John McCain takes on Facebook

He’s going out in a blaze of glory. (Provided he doesn’t vote for that stupid tax reform bill)

He’s proposing that the tech industry disclose who pays for political ads. The techs are going to try to finesse the situation. I’m really beginning to hate them and the Gig Economy they’re forcing on us, ruining our futures and upending the American dream.

BTW, I’ve taken to reading the release notes on the apps I update on my phone. It’s an obsession these days given what I now do for a living. Google and YouTube write the smuggest release notes. They’re all like, “We’re updating. Don’t you worry your pretty blonde head about what features we enhanced. You wouldn’t understand it anyway.” F#%^ing annoying. Kudos to Kayak who write very nice release notes.

Ok, I got off topic. Maybe I’m the only one who gets annoyed with this.

Anyway, I think we should support this bill. Nothing but full disclosure is going to satisfy me now. Your friends and family shouldn’t be suckered in to passing around propaganda without their knowledge.

That’s how we end up with dictators and autocrats with the self control of two year olds.

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An aside.

I live in a diverse suburb east of Pittsburgh. Some of my cousins thought I was crazy to buy my house there. But it’s where I spent my happiest years as a kid. The demographics might have changed, but the sound of the trees in the wind, the smell of the air and the loveliness of the neighborhood haven’t.

I chose my location carefully. It’s close to the bus stop if I ever need it. The street has a stable community of neighbors. The houses are pretty well maintained, mine being a bit of an issue because I bought a foreclosed property and had to spend my money on more critical needs when I moved in.

But I have never regretted moving where I did. Last year at this time, I was actively canvassing every weekend. I met people at my local Giant Eagle where I registered them to vote. I opened my house to strangers on the last three weeks of the campaign and most of my volunteers were African American.

And you know what? It was great. I learned a lot. Mostly I learned that people are people. They have families and feelings and jobs and careers and churches and interests. I still run into some of those volunteers and we’re happy to reconnect and catch up.

They are our neighbors. They aren’t “them”.

Love is love, and people are humans. Anyone who says anything negative about my neighbors or where I live is looking for a swift knee to the junk.

Grow up.

Classical music – rock genre

Early morning activities. Need to finish up something. Later

Comey, the sequel.

James Comey was prepared to exonerate Hillary Clinton last July and drafted a letter stating this. He did this after interviewing Clinton’s aides and before interviewing Clinton herself.

But Trump is hopping mad because it looks like Comey’s investigation was ending without a long term prison sentence, which is what everyone who either voted for Trump or didn’t vote at all was expecting.

Now, there are two conclusions you can draw from this. The Republican conclusion is that Comey wasn’t thorough enough and was failing to get with the plan to keep the email story front and center indefinitely.

Observing what happened shortly thereafter, where Comey had an unprecedented press conference condemning her highly irresponsible treatment of a handful of post email classified documents out of over 50000 emails sampled, it sure looks like someone applied partisan pressure on him to make the whole thing look like much more serious than it actually was.

You *could* conclude, as many Republicans did, that there had to be something there and Comey needed to go back and find it.

The other perfectly logical conclusion is that after he interviewed the aides, he determined that no laws were broken, nothing out of the ordinary happened that hadn’t happened before and there was no reason to keep the investigation open. That is a very plausible explanation. AND it has the benefit of being the least complicated explanation based on the facts.

But he trashed her anyway and then wrote that stupid letter just before the election and her lead vanished in a puff of smoke but no fire.

The pressure on him to make her look bad must have been intense. But he wouldn’t protect a law abiding citizen like Clinton the way he protected John Ashcroft back in the Alberto Gonzales days.

You got to wonder why he did it. Did he feel like he owed Republicans? Are there rogue elements in the FBI and why did he think it was Ok to go around his boss or her deputy Sally Yates?

Probably another case of not taking women seriously. The pressure was on and he decided to make a unilateral decision than have to sit in some kind of meeting with two women trying to come to a consensus or worse yet, have one of them tell him what to do.

Yeah another completely plausible scenario.

Taking down Cilizza for crimes against women

Chris Cilizza. You can’t live with him, you can’t feed him poison mushrooms.

As long as we’re taking down men in the entertainment industry and state legislatures, can we please get rid of this major proponent of implicit bias?

He really is more loathsome than Bill O’Reilly. At least with BillO, most of us knew what he was up to. He appealed to men and women who were very comfortable with women being traditional and subordinate. You knew he was a pompous creep but if that’s what turns you on, knock yourself out.

But Cilizza worked for the Washington Post and now for CNN. He’s supposed to be reality based. But his coverage of Hillary Clinton last year was a textbook case of implicit bias.

Let me count the ways. Actually, not necessary. Here’s a parody of Cilizza’s coverage of Clinton on Mashable about how she is covering up the shortage of McDonald’s Szechuan sauce. Hilarious but just substitute “email” for “Szechuan Sauce” and it’s a perfect match for Cilizza’s relentless pursuit of Clinton over what turned out to be nothing while barely mentioning Trump’s glaring flaws.

She’s unlikeable. She has something to hide. She’s responsible for everything that goes wrong. Her apologies are never good enough. She’s inauthentic. She’s calculating and devious. Her qualifications were never highlighted, only her behavior. She’s everything our culture tells us to condemn in ambitious women as if it is taboo to be both “ambitious” and “woman”.

That’s pretty typical of implicit bias. Where men are graded on their accomplishments women are graded on how they behave.

We are in the 21st century now. Biology is no longer destiny. But this nitpicky crap just puts women constantly on the defensive and continually draws attention to the very thing that has limited women’s progress for thousands of years.

Anyway, why stop with sexual harassment? Let’s take a long hard look at the Cilizzas in our media and workplace. You would think that the entities that hired Cilizza would have told him to cut that shit out as soon as they realized how it was potentially affecting his female coworkers. Because it does. If you can get away with undermining an extraordinarily talented woman in the press, imagine what he’s doing during private happy hours.

WaPo and CNN need to train the members of their staff about what implicit bias looks like and they should use a lunkhead like Cilizza as the poster child for it. Let’s start with the editors. Marty Baron, Jeff Zucker and Dean Baquet who need intense remedial training and should start measuring everything to eliminate any “he said/she said” and compensation ambiguities. Statistics: not just for football anymore.

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A couple months ago, someone I knew waaaay back when who never used to express any sexist sentiment but has clearly been hanging out with a bad crowd, told me that female software engineers just could not stack up to any male engineer.

This in spite of the history of women who helped pioneer programming going all the way back to Ada Lovelace. But whatever. You gotta see proof, right?

So I give you Margaret Hamilton, lead software engineer on the Apollo Project at NASA standing next to her code in 1969:

I

Those were the days before fancy workstations and graphics and object oriented pipelines.

You have to wonder how we have gotten to the place where we don’t think women can do this stuff when clearly they were more than capable 50 years ago.

It was Hamilton’s software that landed Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon. Literally.

BTW, guess who coined the term “software engineering”. That’s right, Margaret Hamilton.

Too bad she just wasn’t any good and some dude could have done it better. {{rolling eyes}}.

Go forth and have no fear

All hail the underdogs and apostates

I’m speechless.

This is so unpresidential and inhumane I can’t believe anyone was clueless enough to vote for him to be president. WE knew he’d be bad but he’s even worse than we thought.

Trump *finally* got around to honoring the fallen soldiers who died in Niger but after this, he may never be asked to do it again:

U.S. President Donald Trump told U.S. Army Sgt. La David Johnson’s widow Tuesday that “he knew what he signed up for …but when it happens it hurts anyway,” when he died serving in northwestern Africa, according to Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Miami Gardens.

“Yes, he said it,” Wilson said. “It’s so insensitive. He should have not have said that. He shouldn’t have said it.”

The president called about 4:45 p.m. and spoke to Johnson’s pregnant widow, Myeshia Johnson, for about five minutes. She is a mother to Johnson’s surviving 2-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter. The conversation happened before Johnson’s remains arrived in a commercial Delta Airlines flight at Miami International Airport.

Wilson witnessed as the widow, who is expecting their third baby in January, leaned over the U.S. flag that was draping his casket. Her pregnant belly was shaking against the casket as she sobbed uncontrollably. Their daughter stood next to her stoically. Their toddler waited in the arms of a relative.

Jeez, he can’t do anything right.

Get McCain to make the phone calls for petessakes.

Better Adversaries

John McCain gave a speech last night after he received the Liberty Medal for 60 years of service to the country. He got straight to the point:

“To abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems,” he said, “is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”

He continued: “We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil.”

McCain’s deliberate use of the phrase “Blood and Soil” is significant. It’s a Nazi slogan. In other words, it’s a warning about how creeping fascism in the form of White Nationalism, undermines the ideals of democracy and rule of law.

Trump appears to have taken it personally (why would that be??) and responded: “I fight back”

Ooooo, be afraid John McCain, be very afraid, oh you survivor of being shot down, years as a prisoner of war and brain cancer fighter.

John McCain responded:

“I have faced tougher adversaries.”

I guess Trump will just take it out on Arizona. Jeff Flake has been getting on his nerves lately too. Maybe its time to shake them down for their lunch money.

Actually, I’d like to see Donald Trump go Mano-a-Mano with John McCain. I think McCain can take him.

Or as this tweet says:

Oh snap! That’s going to leave marks.

But wait! We are not done with him yet.

Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs had this assessment of Donald Trump:

“I’ve been amazed and disappointed by so much of what this president had said, and his approach to running this country, which seems to be one of just a never ending divisiveness. But his comments today about those who have lost loved ones in times of war and his lies that previous presidents Obama and Bush never contacted their families are so beyond the pale, I almost don’t have the words.”

At this point, Coach Pop paused, and I thought for a moment that perhaps he didn’t have the words and the conversation would end. Then he took a breath and said:

“This man in the Oval Office is a soulless coward who thinks that he can only become large by belittling others. This has of course been a common practice of his, but to do it in this manner—and to lie about how previous presidents responded to the deaths of soldiers—is as low as it gets. We have a pathological liar in the White House, unfit intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically to hold this office, and the whole world knows it, especially those around him every day. The people who work with this president should be ashamed, because they know better than anyone just how unfit he is, and yet they choose to do nothing about it. This is their shame most of all.”

Ditto, Coach Pop, megadittos.

Joe Biden is tag teaming with John McCain to dress down Trump. There’s another guy who’s seen tougher adversaries. He lost his wife and daughter in a car accident, his sons were seriously injured and a few years ago, his son Bo Biden died from cancer.
Biden was at an event today where he said Trump reminded him of another historical leader:

The former vice president graphically described the scene of his meeting with a European head of state, saying that the unnamed leader had described to him how Trump “took the president [sic] of Montenegro, shoved him aside, stuck his chest out and his chin, and all I could think of [was] ‘Il Duce’”.

Biden reenacted the mock pose to some laughter from a University of Delaware audience composed mainly of college students. He then corrected the crowd and said: “Not a joke, not a joke. That’s what people are thinking.”

Biden’s remarks – made at an event meant to promote and discuss bipartisan cooperation with Kasich – violated the precedent that outgoing presidents and vice-presidents do not criticize incoming administrations.

Biden talked about Trump in terms of fundamental concern about his effect on the world order.

“This breaking down of international and national norms is the glue that holds the liberal world order together, is the glue that holds together our system,” he said, noting growing concern among “foreign policy poobahs” about the possibility of nuclear war.

Steve Bannon wanted a fight. He’s going to get one.

Why not cut out the middle man?

Ezra Klein asks a very good question that so far I haven’t heard anyone ask before:

OMG, that makes so much sense!! Think of how much time has been wasted by Republicans moving their mouths and uttering sounds about supply side economics and trickle down and laffer curves. We could have spared them all the trouble if the tax cuts had gone directly to the middle class and poor people. After all, it’s their money, shouldn’t they use their own discretion spending it?

This makes almost too much sense. I can’t see the flaw in it. Wait, let me think… no, I can’t see any problems.

And what if we went back to one person one vote in sensibly drawn and sized congressional districts and electoral college maps? We might have stayed out of the Iraq war and elected a qualified presidential candidate who wouldn’t get a thrill out of taking away the health care of little children!!

I’m sure the clever people at Fox News will come up with a counter argument for why it’s audience should trust its betters, who are in office or power, after all, and by divine wisdom know what’s good for us or just good at annoying liberals.

But let’s just savor the crystal clarity of the moment

Another day at the zoo

If Donald’s development goal for the year is learning how to be the most callous person in the country then he has exceeded expectations.

Obamacare is dead, he says, jumping up and down with glee while simultaneously stomping on the heads of “the underserving”, whoever they are.

He still hasn’t called the families of the 4 US servicemen killed in Niger recently. He doesn’t have time, or so he says.

Puerto Rico is still experiencing a catastrophe and he’s pretty much written off 3,500,000 Americans, leaving most of them without clean water or electricity. Well, did they pay their creditors?

I don’t know, Donald, did you?

And California is hurting big time over devastating fires that have killed over 40 people but you know, that’s not a tragedy like Katrina.

Greg Sargent says Republicans are trying to hold themselves hostage over tax reform. “Give the wealthy their tax cut or we’ll shoot ourselves.” Supposedly, the uber (alles) donors have read Republican lawmakers the riot act.

Like we have a problem with that. If they manage to get voted out of office because they got primaried from the right, well, jeez, how much worse can it get??

He’s accusing the Democrats of not supporting his agenda. Yes!! That’s what we’re going to run on next year. WE didn’t support this crap. Are you kidding me? Please gift us some more.

And there is a series of YouTube videos about how Democracies Fall taken from a symposium a couple of weeks ago at Yale. The first speaker, Timur Kuran of Duke University, says what is happening here isn’t caused by globalization or the racism backlash to any significant extent. No, it’s caused by the collapse of the class compromise that we prospered under for the last 80 years due to The New Deal. It started at about the time Jimmy Carter was president. This actually sounds about right. I just wish I’d stayed awake to hear the rest of it. Worth it if you’re into cause and effect and reality based stuff.

Ayayay! No matter how apolitical you claim to be, this stuff has a way of catching up to you.

I’m outta here, Conflucians. I need some down time:

The War on Solstice

For some reason, the so-called “values voters” (self titled), are celebrating that they can now say “Merry Christmas” after years of tyranny by the vast atheist conspiracy outlawing Christmas and any references to it.

Who can forget the years of deprivation, the disappearance of Christmas Trees, the day the colored lights went out, the Anti-Christmas patrols, riding around in riot gear on the backs of flat bed trucks ready to shoot out Christmas stars and transport Merry Christmas greeting violators to the prison planet of Chiron Beta Prime.

Oh, wait that only happens to Jehovah’s Witness kids.

Or was that 17th century England during Oliver Cromwell’s party days?

Never mind.

I love Christmas time. Hey, it was stolen from people who have been celebrating Solstice since time immemorial. But, ok, sure, if you want to call it Christmas, it’s no skin off my nose. {{rolling eyes}}

You don’t have to be a witch to celebrate Solstice. It’s for anyone who marvels at creation and the natural world, regardless of your flavor of god, Flying Spaghetti Monster or non-god belief system. Really, we Solstice celebrators aren’t going to lose sleep over what you celebrate. Knock yourselves out. It’s none of our business.

But “Happy Solstice” is the original greeting. So all you values voters, get over yourselves already.

We just don’t care.