in exchange for a profit is business-as-usual for Herr Drumpf. His buddies all made tons off of Russia, or hope to, and like Bush enabling Halliburton, Trump will award windfalls to those that promise unyielding fealty (I expect Sean Spicer to retire a man far more wealthy than his abilities would indicate). Russia may even have coordinated electoral strategies -- using their operatives, techniques and stolen data -- and certainly selectively leaked -- if not selectively hacked -- information to help Trump win. I suspect the Comey information-free October- and November-surprise was sourced from a Russian hack or faked leak (just like Donny asked the Russians to do on national TV), and this was just one of many things that handed Trump an unlikely election. There are so many possible "primary reasons" that Trump is becoming the kind of person that kept Joe McCarthy up at night that we can't ever know the most significant one, but I'll go with the most controversial and least reported one: a KGB-mentality government with a country full of very talented hackers decided on a multi-pronged approach to "restore the balance of power" and put Russia back in a world leadership position, and that strategy included getting everything you could use to compromise those that might oppose you. It's basically the Realpolitik you'd get here if CIA and NSA alums started running the USA, and somewhere along the line the Ruskis got their hands on enough info against Trump to make him compliant. I think we could agree that this would be the most powerful lever for getting the president of the USA to turn into a pinko, so the burden becomes to demonstrate that it's not tinfoil-hattery.

    Is Trump Blackmailable?

  • I don't think most would argue that the thin-skinned baby we have elected president has enough self-interest that should someone have something on him, he'd gladly sell the entire country down the river to cover his own ass. And no one (reasonable) wants to take the "piss tapes" seriously without some evidence (although if someone started this rumor out of the blue about Hillary I'm sure it would get some serious Echo Chamber time). But how dismissable (as in, we're confident it's NOT true) are these claims that in total the Russians have enough info to get Donny on board with their agenda?

  • Well, the person who put together the dossier on Trump and Russia from which we get much of this info is anything but a whack job. He used to be a spy at MI6, has a very good reputation in the intel community, and has never publicly released info and been proven wrong (i.e. doesn't have a history of making wild accusations). He now co-runs a very successful for-hire investigation agency.

  • He was previously hired by the FBI to gather the evidence on FIFA (the uber-corrupt governing body for world soccer, which is basically an ATM for the morally bankrupt), and if you know how deeply crooked but untouchable that organization was, that's saying something. Hundreds of kleptocrats from dozens of countries got jailed, fined, fired, deported, or simply called out, in a complex (and well masked) tangle of illegal handshake deals with almost no paper trails. For much of the world, the fact that "we" took down Sepp Blatter and FIFA is more scary than drone strikes and radar-invisible airplanes: we touched the untouchables, and that's power.

  • No fewer than four Russians involved with this dossier have died under suspicious circumstances.
    The most likely source of the Trump-Russia intel is Oleg Erovinkin. Erovinkin, a former general in the KGB and its successor the FSB, was found dead in the back of his car in Moscow on Boxing Day in mysterious circumstances. [ http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39364542 ] Putin is former KGB, and present hitman-in-chief, and would have no problem covering a leak with a corpse.

    Erovinkin was a key aide to Igor Sechin, a former deputy prime minister and now head of Rosneft (more later on Rosneft), the state-owned oil company, who is repeatedly named in the dossier. [ http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/mystery-death-of-ex-kgb-chief-linked-to-mi6-spys-dossier-on-donald-trump/ar-AAmkp4E ]
  • I personally believe Trump vindictive enough to want to see someone pee on the Obama's bed ... after all, Obama did wiretap Trump in his home. [As previously mentioned, another of Trump's "tells" is to pre-emptively blame someone for something that he's worried about others finding out about him. Saying "someone wiretapped me to make me look bad" in advance of the imminent release of info divulged by a wiretap would be an example. As would using that claim as a cover for wiretapping members of the prior administration. One thing the FBI is saying for sure, in spite of hemming and hawing on other topics, is that there's nothing to support President Turnip's claim, in spite of Nunes' traitorous (i.e. undermining the intelligence/security process for political gain) spin on the whole thing.] But all asides aside, that titillating (mictating) detail has little to do with the bigger picture of collusion and possible illegal funding, manipulation, hacking, etc. (unless that's the blackmail lever itself) and it's important to keep the clickbait parts of the story separate from the Enemy-Is-Undermining-All-Democracy moments.

    Is There Real Intel About Any Of This?

  • James Comey is believed by many people to have thrown the election to Trump, so it's not like this is the standard witch hunt (which is really more of a Republicant thing than a Donkey Thing, in any case). The folks at 538 figured the Comey disclosures alone were enough to swing the popular vote enough for Clinton to go from a near-lock to a loser. The FBI directorship is a 10 year appointment, not subject to removal by a president, so that he can maintain his independence. Comey seems to have a clear desire for the spotlight, but it's not obvious (yet) that he's partisan, and if he is it would appear to be pro-Republicant, so when he says "there's nothing to the wiretap claim, but there is plenty to investigate with Russia and the elections" we ought to (for now) take that statement at face value.

  • NSA can legally tap US conversations if they are with foreign citizens (even someone they're only 51% sure is foreign, using really weak-tea metrics to make that determination). That's legally. They've shown little care for the law on matters surveillant, or disclosure when the do violate the law ("revealing the name of an American swept up inadvertently in a wiretapping would damage national security and future surveillance programs") so we'll never know the full extent, but pretty much everything they've claimed they don't do has been demonstrably false. So I think we should assume that just about any e-communications between Team Trump and Russia have been tapped, filtered and reviewed, so when the intel community (which, again, Trump-tell: repeatedly dis the intel community before they reveal compromising info, so you can go all Ad Hominem on their ass later when they turn you out) says there's not nothing there, assume there's not nothing there.

    But not only are these people under investigation not idiots, they also regularly meet face-to-face, and the powerful and wealthy are often exempt from the kind of 4th Amendment violations the rest of us have to deal with (do you remember Feinstein having no difficulty with anything the NSA was doing or the CIA was lying about until they looked at her staff's computers, at which point she nearly anuerism'd out?). So, I wouldn't consider absence of evidence evidence of absence, but I fully believe we'll be back to this piece of the story soon. For now, future installments will cover the unbelievable number of players and interactions with our new frenemy Russia. On the off chance you're still reading, check back soon!
  • Monday, April 3, 2017

    Danny Elfman, Prophet

    I recently heard this song for the first time since Donny T took the national stage. I don't know if it's aimed more at Trump or Pence, but boy, does this feel prescient for me ... sorry I can't add the 3-piece marimba section here without the DMCA police busting my ass.

    Insanity - Oingo Boingo


    I am the virus, are you the cure?
    I am a disease and I am unclean
    I am not part of God's well oiled machine
    Christian nation, assimilate me
    Take me in your arms and set me free
    I am part of a degenerate elite
    Dragging our society into the street -yeah-
    Into the abyss and to the sewer don't you see
    The man just told me, he told me on TV

    And the alcoholic bastard waved his finger at me
    And his voice was filled with evangelical glee
    Sipping down his gin & tonics
    While preaching about the evils of narcotics
    And the evils of sex, and the wages of sin
    While he mentally fondles his next of kin

    Do you think you're better than me?
    Do you want to kill me, or befriend me?

    Christian sons, Christian daughters
    Lead me along like a lamb to the slaughter
    Purify my brain and hose down my soul
    White perfection, perfection is my goal

    Christian nation, make us alright
    Put us through the filter and make us pure and white 'cause
    My mind has wandered away from me
    And the flock has wandered, away from me

    Let's talk of family values while we sit and watch the slaughter
    Hypothetical abortions on imaginary daughters
    The white folks think they're at the top, ask any proud white male chump
    A million years of evolution, we get Danny Quayle Donny Trump

    Saturday, March 25, 2017

    True That

    You want to know how to stop the next whistleblower? Stop breaking the damn law.

        -- Ed Snowden

    Thursday, March 16, 2017

    Vivisecting, uh ... I mean, Dissecting … Mr. Trump

    I have a very smart friend (VSF) who appears to be buying into the right-wing talking point that the “mainstream media” is the enemy of the people — or at a minimum, simultaneously incompetent but somehow manipulative and with a powerful axe to grind against the administration — but that some other publications — for example, ones that might called the failed Somali state a “Jihadist Government” when no functioning government even exists — can then be trusted enough to site as sources when providing evidence of the NYT’s “treasonous” actions (in the word of the Parmesan Putin). Recently, VSF & I had a mini-debate about the “last night in Sweden” call-out during a very high-profile speech by the prez (i.e. one where he knows his words will be carefully reviewed), with my VSF buying (what I’m pretty sure is) the alt-media’s “alt-truth” claim that this was a simple mis-step, and me (with no doubts in my mind) seeing the fnord for what it (quite clearly to me) was: a multi-tiered attempt by Trump to shift the focus and the argument onto an unlevel playing field, in a now all-too-common fashion, in pursuit of a specious and dangerous agenda.

    The problem with fighting dirty, as the Republicants and this administration are all-too-willing to do, is that it usually gives an unfair advantage, one that can only be offset by also doing something reprehensible. And Trump’s rhetoric — and to a lesser but still severe degree the rhetorical strategies of the right in recent years — is decidedly dirty. Manufacturing BS is so much easier (and entertaining) than unpacking it that even if you could give a full accounting, in an irrefutable manner, to convincing divulge the inner workings of a manipulative (other-deluding) and narcissistic (self-deluding) mind, it would take more words than anyone would read, and by the time you unpack the whole bolus, there’s so much new malarkey to unpack that you could never keep up. In this respect, I consider Il Douchy a savant: I’m not even sure he knows how well he packs his phrases (I’m guessing he does), given how ham-fisted many of his day-to-day conversational gambits are (“all the best words”), and but like any good Rorschach test, how his words are taken tell us more about the individual hearing them than the person saying them, and he paints BS on a canvas with that in mind.



    would you hire this man to be your proctologist? or your president?
    What follows is an attempt to dissect why he said the Swedish thing and what it really means, proving my point that any convincing explanation is going to be too wordy and tedious for anyone to keep up with, assuming I even have the chops to unpack this (my failure to convince not being proof of my error). I’m not saying an alternative interpretation of Trump’s words is stupid or evil, I’m saying that cognitive bias is so invisible that if you’re being manipulated in the “right way” (as most of the confederate- and don’t-tread-on-me-flag-wavers are), then it’s almost impossible to spot that in yourself. I’m also not saying that anything that aligns with your interest is necessarily false, but I’m highly suspicious of any belief system that benefits the group doing the believing. Being a white, straight, wealthy, non-immigrant, gentile male with corporate-provide insurance and buying into a “religious freedom”, “tax reform”, “there’s too much PC”, anti-immigrant, pussy-grabbing, privatize-everything administrative platform/lifestyle/reading list in any way should make one at least pause for a self-interest check. I know that people who read my blog are bright, beautiful and billionaires (and if they aren’t, it’s ‘cause they’re being held down by the ‘opposition’ press and whomever you didn’t vote for) … but you shouldn’t just take my word for it.


    Anyway. The exact quote (which you should ideally watch a video of, in order to get tone as well as verbatim context) was “You look at what's happening last night in Sweden! Sweden! Who would believe this, Sweden!” One possible (and to me the pretty-much-only) interpretation of this at face value is that something occurred in Sweden the previous night, but I admit these words are ambiguous … which is one of their strengths, from a manipulation standpoint.

    My VSF said “Swedish disbelief is still front page NYTime's fake news. Where has their integrity gone and do they think we're stupid?”  This is itself is a pretty typical (and powerful) alt-media paragraph: it discredits the source (permanently, long after the current debate subsides), implies that possibly the most editorially conservative (in terms of when/what to publish — not from a political standpoint — although if I left this appositive out, using “editorially conservative” to describe the NYT would be a great manipulative ploy along the lines of what we’re discussing) paper in the country may be mis-reporting on Swedish disbelief (implying the Swedes would agree with President Turnip), that the media have an axe to grind by not reporting on other “more important” stories (and I would agree there’s a whole lot of news not being beaten to death that ought to be, but probably different news than what VSF would want to see), that even if you once considered the NYT the “great grey lady” of American press that you just haven’t been paying attention to where their integrity went, and that anyone who buys into the “narrative” of reporting on what people said, instead of what they later claimed they meant, is stupid. That’s a lot of messaging packed into 20 words, and I’m starting to suspect that, like all language, the rhetorical techniques used in right-leaning media and internet comment threads are rewiring some brains, creating an inherent (and not always conscious) ability to make and win arguments at the expense of other cognitive skills.


    Here is just some of what “look what happened last night in Sweden” tells us about the story, the story teller, and the audience:

    1. Ambiguous language: allowing both plausible deniability and interpretation after the fact (or after the polls, if you prefer), Trump mixes tenses, say “… is happening last night.” Either (and this infinite branching is where we can start heading down rabbit holes we might never pull out of) you believe DJ DT has “all the best words” and that this is intentional — in which case it appears he is trying to get across a (false) sense of immediacy, urgency and ‘nowness’ to this scourge, scaring us into acting against our best interests — or you believe he just isn’t that clear, precise or goodly with words, in which case you need to take the scalpel to his retraction as well, and then we’re back down the ever-branching rabbit hole.

    2. Confabulating anecdote and data: if you take his words at face value, which you are likely to do while he’s talking and more words keep coming and you don’t have time to sit down and deconstruct every twist of language and jeezum christ this whole problem of churning out words while writing about the problem of keeping up with a churn of words and all their ramifications is recursively naval gazing and makes one realize how hopeless the problem really is, you would believe that “even Sweden has (a) problem(s)”. If the whitest, safest, least objectionable country on earth is being overrun with dangerous immigrants, imagine what could happen here.  Plus, Purity of Essence … even Sweden (Sweden?!) isn’t white anymore … can you imagine what our country will look like if we don’t start massive deportation, denial of transit visas, rejection of orphaned children and widowed women, religious tests at the borders, racial profiling, maybe an internment camp or two … just until this war on terrorism is over … well, the slippery slope leads to a literal ethnic melting pot, with cauldrons provided by Trump-Haliburton Industries.

    3. Point scored - accepting refugees is bad:
    Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Pussy also said:
    They took in large numbers — they're having problems like they never thought possible….We have to keep our country safe
    In other words, tiny Sweden does this once-morally-necessary thing far more than us, and they’re paying the colored-rabble price for it … part and parcel of this argument is blurring the distinction between immigrant (voluntary, and generally with an option to safely stay at home) and refugee (involuntary, often in life-threatening need, held in camps for years during heavy vetting, with no say in which country they get placed). In short, we should take what used to be a source of our moral authority in the world — that we care for the downtrodden, and will provide life, liberty and opportunity to people denied that elsewhere — and turn it into a public health hazard to be avoided at all costs. It’s dizzying when you think about it: the Republicants have taken a group of voters that believe jihadists hate us because they hate our freedoms, and convinced them that repealing freedom is the way to fight jihad.

    4. Assume that “his people” will look exactly as far as they need to in order to get the confirmation bias they are looking for.
    VSF: “When i heard trumps words, in light of the fact that nothing had happened in sweden, i reasonably concluded the words were botched talking off the top of the butthead speech, and that he was referring to issues around immigration in Sweden. Is it unreasonable of me to expect the press to make that same reasonable leap?

    The presumption is that you’d bother to learn that nothing happened. That requires fact-checking everything Trump says, which isn’t temporally possible, and isn’t even of interest to those with a cognitive bias in favor of their team, or them that really never had interest in facts, science, education, research … all the traits that get lumped into the now-derogatory term “elitist”. You have to discover that nothing happened in Sweden. And if you’re one of the just-large-enough plurality (given a combination of the Southern Strategy and organized disenfranchisement coupled with unlimited political power to corporations) to elect Republicants, you’ll stop when you get to a publication that’s willing to say what it has to to maintain access to the administration, rather than one of those “liberal” rags that has seen enough of this mendacity to know you need to do some digging, maybe over a period of days, to unpack what the Chorizo-in-Chief was getting at, and then the reader has to do some impartial reading and consider nuance and contingency, which just isn’t happening in those states with poor public education (i.e. largely red states).

    5. Make sure you have an “out”, preferably one in your favor.

    If/when the press challenges the statement, for those who are still paying attention, you can then point them to a news story on Fox (aka Pravda West). Having already convinced a large swath of the country that Fox & Friends is real journalism, while any established news organization is fake, you can then use this controversy to get people to read a story (full of further errors and falsehoods) that reinforces your point, one that they otherwise would have overlooked. Heck, even just getting people to talk about a non-thing makes it a thing.

    Making any citation also sounds like the kind of thing that smart people who care about references would do — it’s like adding footnotes to your off-the-cuff white supremacist rant — reinforcing the fear with “facts” and “sources” (even, or especially, if people don’t check those references, which is largely a given, unless those people are the Press, which is why you must vilify anyone who calls you on your shite).

    Trump also uses the “people are saying” defense, once he gets people saying things, to make it sound like (a) he can’t be responsible for being wrong because he only knows what he reads (ignoring that he doesn’t really read) and (b) this must be a thing, or so many people wouldn’t talk about it (even if it’s just one person talking plus a whole lot of echoes).

    Here is a classic Mr. Trump tactic: discrediting (in advance) any source that has/might accuse, and accusing others of doing exactly what he’s trying to get away with (i.e. misrepresent). Now you can also make the press look bad for pressing a president on their words, which is pretty much all a president is, no matter how unpresidential he (always “he”) may act. That Trump managed to shift this whole discussion from analyzing his words to berating the press is evidence of his (one?) genius.

    And this was no mistake, either:
    The decision by Trump’s administration to restrict access to the press for Spicer’s briefing prompted at least some seasoned reporters to observe that the White House had successfully changed the topic:
    "And now, the topic of the evening is the media outlets excluded, not the Priebus interactions w FBI + question of open investigation."
    - Maggie Haberman, New York Times
     

    Ironically, all these techniques are well-known (i.e. we shouldn’t be so susceptible to them) and are commonly used by the Russians (coincidence, I’m sure). This is really helpful reading if you want to learn about how manipulation works … it should sound eerily familiar by now:

    http://jonathanstray.com/networked-propaganda-and-counter-propaganda

    6. Attack truthiness itself.

    From creating web pages for a living, I know your average web reader has the attention span of an ADD ferret on meth. So they will never get as far as discovering that there in fact is no problem with accepting refugees as far as danger is concerned
    (not even my VSF, who implied that he’d do the digging to discover nothing happened in Sweden, but probably stop there):



    Data (see also below) shows immigrants to the US are LESS likely on average to commit crimes than existing US citizens. Although I can’t find data, I assume refugees are even less likely than your average immigrant to bite the hand that literally feeds them. In the same way you’re more likely to get killed by a citizen in Baltimore than a terrorist in Beirut, or a home-grown (likely white & Christian) terrorist than an immigrant/refugee terrorist domestically, the people you should worry about are the people who are already here and bitter (and heavily armed), rather than a grateful newcomer. Given a choice between a white, male, semi-educated, 9th-generation American who is Trump’s biggest supporter and believes the 2nd amendment is inviolable but the document that contains it is shreddable and that white Christian males are intrinsically more valuable (and aggrieved) than other humans, and a random Muslim refugee from Syria: if you have to invite one into your home and you’re worried about getting shot or raped, and Trump’s Sweden rant doesn’t immediately raise your hackles, you’re probably worrying about the wrong individual.

    7. Fear and Anger, Fear and Anger, Fear and Anger, Fear and Anger, Fear and Anger

    Anything that primes the limbic system gets a response. Fear creates obedience (“please save us”). Anger creates many of the same chemicals as more positive emotions … our reward system is triggered by anger, even if there’s a price to pay down the road. Clinton discusses policy, showing she’s able to do the job. Trump riles people up and plays on their emotions, showing he’s able to get the job.

    8. Collateral cognitive damage

    Even after I’ve upped my bullshit detector to max, and convinced myself that this is a manipulation designed to steer us towards an ultra-nationalist society with too many powers handed to the executive branch (see also Russia), a country where populists will keep the current party in power even if it’s not in their best financial interest (the very interest that appears to be pandered to) … if I hear these phrases enough, they start to add up. The Republicants are very good at a few things, and one of them is consistency and redundancy of talking points. Repetition is learning, no matter how wrong the repeated phrase is (and if you don’t believe that, have an otherwise bright Scientologist explain Xenu to you, or a well-schooled Mormon explain the magic underwear). The mere fact that we are no longer outraged by what the president says or does, or that Tweeting is a form of policy making, or that the bar to being presidential is now set at “don’t grab your crotch during the State of the Union” tells us you can normalize anything through repetition. Keep it up long enough, and even the sanest of people will have some doubts about global warming, WMDs, the benefits of regulation, the dangers of immigration, yada yada yada. And the less sane or dubious will start to take these claims as gospel. Then once the gospel says “well, people have doubts about evolution as well as creationism, so why don’t we teach both, that’s only fair?” or “those libtards doubt both of these things, and won’t let us teach both, violating your rights of religion, so let’s elect a demagogue” (to name just one of dozens of topics subject to similar manipulations) … well, Sweden looks like a pretty safe and sane alternative to the Greatest Country on Earth Again(tm).

    So, repeating a mis-truth often enough carries weight (Hillary must be guilty of something, since she’s been the subject of so many investigations, never mind that they never reached any conclusions of nefariousness), but even more significant, telling a lie and then retracting it STILL changes the minds of the most rational of humans (because we aren’t the most rational of creatures). Example (from the link above about propaganda/methods of mass manipulation):

    Participants in a study within this paradigm are told that there was a fire in a warehouse and that there were flammable chemicals in the warehouse that were improperly stored. When hearing these pieces of information in succession, people typically make a causal link between the two facts and infer that the fire was caused in some way by the flammable chemicals. Some subjects are then told that there were no flammable chemicals in the warehouse. Subjects who have received this corrective information may correctly answer that there were no flammable chemicals in the warehouse and separately incorrectly answer that flammable chemicals caused the fire. This seeming contradiction can be explained by the fact that people update the factual information about the presence of flammable chemicals without also updating the causal inferences that followed from the incorrect information they initially received.
     

    So, what’s the problem? 

    Aside from the real damage to the country that will be caused by pushing through these policies, even for those who independently desired these policies, e.g.:
        https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-new-travel-ban-could-affect-doctors-especially-in-the-rust-belt-and-appalachia/
    and the fact that this just really isn’t American (or a land-of-the-brave or home-of-the-free kind of) policy, I can’t believe that the president of the US is both well informed and making these “mistakes” by accident … I just can’t tell which deficiency is demonstrating itself at any given time. It’s sort of like the George W years, when you couldn’t tell if any decision was Bush’s (stupid) or Cheney’s (evil), and so couldn’t pin down why it was wrong while still knowing it was wrong. I personally believe the Prez knows exactly what he’s saying, for the most part, and is intentionally using the oldest political tactic in the book (scare the populace into compliance) in order to get what he wants. 


    I believe he knows that the story he is referencing about Sweden is FALSE:
    http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/feb/20/what-statistics-say-about-immigration-and-sweden/

    and that here in the US, immigrants commit LESS crime than 2nd-generation (or longer) citizens:
      https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/03/immigration-crime-donald-trump-fact-check

    and there aren’t really too many ways to spin this:
      during the period 1990-2013, the number of unauthorized immigrants grew from 3.5 million to 11.2 million. Over that same period, FBI data shows that violent crime rates fell by 48% and property crimes declined by 41%.

    [This is, incidentally, the group that Trump most derides, more than the vetted and visa’d people we’re actually discussing denying entry to, who, presumably, aren’t as dangerous as those who’d break the law to come here.]

    So Trump has intentionally made an assertion that is false but that advances his agenda, that sticks in spite of its falsehood (how many people have seen the data in this post, in spite of the NYT keeping this story on the front page for “too long”), and that somehow became a referendum on the legitimacy of reportage (aka his detractors, if you consider quoting someone a detraction) rather than his truthiness.

    And that leads to this:
    On page one of any political science textbook it will say that democracy relies on people being informed about the issues so they can have a debate and make a decision,” says Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol in the UK, who studies the persistence and spread of misinformation. “Having a large number of people in a society who are misinformed and have their own set of facts is absolutely devastating and extremely difficult to cope with.

    The alternative theory (and we can branch these arguments until hell freezes over, but we can never keep up with the rate of BS manufacture, which is why this rhetorical technique has worked so well for Trump) is that he is so self-unaware and self-interested that he believes what he wants to believe over the truth … in which case he is unqualified for the job, instead of too much of an ass-hat to hold the job.


    So, what do I do about all this?

    Ignoring everything else in here (which we will, sadly, do), we have no moral basis for denying refugee (different than immigrant) status to widows & orphans from parts of the world we’ve destabilized through military adventurism (Isis/Al Qaeda), shadow-cold-wars (Taliban), and funding and befriending our frenemies (Pakistan, Iraq, etc. etc.). Why refugees have a longer ban (120 days) than immigrants and tourists (90 days) would seem to be worth discussing, but again, if you can keep the churn rate high enough on your misspeaks, many important conversations have to get skipped or glossed over. But if you take away just one point, remember: immigrants and refugees are two different groups of people, as are legal and illegal immigrants, and if you can’t make and keep those distinctions, you have no business discussing (never mind setting) policy on this subject.

    You can also start insulating yourself from these rhetorical techniques by being dubious by default … and don’t just apply your skepticism to “the other side.” The link I mentioned above:
        http://jonathanstray.com/networked-propaganda-and-counter-propaganda
    talks extensively about the techniques you could use to persuade-beyond-reason. Becoming aware of those techniques will partially immunize against those techniques. Knowing that you can only have partial immunity should increase your skepticism even further.

    There’s a whole internet full of info on bad logic, propaganda, manipulation, etc. (as well as actual bad logic, propaganda, manipulation, etc.) Here’s another possible starting point:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

    While a bit awkward in places, this entire series:
        https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/just-the-facts
    presents methodologies for immunizing yourself against bias and doing your own fact checking … the amount of work involved is exactly why the president can get away with this crap, but it’s also why we’ve farmed this job out to the press (which is falling down on the job quite a bit, but not in the direction that the alt-right thinks, but rather by erring in the direction of click-bait and sensationalism and cat stories over content ... we are largely at fault for being a cheap-ass and not very discerning audience). Similarly, the job of governing is so complex that our democracy (which is ALSO a Republic, before any of you alt-right ultra-nationalist shite-heads decide to chime in), that we’ve farmed it out to politicians. It’s important that someone keep an eye on that job, and discrediting the ACLU and the NYT puts that final check on power in jeopardy. You do so at your own peril, but also mine, so please stop supporting this behavior.

    Watch the “Obama wiretapped my house” discussion unfold in the manner described above, as a sanity-check on my claims. Safe prediction: nowhere in that discussion will Trump say “clearly, a president should not have these capabilities because the risk of abuse is both obvious and proven.”

    Saturday, March 11, 2017

    You’ve Got Mail (and So Do Your Comrades?)

    I’m sure you’ve read that Vice-Commandante Mike Pence got hacked while using an AOL account for state business, while governor of the fair (as in: meh) state of Indiana.

    [source: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/03/518286557/mike-pence-used-aol-email-for-state-business-as-indiana-governor ]

    Things I could be annoyed with in this story:

    * Pence was hacked with a trivial phishing scam and yet he’s ostensibly bright enough to be a heartbeat away from the presidency (a heart that’s fed a steady diet of KFC, to boot)

    * Pence & Co. repeatedly laid into Clinton during the campaign about the poor judgement used running her own server, given the risks of getting hacked. Not only did the private sector (AOL) fail this free-market warrior, so did the government: the State Department server was hacked at the time Clinton ran her own server — or more accurately, paid a specialist to run a server for her, and I think the distinction is important and generally ignored — and the breach easily could have exposed Clinton’s emails if she’d “done the right thing”. Ironically, the only people who questionably accessed Clinton’s emails were those investigating her, after they subpoenaed her emails … exposing those emails to hacking and Three-Letter-Agency snooping, given that securing email and servers is not what federal employees appear to do well, but over-sharing secret info among spooks is.

    * Pence’s incredibly poor judgment using a public server for sensitive business, with access by sysadmins and other non-state employees, a server run by a company whose board is largely made up of questionable ex-spooks with shady histories … never mind the hacking risk of relying on a dying (and never overly competent) AOL for security.

    * The difficulty of meeting Indiana sunshine law requirements that these private-corp emails be made part of the public record, given that the state has no access to deleted emails, mail logs, etc. for email run on non-governmental servers.

    * Mixing personal and business email, then saying that not all mail could be revealed in the follow-up investigation because some of it was too personal (but claiming Clinton needs to give up her wedding planning emails because that’s part of the public interest, when she did the same, wrong thing), or too important (but not too important to properly secure):
    Some of Pence's emails were deemed too sensitive to be released as part of the Star's public records request.
    * The possibility that he was hacked by a state actor that might be using personal info to blackmail the VP of the US, given that the Russians are both the most capable party, and appear to be getting a hall pass on everything:
    Security experts told the paper that hackers were likely able to access Pence's inbox and sent emails, which could have included those same sensitive documents.
    What I am actually annoyed with in this story:

    * Someone with an AOL account weighing in on the security of a hardened MTA, run by a guy who secures servers for a living, and being taken seriously. Just because your mail client arrived in a box of Captain Crunch does not make it MilSpec. As we used to say of our AOL customers, “our AOL users couldn’t spell A-O-L if you spotted them the vowels.”

    Wednesday, March 1, 2017

    What I’m Giving up for Lent

    Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent (for those not familiar, the official and semi-official holy days associated with Jesus’ Big Comeback are Fat Tuesday [aka Mardi Gras], Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday, and Goddammit How Is It Already Monday). Lent is a 40 days period during which the Big Papa wants us to abstain from something to remind us of the “hardship” of the 40 days’ flood (if you describe nearly all animal life dying from drowning following terrifying exhaustion as “hardship,” and don’t pause to wonder why the post-flood world was not overrun with sea birds) -- because DJ JC was all about causing and not sparing human suffering -- or something like that. I'm sure it made sense at the time it was explained to me.

    In any case, you’re supposed to give up something bad for you, so after careful consideration, I’m giving up religion for Lent. Unfortunately, now that I’m an Atheist, I will no longer know when Lent is over, so I guess I’m stuck. I’m sure the Church will eventually rewrite things to plug that loophole while simultaneously telling us that the Bible is the inviolable word of God.


    Now I just need someone to explain how (chocolate??) egg-laying bunnies is not clearly a co-opted pagan spring fertility rite. Or as my amigo Bill Hicks said, 'Why those two things [chocolate and bunnies], y'know? Why not "goldfish left Lincoln Logs in your sock drawer", y'know? Long as we're makin' s**t up, go hog wild, y'know? At least a goldfish with a Lincoln Log on its back goin' across your floor to your sock drawer has a miraculous connotation to it. "Mummy! I woke up today and there was a Lincoln Log in me sock drawer!" "That's the story of Jesus!"'
     

    Monday, February 20, 2017

    I need a new default image for Social&Media


    The President Only Likes Leaks from Hookers and Wikis

    The President Only Likes Leaks from Hookers and Wikis

    Continuing with just the (IMHO) under-reported stories, it has become increasingly disconcerting that the orange ass-hat refuses to follow the most basic security protocol:
         https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/19/if-trump-hates-leaks-needs-to-give-up-phone 
    "So the only question remaining is how many foreign intelligence services have “pwned” the US president’s phone.

    You may recall how he castigated Hillary Clinton for her private email system. Yet his own chronically insecure practices don’t stop him fulminating against all the “illegal leaks” that his nascent administration has already sprung. And he has ordered an internal investigation to find the traitors in their midst."

    So, he’s using the full weight of a putsch/purge Justice Department to find whistleblowers, when he may well be the source of some of these leaks. I can’t emphasize how insecure this phone is, and how even newer, commercial, non-hardened phones would be a bigly less-awful choice (but still not acceptable). Fearing for their jobs should something from their department leak, WH staffers have started using a chat app which, by design, deletes messages as soon as they’re read. The problem?

    the law governing the management and custody of presidential records. This says that “documentary materials produced or received by the president, the president’s staff or units or individuals in the executive office of the president the function of which is to advise or assist the president, shall, to the extent practicable, be categorised as presidential records or personal records upon their creation or receipt and be filed separately”.
    The only time you are allowed to destroy these federal documents is in these scenaria:

    (the president) obtains the agreement of the national archivist to the shredding and that, if the archivist does not agree, “copies of the disposal schedule are submitted to the appropriate congressional committees at least 60 calendar days of continuous session of Congress in advance of the proposed disposal date”.
    This review-before-delete process is clearly not happening, and democracy loses a little more sunshine. Break the law or lose your job … that’s your choice if you’re working in this administration. Are we great again yet?


    The mainstream media IS doing their job badly, just like DJ Trump done said

    If the media had really been on the job, they would have jumped all over this story, which I had not previously seen. The GOP put out a “push poll” of jaw-dropping audacity. For those not familiar, a push poll is a persuasion piece disguised as as poll in an attempt to influence the opinion of those being “polled”; if I tried to make up an absurd example, a “question” might be something like “given that Hillary killed Vince Foster, and activist judges refuse to hear the overwhelming evidence that we’ll tell you about later and totally didn’t make up, don’t you think that Hillary belongs in jail instead of the White House?” However, I believe at least one of this “poll” questions exceeds even the most extremely wise-ass example I could dream up:
        “Do you believe that if Republicans were obstructing Obama like Democrats are doing to President Trump, the mainstream media would attack Republicans?”
    This is from the party that shut down the government and nearly destroyed our credit rating just to oppose Obama. Who passed — by far — the least legislation of any congress in history while and because Obama was in office. Whose stated top priorities were “make sure nothing passes” (Tea Party) or “make sure Obama fails to get reelected” (Republicants). Who wouldn’t even consider doing their job of considering a supreme court nominee (and I would like to point out that even saying “we’ll listen to and then reject this awful candidate” — as the Democrats did with Bork — is at least arguably doing your job). The party of Birthers. The …. aggggg … I think I pulled a synapse.

    If you’d like to take the poll and distort the results you can do so here, but given that this isn’t about getting input so much as giving it, you won’t accomplish much:
        https://gop.com/mainstream-media-accountability-survey/

    For me, this is the ballsiest part: even if you don’t provide answers to any of the questions, except those requesting your contact info, you end up here at the end of the “poll”:
        https://donate.donaldjtrump.com/mainstream-media-accountability-survey
    So, after asking your opinion for you, they then ask you to give to their needy commandant-in-chief. Who actually believes the big-league billionaire DJT needs their money, particularly now that he’s already been elected, especially after claiming he’d run on his own money in the first place? How do I get my hands on their mailing list … I should be able to sell these rubes anything, if they have any money left after being trickled down upon. Sadly, these Dickensians will soon lack even a trumppence (small enough currency to fit in any hand) to donate, or bail them out of debtor prison when they fail to pay their Trump U bills.


    Older News: Somehow I missed this tidbit
     

    Betsy "I'm not as harmless as my name sounds" DeVos is the least qualified of all Trump’s appointments so far. The fact that she’s also the perfect pick to destroy the department she heads is not unusual, but unless someone else is pulling the strings, she may lack the competence to gut American education (outside of super-wealthy voting districts). But I just learned this:
    Her husband Dick DeVos was a chief executive of the beauty and nutrition giant Amway and her brother is Erik Prince, the founder of the controversial private security company Blackwater.That’s like the perfect storm of evil and hucksterism. Clearly, a fitting choice for this administration. Swamp? Filled.


    Executive Order Round-up

    I don’t understand how anyone who thought Clinton would be too cozy with Wall Street is OK with this cabinet. I can’t believe we even need a reg to say that your financial advisor should be working for rather than against you, unless one believes that finance is full of evil self-interested people, at which point deregulation of that group of sociopaths may not be a great idea. But this EO tops this week’s list of most-overlooked potential media talking points:
    President Donald Trump will halt an Obama administration regulation, hated by the financial industry, that requires retirement advisers to work in the best interests of their clients, while the new administration reviews the rule.I realize they have their hands full, but this is exactly the kind of simple, easy-to-follow, not-easily-alternatively-interpreted ruling that the press can put in front of someone who thinks Trump has their economic interests at heart, in order to prove that corporations are the ones being looked after here.

    And while I don’t really have a dog in this fight, I don’t see how the base’s communal head failed to explode at this EO after all the “takers” rhetoric used to get Trump into office:
    Disapproving the rule submitted by the Department of Labor relating to drug testing of unemployment compensation applicants.

    I welcome your comments, but before you say “well, Obama was also busy with the EOs when he started” I need to preempt you with these questions: were those EOs designed to push the bounds of the constitution, and reshape the power wielded by the executive? Were they this disruptive and debatable, or were they primarily repealing the previous administration’s EOs (the most common use of an EO)? Remember: the plural of anecdote is not data.

    Saturday, February 18, 2017

    Trump, That Bitch

    This is an inevitable topic for this blog … which exists so I wouldn’t rant anywhere people might accidentally see the rant. This topic is so partisan as to no longer be subject to debate, it seems, so by definition is a waste of typing (and reading). If you think our small-handed cheeto-faced overlord is presidential, if you are immune to (verified) facts, data, or anything different than what you want to hear, regardless of its truth or the peril in ignoring it, then any discussion more elevated than primate feces throwing will be wasted on you, and you’ve put us in a lose-lose situation where the only way to change your mind is to resort to the same manipulation (the one true talent I will grant Mr. Drumpf) that I’m so currently appalled by. I realize politics have caused a rift in this country, and we should all hold hands, but I don’t see how the opinion that Trump is a good president is any more reconcilable to me than a discussion of women’s choice would be to someone who considers all abortion (and maybe even all birth control) murder which damns you to an eternal lake of fire (although at least I wouldn’t have to suffer the cognitive dissonance of holding that opinion in one hand, and a picket sign saying “keep government out of our personal lives” in the other).

    So the primary obstacle to me finally writing something on this topic would seem to be the pointlessness of preaching to either the choir or the mob holding the pitchforks. But really, the reason it took so long to start this thread is that I didn’t know which stray piece of the regurgitated furrball which is the Republicant(tm) platform (and I include disenfranchisement and reality distortion as planks in that platform) to grab onto first. Do I gleefully point out to the rubes that fell for his rhetoric that they’re going to be the first to get screwed over? [no, because they’re immune to fact and argument and will be happy to blame their reaming on immigrants if they’re told to do so] Do I focus on Trump the manipulator, or document his “tell,” which is the 2nd grade schoolyard tactic of calling someone else out when you know there’s a risk of you getting busted for the same? [no, because the manipulatable will continue to be manipulated by the better manipulator, and as Scott Adams has shown, pointing out manipulation is the ultimate Push-Poll-style way to manipulate, and it’s so much easier (and entertaining) to manufacture bullshit than unpack it] Do I enumerate the most glaring constitutional failures, the indications that the election was stolen in a hanging-offense-ive way, the lies-as-talking-points, the failure of a single Republican to grow a constitutional spine or pretend they represent people-not-business, the flaws of an electorate that considers the 2nd amendment sacrosanct but the document which contains it a fucking chinese menu where you pick one distortion from column A and hold the due process clause from column B, please? His failure to obey the emoluments clause, on a daily basis? The swamp he’s filling, or the “best people” he’s surrounding himself with? The government he’s fixing by lighting it all on fire? The basic lack of English spelling and grammar you’d expect from a graduate of one of the better schools in this country? [no, no, and no … because my mind melts just trying to enumerate everything that’s gone wrong in less than a month]

    In spite of my personal despair, some people haven’t given up the fight, and in spite of hollerin’ for years that educated urban high-income liberals don’t have a clue what the rest of “their” country looks/thinks/acts like, so shouldn’t be surprised by the Tea Party or its bastard offspring, I would never say I truly understand how this country works (see also: Trump is now our president), or that all resistance is futile. So I’ve chosen to start with the small awfulnesses that you may have missed. Part of the Trump parade is to throw so much shit at the wall that you can’t possibly point out which parts of the wall are shit-free before more shit arrives. He plans on using fatigue, overload, and false compromise from absurd initial positions to advance his agenda, and part of the plan has been to make it hard to finish unpacking one lie before you have to deal with another. But we all have our own triggers and pet causes. Maybe one of these items will encourage you to do the work to convert the mythical red-state-neck that is subject to nuanced reason. Good luck with that.


    Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One Before

    Some of this will not be news to the masochistically well-read, but I bet there’s at least one new tid-bit in here for everyone. If you’ve see something (small but irritating, and it’s not one of Trump’s hands grabbing your p*ssy), say something (to me, so we can keep a running total).


    The Muslim ban that’s not a ban, and not targeted at Muslims? Giuliani himself said that a Muslim ban is exactly what they want, but they know they can’t have it per se, so Trump asked him how to reframe it so it might hold up in court:
        http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/316726-giuliani-trump-asked-me-how-to-do-a-muslim-ban-legally
    [I think if you want to make any headway with the alt-righteous, you need to quote their heroes when making a point, although Trump seems to get a pass on anything approaching consistency … he’s so anti-establishment that now that he’s the establishment he must regularly contradict himself to stay on point]

    The ban (or “ban”) only affects countries with no known terrorist ties to events on US soil in at least 40 years.
        In total, Saudi citizens killed 2,369 Americans between 1975 and 2015, according to CATO. It doesn’t affect any country in which Trump has business interests (including those countries responsible for 9/11, the USS Cole, etc.):
        http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/trump-muslim-ban-excludes-countries-linked-businesses-article-1.2957956

    Protip: Somalia is NOT a jihadist foreign power hell-bent on destroying America … it’s a failed barely-nation-state hell-bent on not falling apart from within. Most of the other 6 countries are those we’ve invaded, fought a proxy war with, or destabilized, including at least one where we killed their democratically elected leader (yes, Virginia, the greatest country in the world does that kind of shtuff). As Yemen recently learned, it’s probably more important to focus on keeping Americans out of your country than worry about getting to America.

    But this is all irrelevant, because the Muslim ban was revoked, right? Wrong. Parts of the EO were rejected by the courts, but the rest is still official USA policy. Refugees, especially widowed women and orphaned children, who are the least of our worries, are still denied entry. After the ban-which-isn’t-a-ban was “lifted,” dual nationals residing in allied countries were still being denied transit through the US. In at least one case, simply having a stamp in your passport from a not-really-banned nation, and traveling from one allied nation to another on an allied nation’s passport was enough to end your trip [in this case, this is a well-known TV announcer and beloved sports star and who took a day trip to Iran participate in a charity football match]:
        https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/feb/18/dwight-yorke-felt-like-criminal-denied-entry-usa

    Existing visas — promises of admission from our country — were revoked. For some people, this can mean losing their life savings, as the trip to their new country was literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. For others, this means limbo in the no-nation which is an airport security area. For others, it could mean being sent back to a country they fled for reasons of asylum, and possible death or torture … in those cases, these people are specifically at risk for either aiding the US in the global war on terror or speaking out against governments that Trump is denouncing.


    Speaking of terrorists, the official terrorist-action list will soon focus only on Muslims, specifically excluding any domestic, white (supremacy) terror (e.g., Dylan Roof). I feel safer already.


    Some white house staffers were removed for failing their FBI background check. But like with Betsy “how do you spell P-U-B-L-I-C S-C-H-O-O-L” DeVos, the loyal fail upward:
    One of the dismissed staffers includes Caroline Wiles, director of scheduling, the daughter of President Trump’s Florida campaign manager. She will instead get a job at the Treasury Department.Apparently, Treasury isn’t an important department … which is odd, since Trump seems hell-bent on dismantling and/or defunding all the other ones.


    Steve Bannon is Trump’s Dick (Cheney, that is). This respecter of the constitution labeled America’s Free Press “the opposition”. 1st amendment, it was nice being able to write about you.


    A recurring theme of the Republicants: Defund, then Dismantle. Once you set something up to fail, you can point out it’s a failure, and then throw it away.

    Trump pulled ads for Obamacare that had already been paid for, and in spite of that, enrollments still rose.

    The IRS has been instructed by the white house not to enforce a provision of Obamacare (which >1/3 of americans still don’t realize is the same as the ACA) designed to ensure enough participation to make the math work (but still less than the 100% participation that allows single-payer to work in every other industrialized country). Meanwhile, provisions to ensure that poor sick people get filtered are being added.
        https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-health-officials-propose-rule-to-shore-up-affordable-care-act-marketplaces/2017/02/15/1f69bd7c-f307-11e6-b9c9-e83fce42fb61_story.html


    Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but not little hands, apparently.

    After harping on Hillary’s email server, which wasn’t hacked (while the state department’s servers were), the Donald was using an entirely insecure phone, which he insists on keeping:
        https://www.lawfareblog.com/president-trumps-insecure-androidBased on the available information, the working assumption should be that Trump's phone is compromised by at least one—probably multiple—hostile foreign intelligence services and is actively being exploited. …anyone around the President should presume they are being actively recorded by hostile powers, regardless of location, unless they are positive the phone is out of the room.
    During the campaign, Trump went so far as to ask Russia to provide the emails that Hillary claimed were personal (or, in other words, asked a hostile foreign power to subvert critical American intelligence agencies, the exact thing they were saying Clinton was risking by running her own server). Scott Pruitt, Trump’s horrific choice for the EPA (unless you are trying to accelerate the Rapture by making your backyard a cesspool of toxic waste), has refused to turn over his emails with oil and energy companies prior to his nomination, in spite of a valid public records request.
    Oklahoma district court judge Aletia Haynes Timmons concluded “there really is no reasonable explanation” for why Pruitt’s office had not complied with the request for his emails. Timmons ordered Pruitt to turn over the records by Tuesday and to comply with other open records requests by the group in 2015 and 2016 within 10 days.
    And while I can’t blame Trump for this, this morsel tells you all you need to know about the future of our democracy: 

    “Though Pruitt ran unopposed for a second term in 2014, public campaign finance reports show he raised more than $700,000, much of it from people in the energy and utility industries.”


    Just as Republicans hoped they could blow enough smoke around the Clintons that someone would conclude there must have been a fire, the firing of Flynn is not the sole piece of evidence that Trump has connections to Russia, and that Russia has something on some Americans, including, quite likely, our draft dodging commander-in-chief. [When asked which foot his deferment-earning bone spurs were in, he replied along the lines of, “I don’t know, it’s in the records, you can look it up.” I have bone spurs — which are in some cases surgically treatable — but I can promise you I’m reminded of the remaining spurs’ location on a daily basis, and have the scars to remember the removed one by.]

    We all believe that there’s not nearly enough info to conclude that we know the pissgate story to be true (although it’s clear to anyone paying attention that if this scandal had involved a Clinton, it would be gospel in huge swaths of the country, just as we all know Saddam was responsible for 9/11). It just sounds like something that would come from the other camp (a la Vince Foster was killed by Hillary). However, the person that put together the dossier is not only a respected MI6 agent with years of not-nutty field work under his belt, he was the guy the FBI used to investigate FIFA, and he cracked an organization that had stayed immune from investigation for years, leading to hundreds of arraignments from a dozen countries in several industries, in one of the biggest corruption scandals in history. The dossier is the work of a highly competent and credible individual, with no apparent axe to grind, and was the result of business-as-usual opposition research.

    But it’s not like there’s just a trickle of Russian ties and influence … there’s a golden stream of innuendo. Trump has had to turn on his own intelligence agencies in order to discredit in advance what he knows they already know (again, there’s that “tell”: before the agencies release info that damages Trump, Trump downplays their importance, independence and competence, so if/when the story finally comes out Trump can say “proof of what I was saying” rather than having to defend what’s being said. Same story with calling the non-alt-right press “fake news” and “traitorous” in advance of anything negative they might report.)

    Flynn was not the first to go, either.


    Paul Manafort resigned as Trump's campaign chairman last August amid reports of his attempts to align Trump's policies with Russian interests;

    And Manafort clearly trained under Trump (“no one knows how many people were at the inauguration because no stats are kept, but we know that ours was the biggest”), and in the course of a single paragraph said that he knows for sure that he never dealt with Russians, and there’s no way to know who the Russians are:
    Manafort called the officials' account "absurd" and said he had never had anything to do with Putin's government. Manafort told the newspaper, "It's not like these people wear badges that say, 'I'm a Russian intelligence officer.'" 

    Carter Page removed himself as a foreign policy adviser last September, as reports emerged about a visit to Russia and other potential contacts.
    And then there’s State Department head Rex Tillerson. Here, the administration isn’t even pretending that they aren’t cozying up to Russia. Russian hacking initially was about anyone-but-Clinton, in response to Clinton’s moves against Russia’s oil deals (with Tillerson’s Exxon), sanctions over their expansion into the Ukraine and Crimea and their ongoing “disputes” in Georgia and Chechnya, and their Olympic doping scandal, all of which Clinton had a role in while occupying Tillerson’s current seat. It was only later, when Trump became a credible candidate, that Russia cared about helping Trump per se. Tillerson, who is supposed to be addressing world-wide issues, will likely focus a disproportionate amount of his time on Russia, and not in the manner you’d treat a hostile government. Putin famously awarded Tillerson the “Order of Friendship,” which in this rare case is not Russian double-speak. The current sanctions against Russia are effective and deserved, but I’ll bet 20 shares of Exxon that they get revoked this calendar year. If you believe these ass-hats when they say “well, I put my stock in a blind trust and quit my job as CEO, so I have no vested interest in helping my former employer” just look at what happened to Haliburton under the Cheney (uh, sorry, Bush II) administration, or the revolving door between top industry and government positions.
    Tillerson, a lifetime Exxon employee, came up through the ranks by managing the company's Russia account. Once he became CEO, Exxon bet billions on Russia's vast but notoriously-elusive oil resources through a bold partnership with Russian oil giant Rosneft. [which is largely state-run] Russia ha[d] already indicated it would welcome Tillerson being named America's top diplomat. Exxon said it could have lost up to $1 billion due to the sanctions, according to regulatory filings.


    State secrets are about secrecy, not security of the state:

    And where are the adults in the room, or the calls for Benghazi- (Starr report-, Whitewater-, choose your poison-) style investigations of Russian influence in US elections and politics, a subject that should get every Reaganite up in literal arms? Following Trump’s directives, the Republicants are putting the blame where it clearly lays … at the feet of those who would risk career and even life to point out serious risks to our country (in all fairness, Obama turned the justice department into a whistle-blower-prosecuting machine):

    Republican Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who's on the House Judiciary Committee, has a view that’s pretty common in Congress these days … ignore the message if you have issues with the messenger:
    "There are some serious legal implications here," Johnson said, "but it has nothing to do with partisan politics. I mean, the leak of highly classified information by what is apparent here — a number of individuals inside our intelligence community — is the illegal act that I think we need to review."
    Just as the Bush administration, at the behest of business, made it illegal to photograph or film the operations of any animal factory, be it for food or entertainment … and just as reddish jurisdictions around the country are making it illegal to film police officers violating citizen’s rights instead of doing anything about police brutality and racism (which does in fact exist, as would be expected in any group as large, disparate and powerful as “all licensed-to-kill individuals in a large and heterogeneous nation”) … we now have this piece of scrumptiousness (i.e. tastes like violence of Baby Harp Seal mixed with precariousness of California Condor):
        http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/wildlife-watch-usda-animal-welfare-trump-records/
    Two weeks into the Trump Administration, thousands of documents detailing animal welfare violations nationwide have been removed from the website of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which has been posting them publicly for decades.This pattern will be repeated across all agencies, removing data and science from public view, wherever it negatively impacts the businesses that own our government, or might make reelection in any way difficult. This will make doing (or reporting) the right thing even harder, will enable opinion to Trump fact, will enable the continued externalization of business costs to the tax payer (not to mention out-and-out handouts to business), and will ultimately dismantle what’s left of a functioning system of checks-and-balances. In the hands of the EPA or Energy or Treasury, this policy of policy-free government could even cripple or end health (pollution), life (atomic waste/fallout), or a functioning economy (neither Dodd-Frank nor Glass-Steagal shall stay this courier from swift completion of a subordinate debt swap trade), either in this country or around the globe.
     

    And if you need to drink away the next 4-8 years or more (oh, yes, they’re working on ensuring at least 8 years, so expect plenty of ASCII to be tossed down this here sinkhole), these recipes should help.