Etiquette



DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Friday, December 6, 2024

The authoritarian assault on expertise: The matter of political sludge

Yesterday I spent several hours trying to debunk false beliefs about two different things that two different commenters raised, belief in alternative medicine and rejection of vaccine safety and efficacy data. Both are heavily grounded in false beliefs. I found and laid out the evidence needed to support my beliefs, and that's about the best one can do. To me it is very discouraging that so many people hold science and expertise in such deep distrust. 


In my opinion, irrational distrust like that is part of an healthy authoritarian mindset. I'm not alone in that belief. Apparently, Joseph Stalin was also aware of the very useful anti-democratic power of irrational distrust of expertise and science generally. In a NYT opinion (not paywalled), former Russian journalist Masha Gessen raises this issue as it relates to oral arguments in a transgender-related lawsuit the US supreme court is considering: 
The only moments of obvious moral searching came when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she was dismayed by the similarities between the case before the court and Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 case in which the court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violated the Constitution. Back then, the plaintiffs argued that, if a white woman could marry a white man and a Black woman could not, then this constituted discrimination on the basis of race. Jackson noted that in that case, too, proponents of the discriminatory law cited what they considered scientific evidence of the harm of interracial marriage.

Tennessee also claims that science is on its side, and that is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this case. Dozens of mainstream medical societies, including the leading associations of pediatricians, filed amici briefs arguing against S.B.1. Apparently trying to find their footing, conservative justices asked about new regulations in the United Kingdom and Sweden. But those regulations were written by medical — not legislative — authorities, and they come nowhere near a total ban.

Every time they posed questions about specific treatments, the justices seemed to get lost in the medical weeds. Which is forgivable: They are justices, not doctors. And they probably shouldn’t be trying to make a ruling based on medical evidence.

The ease with which legislators overrule doctors, and the relatively small amount of attention this overreach received during the Supreme Court hearing, are symptoms of our times. Just in the last few years, more than half the states have passed legislation that limits access to gender-affirming care. Many of the laws are at least as restrictive as S.B.1 — despite the medical profession’s opposition to total bans.
Rejection of genuine expertise is both a precondition and a function of autocracy. Joseph Stalin’s regime outlawed genetics as “pseudoscience,” while he himself was declared an expert in all fields, from linguistics to biology. [Perplexity says that is basically true -- does it sound familiar?]

Contempt for expertise is not the only autocratic force at work in the case of S.B.1 and in similar laws. Another is the government’s intrusion into private lives — in this case, the shameless assumption that legislators can make decisions that rightfully belong with families and their physicians. The Federal District Court cited this issue as one of its reasons for overturning S.B.1. Parents have a “fundamental right to direct the medical care of their children,” the court wrote. That, however, is the part of the case the Supreme Court decided not even to consider. [In it's blatant, unprincipled radical right partisanship the Republican supreme court punted on the hard "due process" part, making it easier to rationalize upholding the state ban]
A third force is the growing intolerance of minorities and, in particular, people who dare to challenge tradition. It’s a cliché to point out that the totalitarian governments of the 20th century jailed and killed freethinkers and outliers of every kind. But it’s a cliché that seems to need repeating, since contemporary autocrats do the same thing — and many of them start by targeting L.G.B.T.Q. people.
Poor experts and scientists. Lot of people think most of them are self-serving liars or crackpots. Unfortunately some of them really are self-serving liars or crackpots. The person whose anti-COVID vaccine crackpottery I debunked yesterday is a medical doctor who spouts shockingly horrendous lies about COVID vaccines killing tens of thousands in the UK. When I finally tracked down the real data, the number of deaths associated with millions of vaccinations in the UK wasn't tens of thousands or even tens of hundreds. It was 5, single digit territory. 

Political sludge: Sigh. Our society is poisoned by an endless deluge of dark free speech oozing out of toxic social media like X, mainstream media like Faux News, podcasts by non-professional blowhards pretending but not knowing what they are talking about and dozens or hundreds of online politics sites pretending but usually knowing exactly what they are doing by claiming false information is truth. 

In the wastewater treatment industry, they call partially treated wastewater sludge. It need to be further treated to clean it up, which is the norm.  


Sludge like that is where I got my samples for
studying bacterial sex in the sewer for my MS degree

I suppose in politics, one can refer to dark free speech as political sludge. At least for wastewater treatment there are ways to deal with it. 




But in politics, there is no way to deal with political sludge. It is legal and untouchable by the government. Political sludge is like a forever chemical. It accumulates in the environment and doesn't go away very fast. For better or worse, federal courts defend political sludge at least as much as honest speech, always calling it free speech. Courts never once mention that some political dishonest speech can be harmful and can even kill some people, e.g., when they follow the advice of anti-vaccine crackpots. 

Thursday, December 5, 2024

News bits

 It's all pretty bad now. Not much positive to note in most news. Science and tech still report out some promising stuff, but the rest is mostly hellscape.

Moral rot and corruption in the USSC gets institutionalized:
A few Supreme Court justices went out of their way to fight back against enforcing the court’s new ethics rules, The New York Times reported Tuesday—and it’s not that surprising.

In a series of secret offline memos and meetings, the justices toiled away over how they would formulate their code of ethics, and—crucially—whether it could actually be enforced.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson all supported enforcement rules for the court’s code of ethics. Kagan even pitched a panel of “safe harbor” judges that justices could go to about ethics concerns. Her proposal failed to gain wider support.

Meanwhile, Justice Neil Gorsuch railed against enforcement of the ethics code, essentially arguing that not abusing his seat of power should be voluntary. One of his memos raising concerns over enforcement stretched to more than 10 pages, according to the Times.

Gorsuch warned that ethics enforcement would threaten the court’s independence, and Justice Samuel Alito echoed his concerns, the Times reported. Justice Clarence Thomas, who has failed to report that he accepted exorbitant gifts and trips from conservative megadonors such as Harlan Crow, argued that the court’s critics could not be appeased.

Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito compromised and agreed to some enforcement mechanisms—but only ones that couldn’t reasonably be enforced. Ultimately, the court decided to place no real restrictions on accepting gifts, travel, or real estate.
There we have it ethics and rule of law fans, moral rot and corruption of the USSC is legal. The argument that ethics burdens or even threatens the court is self-serving nonsense. Their arrogance and contempt for ethics and the rule of law is beyond stunning. At present, there are 11 people about 99.8% above the law, the nine USSC judges, president Bident and president-elect DJT. 
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Tariffs update: President-elect DJT announced 100% tariffs on countries that move to replace the US dollar on Saturday. In a Truth Social post, Trump took aim at “BRICS Countries” — meaning Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates — over longstanding efforts to do away with the US dollar currency. Trump demanded a “commitment” from these countries that they will “neither create a new BRICS Currency, nor back any other Currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar.”

Ah, the distinct smell of nuanced, light touch diplomacy.
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Nervousness about democracy -- an opinion: As the drama played out in South Korea, my phone lit up with a question from friends and media colleagues — including from some of the most sober-minded people I know. Can this happen here? Can an American president — or any other American leader — create a similar political emergency? The short answer is no. The longer answer is yes — if a president (or a governor) exploits ambiguities in American law. .... there is a statutory basis for military intervention in domestic affairs, and the statute — called the Insurrection Act — is so poorly drafted that I have come to call it America’s most dangerous law. The Insurrection Act is almost as old as the United States itself. The law dates to 1792, and it permits the president to deploy American troops on American streets to impose order and maintain government control.

Remember, DJT wanted to call out the troops and shoot protesters. There is no evidence I am aware of that he feels differently today. But I am aware of some reporting that says DJT is chomping at the bit to us the US military to obliterate protesters in the US. Hegseth, a former Fox News host and combat veteran is more concerned about domestic enemies than foreign ones, and he is willing to break rules to defeat them — even the rules his potential job requires him to uphold. Throughout this latest presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly warned Americans about “the enemy within,” an amorphous collection of left-wing ideologues whom he said pose a greater danger to the country than Russia or China. Sometimes he spoke broadly of “radical left lunatics” and “very smart, very vicious people.”

America today is in a cold civil war,” Hegseth asserts in the book, which was published in June. “Our soul is under attack by a confederacy of radicals.” While his generation was fighting wars abroad, Hegseth writes, “we allowed America’s domestic enemies at home to gobble up cultural, political and spiritual territory.”

What? Me worry?? Nah, it's all good. But I do agree that we are in a cold civil war. Unfortunately we're losing.

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Tax policy for the wealthy: How One of the World’s Richest Men Is Avoiding $8 Billion in Taxes -- 
The chief executive of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, has taken advantage of popular loopholes in the federal estate and gift taxes, which have quietly been eviscerated. 
Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, is the 10th-richest person in the United States, worth $127 billion. In theory, when he dies, his estate should pay 40 percent of his net worth to the government in taxes.

But Mr. Huang, 61, is not only an engineering genius and Silicon Valley icon whose company, the world’s second-most valuable, makes the chips that power much artificial intelligence. He is also the beneficiary of a series of tax dodges that will enable him to pass on much of his fortune tax free, according to securities and tax filings reviewed by The New York Times.  
Revenue from the tax has barely changed since 2000, even as the wealth of the richest Americans has roughly quadrupled. If the estate tax had simply kept pace, it would have raised around $120 billion last year. Instead it brought in about a quarter of that.
Tax avoidance is using legal ways to reduce taxes. Tax evasion is illegal withholding of taxes that are owed. Officially, current tax evasion amounts to about $495 billion/year. My estimate is that it amounts to at least about $1 trillion/year. 

However, with new ways to use new tax avoidance laws, wealthy people don't need to resort to tax evasion and the embarrassment and inconvenience of felony convictions. That is what our failed two-party, pay-to-play tax system has done for the rich and powerful. Well, since they bought and paid to legalize tax evasion, why not use tax avoidance to steer clear of the law? Inconvenient felony convictions for tax evasion will soon be a bad memory of the past, just like that brief spasm of effort to get our morally rotted, failed USSC to operate honestly and ethically.
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I deleted my Bluesky account. The interest there was zero. But, it was an informative experiment in social media. I learned that social media like that is not suitable for serious politics. 

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.

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.   😳


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

Wednesday, December 4, 2024

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.


Tuesday, December 3, 2024

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


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)