Trump is gonna spank Canada.........

 Want to know how to accomplish stuff? Bully your neighbors. Works perfectly for Trump:

Canada will deploy helicopters, drones to border after Trump tariff threat

Canada will deploy helicopters, drones and additional personnel to its border with the U.S. to enhance immigration security, a Canadian official announced Monday, Dec. 2. The move comes after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with President-elect Donald Trump, who threatened to impose high tariffs unless Canada took stronger action to secure the border.

https://san.com/cc/canada-will-deploy-helicopters-drones-to-border-after-trump-tariff-threat/

Mind you, rather than tariffs, it might just be easier to annex Canada.........

Canada as the 51st state? Apparently, that’s what U.S. president-elect Donald Trump suggested at his impromptu dinner with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at Mar-a-Lago last Friday.

When Trudeau said Canada couldn’t stomach 25 per cent tariffs, Trump mused about annexation and suggested that while prime minister is a better title, Trudeau could be governor of this 51st state. Sources told Fox News that another guest then suggested that Canada would be a very liberal state, whereupon Trump offered that Canada could be split into a conservative and a liberal state.

According to those present, this exchange produced a lot of laughter, though that of the Canadians was described as nervous. No wonder: while the scenario may seem implausible, with Trump back in the White House, anything is possible.   😳

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/trumps-51st-state-threat-has-trudeau-premiers-running-in-different-directions

Gotta admit, quite a contrast from Sleep Joe, when Trump says jump, Canadians ask "how high?"

News bits

The website Fight Health Insurance allows people who have had insurance claims rejected to use their AI to help them write an appeal against the denial. AI scans the paperwork and helps draft an appeal. To discourage people from even trying to appeal, insurance companies make the process unnecessarily complicated and hard.

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An article posted by FAIR, DC Station Rewrites Gas Exposé After a Word From Its Sponsor, describes how a gas utility company squelched reporting by WUSA in Wash. DC. The reporting was about the effects of gas burning stoves on air polluted with nitrogen dioxide from gas burning in homes. 

For the grassroots group, called the Beyond Gas Coalition, the most pressing message to get to families was how to lessen their exposure to NO2 by keeping windows open during and even after cooking with gas stoves.

WUSA, in fact, produced no less than three stories on the day of the report’s release (Heated, 11/27/24). Unfortunately, WUSA’s stories were quickly followed by an about-face.

WUSA’s trio of pieces began running on the morning of November 21, but by that evening, two of the three links to its stories were broken.

When [Beyond Gas] called up WUSA to inquire, they say the message they received from the producer who worked on the story was that the station made the decision at the behest of the utility company, choosing to pull the story down and hide the video from its YouTube channel until it could include a statement from Washington Gas.

Of course, Washington Gas was under no obligation to ever give a statement.

“[WUSA] essentially told Washington Gas, ‘We’ll kill the story, and let you decide when and whether we republish it,’” Mark Rodeffer, a member of Sierra Club’s DC chapter, told Heated‘s Emily Atkin. “It’s shocking to me that they’re letting one of their advertisers dictate stories.”

It is shocking that anyone nowadays is shocked that advertisers influence news reporting. 

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Trade restrictions are having an impact. China has banned exports to US of gallium, germanium, antimony in response to chip sanctions:

China announced Tuesday it is banning exports to the United States of gallium, germanium, antimony and other key high-tech materials with potential military applications, as a general principle, lashing back at U.S. limits on semiconductor-related exports.

The Chinese Commerce Ministry announced the move after the Washington expanded its list of Chinese companies subject to export controls on computer chip-making equipment, software and high-bandwidth memory chips. Such chips are needed for advanced applications.

The ratcheting up of trade restrictions comes as President-elect Donald Trump has been threatening to sharply raise tariffs on imports from China and other countries, potentially intensifying simmering tensions over trade and technology.

China’s Foreign Ministry also issued a vehement reproof.

“China has lodged stern protests with the U.S. for its update of the semiconductor export control measures, sanctions against Chinese companies, and malicious suppression of China’s technological progress,” Lin Jian, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said in a routine briefing Tuesday.

That doesn't sound good. Those minerals are necessary for electronics. 

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U.S. officials urge Americans to use encrypted apps amid unprecedented cyberattack -- FBI and CISA officials said it was impossible to predict when the telecommunications companies would be fully safe from interlopers. Amid an unprecedented cyberattack on telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have recommended that Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their communications stay hidden from foreign hackers. The hacking campaign, nicknamed Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, is one of the largest intelligence compromises in U.S. history, and it has not yet been fully remediated. .... The scope of the telecom compromise is so significant, Greene said, that it was “impossible” for the agencies “to predict a time frame on when we’ll have full eviction.”

That "salty hurricane" mega-hack sounds like a real whopper. Fortunately, my e-communications aren't worth hacking. I'm a very low value target, worth about the value of a medium sized turnip.  Ew, “full eviction” sounds nasty.

Walmart Buys Vizio to Use Its TVs as a New Way to Blast You With Ads -- Walmart paid $2.3 billion for Vizio with its SmartCast OS along with the 19 million accounts it can advertise to.

Getting blasted with ads sounds like lots 'o fun!

State board approves Bible-infused curriculum -- A majority of the Texas State Board of Education gave final approval Nov. 22 to a state-authored curriculum under intense scrutiny in recent months for its heavy inclusion of biblical teachings. Eight of the 15 board members voted to approve Bluebonnet Learning, the elementary school curriculum proposed by the Texas Education Agency earlier this year. The curriculum will become available in the spring, with schools that choose to adopt the materials expected to begin using them at the start of the 2025-26 school year. .... Members also said politics in no way influenced their vote and that they supported the materials because they believed it would best serve Texas children.

In the past, stunts like this would get shot down by the USSC. But with an aggressive Christian nationalist goal of de-secularizing public schools and a radical Christian nationalist supreme court, all bets are off. We can expect a USSC decision on this possibly in May or June of 2026 unless lower courts drag it out until the USSC's term starting in Oct. 2027.

Privacy update

This post is gonna be real ugly, sorry. Corporations routinely tell us how very seriously they take our privacy and security. Reality doesn't match the rhetoric.

In my opinion, greed is the biggest

Link (not paywalled):

Nearly unlimited highly personal info is available for anyone willing to pay. AI provides many ways to turn that into illicit profit or undermine national security.

Hackers are using artificial intelligence to mine unprecedented troves of personal information dumped online in the past year, along with unregulated commercial databases, to trick American consumers and even sophisticated professionals into giving up control of bank and corporate accounts.

Armed with sensitive health information, calling records and hundreds of millions of Social Security numbers, criminals and operatives of countries hostile to the United States are crafting emails, voice calls and texts that purport to come from government officials, co-workers or relatives needing help, or familiar financial organizations trying to protect accounts instead of draining them.

The losses reported to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center nearly tripled from 2020 to 2023, to $12.5 billion, and a number of sensitive breaches this year have only increased internet insecurity. The recently discovered Chinese government hacks of U.S. telecommunications companies AT&T, Verizon and others, for instance, were deemed so serious that government officials are being told not to discuss sensitive matters on the phone, some of those officials said in interviews. A Russian ransomware gang’s breach of Change Healthcare in February captured data on millions of Americans’ medical conditions and treatments, and in August, a small data broker, National Public Data, acknowledged that it had lost control of hundreds of millions of Social Security numbers and addresses now being sold by hackers.

With no federal privacy legislation to stem the flood, national security experts fear that foreign spy agencies will keep vacuuming up everything they need to hack, recruit or blackmail officials with sensitive missions, debts and embarrassing personal secrets. “Six or seven years ago, people said there was too much data; adversaries don’t know what to do with it,” CFPB Senior Counsel Kiren Gopal told The Washington Post. “Now they have AI tools to sift through for things that are actually useful.”  

Even if all that and more comes to pass — and Trump adviser Elon Musk’s threat to wipe out the CFPB remains unfulfilled — so much data is now available about so many people that any government action is likely to have limited effect.

That speaks for itself and the standard corporate spew, “don’t worry, we take your privacy seriously.” What a farce.

And this from an article, The 7 Biggest Business Lies Ever Told:

1. Equifax data breach

Equifax is one of the three major credit bureaus in the U.S., and in 2017, it was involved in a data breach that affected 143 million consumers. Hackers were able to access personal information like credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, home addresses and even driver’s licenses. The breach happened because the company failed to implement basic security measures.

The breach itself was bad enough, but the company deliberately misled customers and withheld information. It also later came out that additional data breaches occurred, but customers weren’t informed. As a result, Equifax had to pay a minimum of $575 million as a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and 50 states and territories. CEO Richard Smith was ousted three weeks after the data breach was revealed.

The takeaway: Don’t compromise on cybersecurity, especially if your business houses sensitive customer data. If your company does experience a breach, own up to your part in it and be forthcoming about what went wrong. Lying and trying to cover up the problem will only make it worse.

Now who is it saying that we need to deregulated businesses so they can solve problems and spread prosperity, peace and happiness on the land? . . . . . Oh yeah, Project 2025, DJT, MAGA and the GOP.

Time to rank Joe, the Dem party, etc.

Now that the wave of emotions from the election has subsided some and heads are cooler, its time to rank some stuff.

Adding to things to consider, Joe released this statement regarding his pardon of Hunter. He gives his justification for the pardon. Previously he promised to not pardon his son, but changed his mind.

One can only wonder what jail would have been like for Hunter, if one takes as a model how Putin, who has immunity from all crimes, official acts or not, treated Alexei Navalny while he was in a Russian jail on trumped up criminal charges. To be clear, Putin had Navalny poisoned and then murdered when poison failed to get the job done. Would DJT sink that low? Who knows? Maybe.

Where does Joe rank among US presidents, taking into account all the good, bad and ambiguous things he has done (Infrastructure bill, Gaza war, clamp down on pro-Palestinian protesters, climate policy in the Inflation reduction Act, withdrawal from Afghanistan, bad messaging to the public, etc.) and left undone, but probably could have done (illegal immigration, etc.)? 

For context, here is how professionals rank Joe and some other US presidents.    

What about ranking DJT as a president, candidate and president-elect?

In view of all the circumstances, successes, failures and muddle throughs, how does the Dem party rank from 2020 to now in 2024 on a scale of 1-7 where: 

1 = the worst possible in a messy democracy

2 = solidly bad but could have been noticeably worse

3 = modestly bad on balance, but not as bad as 2

4 = about as mediocre as politics can get, part good & part bad & part unclear

5 = modestly good on balance, but not as good as 6

6 = solidly good but could have been noticeably better

7 = the best possible in a messy democracy

Using the same scale, what rank for the GOP from 2020 to now in 2024? What about the American public?

What are the top 2 or 3 most important factors in your assessment of Joe, DJT, the Dems, the Repubs and the American people?

Me tentatively:

Joe: 25 (poor messaging, failed immigration policy, pro-environment policy)

DJT: 46 (rabidly anti-democracy and rule of law, deeply corrupt, thoroughly morally rotted)

Dem party: 2 (poor messaging, out of touch, inept)

Repub party: 1 (solidly anti-democracy and rule of law, deeply corrupt, thoroughly morally rotted)

American people: 3 (too many low information, too many unreasonably deceived and manipulated, unreasonable expectations)