When asked to explain a topic, students often realize that they don't understand it as well as they thought. The same thing happens when someone is asked to explain the consequences of a government policy. They tend to realize they don't understand the issue very well, and moderate their opinion.

A public official may not appoint, employ, promote, advance, or advocate for appointment, employment, promotion, or advancement, in or to a civilian position in the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control any individual who is a relative of the public official.

NJ state legislature passed a bill that would require candidates for president and vice president to release their tax returns in order to appear on the state's ballots. The bill is yet to be signed by Gov. Chris Christie, a Trump supporter. NM, HI, OR, and CA are considering similar bills.

Rainey died inside that shower. He was found crumpled on the floor. When his body was pulled out, nurses said there were burns on 90 percent of his body. A nurse said his body temperature was too high to register with a thermometer. And his skin fell off at the touch.

But in an unconscionable decision, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle's office announced Friday that the four guards who oversaw what amounted to a medieval-era boiling will not be charged with a crime.

Alexandra Petri mocks the Trump budget.

The White House, fooled by the sarcastic headline, shared it in their newsletter without bothering to look at it.

The situation with North Korea seems to be getting worse.

Google Home talking personal assistant spouts audio ads. Not much of a surprise.

New Internationalist, a left-wing worker cooperative publisher best known for its monthly magazine, is offering community shares.

http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/new-internationalist

Sebastian Gorka, President Trump’s top counter-terrorism adviser, is a formal member of a Hungarian far-right group that is listed by the U.S. State Department as having been “under the direction of the Nazi Government of Germany” during World War II, leaders of the organization have told the Forward.

...

Gorka’s membership in the organization — if these Vitézi Rend leaders are correct, and if Gorka did not disclose this when he entered the United States as an immigrant — could have implications for his immigration status. The State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual specifies that members of the Vitézi Rend “are presumed to be inadmissible” to the country under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The Justice Department has announced charges against four people, including two Russian security officials, over cybercrimes linked to a massive hack of millions of Yahoo user accounts. [500M accounts, in 2014]

Two of the defendants — Dmitry Dokuchaev and his superior Igor Sushchin — are officers of the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB. According to court documents, they "protected, directed, facilitated and paid" two criminal hackers, Alexsey Belan and Karim Baratov, to access information that has intelligence value. Belan also allegedly used the information obtained for his personal financial gain.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), Ranking Member of the House Committee on Financial Services, launched a new webpage dedicated to tracking President Trump’s destructive actions against consumers, investors, and the economy.

The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. Tired at length of anarchy, or want of government, they may take shelter in the arms of monarchy for repose and security.

Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy—not that this is the intention of the generality of them. Yet it would not be difficult to lay the finger upon some of their party who may justly be suspected. When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.”

Saw this quote on Twitter. It was selectively edited. I wish people wouldn't do that.

a principle of “organizing the world’s information” has to be separating reliable sources from unreliable ones, and trying to provide answers that are true. It’s clear that in many cases that’s not happening. The snippets, which create the impression of a definitive answer while feeding people bad science, conspiracy, and hate speech, make matters worse.

Google has become dangerous.

The zero response to an FOI asking for details of radio-active monsters, such as Godzilla, being reported to the CNC.

Steve Bannon is fond of a racist novel called The Camp of the Saints that is popular among white nationalists.

A company that sells internet-connected teddy bears that allow kids and their far-away parents to exchange heartfelt messages left more than 800,000 customer credentials, as well as two million message recordings, totally exposed online for anyone to see and listen.

Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, Breitbart, Cambridge Analytica, Brexit, and Trump.

“The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”

-- Jonathan Rust, Cambridge University Psychometric Centre

Free open source plans for "The Growroom," a spherical urban garden structure large enough to walk through. Requires plywood, screws, and access to a CNC machine to cut the plywood.

The Campus Carry movement is largely the creation of the Leadership Institute, a conservative activist organization, partnered with gun rights activists who are further right than the NRA. They have paid college students to form Campus Carry clubs.

Reporters from The Times, BuzzFeed News, CNN, The Los Angeles Times and Politico were not allowed to enter the West Wing office of the press secretary, Sean M. Spicer, for the scheduled briefing. Aides to Mr. Spicer only allowed in reporters from a handpicked group of news organizations that, the White House said, had been previously confirmed.

Claiming people are being paid to riot, Republican state senators voted Wednesday to give police new power to arrest anyone who is involved in a peaceful demonstration that may turn bad — even before anything actually happened.

SB1142 expands the state’s racketeering laws, now aimed at organized crime, to also include rioting. And it redefines what constitutes rioting to include actions that result in damage to the property of others.

Paul Ryan (WI) and Bob Goodlatte (VA) are claiming authority over who other congressmen are allowed to meet with.

Rep. Gutiérrez was among the Members who requested the meeting with the Acting ICE Director in a letter on February 11. A meeting originally scheduled for Tuesday with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and other Democrats in the House was cancelled at the last minute by ICE. It was rescheduled to today and turned into a Republican-led meeting run by Chairman Goodlatte and was apparently made invitation-only. Members were told by Chairman Goodltte at the meeting that any further meetings with ICE officials would have to be cleared by the Republican Judiciary Committee Chairman.

Tips for remote workers and remote-friendly companies.<br> Andy Mention https://twitter.com/amention<br> http://andymention.com/remote-tooling/

Morris Pelzel on Doug Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.

the presentation and arrangement of symbolic data is crucial, and any given arrangement may be more or less conducive to discovery. That is why Engelbart’s observation about “playing” with and “rearranging” the materials we are dealing with strikes such a resonant chord. Even if we are only dealing with text, the ease of recombining and manipulating our words and phrases enables our writing to more quickly reach a suitable form of expression.

as we are social animals, our intellects work most effectively, not in isolation but in connection with others. When thoughts and ideas are externally represented, they thereby enter to some degree a public space,

Gardner Campbell on Doug Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.

even as modes of comprehension increase for some, modes of incomprehension increase for others. The person who sits with “Joe” as Joe demonstrates his new symbol-manipulating capacities reacts in ways that many of us may recognize

...

It takes humility, and hospitality, to spend time with new ideas ... to go deep and go long with concepts that ask us to re-examine many things we take for granted.

Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto black people.

The common conception that ignorance and hate lead to racist ideas, and that racist ideas initiate racist policies, is largely ahistorical. It has actually been the inverse relationship—racial discrimination has led to racist ideas which has led to ignorance and hate.

Ibram X. Kendi https://twitter.com/DrIbram<br> "Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America"

The data Facebook collects, and what they do with it.

Growing up as a conservative Christian, I was warned about secular, liberal relativism. Nothing’s really bad, who knows, it’s all relative. We had to be careful about such slippery slopes.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Balance_fallacy<br> balance fallacy - The mistaken assumption that two sides of an argument have equal merit, so the truth or solution lies somewhere between the two. In reality, one view is often entirely wrong, and should be rejected. Or both views may be wrong, and the truth or solution has not yet been considered.

Why won't "liberals" just accept that Trump is president? Because Trump is an evil, incompetent piece of shit who should not be allowed to hold any government position, let alone the presidency. It isn't just liberals rejecting Trump -- it's anyone with common sense and decency.

The Munich Post versus Hitler -- and similarities between Hitler and Trump.

Andrew Postman says his father Neil got it right in "Amusing Ourselves to Death": our situation is more like Brave New World than 1984. But it's like both. Constant entertainment is a big part of what got us here, but we also have politicians practicing newspeak, and excessive surveillance.

Jay Rosen on the challenges journalists face under Trump, and several suggested countermeasures. An important one is making direct connections with common people and listening to their concerns, which will help build trust.

The Trump Score: "An updating tally of how often every member of the House and the Senate votes with or against the president."

An economist from Venezuela advises us that polarization is the main weapon of populism. We need to counter it.

Researchers at University College London have discovered a Twitter botnet of more than 350,000 accounts created in 2013, and dormant since then. They've also found another one with more than 500,000 accounts.

A rant against those on the far left who refuse to compromise, and criticize centrist Democrats -- yet don't hold their leaders to the same standards.

21 Jan 2017. Trump's White House press secretary Sean Spicer holds a press conference. He reads a prepared statement in which he berates the press and lies like a rug. He takes no questions.

never mind that fake news is neither new (forgery, quackery, and conspiracy theorizing are not recent inventions) nor exclusively right-leaning. The new form it has taken in readily sharable social media, however, has made it easy for conventional media to excuse themselves from responsibility for how the election was covered.

"Fake news" was a small factor, compared to mainstream media treating Trump as a legitimate candidate, and sensationalizing hacked emails that contained nothing significant.

How could political leaders betray what were supposed to be national values? How could brutal practices be embraced by ordinary Americans?

Or, as she put it, “Why did no one stop people from doing bad things?”

The answer you’re supposed to give to children – one I heard myself as a child – is “That’s just the way things were.” You’re supposed to say “Lots of good people owned slaves” or “It was legal then”. You’re supposed to pretend that historic injustices have either been resolved or that they were never that bad, that they didn’t linger and structure the politics of the present.

You’re supposed to normalize cruelty, and in doing so exonerate those who practiced it.

A lot of people will do whatever they can get away with. There aren't always enough people brave enough to bluntly say something is wrong.

One of the most alarming aspects of the rise of Trump is (or should have been) his embrace of the Orwellian lie.<br> ...<br> we are not talking about garden variety lying here — we are talking about the totalitarian lie: lies told, repeatedly, loudly and insistently, in direct confrontation with the indisputable truth. Lies purposefully designed to undermine the very capacity to make truth claims.<br> ...<br> It is a plain fact that our political system is compromised. Nowhere is this more evident than in the financial sector and its (non-) oversight, a bipartisan catastrophe two decades in the making<br> ...<br> It is simply not possible to shy away from the ugly fact that racism was an essential ingredient to his election.<br> ...<br> the playing field has changed, empowering some actors at the expense of others. Or put another way: no internet, no Trump.<br> ...<br> The internet is exponentially more pernicious: entry is free, accountability is absent, and — here we are more stupid — the ability of people to distinguish between fact and fiction has virtually vanished. We are living in a post-fact, post-rationalist, post-deliberative society, in which people believe what they want to believe, as if they were selecting items from different columns of a take-out menu.<br> ...<br> from this point forward we will always be the country that elected Donald Trump as President. And as Albert Finney knew all too well in Under the Volcano, “some things, you just can’t apologize for.” This will be felt most acutely on the world stage.

We are concerned about the constant use of federal funds to support this most notorious expression of segregation. Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman because it often results in physical death.

-- Martin Luther King Jr.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who was eager to launch new investigations of Hillary Clinton, doesn't care about Donald Trump's huge, glaring, absurd conflicts of interest. He's even trying to intimidate the director of the Office of Government Ethics for commenting about it.

Jim Arkedis, formerly an intelligence analyst with the DoD.

Below is how I would assess the credibility of the sources and allegations detailed in Buzzfeed’s recently-released dossier and an explanation of why I believe its two main allegations should be judged on their individual merits as credible with moderate-to-high confidence.

No, that’s not the same as saying the allegations are 100 percent guaranteed to be true, but I think there’s enough evidence there that it would be irresponsible not to consider how this could impact our nation’s security and what, if anything, can be done to mitigate those potential impacts.

The meaning of the term "fake news" and the dilution of that meaning.

Thousands of poorly secured MongoDB databases have been deleted by attackers recently. The attackers offer to restore the data in exchange for a ransom -- but they may not actually have a copy.

Did Media Literacy Backfire?

Media literacy asks people to raise questions and be wary of information that they’re receiving. People are. Unfortunately, that’s exactly why we’re talking past one another.

...

Addressing so-called fake news is going to require a lot more than labeling. It’s going to require a cultural change about how we make sense of information, whom we trust, and how we understand our own role in grappling with information.

According to a 2015 report by Incapsula, 48.5% of all web traffic are by bots.

...

The majority of bots are "bad bots" - scrapers that are harvesting emails and looking for content to steal, DDoS bots, hacking tools that are scanning websites for security vulnerabilities, spammers trying to sell the latest diet pill, ad bots that are clicking on your advertisements, etc.

...

Content on websites such as dev.to are reposted elsewhere, word-for-word, by scrapers programmed by Black Hat SEO specialists.

...

However, a new breed of scrapers exist - intelligent scrapers. They can search websites for sentences containing certain keywords, and then rewrite those sentences using "article spinning" techniques.

Building a container from scratch using Linux command line utilities. (For learning purposes.)

Donald Trump's insane conflicts of interest.

A report this afternoon from the Wall Street Journal, however, revealed that Trump’s disclosure was the tip of the iceberg. The FEC required Trump only to report debt from entities he fully controls. The disclosure left out “more than $1.5 billion lent to partnerships that are 30%-owned by him.” That debt has been securitized and is owed to at least 150 financial entities.

These financial institutions include many firms that are under the scrutiny of the federal agencies that Trump will soon control. Wells Fargo, for example, which services over $900 million in loans connected to Trump, “is currently facing scrutiny from federal regulators surrounding its fraudulent sales practices and other issues.”

Tweets deleted by public officials and candidates.

Parents and students in the Mountain View school district consider their use of math software called Teach to One to be a failure.

The Mountain View school district apparently budgeted $521,000 to implement and operate this new-fangled math program in two local schools. Had they adequately beta tested the program beforehand, the school district might have discovered that Teach to One teaches math (we’ve found) in a disjointed, erratic, and non-linear fashion that leaves many students baffled and disenchanted with math. The program contains errors in the math it teaches. Parents end up having to teach kids math at home and make up for the program’s deficiencies. And all the while, the math teachers get relegated to “managing the Teach to One program rather than to providing direct instruction” themselves.

Sounds like they would have been much better off to just use http://khanacademy.org or http://schoolyourself.org So why are they using this expensive, seemingly untested service?

Sara Holbrook had two of her poems used on the Texas state assessment tests. She verifies what I thought as a student. The questions are ridiculous. The test makers seem to think that their interpretation of a work is the only interpretation, and that they can read the author's mind and know their intent.

"Texas paid Pearson $500 million bucks to administer the tests". Is that right? Was that for just one year? What else could we do with $500 million?

She mentions a study showing that the results of another standardized test could be predicted pretty well using just three data points about families in the community: the percentage with income over $200K; the percentage in poverty; the percentage with bachelor's degrees. So the standardized test tells you nothing that you can't guess by looking at local incomes and education levels.

What a scam.

In November 2016, a bug was discovered in Kaspersky Anti-Virus software that was effectively disabling SSL certificate validation.

Lindy West's thoughtful and amusing goodbye to Twitter. She concisely describes Twitter's good and bad sides. Then she leaves me wondering if any of us should be using it.

I quit Twitter because it feels unconscionable to be a part of it – to generate revenue for it, participate in its profoundly broken culture and lend my name to its legitimacy. Twitter is home to a wealth of fantastic anti-Trump organising, as well, but I’m personally weary of feeling hostage to a platform that has treated me and the people I care about so poorly. We can do good work elsewhere.

I’m pretty sure “ushered in kleptocracy” would be a dealbreaker for any other company that wanted my business.

It’s also important to acknowledge that a more isolated, more nationalist America helps Putin in his objectives even while it compromises our own. We need to accept that America was part of, and needs to be part of, a global system — and that this system is better, cheaper, and more powerful than any imagined alternatives. For many years, the United States has been the steel in the framework that holds everything together; this is what we mean by ‘world order’ and ‘security architecture,’ two concepts that few politicians try to discuss seriously with the electorate.

The Kremlin's worldview has been made clear in writing, and in practice:

• It is a war.
• It's all one war machine: military, tech, info, diplomatic, economic, cultural, criminal, etc.
• Information warfare is not mere propaganda. It aims to subvert and destroy truth, reason, and decency.
• They aim to divide nations, and their citizens.
• They will use military force, as far as they can get away with it.

This Russia does not aspire to be like us, or to make itself stronger than we are. Rather, its leaders want the West—and specifically NATO and America — to become weaker and more fractured until we are as broken as they perceive themselves to be. No reset can be successful, regardless the personality driving it, because Putin’s Russia requires the United States of America as its enemy.

Putin's Russia requires the U.S. to be weak. Even better if it's a weakling stupid enough to think Putin is its pal. I'm sure Putin will say lots of nice things about Trump as long as he's getting a piece of the action.

we first need to see the Russian state for what it really is. Twenty-five years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed. This freed the Russian security state from its last constraints. In 1991, there were around 800,000 official KGB agents in Russia. They spent a decade reorganizing themselves into the newly-minted FSB, expanding and absorbing other instruments of power, including criminal networks, other security services, economic interests, and parts of the political elite. They rejected the liberal, democratic Russia that President Boris Yeltsin was trying to build.

Following the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings that the FSB almost certainly planned, former FSB director Vladimir Putin was installed as President.

President-elect Trump has characteristics that can aid him in defining what comes next. He is, first and foremost, a rule-breaker, not quantifiable by metrics we know. In a time of inconceivable change, that can be an incredible asset. He comes across as a straight talker, and he can be blunt with the American people about the threats we face. He is a man of many narratives, and can find a way to sell these decisions to the American people. He believes in strength, and knows hard power is necessary.

Trump is, first and foremost, a liar, a narcissist, a would-be tyrant, and -- okay -- a rule-breaker (a cheat). Trump will do what Trump thinks is good for Trump. He doesn't give a shit about America. So far, it looks as though Trump is eager to enrich himself through partnership with Putin. We will most likely have to defeat both of them.

the West is already at war, whether it wants to be or not. It may not be a war we recognize, but it is a war. This war seeks, at home and abroad, to erode our values, our democracy, and our institutional strength; to dilute our ability to sort fact from fiction, or moral right from wrong; and to convince us to make decisions against our own best interests.

Beauty and the Beast, for example contains a man who has been magically transformed into a hideous creature, but it also tells a simple story about family, romance, and not judging people based on appearance. The fantasy makes these tales stand out, but the ordinary elements make them easy to understand and remember. This combination of strange, but not too strange, Tehrani says, may be the key to their persistence across millennia.

But for me, hope is not a feeling. It is not an emotion. Hope is action. Hope is found in motion.

...

Hope begins the moment that somebody stands up and says, “Let’s roll.”

...

It is clear to me though that hopelessness and despair often lead to an inability to act. When that happens, we must rely on others to act. Anyone that was gone through trauma and faced extended periods of indecisiveness can understand this. This is why a sense of community is so important, and that we share in our action by relying on others to back us up.

The question that I think we should be asking ourselves is, what is it that my culture is preventing me from seeing?

...

It seems that education is more about filling brains, than teaching people to think.

Education ought to be about drawing something out, not putting something in. One of the things that people should be taught at school, is to think critically about the things that they consider most indisputably correct.

-- Iain McGilchrist (The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World)

http://iainmcgilchrist.com/

Since there is no proven “right way” to assess and track student learning, the most effective option is to turn this responsibility over to the students. Because learning should stem from intrinsic motivation, teachers can spend time showing students how to track the feedback and their progress from long-term learning experiences. This way students will learn to reflect on their growth, set better goals, and be accountable for their own growth.

-- Starr Sackstein<br> http://hackingassessment.com/<br> http://hackinghomework.com/

Deborah Meier points out that democracy has to be learned, and we aren't teaching it adequately. Most schools are authoritarian environments where students are taught, explicitly and implicitly, to do what they're told. We need to give kids experience with democracy -- productive debate, compromise, trial and error, and acknowledging one's own mistakes.

Kudlow makes the case not only that Trump and his administration are not corrupt, but also that they cannot be corrupt, by virtue of their wealth. “Why shouldn’t the president surround himself with successful people?” reasons Kudlow, “Wealthy folks have no need to steal or engage in corruption.”

-- Lawrence Kudlow, "reported leading candidate to head the administration's Council of Economic Advisors"

This asshole has a syndicated radio show, a column in The National Review, and used to host a show on CNBC.

The team on Google Translate has developed a neural network that can translate language pairs for which it has not been directly trained. "For example, if the neural network has been taught to translate between English and Japanese, and English and Korean, it can also translate between Japanese and Korean without first going through English."

Google has adjusted their search results (or the ranking algorithm itself) for "did the holocaust happen". Previously, a page on a white supremacist site had been the top result. That page still appears, but now a little lower in the results.

Sites that promote hate, violence, extremism, and lies should automatically be ranked very low. Google needs to start acting responsibly.

From 19 Jan 2014. If this is accurate, then Edward Snowden is more libertarian extremist than responsible, concerned citizen. Maybe President Obama is right not to pardon him.

Responding to criticism:

• Acknowledge each point.
• Explain how you agree, and what you intend to do to improve, or
• explain why you object to that point.

They might give you additional useful opinions. They might not respond at all. If you get a response that is antagonistic, it's time to let it drop.

A good critic who pans your work should be doing it as a service to your potential audience while giving you honest feedback that you can use to improve (or move on to something else).

Sometimes the problem isn’t with what you’re doing but how it is perceived by others, and even here the critic can show you how to tune your message so what people hear is what you intend to say.

Brace yourself to defend net neutrality (along with everything else) during the Trump kakistocracy.

T-Mobile wasn't the only ISP to try to undermine net neutrality via zero rating. AT&T and Verizon have also been major offenders, particularly when it comes to zero rating their own content. By doing so, ISPs are using their position as Internet gatekeepers to funnel customers to their own content, thereby distorting the open playing field the Internet typically provides. While the FCC has begun to take measures to rein in some of the most egregious practices, it's clear that zero rating will continue to be a major battlefield in the fight for net neutrality.

It seems that some (or many?) people who vote Republican consciously ignore policies that are against their interests. They either think the Republicans won't actually try to do the things they say, or won't be able to pass them into law.

In one of the most heartbreaking interviews in Kliff’s piece, a voter whose husband is waiting for a liver transplant was able to get health insurance for her family thanks to Obamacare. Yet she told Kliff that she backed Trump because “I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this, he would not take health insurance away knowing it would affect so many people’s lives.”

In 2012, a Democratic super PAC convened a focus group to assess whether Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s support for the GOP’s fiscal proposals could be used against him. Yet the focus group’s reactions to these proposals resembled the conversations Kliff had with Trump voters in Kentucky. When the super PAC “informed a focus group that Romney supported the Ryan budget plan — and thus championed ‘ending Medicare as we know it’ — while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.”

A (very long) summary of Trump's ties to Russia, his pro-Putin comments, his Putin-friendly staff members, and his pro-Putin supporters.

Mike Caulfield walks through using Google image search for a fact check.

Apparently, Richard Nixon did write a short letter to Trump in 1987, saying that his wife thought Trump would do well if he ran for office.

I wonder how Nixon would have reacted to Trump's phone call with the president of Taiwan.

Nigel Farage is a piece of shit.

If anybody has a right to speak out about the dangers of hatred and extremism in modern Britain, it is Jo’s bereaved husband, Brendan.

On Tuesday morning, hours after a truck was driven into a Berlin Christmas market, Nigel Farage spotted an opportunity. “Terrible news from Berlin but no surprise,” he wrote, not even bothering to separate his horror and his vindication with a comma. “Events like these will be the Merkel legacy.” Brendan Cox’s response – “blaming politicians for the actions of extremists? That’s a slippery slope Nigel” – was logically flawless.

Farage’s response in turn – that Cox “would know more about extremists than me” because of his links to the anti-fascist organisation Hope Not Hate – is shocking on a number of levels. First, he is talking about a widower whose wife was murdered by an extremist six months ago. Second, he smeared an organisation that exists to drive back racism – at a time when hate crimes have surged after a referendum campaign made inflammatory by politicians including Nigel Farage.

Selling user data should be illegal. And the customer data a company is allowed to collect and store should be very limited.

Under the guidance of Jared Kushner, a senior campaign advisor and son-in-law of President-Elect Trump, Parscale quietly began building his own list of Trump supporters. Trump’s revolutionary database, named Project Alamo, contains the identities of 220 million people in the United States, and approximately 4,000 to 5,000 individual data points about the online and offline life of each person. Funded entirely by the Trump campaign, this database is owned by Trump and continues to exist.

Trump’s Project Alamo database was also fed vast quantities of external data, including voter registration records, gun ownership records, credit card purchase histories, and internet account identities. The Trump campaign purchased this data from certified Facebook marketing partners Experian PLC, Datalogix, Epsilon, and Acxiom Corporation. (Read here for instructions on how to remove your information from the databases of these consumer data brokers.)

Trump's campaign used carefully targeted negative ads to suppress voter turnout.

With Project Alamo as ammunition, the Trump digital operations team covertly executed a massive digital last-stand strategy using targeted Facebook ads to ‘discourage’ Hillary Clinton supporters from voting. The Trump campaign poured money and resources into political advertisements on Facebook, Instagram, the Facebook Audience Network, and Facebook data-broker partners.

“We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” a senior Trump official explained to reporters from BusinessWeek. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.”

100,000 personalized collections of lies.

Parscale also deployed software to optimize the design and messaging of Trump’s Facebook ads. Describing one such test, the Wall Street Journal reporter Christopher Mims writes that “one day in August, his campaign sprayed ads at Facebook users that led to 100,000 different webpages, each micro-targeted at a different segment of voters.” In total, Trump’s digital team built or generated more than 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content.

Donna Zuckerberg on replying to writers who are being harassed.

Helpful responses:

• "You're doing great work."
• "I'm sorry this is happening to you."
• Signal boost, if that's what they want.
• Support from old friends.
• Help from close friends and coworkers.

Less helpful:

• "That's horrible." (They already know.)
• "I reported the account." (She feels this doesn't accomplish anything. I think you should always report such accounts. You just don't need to tell the victim about it.)
• "What has this country come to?" (This sounds like you never noticed racism and sexism until recently.)
• "Hopefully it will stop soon." (The idea that the harassers have moved on to someone else is not a great comfort.)

Unhelpful:

• Don't ask, "What did you expect?"
• Don't suggest the victim should avoid writing about particular topics.
• Don't assume you know how they feel.
• Don't criticize them for showing the threats. (If there's some reason it bothers you, mute or unfollow.)

TV writer and producer Danny Zuker suggests putting on a big televised music and comedy concert on inauguration day to oppose Trump, with all proceeds going to non-profit organizations.

White House report: Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy

On the thinking of Trump supporters, particularly in Louisiana. Similar to what I've read elsewhere, they tend to view wealth as a virtue. Those who still belong to the vanishing middle class look down on "big-government handouts". But those in the struggling working class are willing to accept needed assistance -- as long as it is only going to "real Americans".

Mike Caulfield points out that "digital literacy" needs to include solid knowledge of the Web and how to use it, such as search techniques and uses of specific websites. Principles of site evaluation are not enough.

From 15 Nov 2016, an insightful and entertaining rant about the 2016 election campaign and its outcome.

"Hillary Clinton didn't fail us, we failed Hillary Clinton."

Paul Krugman points out that our current situation is like that during the rise of fascism in the 1930s. And it is also like the situation during the gradual decline of the Roman Republic. Political norms are being ignored. Republicans are placing their party, their wealthiest campaign donors, and their careers, before their nation.

"Famously, on paper the transformation of Rome from republic to empire never happened. Officially, imperial Rome was still ruled by a Senate that just happened to defer to the emperor."

• Putin's hackers stole emails. Wikileaks published them.
• News media covered the emails like a breaking scandal, while giving little attention to how and why the emails were stolen.
• Before that, Republicans made as much noise as they could about Benghazi, and Clinton using a private email server. News media could hardly have been more helpful to them if they were all owned outright by the Republican party.
• News media treated Trump like a serious candidate, rather than the lying, idiot lowlife that he is.
• Days before election day, James Comey announces, maybe possibly kind of, more emails from Clinton's private server discovered on Anthony Weiner's laptop. News media covers it enthusiastically. In a few days, Comey announces there was nothing new. How about that.

Dave Pell's main point here is that news media wouldn't produce crap if people didn't eat it up.

But we aren't all eating the crap. I don't think there's much we can do about the people who do. Many of them aren't being fooled by the lies and sensationalism. They're just choosing to "believe" what they want to "believe". (Though the number actually fooled was probably far more than enough to win the election for Trump.)

We need to give as much support as we can to responsible journalism and commentary. And maybe we can collectively discourage media from producing crap by making sure they know that millions of us are angered by it. Maybe there should be independent journalists as a branch of government, tasked with choosing what the people should know, and granted privileges similar to those that members of Congress have.

A personal appeal from Michael Moore to the Republican members of the Electoral College.

For most of my friends on the Left, the argument against Trump is about fitness: Trump, they say, is not fit to be President. I agree with this claim.

But that claim has been rendered democratically irrelevant. 62 million Americans heard that argument, and disagreed with it. That doesn’t make the claim “Donald Trump is unfit” false. But it does render it unusable by an elector as a reason not to vote for Trump. Whatever they were meant to be originally, we cannot now see electors as democratic guardians of our Republic. They cannot be entitled to second guess the judgment of the people with respect to an issue the people can reasonably be said to have considered.

I disagree with this. The very purpose of the Electoral College is to judge the candidate. That can mean telling the majority that their choice was stupid. (And depending on how many Electors think so, the House is still likely to consider the issue yet again.)

Russia thinks state secession movements are a swell idea. They're involved with some of them.

Nine Lessons of Russian Propaganda<br> Roman Skaskiw (an American who moved to Ukraine in 2012)<br> [I liked this article enough to google the author. First, I looked at Twitter -- and thought it was either an imposter, or his account had been hacked. But then I went looking at other sites, which are registered to someone using the same name. They shift between reasonable and crackpot.]

From 27 March 2016.<br> But gosh... This shit is strangely familiar.

• Use and abuse all factions.
• Destroy and ridicule the idea of truth.
• Headlines are more important than reality. They stick.
• Demoralize, and terrorize.
• Distract and misdirect.
• Pollute the information space.
• Accuse the enemy of doing what you're doing.

Jimi Hendrix radio documentary (4 hours)<br> https://soundcloud.com/openculture/sets/jimi-hendrix-radio-documentary

In an online guide made public Wednesday night, a number of those onetime Hill staffers say that the best way for individuals to derail the policy agenda of Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) is to organize locally and badger their own congressional representatives to vote against individual pieces of legislation.

The guide argues that, like the “Tea Party patriots” who found common cause in their unified loathing of President Barack Obama, progressives who oppose Trump should stand against him before all else rather than try to articulate a policy agenda that has no hope of advancing while the GOP controls all three branches of government.

Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda

Dave Pell points out that Trump's "grab her by the pussy" video was the big news on 7 October -- the same day the New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence acknowledged that Russia was responsible for the DNC hacks. The latter should have been the main story that day, but it wasn't.

Lawrence Lessig on the legal constraints and ethical obligations of the Electors. (First published in The Daily Beast, 13 Dec 2016.)

In my opinion, if the Electors don't reject Donald Trump, they have failed to do the only duty for which the Electoral College was created. (Putting aside the fact that the actual majority voted for Hillary Clinton...) The majority can make a stupid decision. It should be the sworn duty of the Electors to judge the candidate.

Thoughtful blog by Grete Howland, about being raised as an evangelical Christian -- and then discovering that it isn't for her.

For those raised in more liberal, free-thinking denominations, such as certain Episcopal congregations or the Unitarian-Universalist church, the religious molding might not be such a bad thing. In those cases, you might have been taught that everyone is unconditionally welcome in the love of God, that all belief systems are worthy of respect, that decolonization is mandatory practice, to have a community service mindset, and the basic lesson of self-reliance. These are examples of habits and traditions one might want to continue practicing, regardless of personal faith or continued church involvement.

...

I had been taught (1) to put my faith in God regarding everything--finances, relationships, and so on--and (2) that the way to deal with stress and pain was to pray for their causes to be gone. I was not supposed to change my thinking; God was supposed to change my circumstances.

Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda (Former congressional staffers reveal best practices for making Congress listen)

Trump claims nobody brought up Russian hacking before the election. It was already made public on October 7. And he had been personally briefed about it before denying Russian involvement during the debates.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-was-told-russia-was-blame-hacks-long-debate-n663686

(On Google Chrome, hypothesis fails to open for me on that nbcnews page.)

A report on Putin's tactics in France, Germany, and the UK.

From 26 July 2016, Lawrence Lessig says it isn't the time to refuse to vote for "the lesser of two evils". Then he agrees with Robert Reich that people are angry about corrupt government, and Trump is likely to win unless Hillary Clinton makes it a central issue.

Now Trump is already working on using the presidency to line his pockets. His cabinet is basically ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs -- and a few lesser Nazis.

I wonder how many Trump voters are paying attention to this. How many notice they've been scammed? How many are busy rationalizing it? How many notice that they just voted to destroy democracy?

Video messages to members of the Electoral College asking them to vote for someone qualified to be President of the United States of America.

A volunteer observer for the Michigan recount describes his experience -- an army of Republican lawyers doing whatever they could to keep votes from being counted.

Donald Trump's conflicts of interest are already a source of ongoing corruption.

Nine Democratic Senators call for a National Intelligence Estimate on the extent of Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election, and ask the DOJ to confirm that a criminal investigation is ongoing, or to begin one.

http://digipo.io/doku.php<br> The Digital Polarization Initiative<br> "The primary purpose of this wiki is to provide a place for students to fact-check, annotate, and provide context to the different news stories that show up in their Twitter and Facebook feeds. It's like a student-driven Snopes, but with a broader focus: we don't aim to just investigate myths, but to provide context and sanity to all the news – from the article about voter fraud to the health piece on a new cancer treatment."

"Don't be evil."<br> "Do the right thing."<br> Riiiiiiiiight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil

"Lynching in America" documents 4075 lynchings in 12 Southern states between Reconstruction and World War 2.

https://twitter.com/eji_org "The Equal Justice Initiative is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society."

Oh, look. The Benghazi investigation is officially done.

I guess Republicans are probably really tired of investigating stuff right now.

In the last couple of days, I'm seeing more people using the appropriate words: coup, and treason.

Good advice for mentors and mentees, and why it's usually hard for a manager to be a mentor to the same person.

Trump's character and America's recent political climate are familiar to people who have lived in or studied authoritarian states. Russia is using the same tactics on us that they've used, and continue to use, in Europe.

http://phys.org/news/2016-12-pro-trump-bot-colonised-pro-clinton-twitter.html

http://politicalbots.org/?p=787 Bots and Automation over Twitter during the U.S. Election

http://politicalbots.org/ An international research group studying political bots.

More about Google search results being dominated by extremists, hate groups, and conspiracy theorists.

Malware hidden in ad banners with steganography.

Karoli Kuns lists things we need to do:

• forensic investigation of voting machines
• full accounting for any breaches of voter databases
• investigation of RNC hacks
• investigation of Paul Manafort
• testimony from Roger Stone
• testimony from James Comey
• testimony from Mitch McConnell

"Banquet speech by Bob Dylan given by the United States Ambassador to Sweden Azita Raji, at the Nobel Banquet, 10 December 2016."

Shuffler prevents certain hacking exploits by continuously scrambling the code of running programs.

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~junfeng/papers/shuffler-osdi16.pdf