A liar, ineffective, or compromised

I leave for a short trip tomorrow afternoon. I probably won’t post again until Sunday or Monday. Then next Wednesday I leave again for a week. Abe Streep, in an article for ProPublica posted on Daily Kos, discussed the sale of federal lands in the West. A requirement to sell land, which I had mentioned, was thankfully pulled from the Big Brutal Bill. While land conservation groups, along with hunters and hikers, are cheering they must still be wary. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah has been pushing for a federal land sale since he came to the Senate in 2010. The basic reason is the government has no need to hold on to it (conservation groups, hunters, hikers, and lots of other people who use federal land would disagree). Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act in 1976 and in 1980 Reagan campaigned on returning federal land to the states. Many Western states have a high percentage of land owned by the government. I think I remember seeing that the feds own 87% of Nevada. Streep provides a history of the efforts to sell or protect federal land. The desire to sell federal land got a boost recently from “coastal elites” who recognized building on former federal land could help ease the housing crisis. Utah is short 61K housing units and Nevada is short 118K units. Why not sell federal land near cities to build affordable housing? That isn’t so easy. Sell the land for what developers are willing to pay for it – perhaps $200K an acre – and costs are already too high for affordable housing. The Bureau of Land Management can sell it for the low price of $100 an acre (and they can sell it for whatever they want to promote the common good). But there are few takers. One problem is the law gets in the way, partly because its terms are not well defined, partly because the processes don’t favor the goals, and partly because developers make a whole lot more money from expensive houses than affordable units. Some deals have been made but are proceeding slowly. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin has a lot of quotes of people discussing the Epstein case. I’ll mention only one of them. Sahil Kapur quoted an article in the New York Times that quoted Natalie Winters, co-host of Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast:

She summed up the movement’s sense of betrayal this way: “I just think it’s frankly very grifty to have spent your entire career promoting, even if it weren’t the Epstein thing directly, but the idea that there is this deep state, the idea that there’s this unelected class of, you know, banker, corporation, countries, intel agencies, blah, blah, blah. And then finally, you have the power to expose it, and either you’re not because there’s nothing there, it which case it makes you a liar – and I don’t believe that – or you’re ineffective, or you’re compromised.” This twisted tale has raised fundamental questions about the limits of Mr. Trump’s abilities to control the conspiratorial forces he has plied in his pursuit of the presidency.

Down in the comments exlrrp posted a meme:

So Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison for a “made-up hoax by Obama, Comey, and Biden”? MAGAs, are you that stupid to believe your cult leader?

Maxwell was Epstein’s assistant and it seems the woman took the fall for much of what Epstein did – then again Epstein was in prison for those crimes and there was a lot of discussion on whether he committed suicide or was murdered so the details of his career would not be revealed in court. TheKingOfPies posted a cartoon showing an elephant and donkey:

Elephant: Trump’s fighting in other countries’ wars!?! Trump’s tariffs really are taxes Americans pay!?! Trump won’t release Epstein’s list of clients!?! Donkey: Are you just realizing Trump’s lies or are you admitting Trump lies?

When the nasty guy moved back into the White House Rosie O’Donnell moved to Ireland. Perhaps to distract from the Epstein scandal he called her a “Threat to Humanity” and said he would try to revoke her citizenship. GoodNewsRoundup of the Kos community posted the full text of O’Donnell’s rebuttal. Here’s a bit of it:

you call me a threat to humanity— but I’m everything you fear: a loud woman a queer woman a mother who tells the truth an american who got out of the country b4 you set it ablaze you build walls— I build a life for my autistic kid in a country where decency still exists you crave loyalty— I teach my children to question power

A week ago Emily Singer of Kos reported Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session of the state legislature to demand they make the state Congressional House districts even more gerrymandered in hopes of blunting the expected loss of seats to Democrats next year. Some Republicans in that Congressional delegation are concerned that in an attempt to make more Republican majority districts their margin in each district will be smaller, giving Democrats a better chance to win. Democrats say this is a craven political move to distract from the central Texas floods. Also a week ago Lisa Needham of Kos reported the nasty guy and his cabinet redefined a “federal public benefit” to prevent undocumented immigrants from accessing a wide range of resources. Previously, if a program such as Head Start or a food bank was administered at the community level the recipient didn’t get it directly from the federal government. That meant undocumented immigrants could apply. The new definition says that if the program is funded with federal money undocumented immigrants were banned from receiving the benefit. It means all these programs have to ask for documentation. It also means immigrants can’t use federally funded education and food programs mentioned plus are banned from many health and mental health clinics. Why make this change?

The administration has not been shy about using the tools of violence to push immigrants out of public life. But deploying soft power like this, by withholding resources, is just as dangerous—so of course they’re doing it.

They’re doing it because they can, because they want to make life for immigrants as difficult as possible, because they relish in being cruel. Biden and his Federal Trade Commission created the click-to-cancel rule. Canceling a subscription online must be as easy as signing up. A company can’t make signing up easy, done with a single click, yet extremely difficult to cancel. Needham reported of course, companies hate it, so they ran to a favorable court, this time the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. This was a safe court because it has only one judge appointed by a Democrat.

One of the bases for the ruling was that the FTC failed to do a preliminary regulatory analysis, required when a rule’s impact on the economy would exceed $100 million. Of course, the only way companies can complain that making it easier to cancel things would cost at least nine figures is to acknowledge that trapping people into paying for services they can’t cancel is a significant moneymaker.

The 8th Circuit gave its decision five days before the click-to-cancel rule was to go into effect.

We are not in this together

I didn’t post over the previous two days because my computer did not have internet access. The reason is also a customer service rant. If you have no interest in my travails, jump to the next section of this post. My friend and debate partner describe sessions like this as “customer disservice.” When I bought this new computer I also bought a new modem and router, so I didn’t have to keep making rental payments on the one from Comcast/Xfinity. I think I calculated the replacements will hit break even in less than a year. Two days ago I decided was a good day to actually install the new hardware. Yeah, it’s been about seven weeks, but switching to and learning the new music program was a higher priority. The first problem was that the modem and router had transformers in their power plugs. They had to go at the ends of the surge protector. The house is sixty years old, of course there aren’t enough electrical outlets. Also, the cases around the transformers are bulky enough they don’t allow enough room for the neighboring plug. I found an extender and a narrow plug and managed. I connected all the wires and turned them all on. The modem booted. The lights on the router came on. But the computer said I had no internet. I called the modem company. The answer bot said I needed to call the internet provider to have the modem “provisioned.” So I called Comcast. The answer bot gave me a half minute message saying Comcast needed my updated contact info. They occasionally ask that when I’m on their website and they want an email address not through them (which I don’t have) and they already had my phone number. The answer bot required I specify the problem. My answer prompted the bot assume their modem was the problem and demanded I do a modem test. They could send a link to my phone or I could do it online. For an internet company Comcast seems pretty ignorant of how the internet works. I can’t do it online because the modem doesn’t work. The bot had hung up. I called again, waiting through the half-minute message again. The same scenario played out. I thought of calling the nearby Xfinity store. But I didn’t have a number and no internet to look it up. I called a third time. This time I accepted the text message on my phone. The bot hung up. I tapped the link. My phone said “No internet.” I called a fourth time. Yeah, that half-minute message a fourth time. This time I tried saying I wanted to change my internet service rather than saying I had an internet problem. A few questions later I was connected to a real person. I told him what I wanted to do. He asked for the MAC number of the modem. Then he complained the number didn’t match the Xfinity modem I had. Well, of course not! He finally understood what I wanted and he entered the new number. He said that since returning the modem meant a change in my billing I had to confirm it. He sent me another text with another link. Still no internet on the phone. He switched to verbal confirmation with the voice coming from the computer and reply to go to it, not him. The computer said if I agreed I was to enter “1” – but it didn’t recognize it. We went round on this several times and it did not recognize the “1” from my phone keypad. I asked him to enter the 1 for me – he had heard I confirmed. He wasn’t allowed to do that. I asked for a supervisor. The agent said a supervisor had no more capability than he had. Besides, a supervisor would not be available for two hours. In the meantime he could schedule an appointment with a technician. I had him confirm whether a tech guy would charge because it wasn’t their modem. He scheduled it just in case. I asked if the Xfinity store could resolve this problem. I had to return their modem anyway. He said they could. So I went to the store. I think the person waiting on me was transgender or nonbinary, though it would have been rude to ask. I’ll use nonbinary pronouns. They received my modem, used its ID to pull up my account, and gave me a receipt for the return. Then they said they could do no more because having a technician appointment locked the store people out of the system. After I expressed my astonishment they said they could delete the appointment. I quickly agreed. Soon they said all was in order, the new modem registered and ready, though one more confirmation step needed to be done and they at the store could not do it. I could reschedule a technician or call the 800 number again. I said a bit about how bad online service was and they agreed – as company agents they have to go through the same nonsense every time. This sounds like really bad use of agent time (as it is bad use of customer time). They said there is a way around it. They gave me a phrase to text to a different number and a tech person would call me. That different number turned out to be the number that was used to text me before. Alas, by the time I was able to use it the time was after 5:00. I thought perhaps their staff didn’t work or didn’t respond to these texts in the evening. During the evening I texted Niece, who is much better with phones than I am, about why my phone didn’t have internet service. She had me try various things and finally gave up. A bit later I thought to reboot my phone. That worked. I had internet again. I knew it was separate from the modem that wasn’t working Yeah, my phone can go wonky at the worst times. The next morning I called Comcast and their answer bot didn’t answer. I tried several times. I spent a lovely afternoon with Niece. She and I enjoyed the Detroit Institute of Arts. Back at it during the evening. Called Comcast. Other than repeating the half-minute message again it was rather quick to connect me to a human. He said he could see the modem. He had no idea what second thing the store person said was necessary. Shortly after that we were disconnected. So another call and another chance to ignore the message. This human had me unplug and replug the modem so that it would reboot. From his end things looked “100%” but I still didn’t have internet access. I should call the modem company. I did. This guy had me reset the modem. Then he had me connect the computer straight to the modem without the router. After another reboot a tab opened on my browser saying “Welcome to Xfinity! Download the Xfinity app on your mobile phone to activate your internet in minutes.” Nope, not letting them on my phone. This customer agent actually gave me decent service. He confirmed the router is only necessary when I need WiFi and most of the time I don’t. So I’ll leave it out for now. Called Xfinity again (and listened to the message again) and was connected to a human promptly. Yes, there was indeed one more step Xfinity needed to do. They needed to send a provisioning file to the modem. The modem answer bot was right. The store person was right and the two earlier people this evening were not. Sending the file rebooted the modem. When it was done I had internet! Web pages loaded. Two dozen emails downloaded! Things are better. Before this call ended the agent said she could tell when I started talking I was extremely frustrated. She was accurate. She was glad things were all straightened out and I felt better. One might think after so much hassle (and this not the first time) I would drop Comcast for another company. There are two reasons why I haven’t yet. First, my email address is through Comcast. With standard practice being to make one’s email addy one’s account identifier I would have go to a great many websites to change it. Second, various comparisons of the companies in my area rate them all equally bad at customer service. One wonders why they are all so bad. If you skipped the rant please resume reading here. How does one tell the difference between a prophet and someone just making stuff up? I’ve heard the distinction is that some of the prophet’s predictions have come true, so there is a decent chance the rest of them will too. Keep that thought in mind. Of course, some people say foretelling the future is not possible, so there is no such thing as a prophet. Reinvented Daddy of the Daily Kos community discussed what he thought was the reason why the MAGA people, meaning also the Republican Party and conservative evangelicals, are so cruel. He believes the answer, and I think he’s on to something, is the central position of the Bible’s book of Revelations in their beliefs.

Jesus of revelations is a horribly mean and spiteful creature requiring constant praise and supplication. Most of what is understood of Revelations is misinformed myth since few, even among the religiously educated, can understand it’s ridiculously bad writing. It was penned 60 years after the death of Jesus purely from the imagination of a hermit who lived in a cave on a desert island off Turkey. He despised the churches of St Paul. A raving lunatic, he wrote like one but the book survived because people liked apocalypse porn as much in the first century as they do in the 21st century.

For those who don’t know (which includes most Christians) Revelations is about the End Times, in which Jesus comes back to earth, heads an army that defeats all the forces of evil (interpreted to be all those who don’t believe in Jesus), and brings about a new heaven and new earth where there is no longer a reason for crying. The last couple of chapters portray a world that sounds lovely. The readers at the time, under the domination of Rome, would have appreciated this vision. But one must go through some twenty chapters of mayhem to get there. Then again, causing mayhem against Rome sounded pretty good too. After the Roman era Revelations was mostly ignored until after the American Civil War when the South, stinging from defeat, decided it spoke to them. Yeah, a just defeated society that considers itself highly Christian, is going to latch on to a story that says Jesus will come back and defeat their enemy. Richard Nixon, in his Southern Strategy, understood that Democrat presidents Kennedy and Johnson were seen as betrayers for their racial and economic reforms of the Civil Rights Act. Since then (according to Reinvented Daddy) Republicans have been making promises to the evangelicals they had no intention of keeping. And now we have a majority on the Supreme Court that believes the righteous ass-kicking portrayed in Revelations supersedes the Constitution. They are now keeping those promises. So is that hermit who wrote those words nearly two thousand years ago a prophet or did he make stuff up? In those two thousand years none of it has come to pass. You decide. John Stoehr, through his Editorial Board, wrote about a related ideology. During a national emergency, such as two destructive hurricanes just a couple weeks apart, many people reach out to those in distress, saying we’re all in this together. Yet, the words of politicians on the far right imply no, we’re not in this together. We see that as a betrayal of core beliefs and call them hypocrites. That’s easier that believing their core beliefs are vastly different from our own.

Rightwingers are not hypocrites, though. They believe American society is divided into ingroups and outgroups. The former is good, right and deserving. The latter is bad, wrong and undeserving. When there’s a national emergency, the federal government should help the ingroup, because it’s the only group that constitutes a “real nation.” Meanwhile, the outgroup can take care of itself. Or die trying. Not only do they believe American society is divided into ingroups and outgroups, they believe it ought to be. The orders of power should be vertical and hierarchical. That is the ideal, because that is “natural.” For this reason, liberal efforts to flatten the orders of power, so that the outgroup has as many rights and privileges as the ingroup, are seen by rightwingers as a perversion of the natural order of things. To them, we are not all in this together, because we can’t be. If we were, that would be in defiance of God. And that’s why they lie.

That is why they say America needs to become great again. That is why they claim Biden and Harris are destroying America. We ask them to put nation above politics. In their eyes they already are. We don’t recognize their definition of nation is different. They believe when the federal government hands out money after a disaster it should go to the ingroup and not to the outgroup. So vetoing FEMA funding (because much of its money goes to the outgroup), then demanding FEMA funding (for the ingroup) is not a contradiction in their thinking. They spread so many lies about the nature of these hurricanes because they oppose the idea of all people being in it together and want to discredit it. They support Russia because they see the same top-down society they want for themselves. With that understanding Speaker Johnson’s refusal to reconvene the House to pass more FEMA funding makes sense. I have long recognized correspondingly there are two definitions of freedom. Some want freedom from oppression. The others want freedom to oppress. They want that freedom so that they can maintain the social hierarchy with themselves on top. And the social hierarchy is maintained through oppression. An aspect of that national view is on display in this article by Morgan Stephens of Kos that begins:

So it’s come to this. On Wednesday, President Joe Biden was forced to address the bonkers right-wing conspiracy that the government is controlling the weather, steering catastrophic hurricanes into conservative communities in an effort to influence the 2024 election. "Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene … is now saying the federal government is literally controlling the weather,” he said during a briefing on the federal response to Hurricane Helene and preparations for Hurricane Milton. “We're controlling the weather? It's beyond ridiculous. It’s got to stop.”

Masculinity contest cultures

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos wrote Republicans can’t decide if Biden is senile or superhuman. They’ve been portraying Biden as senile every chance they get (have you heard that Biden is old?). Then Biden does something, like his State of the Union address in March which showed him vigorous and with a competent mind. So what to do? Accuse Biden of being on drugs. Several have proposed Biden be given a drug test just before Thursday’s debate (of course, no need to give on to the nasty guy). Claiming Biden is on drugs is an all purpose excuse. On NPR this evening I heard it phrased as “performance-enhancing drugs,” which athletes take for physical improvements. Thankfully, NPR was reporting on the Republican tactic, not buying into it. Sumner wrote:

But the silliest thing about all this may be the idea that there are “performance-enhancing drugs” someone can take to overcome dementia. The sad fact that millions of American families face every day is that most forms of dementia are a one-way street. Treatments may slow the progress of the condition, but nothing can pull someone back once they have gone far down that path. All the stimulants in [Trump doctor Ron] Jackson’s little black bag can’t drag someone from the kind of senile state that Fox News and Republicans claim Biden lives in and restore them to vigorous, determined competence. If only it were possible. Everyone would love to lay their hands on these magic pills.

I would have definitely given those magic pills to my mother, if they existed. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Jerusalem Demsas of The Atlantic and her interview of Dr. Alice Evans about the increased sexism of young men worldwide. Part of the issue is young men are facing such things as higher home prices and differing outcomes for men with and without college degrees. Another factor is because women have increased opportunities they are able to reject men that don’t give them enough economic security, love, respect, or even fun. These women don’t have to “make do” with what society expects. Wrote Evans:

They’re guys with emotions—and nobody wants to be ghosted, to be rejected, to feel unwanted. So if men go on these dating apps, and they’re not getting any likes, and even if they speak to her, when she doesn’t have the time of day, it just bruises and grates at your ego, your sense of worth. And so then, men may turn to podcasts or YouTube, and if you look at that manosphere, if you look at what people are talking about, it’s often dating. And so they’re often saying, Oh, women have become so greedy. They’re so materialistic...

In the comments exlrrp posted memes to show a church (likely Catholic) where the Ten Commandments are not displayed. And they would not be displayed in the nasty guy’s prison cell. In a second comment exlrrp posted a photo of the sign on a Grace United Methodist Church that says, “If your version of Christianity wants to put the 10 Commandments in schools but take free lunches out of them, you are worshiping something other than Jesus.” Pedro Molina posted a cartoon on Kos. An elephant in a pinstripe suit is in a classroom pointing to the Ten Commandments posted behind him. He says to a schoolboy, “...And do you know what happens to those who break them?” They boy replies, “They become your presidential candidate!” Back in mid May Wailin Wong and Adrian Ma of NPR’s Planet Money talked to June Carbone, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who was one of the authors of the book Fair Shake: Women And The Fight To Build A Just Economy. Carbone and colleagues saw that efforts to close the gender pay gap between men and women college grads had been stalled for about 30 years. And it didn’t look like old fashioned sexism. What the researchers found is a winner-take-all approach to business that wasn’t so widespread 30 years ago. Ma said:

Companies that adopt a winner-take-all approach prioritize winning at all costs. They do ethically questionable or sometimes straight-up illegal things in pursuit of short-term goals, like pumping up the stock price.

Carbone explained why this put women at a disadvantage:

First, if you don't compete on the same terms as the men, you lose. Second, if you do compete on the same terms as the men, you lose because women are disproportionately punished.

An example: Women in finance are less likely than men to commit financial misconduct. And if they do they are more likely to be to be fired. Ma said these kinds of work environments are “masculinity contest cultures.” They attract people who tend to engage in high levels of sexual harassment, bullying, and favoritism. The companies can’t maintain diversity because they push women out. Carbone and co-authors argue for changes to reduce winner-take-all culture, “like people speaking out against abusive behavior, more gender diversity, government investment in childcare and paid family leave, and stronger regulation of misbehaving companies.” I see increasing gender diversity will be difficult in an organization that tends to push women out. And men tend not to speak out against abusive behavior because they want to participate in it. Mark Sumner of Kos, as part of his 7 stories post included at the bottom a video by Mr. Who’s the Boss explaining the “ensh**ification” of the internet, or why the internet is getting worse. He started with Uber as an example, then explained that many other internet companies do the same things. The video is 25 minutes. When Uber started they made it really easy and cheap for the rider. Soon riders thought the service was essential. Then the made it better for the driver to sign up more of them and lock them in. Then it made it better for the shareholder – how to get the most out of customers and spend least on suppliers. They introduced tiering. That means better service if one pays more. If it stopped there that is good. But it soon meant worse service for those that didn’t pay more. Then they began to hide or misdirect the true price. So it was to find what is the worst service at the highest price before we scare off the customer. Now that there are a lot fewer taxis the Uber price is more expensive than taxis were. Add to that a subscription, giving one a discount. It makes the customer more loyal. But soon fewer things are included in the subscription. An example is Amazon charging for shipping that is supposed to be included and defaulting to the slower and cheaper shipping method, hoping the customer doesn’t notice. Facebook knows it has you because leaving is social suicide. So Facebook shows ads and other content not because it thinks that’s what you want (though many times it is) but what makes Facebook the most money. Then there are dark patterns. The biggest is how difficult it is to unsubscribe. He had an example of how difficult it could be. Add to that the free month – which requires a credit card – that they hope you forget about when it comes time to start billing. Streaming services used to be a great deal. Except now one needs to subscribe to several to get all the hit shows. The more there are the worse each one gets. He found he was paying over a 1000 pounds a month for all the streaming services. Things one can do: When trying a service for that free month subscribe, then immediately turn off auto renew (or unsubscribe). Instead of paying for all the streaming service every month, rotate between them. As part of planning my summer travels that include New York City and a couple Broadway shows I got an email showing where previous Broadway hits can be found on streaming services. Some were recorded straight off the stage, some rewritten as movies. Many I thought were intriguing turned out to not make the transition well. One that did was a show I saw on tour in Detroit. It is the musical Come From Away and I wrote about how much I loved it here. The story is straightforward. The 9/11 terrorist attacks closed US airspace. Planes already in the air had to go somewhere. The town of Gander, Newfoundland, population of 10 thousand, had been a refueling station on trans-Atlantic flights before the time of jets. When the US airspace closed Gander suddenly had 6,500 guests to care for until the airspace reopened several days later. The guests were amazed at how well they were treated. So when I heard the stage version had been filmed I wanted to share so you can see it too. Come From Away is on Apple+. And if I get a subscription to Apple+ (keeping the suggestions above in mind) I just might enjoy it again.

Persuade the people, not five members of the Supreme Court

I watched the Tournament of Roses Parade today, as I almost always do on New Year’s Day. This year, as in previous years, the floats were beautiful and whimsical, the horse teams were great, and the bands were stirring. I especially enjoyed the band that danced as they played (and I wonder how they would be feeling after five miles), a Japanese band that put out some cool moves, and a big Pennsylvania band that held panoramic banners down the middle of the marchers. All quite cool. As I have for the last few years I watched the parade on the KTLA livestream. The big advantage is no commercials for the entire duration of the parade. This went smoothly two years ago. Last year the stream glitched frequently (as at least once a minute), making me wonder of my internet provider was slowing down my speed because I wasn’t working through their own TV streaming of the networks. But I suffered through it. This year the feed went smoothly for almost 40 minutes, then started glitching. I was prepared this time and quickly switched to my provider’s network feed. And, of course, endured commercials. After a while I timed it – about seven minutes of parade followed by three minutes of commercials. So I paused the network feed and went back to KTLA. Glitching there sent me back to the network. A couple more rounds of commercials later I went back to KTLA, but this time I didn’t pause the network stream, letting it run in a minimized window. Yeah, I now had twice as much internet streaming data coming to my computer. Yet, no KTLA glitching. Anyone want to explain that? Egberto Willies of the Daily Kos community discussed Rep. Jamie Raskin making the case that the nasty guy should be disqualified from the presidential primary and general ballots. While Willies included a video of Raskin speaking on CNN he didn’t include a transcript. Raskin is an authority on the Constitution, teaching constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law for over 25 years. He’s also written three books on the fragility of democracy. Raskin’s opening point is unlike age or place of birth (the Constitution requires presidential candidates to be 35 or older and native born) the restriction on not being an insurrectionist is a choice. One can choose to be an insurrectionist. Willies wrote:

Raskin’s argument gains further weight considering the broader democratic implications. As the only national office representing all Americans, the presidency demands a holder who embodies the nation’s democratic ideals. Allowing someone who has actively worked against these principles to contend for or hold this office again would not only be a disservice to the Constitution but also to the democratic ethos of the nation. Furthermore, the Supreme Court’s potential involvement in this matter underscores the urgency and complexity of ensuring the integrity of presidential qualifications. As Raskin notes, the Court’s decision could significantly impact the democratic fabric of the nation. It’s not merely a legal decision but a statement of the values and principles that define American democracy. This discourse is crucial not only for legal and political scholars but also for the general public. It serves as a reminder of each citizen’s responsibility in safeguarding democracy. ... For those who believe disqualifying the president from the ballot would create chaos, let’s be clear: the former president drew first blood. Noting that there is a distinct possibility he will lose in a popular vote landslide in 2024, it is clear that under all circumstances, he will be reactionary. As such, the country must abide by the Constitution.

Charles Jay of the Kos community noted that the nasty guy likes people being disqualified from the ballot – when it’s not himself. He led the charge to disqualify Obama, claiming Obama was foreign born. He wanted to disqualify Ted Cruz as he claimed that Cruz won the Iowa caucuses by cheating. And he repeatedly called for Hillary Clinton to be disqualified. But when there are attempts to disqualify himself he expresses his outrage, calling it – well all kinds of things. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted EJ Dionne of the Washington Post discussing the strange national mood:

If you wonder why there is so much political discontent, look no further than a year-end YouGov survey, which found that both liberals and conservatives believe the country is moving the wrong way — meaning away from their own views. Forty-four percent of liberals said U.S. politics had moved further to the right over the past decade; only 16 percent said things had moved leftward. Among conservatives, 55 percent said politics had moved to the left, while only 15 percent saw a move rightward. (Moderates, appropriately, were split about evenly.) Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux captured the mood. “Everybody thinks they’re losing,” he told me.

In another roundup Chitown Kev quoted Paul Kahn of The Hill who wrote that older generations of liberals relied on and worked with federal courts to maintain human rights, such as minority voting. But liberals haven’t done that in a while.

A younger generation on the left has known only a conservative, reactionary court. They distrust it for good reason. They have gotten little from it, even as conditions of inequality have worsened in the country. Their distrust of the Supreme Court colors their attitude toward the politics of their parents’ generation. Too much reliance on the court, they believe, resulted in only shallow victories. That which the court gave, it could take away. In a democracy, the only secure foundation for progressive reform is in the people themselves. The hard work of democratic politics, they believe, is to persuade the people, not five members of the Supreme Court.

Back at the end of November Tovia Smith of NPR reported on who decides what is age-appropriate in libraries. This is an important question in an era of people wanting to ban books.

The process of classifying books can be somewhat inconsistent. Books usually get an initial designation from authors and publishers. Then, professional book reviewers usually weigh in with their own age-bracket recommendation, and distributors and booksellers can do the same. But ultimately, local library staff make the final call about the books they buy and where they should go.

And those eager to ban want to influence that last step. Libraries respond that parents are involved because many librarians are parents. Other ideas, beyond banning, are being considered. One is to put the troublesome books in the adult section and let parents ask for library cards that restrict what a child can check out. Want to restrict what your child can read while in the library? That’s on the parent. Another proposal, being considered in Washington state, is a rating system similar to the G, PG, etc system used by movies. The problem is who gets to decide which book gets what rating, a liberal group a conservative group, or the publishers? Some say government should apply the ratings and others respond government should not legislate morality. And we’re familiar with new laws to make book banning easier. Also from the end of November Laura Clawson of Kos reported:

The story was ridiculous enough on the surface: A 20-year-old woman showed up at a Texas school board meeting and insisted that a kiss depicted in a specific children’s book had set her on the path to a pornography addiction that left her depressed and suicidal within two years, at age 13.

Clawson said that 11 year old, if tormented by a depiction of a kiss, is likely to have other factors going on. It also appears the woman wasn’t telling the whole truth. She is an employee of Brave Books, a far-right publisher attempting to be a competitor of Scholastic. So honesty isn’t one of the family values they want to teach. Even so, that particular book was another banned by the district. In early December Clawson reported:

Republicans like to rail against public schools as “government schools,” with the implication that they are sites where the government brainwashes children with liberal and “woke” ideology. Now, Florida Republicans are in court arguing that Florida public schools are their government schools and can be required to push their message—all the way down to the books in the school libraries. In response to two lawsuits against the Escambia County and Lake County school boards and, in one case, state education officials, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody and the two school boards are arguing, as Moody put it in her brief, that “Public-school systems, including their libraries, convey the government’s message.” According to Moody, who is representing the state, public school libraries are “a forum for government speech,” not a “forum for free expression.” The logical extension of that position is that whoever is in charge of the government gets to decide on all of the information that is not only taught in schools but available in their libraries. Republicans are of course safe in pushing this idea because while they will ban books with LGBTQ+ characters and anti-racist messages, Democratic administrations tend to leave decisions up to the professionals in the schools. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, for example, is not pushing for the removal of books with straight characters because she is herself LGBTQ+.

In mid December Nadra Nittle in an article for The 19th posted on Kos reported some good news in the book preservation front. Last June Grandparents for Truth formed. They are elders and allies mobilizing to give children “the freedom to learn.” They do the same things Moms for Liberty do – show up at school board meetings and become candidates for school board – but with a message to include people of color and LGBTQ people and with a stance against bigotry. The group is sponsored by People for the American Way, established by Norman Lear back in 1981 to counter the Moral Majority. Most of this article is an interview with Alana Byrd, PFAW’s national field director, and Marge Baker, PFAW’s executive director, about Grandparents for Truth. I’ll let you read it, though I’ll mention Byrd said her mother is a child of Holocaust survivors who frequently heard the story that book banning is how authoritarianism starts. Every year Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, MI issues an annual list of words they believe should be banished from use due to misuse, overuse, and general uselessness. Some of the words on this year’s list: Impact – overused and there is a good word that makes more sense: affect. At the end of the day – overused, “often employed as a rhetorical device that attempts to encapsulate the complexities of a situation summarily, lacking nuance and depth.” Iconic – too often used to refer to things that aren’t really iconic. Cringe-worthy – “The irony is served hot, as the very term ‘cringe-worthy’ finds itself under the spotlight. It’s like a word caught in its own cringe-worthy moment.” Side hustle – “Our contributors feel that the only hustle is the one needed to get to their second job.”

Writing off whole schools as needing detention not education

One day after writing about a book I’m writing about another. This one is short – only 125 pages of text and another ten of photos. The book is How We Sleep at Night by Sara Cunningham. It is her story of coming to terms with her son Parker being gay – when he told her she definitely did not sleep well at night. The Cunningham family attended a Baptist church, mostly because that was the one in the neighborhood. They became deeply involved in the church because they felt cared for, not that they were strong believers in every point in the doctrine. But when Parker told her he was gay her main thought was: How do I keep my son from going to hell? It took her a while to see that he wasn’t. She saw when he fell in love with a man he became more confident. During her process she became annoyed with the way her church treated her and the kinds of prayers they said for her son. It’s been many years since I’ve read these kinds of stories. Alas, they’re still happening (though this one is almost ten years old) and some with much worse outcomes. Cunningham doesn’t work through the Bible passages used to condemn LGBTQ people, though she does list a few books that do. Each chapter of the book ends with the lyrics of one of Parker’s songs. A website is included so the reader can listen to Parker sing it. Alas, ten years later that is now an Asian site. I did find a YouTube video of Parker singing, but a song that was not related to the book. An online search of Sara shows that she offers “Free Mom Hugs” at pride events and has offered to be the mom at any gay wedding. Dartagnan of the Daily Kos community discussed that the nasty guy and Putin desperately need each other. To evade jail the nasty guy needs to get reelected and get his Department of Justice cronies to call off the cases against him. And to do that he needs Putin’s election interference that he enjoyed back in 2016. To not lose in Ukraine Putin needs the nasty guy to get elected. Once in office the nasty guy will pull out of NATO, thus weakening it, and put an end to America’s supply of military equipment to Ukraine. To make all that not happen a few other things should happen. First, the nasty guy should be convicted well before the 2024 election. Second, Ukraine should push Russia out of its territory before our election. And third, we need to be prepared for the onslaught of interference. That interference is definitely already being planned for, the onslaught not so much. And as part of that preparation we need to improve our capabilities to thwart that interference. Americans have a right to know what hostile foreign agents are trying to influence our voters. Related to the nasty guy’s criminal liability Mark Sumner of Kos wrote about more indictments against him. Media was expecting indictments related to Georgia election tampering or to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. But those haven’t dropped yet. This set of indictments are additions to the case of failing to turn over classified documents. The main part of this is an attempt (I’m not sure, did he succeed?) to destroy surveillance camera images, the destruction of evidence he was told to preserve. There are also additional charges against the nasty guy, the big one being he waived around a classified document at his Bedminster resort. The nasty guy is up to 40 indictments, a few more were added to his valet Walt Nauta and a few were given to aide Carlos De Oliviera. Hunter of Kos reported that “libraries in at least 28 Houston public schools are being repurposed into ‘disciplinary centers.’ ” Students who misbehave will be sent there. They might watch lessons virtually, work alone, or work with other detained students. The books will still be there (that’s quite a concession!), but the librarians and media specialists were laid off. All this is being done by the new state-appointed superintendent of Houston schools.

This is what a failed state looks like: lots of guns, lots of focus on discipline, and lots of contempt for anybody who looks like they might grow up to be a book-learner. ... But "most" of the 28 schools that will have their librarians relocated to other campuses "are located in low-income communities of color," notes Houston Public Media, and again: You can't get a more on-the-nose example of how Republican-led states are trying to reshape our schools than removing school librarians in communities of color so that they can repurpose the rooms into disciplinary centers. Are we supposed to pretend this is anything but what it looks like? Because it looks like writing off whole schools full of kids as needing detention rather than education.

I’m finally getting to a pundit roundup by Greg Dworkin for Kos originally posted December 17, 2022. Pundits were talking about classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and COVID vaccines. There was also a pair of quotes from Noah Smith tweeting and writing on Substack. The tweet is from August 28, 2017 and says:

15 years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet.

And from Substack in 2022:

Five years ago I was sitting around drinking a beer with my college buddy Dayv. I was scrolling through Twitter and watching people get mad at Donald Trump’s latest outrage, and I said “You know…fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now the real world is an escape from the internet.” “Tweet that!”, Dayv said, so I did. That banal observation became my most popular tweet of all time, and the quote has now been posted ad infinitum on content mills all over the web.

There was a hearing in Congress about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (formerly known as UFOs). I’m not going to get into that. Though one frame of a comic by Brian McFadden of Kos comics is worth sharing. It shows Mr. Spock of Star Trek saying:

Earth is experiencing multiple crises that require immediate action and you’re investigating imaginary phenomena? Highly illogical.

Americans want to work for companies with vaccine requirements

Yesterday I reported that Moscow Mitch agreed to not filibuster the bill to raise the debt ceiling. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported that he didn’t explain that well to his fellow Republicans and had a bit of trouble getting the ten votes needed to end the filibuster. He did, with a vote to spare. Those who voted against it accused Mitch of caving to the Democrats (some Democrats gleefully saying the same thing). They were encouraged to hold firm by the nasty guy. So maybe Mitch doesn’t have all that much control over his party. The actual bill passed 50-48 and goes on to the house. As I mentioned yesterday, this bill gives the Treasury enough borrowing power to last until early December. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, has several interesting quotes, all in this block. First is a tweet from Kate Irby.

So after a pileup of deadlines in September, Congress has punted: - the debt cliff until December - a government shutdown until December - infrastructure/reconciliation until the end of the month

In response to a story of Biden making another push for vaccine mandates, a tweet by Ben Wakana:

Incredible nugget in this story. United Airlines received 20,000 applications for 2,000 flight attendant positions – a ratio HIGHER THAN BEFORE THE PANDEMIC. Americans *want* to work for companies with vaccine requirements.

A tweet from Brad Heath:

New from @reuters: One America News, the right-wing cable network that peddled 2020 election conspiracies, gets nearly all of its revenue from AT&T.

Alas, various phone companies hold monopolies on land lines in an area. From Nieman Reports:

The Cleveland Plain Dealer recently declared they would be taking a fairly radical approach going forward. Editor Chris Quinn stated the paper would ignore false statements from U.S. Senate candidate Josh Mandel that the paper believed were ploys for attention. Mandel has promoted the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen and advocated rescinding Ohio’s mask mandate earlier in the pandemic. Publishing outright false claims by politicians only serves the politicians’ agenda, argues Quinn, and his newsroom would not be complicit.

And from the Washington Post:

Who believes in conspiracy theories? Statistically speaking: almost everyone. A team of researchers recently showed several thousand Americans a list of 20 common conspiracy theories and asked if they believed them. These included false conspiracy theories about the John F. Kennedy assassination, 5G cellular wireless technology, Barack Obama’s birth certificate, covid-19 and climate change. The result: Nine in 10 Americans believed in at least one conspiracy theory.

Laura Clawson of Kos reported Federal District Judge Robert Ptiman ordered the new Texas abortion law be suspended. Texas will appeal to the highly conservative 5th district. That may not matter because the Supreme Court is already scheduled to hear a case to end Roe v. Wade. That threat has prompted several reproductive rights groups to change their stance and now favor the elimination of the filibuster. I’ve heard women’s health clinics in Texas have not resumed offering abortions, even though this ruling says they can. There’s a little detail in the bill that says if it isn’t struck down it is retroactive through the time it is suspended. Boatsie of the Climate Brief, part of the Kos community wrote that a big part, perhaps enough of a part, of our climate change problem can be solved though Nature. There are an estimated 4.4 billion acres not used for agriculture or urban development that could be reforested. Wetlands and grasslands can be protected and improved. The practice of agroecology can create sustainable food systems and help end inequality. All of this can pull a significant amount of carbon from the air (and I’ll let you read the numbers) which will significantly reduce climate change. Commenter Mercy Ormont believes the numbers in the story are correct. Some people make money from cutting down trees (both for lumber and for clearing the land for crops – see Brazil’s rainforest). So until they can make at least as much money preserving trees and planting more it won’t happen. Grasslands and wetlands won’t be preserved and strengthened as long as more money can be made by destroying them. Without big policy changes, strengthening Nature ain’t gonna happen. Which is why it hasn’t happened yet. In another comment the author linked to an article listing ways Biden, through executive orders, can take significant action on climate change. Hundreds of environmental groups have made sure knows about what he can do. Yet, he hasn’t. Alec Luhn, a former Russia correspondent and now working for Scripps in environmental journalism, tweeted:

Russia says its forests absorb so much CO2 that it can *increase* emissions thru 2050 & even start selling carbon credits. Meanwhile wildfires here have released more CO2 in 3 months than Germany does in a year...

Luhn then reviewed the fire situation in the Russian Taiga, the world’s largest forest. Fires are now burning hotter, longer, and more often. Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist, tweeted about the results of a study by Alexander Bor and Michael Bang Peterson:

The internet doesn't turn people into trolls. It just makes their trolling more visible. 8 studies, over 8k people: if you're an asshole online, you're probably an asshole in person too. Trolls choose aggression to get attention. It's better to ignore them than feed them.

I didn’t know – The National Center for Lesbian Rights tweeted that today is International Lesbian Day. The tweet includes the slogan “A day without lesbians is like a day without sunshine.” Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos shared some late night commentary. Here are a couple.

The infrastructure bill has been delayed indefinitely. So I guess we'll just cross that bridge when it collapses on top of us. —Colin Jost, SNL This should be a no-brainer: just get rid of the filibuster. It's an old rule historically used to preserve racist policies, it's not in the Constitution, and yet it's blocking the United States' ability to stay solvent. Keeping the filibuster would be like an E.M.T. trying to defibrillate someone and going, 'You know, I'd love to save his life but I can't—he's wearing white after Labor Day. He'll be missed…but not in those pants. —Stephen Colbert

You haven't crossed the red line yet. Keep trying.

I read through the transcript of another podcast from Gaslit Nation, this one titled A New Era of Cyberwar. Hosts Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior brought on Andy Greenberg of WIRED. His latest book is Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt or the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers.

Perhaps I should start with an explanation of the series title Gaslit Nation. There were movies made in Britain in 1940 and America in 1944 with the title Gaslight. In both of them a female character is repeatedly told that what she sees and hears is not true. The term gaslighting means a form of psychological abuse in which the victim is manipulated into doubting their own reality, to undermine their confidence and credibility.

Kendzior and Chalupa are saying that the nasty guy, the GOP, and the entire transnational crime syndicate in which they operate is gaslighting the entire nation. An example is the brazen attempts to declare that Ukraine hacked the 2016 election and not Russia.

Here’s Greenberg’s summary of the book:

This is a story about a cyberwar that unfolded in Ukraine that the world has watched unfold without reacting, without coming to the defense of this country in the shadow of Russia. As a few, Cassandra has warned that this cyberwar was going to spill out to the rest of the world, and it did. That is the arc of the book. By the time that we felt the effects of this cyberwar in the West, it was too late. I think that you guys have told the story of Ukraine as something of like a canary in a coal mine for the West, and this story kind of mirrors that as well.

Ukraine is a land caught between East and West. It is the borderlands, the pawn that both sides fight over. Through history it has been intertwined with Russia. Chalupa has said many times, “It’s a miracle that Ukraine as a country even exists.” Ukranians want what they see in London or LA – to be able to rules themselves and not be anyone’s pawn.

At the moment Russia wants to pull Ukraine back into its sphere of influence. So Russia does to Ukraine what it intends to do to the rest of the world. And one of the first things they did was meddle in the Ukrainian election in 2014, two years before they would do the same thing in America. To understand Putin and what he intends for the world look at what he’s doing in Ukraine.

In December of both 2015 and 2016 Russia hacked the Ukraine power grid and turned off the power to hundreds of thousands of people. Greenberg made the connection and wrote about it in WIRED. The day that issue hit the newsstands the NotPetya cyberattack hit Ukraine and spread to the rest of the world. Greenberg didn’t think his prediction would come true quite that fast. From the book’s introduction about what happened in Ukraine:

ATM and credit card payment systems inexplicably dropped offline, mass transit and the country's capital of Kyiv was crippled. Government agencies, airports, hospitals, and the postal service, even scientists monitoring radioactivity levels at the ruins of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, all watched helplessly as practically every computer in their network was infected and wiped by a mysterious piece of malicious code. This is what cyberwar looks like. An invisible force capable of striking out from an unknown origin to sabotage on a massive scale, the technologies that underpin civilization.

In America one big effect was all 17 of the shipping terminals owned by Maersk were paralyzed. Ships arrived at these ports and could not be unloaded.

Because most of the damage was in Ukraine, the world barely noticed.

Partly why we didn’t notice was the big companies that were hit didn’t want to talk about it.

And our government, starting with Obama, ignored it, thinking it was just Ukraine’s problem. They’re not even in NATO.

One group of hackers is called Sandworm because some of the stuff associated with their malware references the science fiction novel Dune. So hackers who crossed all sorts of red lines deserved rebuke and punishment, which didn’t happen. The nasty guy has this big blindspot whenever there is talk of what Russia is doing in Ukraine.

The idea for these cyberattacks came from Stuxnet. This was the first malware designed to destroy something in the physical world. At a time when Iran was using centrifuges to enrich uranium this malware, created by the US and Israel, was introduced to the facility housing the centrifuges. The malware instructed them to do crazy things, which destroyed them.

Did we prevent Iran from making a nuclear bomb or stop Israel from attacking Iran? Perhaps. But we also gave Russia the idea for hackers to mess with power plants. There’s one difference – Russian hackers, Kremlin people in general, are willing to cause massive collateral damage and let civilians be harmed or killed. Stuxnet was targeted. NitPetya was not.

Some of us still think that we go “over there” to fight wars. Our oceans protect us. But cyberwarfare is without borders. Malware can easily hop an ocean. Greenberg:

Sandworm, to me, seems to be this kind of collection of motives, these disruptive acts of massive sabotage. They do send a message to the West. They say, "We have this ability, if you mess with us, we can turn off your power, we can unleash destructive worms in America." That does box in what I think the US is willing to do in Syria, in Ukraine, for instance, when we know that that capability is in Russian hands. But there's also almost terroristic effect of these attacks. They are their own sort of influence operation. They make Ukrainians scared. They make Ukrainians lose confidence in their own governments. They try to make Ukraine look like a failed State. That is, I think part of their intention.

There may be other motives for their actions. One motive might be massive machismo – I created this tool and I’m going to use it. I don’t care about the consequences of my actions. Another motive might be petty – since Russia was banned from the 2018 Olympics for doping they may have been the ones behind the hack of the Olympic computer systems. If Russia can’t enjoy the Olympics, no one will.

Greenberg again:

Hackers in countries like Iran and North Korea and Russia, they have a kind of insurgent mentality. I think they want to blow things up in part because that is how you destabilize the global order and put yourself in a better position. Whereas, the US, and even China, they use their cyber capabilities very strategically just to advance their own interests, and in a way, that is often pretty restrained and limited. Even in China's case, it's really just espionage for the most part.

And, of course, the Chinese are using these tools against their own citizens. As for the US, they have teams trying disrupt the attacks of others. But their efforts are very targeted against only the perpetrators. American teams could be causing blackouts, but are careful not to.

How to counter this? “Banks, not tanks.” Diplomacy and sanctions, not warfare. At the very least, calling it out. Greenberg said:

Why don't we see more White House statements about these unacceptable cyber attacks saying this is a red line? The arena of cyber warfare is one where the red lines are still being drawn. If you don't call out unacceptable attacks, then you essentially are telling the adversary, "Well, you haven't crossed the red line yet. Keep trying." And that's what they've done.

There should be a Geneva Convention for the internet around cyberwar. Such things as touching a hospital or a power grid are considered a war crime.

What are we waiting for?

I learned something this morning. My digital indoor-outdoor thermometer has two digits, plus a decimal digit for the outdoor temperature. So when the temperature is below -9.9 it can’t display the negative. When I got up this morning it read 10.2. A while later it read -9.8.

That also means it can’t display temperatures above 99.9 – which it hasn’t had to do in the dozen or more years I’ve had it.

To add a bit more to the cold weather fun: Consumers Energy, a big supplier of natural gas for home heating in the Detroit area, sent out a notice yesterday saying there had been a fire in one of their substations. They were getting concerned about making sure everyone had a sufficient supply of gas. They didn’t think the cause of the fire was related to the cold, though the timing was quite inconvenient. The big auto manufacturers shut down a couple shifts and CE asked all of us residential users to move our thermostats down a few extra degrees. CE sent out another notice saying we can resume normal heating at midnight tonight.



After the nasty guy held government workers hostage for 35 days there have been several bills that propose ways to prevent further shutdowns. Democrats stopped supporting them when they realized what could happen. If bills to fund certain parts of the government are not passed, the shutdown would be prevented by funding at previous levels. So what if the GOP keeps doing this for several years? This mechanism wouldn’t be adjusted for inflation so the affected departments would effectively see budget cuts.



Chris Vickery, in a Twitter thread, is hesitant to point out what bots – robots in the internet – are capable of. But we need to think about defenses. With so much of your info out there here are things that evil people might do: Put your name on hundreds of college application forms so your phone won’t stop ringing for weeks. Emails designed to evade spam filters pour in, hundreds per hour. Faked pornography of you sent to everyone you’ve friended. Your credit score is requested repeatedly, which tanks your score. Voice powered bots call your landlord, boss, neighbors, and friends with stories of how you beat your wife.

And here's the kicker- You don't know why you are being targeted. You don't know who *exactly* the adversary is. That is part of the strategy. You were chosen to be targeted because an algorithm believes you are the right combination of destroyable with effective chain reactions.

You see, they don't need to target everyone. They only need to target the right people, with the right technique(s), at the right time to cause cascading failures which destroy you and everyone else within, or allied with, your nation. That is one coming storm. We need defenses.

Tuxedo Mask has a Twitter thread with a series of charts that explain things – or at least explain why something is wrong – in one chart. He has charts that show the problem with for-profit healthcare, gun violence in America, income inequality, the student loan debt crisis, and who benefits from the 2017 tax scam.



Melissa McEwan of Shakesville is puzzled and highly annoyed that the nasty guy is still in office. What are we waiting for?
http://www.shakesville.com/2019/01/the-time-is-now-get-trump-outta-there.html

What we can observe, in public, on Twitter, every day, is enough to justify Congressional action to begin the legal process for removing Trump from office. There is no reason to wait, and every reason to be urgent and decisive.

People insist we need “proof.” Proof of what? asks McEwan. Things we can see happening every day?

We have the agent of a foreign government sitting in the Oval Office. What greater motivation could we possibly need to take action?

McEwan says this isn’t just a call to House Democrats to speed things up. She also calls on the GOP, even though she knows how improbable that is. And we’re called to action too.

I feel like we exist in this weird half-space, where most people are somehow simultaneously in denial about the gravity of what's happening and also already resigned to whatever happens next.

Olympic technology

A busy few days between the Detroit Symphony Orchestra French Festival (programs 3 & 4 this week) and Olympic figure skating – in addition to the other things I do. Watching the Olympics has been a technological adventure.

I bought my TV in 1982. No big deal because for the last few years I turn it on maybe a half-dozen times a year. Connected to it is a VCR machine given to me by my friend and debate partner because he wasn’t using it anymore (back during the Winter Olympics of 2014). Though not used much the TV is showing its age. It used to take a half hour to warm up and clear the snow (yeah, it is connected to cable) and when I turned it on earlier this past week it was still snowy after an hour. So while I could watch opening ceremonies on it I decided to try live-streaming, which worked pretty well.

Then came the men’s figure skating short program Thursday evening. That afternoon I couldn’t get live-streaming to work. All I got was the network logo and 3 blinking lights saying it is thinking. Never anything more, never an error message. I called my internet provider. They were unable to help and sent my case to the team that handled difficult cases. They were to call back within 24 hours.

I watched it live – well, the TV was on all evening and I looked at it about every 15 minutes to see if they had stepped away from skiing. I think they went to skating around 10:00. The network broke for news a bit after 11:00 with comments that the best skaters were still to come. So I recorded to about 1:30 am.

I watched it Friday morning. And what I thought was advertised as prime time viewing actually ended around 1:00 am. Glad I didn’t wait up.

So Friday evening I set the VCR to record the men’s long program, setting it for 8 pm to 1 am, and went off to the concert. While I was gone that call finally came.

I called them Saturday afternoon. I spent an hour on the phone with the technician. He couldn’t get it to work with Firefox, my browser of choice, so we switched to Chrome (which is installed, but rarely used). He finally determined that Adobe Flash was out of date. Not surprising, since Firefox doesn’t play well with Flash and never gets used. So I did a Flash update and some browser tweaking and I got live-streaming to work on Chrome.

Back on Firefox I tried it and finally got an error message: Flash is out of date and is a security risk.

So back to Chrome. The video of the men’s long program wasn’t easy to find. A few listed streams were the highlights – such as a particular skaters several quad jumps. The tech guy persevered and found how I could watch 3 hours of the event. But it was time to prepare for the evening concert.

This afternoon and evening I watched it – all 3 hours. And a zillion commercials. I found I could not jump over the commercials. And if I happened to back up a bit to far I had to wait through a batch of them again. It didn’t take long to find the mute.

I think there were 30 men in the short program. On what I had recorded I saw the Americans and the top six. Out of those 24 advance to the long program and are put in blocks of six skaters according to their standings after the short program. In this 3 hour video I saw blocks 4, 3, and 2. I enjoyed American Nathan Chen’s wonderful performance, a rebound after a disastrous short program that left an expected medalist in 17th place (he won the long program and finished 5th). There was also gay American Adam Rippon in a fabulous performance. He didn’t have the quad jumps of the leaders, so couldn’t earn a medal. Even so, he was excellent at what he did.

But there was no block 1 in this video, nothing of the top six.

I did find separate videos of the performances of the medal winners. But not of the other three in the block.

Strange.

Rippon’s competition is over. In the men’s program he placed 7th in the short program and 10th in the long program, for an overall position of 10th. In the team competition, which I didn’t watch, he and the USA team took bronze. Quite good. For the second week of the Olympics he has been hired by NBC. And once back in America he won’t be taking his bronze medal to the White House.

Live streaming worked well enough that I will probably use it for ice dancing and ladies programs.

Doing it fraudulently

Yesterday in my post about Ajit Pai of the FCC wanting to end an open internet I wrote, “1.52 comments in opposition left on the cumbersome FCC website versus only 23,000 in favor.”

A correction to that sentence. It should be “1.52 million comments…” I apologize for leaving out a very important word.

And an explanation. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reports that data scientist Jeff Kao analyzed the comments. He determined that 1.3 million of the comments in favor of ending an open internet were generated by bots and thus were fake. Kao calculated that “more than 99% of the truly unique comments were in favor of keeping net neutrality.” So my corrected sentence above shows data after Kao’s analysis. All those fake comments – and the acknowledgment that they are fake – allows “Pai’s office to argue that the comments should not be seen as a legitimate expression of public opinion.”

Eric Boehlert of Shareblue reports the corrupted the comments aren’t a new revelation. The comment page was opened in April. By May, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman started investigating. Some of those fake comments came from people whose identities were misused (a better word might be “stolen.” That includes tens of thousands of New Yorkers and hundreds of thousands nationwide. Schneiderman has repeatedly asked the FCC to hand over records. He hasn’t received any reply.

Wrote McCarter:

Pai is going to ignore what the American people want, and give the internet away to a few players like Comcast and Verizon. He's doing it fraudulently, by ignoring cheating and lying. Because of course he is. That's how Republicans get everything they want.

Thoroughly not supported

The head of the Federal Communications Commission Ajit Pai is proposing removing the net neutrality rules, or open internet rules. The FCC board will, I think, vote on it in mid December. That board has 3 GOP members and 2 Dems.

Removing the open internet rules means that an internet service provider (ISP), a company that connect your computer or phone with the internet, can do such things as:

* Charge you extra for certain content, such as a competitor’s streaming service, because they want to prod you to use their own streaming service.

* Instead, they may slow down the info from certain sites (like competitors), enough that using those sites become irritating to use.

* Or they may simply block some sites. One big internet company, ClearChannel, is owned by fundamentalists. And we know what kinds of sites they would want to block.

I’m lucky that I live in an area that has (I think) four companies that could connect me to the internet. If I get pissed off at the current one (and opposing an open internet is a big reason) I can switch – even though doing so will be a pain because I’d have to change my email address and so many websites I visit are geared to that address.

But two-thirds of American consumers have only one choice of provider. These companies are monopolies.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville calls this “dreadful news.” “Kyriarchy” is a word she uses for what I call ranking – the widely held belief that some people are supposed hold a societal rank over others.

One of the most dangerous potential outcomes of subverting Net Neutrality is that media with the broadest potential audience — i.e. kyriarchy-upholding garbage, which makes money hand over fist — will be the most cheaply accessible, while specialized media — i.e. kyriarchy-challenging material, which struggles to turn a profit — will be the most expensive, since media producers invested in social justice don't tend to get rich from their work.

That kyriarchy-challenging material refers to any site run by any minority (black or ethnic, LGBT, feminist, Muslim, etc.) that challenges white male supremacy. We may lose our diverse voices.

That prompted a response from reader Ignatius Cheezburger:

The other concern being that if the ISP happens to endorse or support certain political or cultural views as a matter of corporate policy, that ISP can now selectively filter certain content for priority delivery that is in keeping with their views and other content that runs contrary to those views for lower priority delivery, or no delivery at all. For example, NARAL or Planned Parenthood suddenly finds its alerts and updates getting bounced from all of its members within the ClearChannel family. Not good. Not good at all.

McEwan urges us to make noise in Congress and mentions ways to do so. I’ve done it and urge you to do it to.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a series of tweets, notes how thoroughly this move by Pai is not supported by the public – 1000 small business owners, investors, and tech startups. 900 video creators whose content is viewed by 240 million viewers. 200 international businesses. 52 racial justice, civil rights, and human rights organizations. Dozens of ISPs across the country. 120,000 libraries. Privacy organizations. Attorneys General from a dozen states. 60 mayors. National Association of Realtors. 1.52 [ETA] million comments in opposition left on the cumbersome FCC website versus only 23,000 in favor. 77% of Americans (73% of GOP and 80% of Dems) as shown by a poll.

So if the public and virtually every facet of Internet culture (including ISPs) oppose the FCC’s plan, then why are we even going down this path? To put it simply: the FCC is not serving the public interest but is rather serving the interests of the very few but massively vertically integrated ISPs that support the current agency’s agenda.

Put another way: campaign cash.

In reply Paul Geffen tweeted:

Also the interests of the government in controlling access to information and communication.

I pledge allegiance to humanity

When the Equifax data heist was announced I figured my data was stolen. I put a credit freeze on all three credit reporting services (doing it through Equifax was free). I signed up for a credit reporting service through my insurance company (not through Equifax). I tried to get my current credit reports but couldn’t because of the system overload.

But I didn’t think the mess would spread way beyond financial. Waldo Jaquith tweeted:

In some states, using only the information found in Equifax’s records, you can screw with people’s voter registrations.

Amadi responded in a tweet:

Ask yourself who might want the kind of info in the Equifax hack and for what purpose.

I’ve been quoting and linking to Melissa McEwan of Shakseville a lot over the last couple years. Over that time and quite a bit since January she has been highly critical of the nasty guy, documenting his travesties. She discusses both the well reported stuff and the important but obscure stuff. Then she explains it well.

Such as this bit: The nasty guy isn’t making life difficult for just illegal immigrants. He doesn’t like legal ones either. The Department of Homeland Security has issued plans to collect social media info on all immigrants. This includes permanent residents and naturalized citizens. And the net is to include all US citizens who communicate with them.

Citizen advocates are alarmed, saying it is “an invasion of privacy and deters freedom of speech.”

McEwan is especially frightened of this announcement because her husband is a naturalized citizen. This could prompt the gov’t to start surveillance of her highly critical blog. Will she soon no longer be safe here?



An example of McEwan’s insight and criticism of the nasty guy is this look at why he is so upset with the football players who take a knee or link arms during the national anthem. In sports people with highly different politics can root for the same team. White boys can have black and female role models. It costs nothing to be a fan, no one has to buy the souvenirs or even a ticket. It isn’t exclusive to the wealthy. It is a way of uniting people. And the nasty guy doesn’t want that.

Commenter xpctmr adds another angle. Professional sports is a distraction from daily troubles. White folks can admire black folks.

So for black players to say, "Hey, by the way, since you care so much about me, how about acknowledging that even I, in my relatively privileged position, suffer racist attacks and am at risk of being unjustly killed, and that people all over this country who look like me are, too, including my family and loved ones?" breaks the implicit understanding (by whites) that black folks should know (and stay in) their place, and not interrupt a ceremony white folks are using to escape their lives, nor pop their privilege bubbles.

White people don’t want to be reminded that in the same stadium black folks are experiencing racism while they try to enjoy the game.



Carina, a guest on Shakesville, explains why she stopped saying the Pledge of Allegiance many years ago. Her reasons are especially important when the pledge is for allegiance to a country now led by a tyrant. She offers a new pledge:

So, no, I do not pledge allegiance to a flag, a flag which is changeable, which can change hands from a true leader to a tyrant in a heartbeat. I pledge allegiance, instead, to the very best of what that flag has represented. I pledge allegiance to freedom, to liberty, and to justice. I pledge allegiance to humanity. I pledge allegiance to my sisters and siblings of the human race, the downtrodden, the forgotten, the marginalized. I pledge allegiance to this Earth we share. I pledge allegiance to Black lives. I pledge allegiance to every woman and person who desires bodily autonomy. I pledge allegiance to indigenous water protectors. I pledge allegiance to the undocumented, the detained, the banned, the deported.

I pledge allegiance to myself, to always remain true to what lives in my heart. I pledge allegiance to you and me. That is my pledge. And this pledge I will stand for.

Even as Houston is recovering from Hurricane Harvey the debate over Confederate monuments continue to rage. While waiting for monuments to be taken down TransGriot proposes what might take their place. TransGriot describes herself as a black trans woman. Her choices:

Barbara Jordan, first black woman elected to the Texas Senate and the first black elected to the Texas legislature since Reconstruction. She was also elected to the US House in 1972 and part of the Watergate impeachment hearings.

George Leland, a black man who succeeded Jordan in the US House and chair of the House Select Committee on Hunger.

Kathy Whitmire, first female mayor of Houston who broke the power of the “good old boys.”

I’ve heard others say you want to to honor history of the South? Let’s replace Confederate monuments with monuments to those who battled slavery, such as Harriet Tubman.

Pardon me

A couple tweets from Minnesota Senator Al Franken:

Without Net Neutrality, what will happen to Americans using internet as a place to fight against injustices? We can’t afford to find out.

The internet is a place where ppl can tell their own stories & come together to work toward justice, equality for all bc of Net Neutrality.

The nasty guy and his team are working hard to figure out how to stop the investigation into his affairs with Russia. Special counsel Robert Mueller is apparently getting too close. The nasty guy and his team are also discussing the presidential authority to grant pardons. Does that include his children? Or himself?

Tantamount to shutting down free speech

The new Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai has led his team into the first step in undoing net neutrality, the rules that say internet service providers must treat all traffic the same. They can’t slow down or block traffic from sites they compete against or disagree with. The first vote was 2-1 in favor of undoing the rules.

There will now be 90 days of comments. And the comment process is looking mighty suspicious.

Joan McCarter of DailyKos wrote:

Shutting down the open internet is tantamount to shutting down free speech and doing it for Trump makes it even more fraught with danger.

Carvell Wallace emphasizes that last point in a series of tweets:
https://twitter.com/carvellwallace/status/866768598143909889

If you’ve noticed that black and brown writers, media makers, activist, etc have a much bigger role in the conversation, if you’ve notices that writers like me have a platform now when we would not have 20 years ago, then you should know that it’s because the internet has to a significant extent removed traditional gatekeepers from media. Back in the 90’s you COULD NOT GET ON unless a white person gave you permission. And that could be revoked if you talked too crazy. Social media, and the initial (relative) even-handedness and openness of the net has changed that, has allowed us to talk openly, honestly. This is EXACTLY why whiteness is being so roundly question as a benign and neutral default. This is EXACTLY how patriarchy is coming to be publicly and widely examined for the fucking bullshit scourge that it is. NET NEUTRALITY is about all that. This is literally an attempt to return ALL media to paying corporations.

It’s not the common man

Yesterday the House approved a bill, already passed by the Senate, to rescind the rules saying an Internet Service Provider must get your permission before selling what they know about you, including such things as all the websites you visit. The nasty guy hasn’t signed it yet, but there is little doubt he will.

That has left me wondering whether I should be proud of the sites I visit that resist the nasty guy, even if that history might someday be used against me. That has also had me trying to figure out what a Virtual Private Network is, how it works, and if it keeps my ISP from snooping. I haven’t gotten very far in that quest (the Wikipedia entry on VPN is filled with tech jargon). A second quest might be to see if there are providers in my area who vow not to sell my data.

I’m aware there are millions of people who wouldn’t know how to deal with a VPN or don’t have an alternate company in their area.

T.C. Sottek of The Verge has a list of all 265 members of Congress who gave away our privacy. With each name is now much money internet providers have donated to them in the last year. I didn’t compute a grand total, but it looks like internet companies got what they wanted for a bargain. Buying Congress must be cheap these days.

Those active in social media know about trolls, those people who harass others with differing opinions (Melissa McEwan of Shakesville is well acquainted with trolls). These trolls depend on being able to attack anonymously. Internet privacy is highly important to them. Andy Cush of Spin reports they are extremely ticked-off that the nasty guy, someone they strongly supported, would consider damaging their privacy. Cush notes:

Incidentally, the episode is a useful cautionary tale for impressionable young Trump supporters about the Republican Party’s conflation of free-market corporatism and individual liberty in general. When you deregulate industries, it’s not the common man who enjoys new freedoms. It’s the people and organizations who already have lots of money and power–in this case, the ISPs. And when those people in power are given an opportunity to further exploit the common people who rely on them for essential services in exchange for a little more money, they’ll always take it.