Trust The Plan

 Yeah, right.

This new book just jumped the line. I consumed it forthwith. Wrote him an Amazon review. Five stars, Dawg.

Trust THIS Review

I was settling in to study the new 824 pg book "The Big Myth" by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway for my blog when Will Sommer's new book "Trust The Plan" came to my attention. I read the Amazon "Look Inside" sample. Intrigued, I downloaded it and read it carefully overnight. I tweeted the author that "Chapter 7 alone was worth the price." Mr. Sommer delivers a fine, enjoyable writing style, and—notwithstanding that he's a journalist, not a social psych practitioner—provides astute analytical evaluations of the phenomena comprising the fevered, impenetrable  conspiratorial illogic which hobbles a disturbing percentage of humanity (abetted by the new comms wrinkle of digital social media). As a (now-retired) long-time statistical analyst and former forensic radiation lab programmer who did a lengthy adjunct stint teaching collegiate Critical Thinking and Argument Analysis, I have an abiding concern over the bozo cognitive muddles and antics characteristic of "QAnon" and the broader cohort of the "SERIOUSLY?" demographic. I joke that "Occam's gonna need a bigger chainsaw."

The joke is increasingly not funny. I've certainly had my exasperated mocking sport with these myriad, poignant Legends In Their Own Minds across the years, but some of them increasingly threaten or engage in armed violence, not only against the hated "State" but also anyone who individually pushes back on their noise.

"Trust The Plan" is well worth your time. Trust Me. It was for me. I don't have a "Plan," just a candid reading recommendation.

When I wrote and submitted the review (still pending as I post this), the only prior text review posted was a pissy 1-star Trump troll screed.

"Ridiculous" (Chris Long)
First of all, there IS no such entity as “QAnon.” This is literally a mainstream media construct. So, the author is off to a very poor start just from the title alone.
Secondly, the book description says it all: “Trust the Plan shows us in granular detail who we’ll be up against for years to come.” So what we have here is yet another anti-Trump diatribe.
No thanks.
TRUMP 2024!

Untraceable dude obviously did not read the book.

 

SATURDAY UPDATE

 

Amazon posted my review, along with this beaut.

 

"No further questions. The Prosecution rests, Your Honor."

 

The SERIOUSLY? demographic.

NPR UPDATE

 

ERRATA

Ohhhh, Canada...

Yeah, I know, we're admonished to "be civil" to these careening Dramatists. They're "hurting," and simply acting out in response to feeling "neglected" by us mainstream society "normies" and the overlord globalist "elites."

 

I guess. 

 

Oh, props to Will for noting the history of the "Where We Go One We Go All" thing. It's from the awesome 1996 Jeff Bridges sailing movie "The White Squall." Totally loved that flick.

 

BULWARK INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

 

 I have a singer-songwriter-keyboardist friend from Oregon, a devout evangelical Christian by the name of Doug Brons. He's fabulous. I've called him "the Michael MacDonald of Christian rock." In the last year or so, though, he's started posting weird QAnon-ish stuff on Facebook, making dark allusions to "the Coming Storm" and the "WWG1WGA" thing. Check out his recent song "We Are The Patriots."

 

OK, then...

_____

 

Oh, yo, hey Mr. "Chris Long" Trump 2024, a little quickie BobbyG Photoshop erratum for you:

 

Eloquent, as always. Original tweet here (unless they pull it).

I posted it on Facebook. One of my FB friends assumed it was a spoof. "Dude, I transcribed it verbatim from the audio clip put up on Twitter by his spokeswoman, then pilfered that "coin" image via Google and quickly glommed the whole thing together in a jpeg, using Photoshop."

IN THE MAIL TODAY

My new Harper's arrived. Back cover, full bleed ad:

I got the Kindle edition Tuesday when it was released, and am burrowed well into to it. First cited it here.

This is the story of how American business manufactured a myth that has, for decades and to our detriment, held us in its grip. It is the true history of a false idea: the idea of “the magic of the marketplace.” Some people call it market absolutism or market essentialism. In the 1990s, George Soros popularized the name we find most apt: market fundamentalism.1 It’s a quasi-religious belief that the best way to address our needs—whether economic or otherwise—is to let markets do their thing, and not rely on government. Market fundamentalists treat “The Market” as a proper noun: something unique and unto itself, that has agency and even wisdom, that functions best when left unfettered and unregulated, undisturbed and unperturbed. Government, according to the myth, cannot improve the functioning of markets; it can only interfere. Governments therefore need to stay out of the way, lest they “distort” the market and prevent it from doing its “magic.” In the late twentieth century, market fundamentalism was cloaked in the seemingly ancient raiments of received wisdom. In fact, it was more or less invented in the twentieth century.

Classical liberal economists—including Adam Smith—recognized that government served essential functions, including building infrastructure for everyone’s benefit and regulating banks, which, left to their own devices, could destroy an economy. They also recognized that taxation was required to enable governments to perform those functions. But in the early twentieth century, a group of self-styled “neo-liberals” shifted economic and political thinking radically. They argued that any government action in the marketplace, even well intentioned, compromised the freedom of individuals to do as they pleased—and therefore put us on the road to totalitarianism. Political and economic freedom were “indivisible,” they insisted: any compromise to the latter was a threat to the former—any compromise at all, even to address obvious ills like child labor or workplace injury. Why did we ever come to accept a worldview so impervious to facts? A worldview Smith himself, often thought of as the father of free-market capitalism, would have rejected? This book tells that story...

Oreskes, Naomi; Conway, Erik M.. The Big Myth (pp. 10-11). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition

CONCLUSION

Judge Richard A. Posner is one of America’s most distinguished conservative jurists and for many years a leader of the law and economics movement. This movement, which originated at the University of Chicago, holds that the law is best viewed as a tool to promote economic efficiency and that economic analysis can and should can guide legal practice.1 Posner spent most of his career displaying a jaundiced view of government regulation and he influenced many a young jurist to do the same; one analysis finds him to be the most cited law writer of the second half of the twentieth century. His jurisprudential philosophy—which substantially equated justice with economic efficiency—provoked one critic to snarl that “Maximum Wealth, badly distributed, does not lead to maximum happiness.”

In 2009, Posner undertook an analysis of the 2008 financial crisis, which caused him to rethink his views. A “rational decision-maker starts with a prior probability,” Posner wrote in A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression, “but adjusts that probability as new evidence comes to his attention.” The near collapse of the world’s banking system offered a raft of evidence about the reality of market failure and the need for government regulation, particularly in financial markets. “Behavior that generates large external costs,” he tartly observed, “provides an apt occasion for government regulation.” What he had learned from the crisis was that “we need a more active and intelligent government to keep our model of a capitalist economy from running off the rails. The movement to deregulate the financial industry went too far by exaggerating the resilience—the self-healing powers—of laissez-faire capitalism.” The responsibility for building the guard rails that capitalism has proven itself to require has to rest with government, because there isn’t any other institution to do it.

The 2008 collapse should have hit “economic libertarians in their solar plexus,” Posner observed, because the crisis was the result of underregulation, a consequence of the “innate limitations of the free market.” But if the economic libertarians were hit by the 2008 crisis, they refused to flinch. In conservative circles and the offices of K-street lobbyists, trade associations, and think tanks, and on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, as well as in much academic economics, free-market ideology remained largely in place… [pp. 567-568].

I recall my nano-bit part in the 2008 financial crash run-up.

 

UPDATE: I'm now about halfway through "The Big Myth," which the Kindle app tells me is almost a 19 hour read. It is kickin' my butt. Stay tuned...

__________

 

One year on:

Russia's 3-day conquest of Ukraine.

 

It was gonna be a cakewalk, with Zelenskyy quickly arrested, exiled, or dead, Putin's tank columns rolling boldly through KyIv in no time, euphoric Ukrainians lining the streets to throw flowers at their liberators.

 

As noted foreign policy analyst Mike Tyson observes:

"Ev'rybody got a plan, 'til he get hit."

NY TIMES UPDATE

“A walk in the park.”

That was the assurance skeptical members of the Russian military said they were given by superiors as it appeared increasingly clear that President Vladimir V. Putin truly did mean to wage an unprovoked war on neighboring Ukraine.

And it seemed to make sense.

Ukraine was a vastly outgunned nation led by the unlikeliest of presidents, a former comedian elected just a few years before. Russia was a major military power, if not the global force it was in the days of the Soviet Union.

And so when the first planes raced across the border followed by ground troops, it was widely assumed that it would be mere days before the Russian tricolor was hoisted over Kyiv, the capital.

That was a year ago. Now, no one is talking about a walk in the park. They speak of slogs and slaughter. Of a Kremlin “special military operation” that metastasized into the biggest ground war in Europe since World War II. Of Russian casualties of around 200,000 killed or wounded, by some Western estimates."...

Been a very sad year.

How and When the War in Ukraine Will End
Forecasting a conclusion to an unpredictable conflict
By Uri Friedman

Sometimes the best way to understand what’s possible is to ask impossible questions.

One year ago, Russia launched a war that many never expected it to wage and assumed it would quickly win against a cowed Ukraine and its allies. How and when will the conflict end? For a war that has defied expectations, those questions might seem impossible to answer. Yet I recently posed them to several top historians, political scientists, geopolitical forecasters, and former officials—because only in imagining potential futures can we understand the rough bounds of the possible, and our own agency in influencing the outcome we want.

The main takeaways from the responses I received? Prepare for the possibility of a long, shape-shifting conflict, perhaps lasting years, even a decade or more. Watch how the rest of the world regards the Kremlin’s imperial ambitions. Expect any negotiated settlement to be fragile and reliant on third-party intervention. And don’t anticipate a dramatic finish, such as a Russian nuclear detonation in Ukraine or the overthrow of Vladimir Putin in Russia. Notably, in a reversal of perceptions a year ago, some experts could envision a decisive Ukrainian victory against Russia, but none forecast a decisive Russian win against Ukraine…

 

"The war in Ukraine is the final shovel of dirt on the grave of any optimism about the world order that was born with the fall of Soviet Communism. Now we are faced with the long grind of defeating Moscow’s armies and eventually rebuilding a better world." —Tom Nichols

__________

 

Will this SCOTUS strike down or materially modify CDA Section 230?

SECTION 230, COMMUNICATIONS DECENCY ACT: 47.USC.230

§ 230. Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material

(a) Findings
The Congress finds the following:

(1) The rapidly developing array of Internet and other interactive computer services available to individual Americans represent an extraordinary advance in the availability of educational and informational resources to our citizens.

(2) These services offer users a great degree of control over the information that they receive, as well as the potential for even greater control in the future as technology develops.

(3) The Internet and other interactive computer services offer a forum for a true diversity of political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development, and myriad avenues for intellectual activity.

(4) The Internet and other interactive computer services have flourished, to the benefit of all Americans, with a minimum of government regulation.

(5) Increasingly Americans are relying on interactive media for a variety of political, educational, cultural, and entertainment services.

(b) Policy
It is the policy of the United States—

(1) to promote the continued development of the Internet and other interactive computer services and other interactive media;

(2) to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the
Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation;

(3) to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over
what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet and other interactive computer services;

(4) to remove disincentives for the development and utilization of blocking and filtering technologies that empower parents to restrict their children’s access to objectionable or inappropriate online material; and

(5) to ensure vigorous enforcement of Federal criminal laws to deter and punish trafficking in obscenity, stalking, and harassment by means of computer.

(c) Protection for ‘‘Good Samaritan’’ blocking and screening of offensive material

(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher
or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

(2) Civil liability

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account
of—

(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).1

(d) Obligations of interactive computer service

A provider of interactive computer service shall, at the time of entering an agreement with a customer for the provision of interactive computer service and in a manner deemed appropriate by the provider, notify such customer that parental control protections (such as computer hardware, software, or filtering services) are commercially available that may assist the customer in limiting access to material that is harmful to minors. Such notice shall identify, or provide the customer with access to information identifying, current providers of such protections.

(e) Effect on other laws

(1) No effect on criminal law

Nothing in this section shall be construed to impair the enforcement of section 223 or 231 of this title, chapter 71 (relating to obscenity) or 110 (relating to sexual exploitation of children) of title 18, or any other Federal criminal statute.

(2) No effect on intellectual property law

Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit or expand any law pertaining to intellectual property.

(3) State law

Nothing in this section shall be construed to prevent any State from enforcing any State
law that is consistent with this section. No cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section.

(4) No effect on communications privacy law

Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit the application of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 or any of the amendments made by such Act, or any similar State law.

(f) Definitions

As used in this section:

(1) Internet

The term ‘‘Internet’’ means the international computer network of both Federal and non-Federal interoperable packet switched data networks.

(2) Interactive computer service

The term ‘‘interactive computer service’’ means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions.

(3) Information content provider

The term ‘‘information content provider’’ means any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer service.

(4) Access software provider

The term ‘‘access software provider’’ means a provider of software (including client or
server software), or enabling tools that do any one or more of the following:

(A) filter, screen, allow, or disallow content;
(B) pick, choose, analyze, or digest content; or
(C) transmit, receive, display, forward, cache, search, subset, organize, reorganize, or translate content.

__________

(June 19, 1934, ch. 652, title II, § 230, as added Pub. L. 104–104, title V, § 509, Feb. 8, 1996, 110 Stat. 137; amended Pub. L. 105–277, div. C, title XIV, § 1404(a), Oct. 21, 1998, 112 Stat. 2681–739.)

REFERENCES IN TEXT
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, referred to in subsec. (e)(4), is Pub. L. 99–508, Oct. 21, 1986, 100 Stat. 1848, as amended. For complete classification of this Act to the Code, see Short Title of 1986 Amendment note set out under section 2510 of Title 18, Crimes and Criminal Procedure, and Tables.

CODIFICATION
Section 509 of Pub. L. 104–104, which directed amendment of title II of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 201 et seq.) by adding section 230 at end, was executed by adding the section at end of part I of title II of the Act to reflect the probable intent of Congress and amendments by sections 101(a), (b), and 151(a) of Pub. L. 104–104 designating §§ 201 to 229 as part I and adding parts II (§ 251 et seq.) and III (§ 271 et seq.) to title II of the Act.

AMENDMENTS
1998—Subsec. (d). Pub. L. 105–277, § 1404(a)(3), added subsec. (d). Former subsec. (d) redesignated (e). Subsec. (d)(1). Pub. L. 105–277, § 1404(a)(1), inserted ‘‘or 231’’ after ‘‘section 223’’. Subsecs. (e), (f). Pub. L. 105–277, § 1404(a)(2), redesignatedsubsecs. (d) and (e) as (e) and (f), respectively.

EFFECTIVE DATE OF 1998 AMENDMENT
Amendment by Pub. L. 105–277 effective 30 days after Oct. 21, 1998, see section 1406 of Pub. L. 105–277, set out as a note under section 223 of this title.

 

ORALS COMMENCE AT SCOTUS FEB 21ST ON TWO CASES

 

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google/YouTube, Tumblr, Pinterest, GETTR, Telegram, & Truth Social, etc—none of them are currently considered "publishers" subject to content liability litigation and remedies. That may well change this year. There's a lot at stake.

 

Stay tuned...

2-22 UPDATE

[CNN]  After back-to-back oral arguments this week, the Supreme Court appears reluctant to hand down the kind of sweeping ruling about liability for terrorist content on social media that some feared would upend the internet.

On Wednesday, the justices struggled with claims that Twitter contributed to a 2017 ISIS attack in Istanbul by hosting content unrelated to the specific incident. Arguments in that case, Twitter v. Taamneh, came a day after the court considered whether YouTube can be sued for recommending videos created by ISIS to its users.

What's at stake: The closely watched cases carry significant stakes for the wider internet. An expansion of apps and websites’ legal risk for hosting or promoting content could lead to major changes at sites including Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube, to name a few.

For nearly three hours of oral argument, the justices asked attorneys for Twitter, the US government and the family of Nawras Alassaf – a Jordanian citizen killed in the 2017 attack – how to weigh several factors that might determine Twitter’s level of legal responsibility, if any. But while the justices quickly identified what the relevant factors were, they seemed divided on how to analyze them…

May portend a relatively narrow, non-"groundbreaking" set of rulings. Or no new rulings (kick it over to Congress). We won't know until June or July.

__________

 

Presidents' Day 2023

February 20th, 2023. Kyiv, Ukraine

__________

 

This man

is seriously mentally ill.

 

Up at 1 a.m. at Mar a Lago to rant incoherently on his "Truth Social" platform. It would be comical were it not so.

 

 

ON A SERIOUS NOTE

 

I highly recommend Elie Honig's new book.

 

Chapter 17
United States v. Donald John Trump

Donald Trump has, as of this writing, never been charged with a crime. He has been investigated criminally at the federal level and in several states for crimes ranging from endangering-the-republic serious to the technical and obscure. But he has never been criminally charged, ever, with anything.

That’s a far cry, of course, from saying that Trump has never actually committed a crime. To the contrary, as I’ll argue here, he has committed many crimes, dozens even (depending how thinly we slice each of his criminal episodes into component parts), often in open public view. He has simply gotten away with it.

Trump might still face charges at some point; it’s possible he gets charged by somebody, somewhere, with something, between the writing of this book and publication. (The Fulton County district attorney in Georgia seems the most likely of anyone to file charges, as we’ll discuss in chapter 19.) But given the time that has lapsed, and the complex legal, structural, and political obstacles that any prosecution is certain to encounter, Trump’s ultimate conviction and imprisonment are now more the stuff of fantastical Twitter memes than reality.

So, looking back at Trump’s history of criminality, we need to consider the counterfactual. What charges might Trump have faced, in a (hypothetical) world where he received no formal legal protection while he was president, and none of the other advantages that bosses commonly enjoy and exploit, both during and after his presidency? What if Trump had done all he did, but was just an ordinary guy? And what if prosecutors had taken action quickly and decisively, without spinning their wheels for years and allowing the political landscape to shift under their feet?

Before we begin, I need to make this clear: I reject the casual assertion that a prosecution of Trump would be easy, or a given. I’ve worked long enough as a prosecutor to know that there’s no such thing as an automatic conviction, and that a criminal case against a former president would be extraordinarily difficult, regardless of the strength of the evidence. But we also need to move beyond the defeatist shrug of the shoulders—“Well, it’s complicated, he was the president, it’s never been done before, it’ll cause dissension, what are you gonna do?” There’s a substantive discussion to be had between these poles.

We do not, of course, have all the facts that were available to prosecutors—or would have been available, had they opened criminal investigations and pursued them in a timely and aggressive manner. But we do know an awful lot, often more than enough to conclude with confidence that Trump did in fact commit a particular crime.

We know about Trump’s conduct, first, because journalism about his misdeeds has been remarkable for its scope, depth, and accuracy. There have been sporadic misfires, but by and large, media reporting about Trump’s conduct has been spot-on, and countless scoops have later been definitively confirmed. Of course we’ll rely here only on those factual allegations that have now been established beyond serious dispute.

Over time, even more evidence has entered the public domain. Grand jury materials have now been publicly disclosed, as criminal cases against Trump’s cohorts (and, at times, co-conspirators) have progressed and concluded. Judges have ordered the Justice Department to turn over internal documents to Congress, media outlets, and public transparency advocates. Congress, inspectors general, and others have uncovered new evidence through their investigative work; the House January 6 Select Committee has uncovered particularly damning evidence about Trump’s quest to steal the 2020 election. People who were directly involved in Trump’s crimes, or witnessed them, have come forward (at times, conveniently, just a bit too late for prosecutors or other investigators to make meaningful use of their information). Heck, Trump himself has openly admitted much of his wrongdoing—bragged about it, even—in his tweets (pre-ban) and other public statements. The amount and quality of evidence varies by crime, but we have an ample factual record to proceed here…

Honig, Elie. Untouchable (pp. 201-203). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Yeah.

And, then, there's this mess. Fox News execs and show hosts caught red-handed via the Dominion defamation lawsuit discovery process stating multiple times off the record that they knew the Trump "stolen election" allegations had zero credible evidence justifying them.

So, you'll enjoy this: we put what Fox hosts Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham said, on air, side by side with what they were saying to each other on text, in private, when the cameras stopped rolling.

It's a must-watch and it's pretty shocking:pic.twitter.com/tkrkzpF5tY

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) February 18, 2023

ERRATUM

OK, then…

 

Running for President? Lordy.

 

ON DECK

 

Release date Feb 21, 2023

Click cover image

"A carefully researched work of intellectual history, and an urgently needed political analysis." --Jane Mayer

“[A] scorching indictment of free market fundamentalism … and how we can change, before it's too late.”-Esquire, Best Books of Winter 2023

The bestselling authors of Merchants of Doubt offer a profound, startling history of one of America's most tenacious--and destructive--false ideas: the myth of the "free market."

In their bestselling book Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway revealed the origins of climate change denial. Now, they unfold the truth about another disastrous dogma: the “magic of the marketplace.”

In the early 20th century, business elites, trade associations, wealthy powerbrokers, and media allies set out to build a new American orthodoxy: down with “big government” and up with unfettered markets. With startling archival evidence, Oreskes and Conway document campaigns to rewrite textbooks, combat unions, and defend child labor. They detail the ploys that turned hardline economists Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman into household names; recount the libertarian roots of the Little House on the Prairie books; and tune into the General Electric-sponsored TV show that beamed free-market doctrine to millions and launched Ronald Reagan's political career.

By the 1970s, this propaganda was succeeding. Free market ideology would define the next half-century across Republican and Democratic administrations, giving us a housing crisis, the opioid scourge, climate destruction, and a baleful response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Only by understanding this history can we imagine a future where markets will serve, not stifle, democracy.

Recall my coverage of Dr. Oreskes' prior book “Why Trust Science?”

 

Waiting impatiently to download and study. 

UPDATE ON THE MENTALLY ILL DONALD

Sir, your neurological calamity is still covered by Obamacare.

__________

 

"A Short Stay in Hell"

And, NO, it wasn't attending a Trump MAGA rally.
 

 

What an interesting book! Props to Dr. Todd Kashdan for the heads-up. I think a lot of folks who read it and commented on it didn't get the point / joke. Even those who reviewed it favorably.

"Library of Babel," anyone?

apropos:

 

I am enjoying the "hell" out of this book. Stay tuned...

__________

 

Calamity in Turkey and Syria

 

Horrific. Back-to-back 7.8 and 7.5 earthquakes. The death toll will certainly hit 5 figures. As I write it's up over 7,000. Hundreds of buildings collapsed. And, crappy cold, snowy winter weather in its midst. Ugh.

 

I was gonna write on some other stuff today. It can wait.

FEB 12TH, 10 am EST

The death toll now reportedly exceeds 33,000, and expected to perhaps yet double or more. Closing in on 100,000 injured, millions homeless. Just terrible. 💔

__________

 

"You could fill up a book with what I know."

"But with all I don't know, you could fill up a library."

. 

I found the blog post title quote in this Atlantic article by Thomas Chatterton Williams.

When I was in my 20s and writing my first book—I know, I really fucked up there—I came across a quote I can no longer find the source of that said, essentially, “You could fill a book with all I know, but with all I don’t know, you could fill a library.” It’s a helpful visualization, perhaps the most basic and pragmatic justification for deep reading. And though correlation is not causation, I submit that we’d save ourselves an enormous amount of trouble in the future if we’d agree to a simple litmus test: Immediately disregard anyone in the business of selling a vision who proudly proclaims they hate reading...

Tweeted him to tell him I'd be "stealin' it."

We have never before had access to so many perspectives, ideas, and information. Much of it is fleetingly interesting but ultimately inconsequential—not to be confused with expertise, let alone wisdom. This much is widely understood and discussed. The ease with which we can know things and communicate them to one another, as well as launder success in one realm into pseudo-authority in countless others, has combined with a traditional American tendency toward anti-intellectualism and celebrity worship. Toss in a decades-long decline in the humanities, and we get our superficial culture in which even the elite will openly disparage as pointless our main repositories for the very best that has been thought.

…In an ill-conceived profile from September, published on the Sequoia Capital website, the 30-year-old SBF rails against literature of any kind, lecturing a journalist on why he would “never” read a book. “I’m very skeptical of books,” he expands. “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”…

It is one thing in practice not to read books, or not to read them as much as one might wish. But it is something else entirely to despise the act in principle. Identifying as someone who categorically rejects books suggests a much larger deficiency of character …. receiving all of your information from the SBF ideal of six-paragraph blog posts, or from the movies and random conversations that Ye prefers, is as foolish as identifying as someone who chooses to eat only fast food.

Many books should not have been published, and writing one is an excruciating process full of failure. But when a book succeeds, even partially, it represents a level of concentration and refinement—a mastery of subject and style strengthened through patience and clarified in revision—that cannot be equaled. Writing a book is an extraordinarily disproportionate act: What can be consumed in a matter of hours takes years to bring to fruition. That is its virtue. And the rare patience a book still demands of a reader—those precious slow hours of deep focus—is also a virtue. One might reasonably ask just where, after all, these men have been in such a rush to get to? One might reasonably joke that the answer is either jail or obscurity…

Great article.

"...when a book succeeds, even partially, it represents a level of concentration and refinement—a mastery of subject and style strengthened through patience and clarified in revision—that cannot be equaled. Writing a book is an extraordinarily disproportionate act: What can be consumed in a matter of hours takes years to bring to fruition. That is its virtue. And the rare patience a book still demands of a reader—those precious slow hours of deep focus—is also a virtue..."

I continue to read for at least 30 hours a week, averaging 2-3 books a week plus all of my periodicals. There's just too much to learn and unlearn. 'Nuther fav quote of mine: "The best place to hide a $100 bill from Donald Trump is inside a book."

 

Just finished this one.

 

Stay tuned. Not yet sure about this one. It piqued my interest in light of my 1998 Master’s in Applied Ethics ("Ethics & Policy Studies") and my ongoing Jones for so-called "Deliberation Science." 

 

 

UPDATE: ANOTHER BOOK JUMPS THE QUEUE

 

Read this New Yorker article the other day. Led me to this book. Had to get it. Delightful thus far.

 

 

Early on, some "Taylorism 2.0" observations (I've taken my shots at Taylor across the years. I'm one of those humanistic progressive QI guys):

...Sometimes, digital enforcement happens through attempts to prevent violation, making rules more difficult to break—using code to make it more onerous (or even impossible) to deviate from an imposed rule. For example, digital rights management technology makes it (nearly) impossible to violate copyright law. If these technologies work as “perfectly” as intended, rule violation is completely impaired, and violation becomes practically impossible (or at least much more difficult). But even more common than tools of prevention are tools of detection—technologies that function not by making rule-violating behavior more difficult to execute, but by creating a comprehensive account of our behaviors. These are surveillance technologies. For example, body-worn cameras don’t make it impossible for a police officer to use unauthorized force against a civilian, but are intended to make the officer more accountable should they do so. These technologies may work by deterring sanctioned behaviors—knowing that one is being observed can incentivize rule-following—or because they enable enforcers to more swiftly detect and punish rule-breaking.

Perhaps nowhere do we see this trend more clearly than in the workplace, where surveillance over workers’ behaviors has become a favored method for compelling compliance with the aims of management. As we’ll see, this practice has deep roots—but contemporary workplace surveillance has some new features, too.

Work and the Future of Work
We often anticipate the “future of work” in either dreamy or dystopian terms. The phrase has been widely adopted by technologists and commentators, either to describe a paradisical ideal in which people have much greater autonomy and flexibility to do work in ways that suit them while affording them ample time for leisure; or, as a dark alternative, as a future in which workers have ever-diminishing social and economic power and in which their every move and thought is overseen, predicted, and optimized by management, human or algorithmic. Both visions, though, are united by the assumption that the future of work (whatever it looks like) will happen, well, in the future—that is to say, this is a vision of a time that is not now, and that is somehow different than now, or at least different enough that it deserves its own label.

It’s rather curious that we tend to talk in such future-oriented prognostications about what technological change will portend for work and the workplace. In other domains, the way we talk about technology tends to be more focused on what is occurring now or in the very near term; but when it comes to work, we maintain some temporal distance, at least in our discourse, from these changes. This is odd because the “future of work” is, of course, not some distant or discrete mode of social organization so unlike the one we have today. The management practices of tomorrow are, in many ways, not particularly different from the management practices of the past. They’re built on the same foundations—motivating efficiency, minimizing loss, optimizing processes, improving productivity. And one of the most common strategies for achieving these goals, then and now, is increased oversight over the activities of workers.

So what's new about today’s workplace surveillance? Is this not just more of the same, driven by the same organizational goals that have always motivated managerial oversight—even if the specific technologies that are used to do so have changed form in one way or another? Some workplace monitoring is old wine in a new bottle, a contemporary instantiation of the manager with a clipboard looming above the factory floor. This is not to say, of course, that these practices don’t deserve scrutiny or critique—but we should be precise about what, if anything, is new here.

In fact, there are some subtle but important dynamics that distinguish contemporary workplace surveillance from what’s come before, and that will become important in telling the truckers’ story. First, contemporary technologies facilitate surveillance in new kinds of workplaces. Geographically distributed and mobile workers, for example, have historically maintained more independence from oversight than workers centralized in nonmobile workplaces, like factories, call centers, and office buildings—but location tracking, sensor technology, and wireless networking have changed that. Porous boundaries between home and work also facilitate surveillance in new places. For example, the growth of work-from-home arrangements during the Covid-19 pandemic has led to greater use of tracking software to monitor workers’ keystrokes, locations, and web traffic—as well as video capture of the kitchen tables and living rooms in which their work now takes place.

New kinds of data also come to the fore. As sensor technologies become cheaper and easier to deploy, and workplace surveillance capability is more frequently embedded in software by default, employers are well positioned to capture more and more fine-grained data about workers’ movements and activities. Wearable technologies, like those used in Amazon’s warehouses, monitor and evaluate workers’ speed with much more precision than was previously possible—including the number and length of their bathroom breaks. Employers increasingly monitor and analyze datapoints like workers’ social media posts, phone calls, and attendance at meetings; Microsoft faced pushback in 2020 when it built “productivity scoring” into its widely used Office 365 product, which gave managers access to “73 pieces of granular data about worker behavior” like email and chat frequency. And as we’ll discuss, biometric data is also becoming more commonly collected in the workplace—from authentication mechanisms like fingerprint and retinal scans to behavioral data about workers’ attention and fatigue.

These new data streams fuel new kinds of analysis that impact how workers are managed. In some contexts, managerial decisions are implemented through opaque algorithmic systems that can create acute information asymmetries between workers and firms—like Uber’s use of algorithms to apportion rides and determine rates without making those rules transparent to its drivers. Other analyses are predictive, designed to forecast which workers are likely to be most productive, how many workers to staff at a given time to meet demand, or which worker is likely to make a sale to a particular customer.

Finally, contemporary workplace surveillance can blur boundaries between the workplace and other spheres of life, creating new kinds of entanglements across previously disparate domains. Surveillance of work-from-home environments can facilitate data collection about family, friends, and living situations. Managers often keep tabs on workers’ online activities on social media platforms. Workplace wellness programs can facilitate employers’ collection of data about worker health, stoking concerns about discrimination. And “bring-your-own-device” policies, in which an employer’s software is installed on a worker’s own personal phone or computer, can further muddle distinctions between home and work and create additional data privacy and security concerns.

Levy, Karen. Data Driven (pp. 6-9). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Scary smart. Law Degree and a Doctorate in Sociology from Princeton. What a Sheet (pdf).

 

 

Just guessing, based on her CV, she may be about 40 ( no personal bio info). But, I gotta say, were I a bartender and she came in, I'd be asking for ID.

Stay tuned...

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"RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA..." Interesting Twitter thread

Click

1. The person who led the relevant section, Charles McGonigal, has just been charged with taking money from the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Follow this thread to see just how this connects to the victory of Trump, the Russian war in Ukraine, and U.S. national security. 1/20
   
   
2. The reason I was thinking about Trump & Putin in 2016 was a pattern. Russia had sought to control Ukraine, using social media, money, & a pliable head of state. Russia backed Trump the way that it had backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, in the hopes of soft control 2/20
   
   
3. Trump & Yanukovych were similar figures: interested in money, & in power to make or shield money. And therefore vulnerable partners for Putin. They also shared a political advisor: Paul Manafort. He worked for Yanukovych from 2005-2015, taking over Trump's campaign in 2016. 3/20
   
   
4. You might remember Manafort's ties to Russia from 2016. He (and Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump, Jr.) met with Russians in June 2016 in Trump Tower as part of, as the broker of the meeting called it, "the Russian government's support for Trump" (#RoadToUnfreedom, p. 237). 4/20
   
   
5.  Manafort had to resign as Trump's campaign manager in August 2016 when news broke that he had received $12.7 million in cash from Yanukovych. But these details are just minor elements of Manafort's dependence on Russia. (#RoadToUnfreedom, p. 235). 5/20
   
   
6. Manafort worked for Deripaska, the same Russian oligarch to whom McGonigal is linked, between 2006 and 2009. Manafort's assignment was to soften up the U.S for Russian influence. He promised "a model that can greatly benefit the Putin government." (#RoadToUnfreedom, p. 234). 6/20
   
   
7. While Manafort worked for Trump in 2016, though, Manafort's dependence on Russia was deeper. He owed Deripaska money, not a position one would want to be in. Manafort offered Deripaska "private briefings" on the campaign. He was hoping "to get whole." (#RoadToUnfreedom, 234) 7/20
   
   
8. Reconsider how the FBI treated the Trump-Putin connection in 2016. Trump and other Republicans screamed that the FBI had overreached. In retrospect, it seems the exact opposite took place. The issue of Russian influence was framed in a way convenient for Russia and Trump. 8/20
   
   
9. The FBI investigation, Crossfire Hurricane, focused on the narrow issue of personal connections between the Trump campaign and Russians. It missed Russia's cyber attacks and the social media campaign, which, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, won the election for Trump. 9/20
   
   
10. Once the issue of Russian soft control was framed narrowly as personal contact, Obama missed the big picture, and Trump had an easy defense. Trump knew that Russia was working for him, but the standard of guilt was placed so high that he could defend himself. 10/20
    
    
11. It is entirely inconceivable that McGonigal was unaware of Russia's 2016 cyber influence campaign on behalf of Trump. Even I was aware of it, and I had no expertise. It became one of the subjects of my book #RoadtoUnfreedom. 11/20
    
    
12. The FBI did investigate cyber later, and came to some correct conclusions. But this was after the election, and missed the Russian influence operations entirely. That was an obvious counterintelligence issue. Why did the FBI take so long, and miss the point? 12/20
    
    
13. I had no personal connection to this, but will just repeat what informed people said at the time: this sort of thing was supposed to go through the FBI counter-intelligence section in New York, where tips went to die. That is where McGonigal was in charge. 13/20
    
    
14. The cyber element is what McGonigal should have been making everyone aware of in 2016. In 2016, McGonigal was chief of the FBI's Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section. That October, he was put in charge of the Counterintelligence Division of the FBI's NY office. 14/20
    
    
15. We need to understand why the FBI failed in 2016 to address the essence of an ongoing Russian influence operation. The character of that operation suggests that it would have been the responsibility of an FBI section whose head is now accused of taking Russian money. 15/20
    
    
16. Right after the McGonigal story broke, Kevin McCarthy ejected Adam Schiff from the House intelligence committee. Schiff is expert on Russian influence operations. It exhibits carelessness about national security to exclude him. It is downright suspicious to exclude him now. 16/20
    
    
17. Back in June 2016, Kevin McCarthy expressed his suspicion that Donald Trump was under Putin's influence. He and other Republican members concluded that the risk of an embarrassment to their party was more important than American security. #RoadToUnfreedom, p. 255. 17/20
    
    
18. The Russian influence operation to get Trump elected was real. It serves no one to pretend otherwise. We are still learning about it. Denying that it happened makes the United States vulnerable to ongoing Russian operations. 18/20
    
    
19. I remember a certain frivolity from 2016. Trump was a curiosity. Russia was irrelevant. Nothing to take seriously. Then Trump was elected, blocked weapon sales to Ukraine, and tried to stage a coup. Now Ukrainians are dying every day in the defining conflict of our time. 19/20
    
    
20. The McGonigal question goes even beyond these issues. He had authority in the most sensitive possible investigations within U.S. intelligence. Sorting this out will require a concern for the United States that goes beyond party loyalty. 20/20.

I've read two of his books.

 

Serious scholar. 

 

Below, I just downloaded another of his books and have begun reading.

 

The year 2010 was a time of reflection. A financial crisis two years before had eliminated much of the world’s wealth, and a halting recovery was favoring the rich. An African American was president of the United States. The great adventure of Europe in the 2000s, the enlargement of the European Union to the east, seemed complete. A decade into the twenty-first century, two decades away from the end of communism in Europe, seven decades after the beginning of the Second World War, 2010 seemed like a year for reckonings.

I was working on one that year with a historian in his time of dying. I admired Tony Judt most for his history of Europe, Postwar, published in 2005. It recounted the improbable success of the European Union in assembling imperial fragments into the world’s largest economy and most important zone of democracy. The book had concluded with a meditation on the memory of the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe. In the twenty-first century, he suggested, procedures and money would not be enough: political decency would require a history of horror.

In 2008, Tony had fallen ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative neurological disorder. He was certain to die, trapped in a body that would not serve his mind. After Tony lost the use of his hands, we began recording conversations on themes from the twentieth century. We were both worried, as we spoke in 2009, by the American assumptions that capitalism was unalterable and democracy inevitable. Tony had written of the irresponsible intellectuals who aided totalitarianism in the twentieth century. He was now concerned about a new irresponsibility in the twenty-first: a total rejection of ideas that flattened discussion, disabled policy, and normalized inequality…

Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom (p. 2). Crown. Kindle Edition.

UPDATE

 

Read his Substack piece.

 

We are on the edge of a spy scandal with major implications for how we understand the Trump administration, our national security, and ourselves.

On 23 January, we learned that a former FBI special agent, Charles McGonigal, was arrested on charges involving taking money to serve foreign interests.  One accusation is that in 2017 he took $225,000 from a foreign actor while in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office.  Another charge is that McGonigal took money from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch, after McGonigal’s 2018 retirement from the FBI.  Deripaska, a hugely wealthy metals tycoon close to the Kremlin, "Putin's favorite industrialist," was a figure in a Russian influence operation that McGonigal had investigated in 2016.  Deripaska has been under American sanctions since 2018.  Deripaska is also the former employer, and the creditor, of Trump's 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

The reporting on this so far seems to miss the larger implications. One of them is that Trump’s historical position looks far cloudier. In 2016, Trump's campaign manager (Manafort) was a former employee of a Russian oligarch (Deripaska), and owed money to that same Russian oligarch.  And the FBI special agent (McGonigal) who was charged with investigating the Trump campaign's Russian connections then went to work (according to the indictment) for that very same Russian oligarch (Deripaska).  This is obviously very bad for Trump personally.  But it is also very bad for FBI New York, for the FBI generally, and for the United States of America…

This bears ongoing close scrutiny.

 

JOE CONASON

…Before he moved on to other positions at FBI headquarters, McGonigal's career had begun in New York, where he worked closely with James Kallstrom — the right-wing ideologue who headed the New York office for decades. A bosom buddy of Giuliani and Trump, Kallstrom is suspected of leading the pressure campaign that induced Comey to reopen the Clinton investigation. The explicit threat of leaks by agents and former agents like Kallstrom, who reportedly hated Clinton, spurred Comey's disastrous decision and his public announcement, which again violated department policy against election interference.


Damning as those facts may seem, they only get us so far. There is much more to learn before we can understand the full story of 2016. The scrupulously nonpartisan presidential historian Michael Beschloss asked this week whether McGonigal's indictment will lead us closer to the truth. Will the prosecution of McGonigal reveal the details of his relationship with Deripaska, whom he had once investigated before becoming his corrupt stooge? Will Comey provide a full and honest accounting of what happened in the New York FBI office before the election? Will the New York Times examine — and disclose — how that misleading story about Trump and Russia appeared on its front page? Who briefed the Times for that bogus story?


With Trump seeking to return to the White House, the answers to those questions do not merely reckon with the past but are critical to democracy's future. The malign conspirators who first brought that would-be tyrant to power, both foreign and domestic, are still at large

HORRIFIC OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

Speechless.

From The Atlantic:

The first video only begins as an officer pulls up behind Nichols’s car and he and other officers demand, with weapons drawn, that Nichols get out of the car. “Damn, I didn’t do anything,” Nichols says as they drag him from the car and pepper-spray him. But in the scrum, the officers also spray themselves, and Nichols somehow breaks free and runs away on foot. After giving chase, two officers mill around, pouring water in their eyes and catching their breath. The radio barks that an officer has found Nichols some distance away. “I hope they stomp his ass,” one cop says.

He got his wish. The next three videos, two from body cams and one from SkyCop, don’t capture the moment when officers catch up with Nichols, but the surveillance camera shows several officers beating him on a suburban corner. He doesn’t appear to be resisting them, or even physically able to do so; he looks like a rag doll. They shout for him to do this and that, but Nichols, being yanked in every direction by the officers, could hardly have complied if he wanted to. They stomp and kick him as he repeatedly calls for his mother…

Will this stuff ever end?

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