A tax cut I neither need nor want

Those browser tabs have accumulated again.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville points to an important finding of a recent Washington Post poll about voter opinions. Among white voters their preference for the GOP over the Dems has gone up five points since January. The margin is now 14%. Wrote McEwan: “White people are eating up Republicans' white supremacy.”



McEwan has an observation about all that data Cambridge Analytica and similar companies have scooped up. It’s a trove of information on people’s vulnerabilities that can be used to extort of turn them.

Anyone who's ever used Facebook messenger to have an affair. Anyone who's got a secret Facebook page to flirt. Anyone who gossips with work colleagues about the boss. Anyone who disclosed anything on Facebook, to what they thought was a closed audience, that could be used against them with their employer, including sexuality, beliefs, illnesses. Anyone who uses Facebook to catfish, or has been embarrassingly catfished, or who has used messenger to talk to a dealer, or arrange any kind of nefarious or criminal activity.

Personal shameful (or stigmatized) behavior has always been used to cultivate or turn assets, and now the record of many people's personal shameful (or stigmatized) behavior is in the hands of any bad actor who pays for it.

I had to look up that bit of internet slang. Being catfished means being lured into a relationship through a fictional online persona.



Love those activist Florida kids. This batch appear to be from Gainesville rather than Parkland. Eight students, ages 10-19 sued the State of Florida over failing to keep them safe from the impacts of global warming. The students are teaming up with Our Children’s Trust out of Oregon.



Billionaire Seth Klarman gave more than $7 million to the GOP during the Obama years. But now Klarman says:

The Republicans in Congress have failed to hold the president accountable and have abandoned their historic beliefs and values. For the good of the country, the Democrats must take back one or both houses of Congress. … I received a tax cut I neither need nor want. I’m choosing to invest it to fight the administration’s flawed policies and to elect Democrats to the Senate and House of Representatives

McEwan included in a post a brief video showing the reach of the damage of a nuclear bomb going off over the White House. And who tweeted the video? Russian state propaganda outlet Sputnik. This is not normal.



I had written recently about the fondness the Evangelical church has for the nasty guy. There’s a flip side to that story. Those of Millennial age and younger are leaving the Evangelical church in droves. Part of it is the support for the nasty guy. The rest is that the youth don’t like the positions their elders have taken on same-sex marriage, treatment of women, abortion, climate change, evolution, and more. There are also the sex scandals the leaders seem to routinely get into. There are now online movements #exvangelicals and #emptythepews to help those people who leave the denomination.