In his biography of Sen. John Kennedy published during the 1960 presidential campaign, historian James MacGregor Burns portrayed the young candidate as charming and intellectual [qualities that Mr. Nixon lacked] but he worried that Kennedy lacked the character to lead the nation in extraordinary times. Burns recalled that Franklin Roosevelt once described the presidency as “pre-eminently a place of moral leadership. All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.”
The quote comes from an article about JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. by Steven Levingston of The Daily Beast dated today, supplied in Microsoft’s news feed– on its face, the article has nothing to do with the 2016 election, but in substance, it can be read as a moral condemnation of the voters whose votes resulted in today’s administration. One wonders if present-day voters would agree that the presidency is “a place of moral leadership” given the fact that almost half of them voted for someone with no morals whatsoever. One further wonders how badly JFK would have lost to Richard Nixon if Mr. Nixon had weaponized “fake news.” One does not doubt at all that Mr. Nixon would have used “fake news” if he had the opportunity.
By sheer coincidence, a study in the same news feed states that “fake news” about Hillary Clinton suppressed votes for her in that election by roughly 2 to 2.3 percent– far more than enough to throw the election against her, which she lost by between 0.2 and 0.7 percent in each of three swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Three bits of “fake news” were studied, hidden among 281 true assertions presented in a survey:
1) Clinton was in “very poor health due to a serious illness” (12 percent believed this canard)
2. Pope Francis endorsed Trump (8 percent accepted this absurdity)
3. Clinton approved weapons sales to Islamic jihadists, “including ISIS” (20 percent swallowed this lie)
The piece was titled “Study suggests fake news might have suppressed Clinton vote” and was credited to Aaron Blake – The Washington Post – Tuesday, April 03, 2018. Sadly, due to a web of interlocking contracts and permissions, M. Blake will not be paid anything for this use of his/her writing talent.
(Photo courtesy of pixabay.com and Tumisu)
“I think we just have to acknowledge the entire industry’s complicity with what’s happening with Facebook,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an internet real estate firm. “It’s almost like we’re Inspector Renault in ‘Casablanca’ where we say we’re shocked, shocked with what’s happening and then a moment later someone hands us our winnings.”
…
Another tech leader, Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, said recently on Twitter that none of his companies advertise on the social network and vowed to take down the official Facebook pages for Tesla and SpaceX.
“It’s not a political statement and I didn’t do this because someone dared me to do it,” he wrote. “Just don’t like Facebook. Gives me the willies. Sorry.”
Many people have repeated the truism that Facebook regards people as its product, not its customers, because Facebook receives income from the sale of blocks of personal data about large numbers of people– who pay nothing for the service of having their data listed and conglomerated.
There is a body of opinion that regards Facebook as “evil” because its business model is based on agglomeration of personal data, but to be consistent, we would have to regard a phonebook (remember those?) as “evil” too. What is actually evil is the use to which political entities (those which traffic in the election of political leaders/controllers rather than the sale of commodities) have put Facebook’s ability to single out individuals and small groups of people for targeted, individualized propaganda (“advertising” for a political personality or a point of view or attitude) and attempts by foreign (mostly Russian) agents to promote fear and division among American voters by finding and reinforcing anxieties.
The new capability which Facebook brings to advertising and propaganda is its “microtargeting”– the ability to tailor messages to individuals and small groups defined by their data profiles. Amalgamation of certain combinations of data can reveal to a significant degree of specificity what a person’s “private” attitudes may be (such as one’s sexual preferences, for example) and to what extent they are susceptible to tailored messages in the first place.
To some people, this capability is trivial or even irrelevant– such people are not easily swayed by advertising campaigns or political speeches, no matter how sophisticated the propaganda or how blatant the lies. To the majority of people, however, this is a powerful tool to which they are highly vulnerable and of which they are completely unaware. It would be useful if these issues were clearly revealed to individual users before their data is collected and aggregated. It would be even more useful if it were clear that the individual could opt out of this aggregation of their personal data for use upon them.
(The quotes come from a New York Times article excerpted by the Microsoft new service, dated Monday, April 2, 2018)
(illustration courtesy of pixabay.com and geralt)
Comment of the Day: Shulkin is Removed to Make Way for Privatization of the Veteran’s Administration
By
It has been my greatest professional honor to serve our country’s more than 20 million veterans. Almost three years ago, I left my private sector job running hospitals and came to Washington to repay my gratitude to the men and women who put their lives on the line for our country.
I believe strongly in the mission of the Department of Veterans Affairs, and nothing about my political experience in Washington could ever change that. I also believe that maintaining a strong V.A. is an essential piece of the puzzle that is the United States’ national security system: We can only expect our sons and daughters to risk their lives and fight for our freedom if we can keep our promise to care for them when they return home broken, injured or traumatized. There is no excuse for not holding up our end of the bargain. The mission set forth by President Abraham Lincoln to care for those who have “borne the battle” is a sacred duty that I will remain committed to always.
During my tenure at the department, we have accomplished a tremendous amount. We passed critical legislation that improved the appeals process for veterans seeking disability benefits, enacted a new G.I. Bill and helped ensure that we employ the right people to work at the department. We have expanded access to health care by reducing wait times, increasing productivity and working more closely with the private sector. We have put in place more and better mental health services for those suffering from the invisible wounds of war. We are now processing more disability claims and appeals than ever before and, for the first time, allowing veterans to see the status of their appeals by simply logging on to their accounts. Unemployment among veterans is near its lowest level in years, at 3.5 percent, and the percent of veterans who have regained trust in V.A. services has risen to 70 percent, from 46 percent four years ago.
It seems that these successes within the department have intensified the ambitions of people who want to put V.A. health care in the hands of the private sector. I believe differences in philosophy deserve robust debate, and solutions should be determined based on the merits of the arguments. The advocates within the administration for privatizing V.A. health services, however, reject this approach. They saw me as an obstacle to privatization who had to be removed. That is because I am convinced that privatization is a political issue aimed at rewarding select people and companies with profits, even if it undermines care for veterans.
Until the past few months, veteran issues were dealt with in a largely bipartisan way. (My 100-0 Senate confirmation was perhaps the best evidence that the V.A. has been the exception to Washington’s political polarization). Unfortunately, the department has become entangled in a brutal power struggle, with some political appointees choosing to promote their agendas instead of what’s best for veterans. These individuals, who seek to privatize veteran health care as an alternative to government-run V.A. care, unfortunately fail to engage in realistic plans regarding who will care for the more than 9 million veterans who rely on the department for life-sustaining care.
The private sector, already struggling to provide adequate access to care in many communities, is ill-prepared to handle the number and complexity of patients that would come from closing or downsizing V.A. hospitals and clinics, particularly when it involves the mental health needs of people scarred by the horrors of war. Working with community providers to adequately ensure that veterans’ needs are met is a good practice. But privatization leading to the dismantling of the department’s extensive health care system is a terrible idea. The department’s understanding of service-related health problems, its groundbreaking research and its special ability to work with military veterans cannot be easily replicated in the private sector.
I have fought to stand up for this great department and all that it embodies. In recent months, though, the environment in Washington has turned so toxic, chaotic, disrespectful and subversive that it became impossible for me to accomplish the important work that our veterans need and deserve. I can assure you that I will continue to speak out against those who seek to harm the V.A. by putting their personal agendas in front of the well-being of our veterans.
As many of you know, I am a physician, not a politician. I came to government with an understanding that Washington can be ugly, but I assumed that I could avoid all of the ugliness by staying true to my values. I have been falsely accused of things by people who wanted me out of the way. But despite these politically based attacks on me and my family’s character, I am proud of my record and know that I acted with the utmost integrity. Unfortunately, none of that mattered.
As I prepare to leave government, I am struck by a recurring thought: It should not be this hard to serve your country.
Dr. Shulkin was one of the very rare holdovers from the Obama administration that Mr. Trump allowed to continue in place– however, that oversight has been corrected as Mr. Trump’s “policy” of “privatization” has reached into the VA. In particular, the drug companies don’t like the fact that the VA negotiates (and plays hardball) with them over drug prices. Most important to Mr. Trump is the fact that Dr. Shulkin seems to know what he is doing and wants the VA to continue to function– personal acquaintance, incompetence, and a demonstrated desire to destroy the agency which is controlled being the main factors that Mr. Trump looks for in an agency head.
Responses from the comment-ocracy at the New York Times web site:
My wife was a VA hematologist / oncologist for many years. She loved her patients and her medical practice. From what I could tell, they loved her and the many other doctors who served them. My dad was a vet who relied on the VA for his care in the last decades of his life. He couldn’t say enough good things about the care he received and he could not have been prouder of his daughter-in-law.
My wife retired before the 2016 election and started full time at the university hospital where she previously held only an academic role. My dad died earlier than that. My wife could not be happier that she does not have to walk past the portrait of Donald Trump when she goes to work to see her patients. My mom says that had my dad not died earlier, seeing Trump elected would have done him in.
So, ask yourself: As Trump has selected cabinet secretaries whose main objective is the destruction of their agencies, why should the VA be different? Excellent medical care for vets is not particularly different than excellent environmental care for our general population or excellent consumer protections or increased access to health insurance. When your goal is to make sure that citizens are poorly served by their government while your real constituents get rich, your primary challenge is lying about it long enough to get the dirty work done before the citizens catch on and boot you out of office.
When the government hands control of the VA over to for-profit companies, it creates serious gaps in accountability and transparency. Even the current publicly operated VA has challenges because most institutions tend to resist reform. When a for-profit company runs the VA, this inherently closed nature functions to shield the activities of an entity whose primary duty is to deliver value to its shareholders.
This lack of accountability is especially dangerous because of the horrifying record of abuse and neglect in the hands of private industry. Just look at the private prison system. Last year, for example, the Justice Department’s inspector general found that private prisons with federal prison contracts delivered deficient medical care, had higher levels of violence than regular federal prisons, and misused solitary confinement as overflow space.
For these reasons, we should all staunchly oppose privatization of the VA, and we must continue working to expose the harm to human rights caused by the Trump administration’s embrace of companies who place profit over all else. We must remain accountable to our military veterans and our governmental representatives must ensure veterans receive continued and improved care through the public VA system.
Many years ago when I was in private practice I had the opportunity to discuss privatization of the VA with Ned Powell who was Under Secretary of the VA under Clinton. I felt that was the way to cheaper and better care. I was in Washington about 2 years ago on other business and having worked in the VA for the preceding 10 years I had to meet him to give my apology. I was wrong, plain and simple. This is a coordinated system dealing with a unique population that for many reasons is more complicated than what I saw in private practice. Outcomes are tracked and a very good electronic medical record which is shared throughout the country makes treating our mobile population a coordinated event. New patients are tested for a variety of problems when they enter the system and a prescription system alerts of drug interactions and allergy problems.
Expanding government-paid private care for military veterans outside the VA is a top priority for groups funded by the Koch bros. The Koch-backed Concerned Veterans of America has pushed for legislation, but most other major veterans organizations opposed it. The Koch brothers’ perpetual goal is to reduce the role of government & the need to pay taxes to support it. Privatization should be stopped from wreaking havoc on our V.A. health care delivery system.
The V.A.is the largest hospital & healthcare system in the U.S., & is the closest working model to a national single payer health insurance system . The V.A. is the only system that negotiates directly with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices, & is a comprehensive resource for veterans seeking all types of care: mental health, physical health issues, physicians/medicine/ nursing/social services/social work/ clinical social work/ clinical psychology and more. The VA is a great example of the public sector working well by providing quality care for the people that use it, and it saves lives.
A 2016 RAND Corporation analysis found that the VA provides good quality care compared with other health systems, usually in a timely manner. The V.A. cares for some of our sickest patients with the best results at the lowest cost with the highest patient satisfaction. The key to maintaining and improving V.A. healthcare and social services is to fully support, fund & staff the VA.
While I’m sure this has happened and will continue to happen in certain cases. As a physician working in both the private and VA setting. I would say access to care in the VA is much much higher than in the private sector. When I see a veteran, I often order labs, CT scans, and do procedures on the same day I see them. This sort of access is rare in the private sector and greatly depends on the type of insurance one has.
Generally speaking, the delays for referrals, tests, procedures for many HMO or other managed care patients (so called Obamacare) is much worse.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and skeeze)
A shattering collapse of civilisation is a “near certainty” in the next few decades due to humanity’s continuing destruction of the natural world that sustains all life on Earth, according to biologist Prof Paul Ehrlich. In May, it will be 50 years since the eminent biologist published his most famous and controversial book, The Population Bomb. But Ehrlich remains as outspoken as ever. The world’s optimum population is less than two billion people – 5.6 billion fewer than on the planet today, he argues, and there is an increasing toxification of the entire planet by synthetic chemicals that may be more dangerous to people and wildlife than climate change. Ehrlich also says an unprecedented redistribution of wealth is needed to end the over-consumption of resources, but “the rich who now run the global system – that hold the annual ‘world destroyer’ meetings in Davos – are unlikely to let it happen”.
This comes from the Guardian on March 22, 2018...
“This could have been written by President Obama and liberal Democrats,” Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said Thursday night on Fox News, hours before he consented to a vote on a 2,200-page bill most of his colleagues hadn’t had time to read. Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska accused his party of hypocrisy. “Every Republican would vote against this disgusting pork bill if a Democrat were president,” he said in a statement.
This comes from the Atlantic, which describes multiple agencies Mr. Trump vowed to zero out of the budget– that were retained. The only major difference was a huge increase in military spending. There will be a massive deficit because of this military spending increase, but that is for when the Democrats take over the Congress– and impeach the bum (and his sanctimonious sycophant.) I was really surprised by this bizarre twist. The National Endowment for the Arts and the Endowment for the Humanities are still there! None of the humane budget items have been slashed, as Mr. Trump claimed would happen. Why? The Democrats were as surprised as anyone. There is no rational explanation for this phenomenon. Answers, anyone?
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and sallyjermain)
“Human-made threats are pushing more and more of our animals, and their habitats, to the very brink of extinction,” says Philip Mansbridge, UK regional director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. “With so many species at a tipping point, we must all act now to protect our land and marine environment and the vast array of animal and plant life, which are vital to healthy biodiversity and all our futures.”
…
These grim outcomes are predicted by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services(IPBES), the biodiversity counterpart of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Today in Medellin, Colombia, IPBES launched four reports assessing biodiversity in four key regions: the Americas, Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Europe and Central Asia.
The reports emphasise that human survival could itself be jeopardised in each region. Nature provides services that are worth trillions of dollars worldwide, such as food, shelter, water, weather and clean air. Unless these “ecosystem services” are safeguarded, we will lose them.
…
A major assessment of Earth’s biodiversity concludes that exploitable fish stocks along Asia-Pacific coastlines will completely collapse by 2048. Meanwhile, half of all Africa’s mammals and birds face extinction by 2100, as do 37 per cent of Europe’s freshwater fish.
This grim news is from a report in “New Scientist”, a venerable weekly magazine that explores developments in science. This means that the fish which Asia and the West Coast of America will lose all of its edible fish in the next twenty years. Africa, which is dependent on natural sources for its food, will face worsening famine as its ecosystems collapse. America will be completely dependent on its own, degraded farmland. Human population increase has prompted the destruction of habitat all over the world, and humans will be forced more and more towards artificial production of food stocks to avert famine in this country. This is the premise of the recent movie “Blade Runner 2049” in which artificial humans are out-competing naturally born people, and all are producing their food in tanks instead of from the ground. Ecological destruction has forced people into cities, and the country-side is given over to food production tanks and solar power installations. The natural world is a memory, sensations of which are artificially created in computers for the increasingly common “skin jobs.” Even the task of eliminating errant “skin jobs” is tasked over to more of their own kind.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and jplenio)
An attorney for the defense in the trial of Kansas militia members who are accused of plotting to blow up an apartment building housing Somali immigrants told the jury that the secretly recorded conversations between the defendants were protected speech under the First Amendment because:
“… hatred is not a crime in this country…”
The prosecution argued that the discussion revolved around concrete plans to obtain explosives, pack a truck with them, and detonate them next to an apartment building filled with immigrants from Somalia who worked in a meatpacking plant.
“Defendants wanted to send the message Muslims are not welcomed here — not in Garden City, not in Kansas, not in America,” prosecutor Risa Berkower said in her opening statement.
The three men were indicted in October 2016 after a militia member, Dan Day, became alarmed and contacted the FBI. He agreed to wear a wire and recorded profanity-laced conversations among the men that led to their arrest.
The government plans to present evidence that the men manufactured homemade explosives and tested them. It also plans to present testimony showing the men tried to recruit other members of the Kansas Security Force to join them, and warned them not to tip off law enforcement about the plan. Some militia members will testify they didn’t like Muslims but refused to join the plan to kill people.
Attorneys for the defense said the FBI set up the men with a paid informant and all the talk about violence wasn’t serious. They said that the men had a right to free speech and association under the Constitution. The FBI acknowledges it paid Day more than $32,000 for expenses including a used vehicle after his broke down.
The alleged plot came against the background of a vicious election campaign in the fall of 2016, in which presidential candidate Donald J. Trump incited hatred against immigrants not from Norway. It’s true that hatred for certain groups of people is not against the law– it would be unconstitutional to prosecute people for their attitudes– but it is certainly also true that hatred can lead to attempts to abridge the rights of others.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and arnoldus)
Before losing his security access, Kushner was particularly interested about information on the Middle East, the Intercept reported, citing several former White House and U.S. government officials.
When Salman became the new heir to the throne in June last year, the daily brief reportedly began to focus on shifting political allegiances in Saudi Arabia, and named several Saudi royals who were opposed to the crown prince’s position.
Kushner then made a surprise trip to Riyadh in October, reportedly staying up until 4 a.m. with Salman to discuss strategy.
Several sources told the Intercept that following the meeting, Salman told close confidants that Kushner had spilled the names of the Saudi royals “disloyal” to the prince, although Kushner’s camp strongly denies the claim.
Salman reportedly told the United Arab Emirates’ Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed about the meeting with Kushner, bragging that he had Kushner “in his pocket,” sources told the Intercept.
Just a week after the meeting Salman began his large-scale corruption crackdown, which saw 200 officials arrested. According to the report, Saudi officials mentioned in the daily briefs were among those detained.
–From the Business Insider via Microsoft News digest, credited to Rosie Perper.
In other words, Jared used his access to the “Presidential Daily Brief” to obtain the names of Saudi rivals “disloyal” to Prince Salman, then passed that information on to the Prince. This was apparently with the approval of Mr. Trump, who is a great fan of Mohammed bin Salman (an autocrat after his own heart.) Whether this activity was “legal” is beside the point. The point is that it is disingenuous. The Prince claims to be suppressing corruption, when in fact he is merely substituting another form of corruption. The Prince used the information passed on by Jared to imprison and shake down at least 200 immensely wealthy Saudis, who were forced to give away control of their assets (worth billions of dollars) in order to regain their freedom. Some of these wealthy Saudis were reputedly tortured to enhance their compliance.
Thus, the intelligence obtained by our national security agencies on Saudi persons was passed through the President’s senior advisor (who has since lost his top-secret security clearance and access to the daily briefing) back to those in power in the kingdom to help them control their own people. The Prince is said to have bragged that he had Jared in his pocket.
The President has gone on to promise to sell more weapons to Saudi Arabia this week during a visit by the Prince. He seems to think that he will shore up his approval ratings by supporting jobs for armaments-industry workers. This seems unlikely, as he already has relatively high ratings among this group and there is little he can do to disguise his personality from those who are repelled by it.
We hope for an end to the war in Yemen, but that does not appear to be on the President’s agenda. With no personal experience of war, he seems to think that it is somehow a good thing to send Saudi warplanes into Yemen with American targeting data (apparently error-ridden from the casualty figures) to blow up Yemeni infrastructure. The Houthis are unlikely to be effectively deterred by the devastation and suffering visited on their country, and Mr. Trump does not appear to realize this. Perhaps he should have “War is Hell” stamped on the back of his hand.
(photo of mountains in Yemen courtesy of pixabay.com and feinibookcosmo)
“When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America…America will triumph over you.”
Twitter post by John O. Brennan on March 17, 2018 responding to Mr. Trump’s tweet about “a great day for democracy” when Andrew McCabe was fired for supposedly lacking “candor” following a recommendation by the Justice Department’s Inspector General… but this was all based on an invalid premise: that McCabe wasn’t authorized to release statements to reporters. The firing was rushed to get McCabe out before his birthday so he couldn’t get his full retirement benefits or, more importantly, his health insurance. This appears to be a petty act of vindictiveness by Mr. Trump, who directed Mr. Sessions to do the dirty deed even though the IG’s investigation wasn’t finished. He’s making a mistake by provoking an enemy who is a witness to his obstruction of justice.
Meanwhile, McCabe tweeted about his children:
“Things that have caused tears from our children this evening.
Being served Milk in a Green Cup
Coloring was taking too long
The Mail hasn’t come yet
The News was on
The TV was turned off
A toy wasn’t allowed to be brought downstairs
Life in General
I’d say he’s taking it pretty well.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and geralt)
” Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration. ”
“I feel compelled to explain why I have to leave. Four decades ago, I took an oath as a newly commissioned officer. I swore to “support and defend the Constitution,” and that oath did not expire when I took off my uniform. Today, I feel that Fox News is assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers. Over my decade with Fox, I long was proud of the association. Now I am ashamed.
“In my view, Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration. When prime-time hosts–who have never served our country in any capacity–dismiss facts and empirical reality to launch profoundly dishonest assaults on the FBI, the Justice Department, the courts, the intelligence community (in which I served) and, not least, a model public servant and genuine war hero such as Robert Mueller–all the while scaremongering with lurid warnings of “deep-state” machinations– I cannot be part of the same organization, even at a remove. To me, Fox News is now wittingly harming our system of government for profit.”
This is a quote from Buzzfeed, which obtained the contents of an email retired Lt Col Peters sent to his colleagues explaining why he has quit after ten years as a news reader and “contributor.”
(photo taken in Moscow courtesy of pixabay.com and 3dman_eu)
Conrad Theodore Seitz 