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Runaway,
You've been hearing a lot about the importance of campaign fundraising recently, and I wanted to take a second to explain more about a big piece of that: Our opponents' massive fundraising lead.
Donald Trump and the RNC have more than $240 million in the bank for the general election. That's a historically unparalleled number -- in huge part because of when they started. At every turn, Trump has used his office as an opportunity to campaign instead of lead, and he's already begun to spend his war chest on attack ads against Joe Biden. We’ve always known that Democrats don’t need to match Trump’s fundraising numbers dollar for dollar, but we can’t afford to fall further behind and let our candidates face Republican attacks without our full support.
We’ve built an incredibly strong Democratic Party infrastructure in the last three years, and we’re in a good position to capitalize on these efforts as we get closer to November. That said, our financial disadvantage puts us in a tough position. A lack of resources means we’re less able to plan ahead and act strategically, and that could have major consequences for our presidential nominee and Democrats down the ballot. That's why I'm asking you to do something important today:
Will you make a $7 donation to the DNC today to close the gap on Trump's fundraising lead and help Joe Biden and Democrats in competitive races fight back? Every bit helps.
DONATE: $7
DONATE: $10
DONATE: $25
DONATE: $50
DONATE: $100
Donate another amount
Since Tom Perez took over as chair in early 2017, the DNC has made unprecedented investments in organizing, data and technology infrastructure, and voter protection efforts. We know that the presidential election is likely to be an incredibly close race, and with so many House and Senate seats up for grabs, we can’t risk not fully funding these critical programs.
That’s where you come in, Runaway. Grassroots supporters like you are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party, and victories up and down the ballot this November require your early support.
With just 184 days until the most consequential election of our lifetimes, we need Democrats like you to commit to our shared goals now, while there’s still time to make a difference. Can I count on your $7 today?
Thanks and stay safe,
Patrick
Patrick Stevenson
Chief Mobilization Officer
Democratic National Committee
P.S. Trump’s fundraising advantage is arguably the single biggest reason he could be reelected. The good news: You can fight back, Runaway. Make a $7 donation and help close the gap today.
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If you’re ready to elect Democrats in all 50 states, make a contribution today.
Contributions or gifts to the Democratic National Committee are not tax deductible. Paid for by the Democratic National Committee, www.Democrats.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
Runaway
2:56 AM (2 minutes ago)
to feedback
I've heard a lot about campaign fund raising, yes. I haven't heard a lot about any candidates that I can support. Is Creepy Joe lucid today?
_________________________________________________________
I've been sending similar replies for more than a month now, to two or more emails each day. You would think they might figure things out.
Michigan militia puts armed protest in the spotlight
Gun-carrying protesters have been a common sight at some demonstrations calling for coronavirus-related restrictions to be lifted. But an armed militia’s involvement in an angry protest in the Michigan statehouse Thursday marked an escalation that drew condemnation and shone a spotlight on the practice of bringing weapons to protest.
The “American Patriot Rally” started on the statehouse steps, where members of the Michigan Liberty Militia stood guard with weapons and tactical gear, their faces partially covered. They later moved inside the Capitol along with several hundred protesters, who demanded to be let onto the House floor, which is prohibited. Some protesters with guns — which are allowed in the statehouse — went to the Senate gallery, where a senator said some armed men shouted at her, and some senators wore bulletproof vests.
For some observers, the images of armed men in tactical gear at a state Capitol were an unsettling symbol of rising tensions in a nation grappling with crisis. Others saw evidence of racial bias in the way the protesters were treated by police.
For some politicians, there was fresh evidence of the risk of aligning with a movement with clear ties to far-right groups.
Prominent Michigan Republicans on Friday criticized the showing, with the GOP leader of the state Senate referring to some protesters as “a bunch of jackasses” who “used intimidation and the threat of physical harm to stir up fear and feed rancor.”
President Donald Trump, who has been criticized in the past for condoning extremist views, called the protesters “very good people” and urged Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to “make a deal.”
Michiganhas been the epicenter of the political showdownover how to contain the spread of the deadly virus without decimating the economy. About a quarter of the state’s workforce has filed for unemployment and nearly 4,000 people have died.
for the rest of the story click spoiler or click the link
Rally organizer Ryan Kelley said the event was intended to pressure Republicans to reject Whitmer’s plan to continue restrictions on work and travel. He called the protest a “huge win,” noting the Republican-controlled Senate refused to extend Whitmer’s coronavirus emergency declaration — though she said Friday her stay-at-home order remains in effect.
Kelley, a 38-year-old real estate broker, said he and other organizers are not part of a formal group but represent people who have been harmed by the stay-home order. He said he invited the Michigan Liberty Militia, which is listed as an anti-government group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, to serve as “security.” He suggested anyone who had a problem with their presence should read the Constitution and “live life without fear.”
Gun-carrying protesters outside state capitols are a regular occurrence in many states, especially in Republican-leaning ones. But rarely do such protests converge at the same time around the country like they have during the coronavirus pandemic.
In Wisconsin, about a dozen men, several wearing camouflage, carried what appeared to be assault rifles and other long guns and stood around a makeshift guillotine at a protest attended by about 1,500 people. In Arizona, a group of men armed with rifles were among hundreds of protesters who demonstrated at the Capitol last month demanding Republican Gov. Doug Ducey lift his stay-home order. Many in the crowd also carried holstered pistols.
Gun groups have been involved in organizing several of these protests — which drew activists from a range of conservative causes. Gun rights advocates believe the restrictions on some businesses and closure of government offices are a threat to their right to own a gun, said Michael Hammond, legislative counsel for Gun Owners of America, a group that bills itself as the “no compromise” gun lobby.
Hammond said he routinely gets messages and emails from people around the country, complaining that authorities are making it impossible to exercise their Second Amendment rights. In some cases, that has meant orders closing gun shops or gun ranges or offices shutting down that process permits.
But Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, a gun-control group, considers these protests organized by the ultra-right and not necessarily reflective of most gun owners.
While it’s legal to openly carry firearms inside some state capitols, Watts called it “dangerous to normalize this. Armed intimidation has no place in our political debate.” She said those carrying guns at protests are almost always white men, and are “a vocal minority of the country” that opposes the stay-at-home orders.
An overwhelming majority of Americans support stay-at-home orders and other efforts to slow the spread of the virus, according to a recent survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
The visual of heavily armed protesters, mostly white men, occupying a government building to a measured response by law enforcement is a particularly jarring one for many African Americans.
It draws a stark contrast to the images that emerged from Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, when crowds of unarmed, mostly black men, women and children took to the streets in protest after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown. Police shot tear gas to disperse the crowds, further inflaming the tensions between predominantly black community and law enforcement. It worsened when members of an armed militia group called the Oath Keepers arrived, some of them armed and sitting on rooftops. Jon Belmar, who was then St. Louis County’s police chief, said at the time that the presence of the group, whose members wore camouflage, bulletproof vests and openly carried rifles and pistols, was “unnecessary and inflammatory.”
“Systemically, blackness is treated like a more dangerous weapon than a white man’s gun ever will, while whiteness is the greatest shield of safety,” said Brittany Packnett, a prominent national activist who protested in Ferguson.
The Michigan demonstrators, she added, “are what happens when people of racial privilege confuse oppression with inconvenience. No one is treading on their rights. We’re all just trying to live.”
Trump, meanwhile, suggested it was Whitmer who should be moved to action.
“The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire,” the president tweeted Friday. “These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal.”
It's an AP story, several sites are carrying it, I chose to use https://www.bigcountryhomepage.com/news/us-politics/michigan-militia-puts-armed-protest-in-the-spotlight/
More calls for US censorship
But the “extraordinary” measures we are seeing are not all that extraordinary. Powerful forces were pushing toward greater censorship and surveillance of digital networks long before the coronavirus jumped out of the wet markets in Wuhan, China, and they will continue to do so once the crisis passes. The practices that American tech platforms have undertaken during the pandemic represent not a break from prior developments, but an acceleration of them.
As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China. Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.
In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.
and
Apple and Google have told critics that their partnership will end once the pandemic subsides. Facebook has said that its aggressive censorship practices will cease when the crisis does. But when COVID-19 is behind us, we will still live in a world where private firms vacuum up huge amounts of personal data and collaborate with government officials who want access to that data. We will continue to opt in to private digital surveillance because of the benefits and conveniences that result. Firms and governments will continue to use the masses of collected data for various private and social ends.
The harms from digital speech will also continue to grow, as will speech controls on these networks. And invariably, government involvement will grow. At the moment, the private sector is making most of the important decisions, though often under government pressure. But as Zuckerberg has pleaded, the firms may not be able to regulate speech legitimately without heavier government guidance and involvement. It is also unclear whether, for example, the companies can adequately contain foreign misinformation and prevent digital tampering with voting mechanisms without more government surveillance.
The First and Fourth Amendments as currently interpreted, and the American aversion to excessive government-private-sector collaboration, have stood as barriers to greater government involvement. Americans’ understanding of these laws, and the cultural norms they spawned, will be tested as the social costs of a relatively open internet multiply.
COVID-19 is a window into these future struggles. At the moment, activists are pressuring Google and Apple to build greater privacy safeguards into their contact-tracing program. Yet the legal commentator Stewart Baker has argued that the companies are being too protective—that existing privacy accommodations will produce “a design that raises far too many barriers to effectively tracking infections.” Even some ordinarily privacy-loving European governments seem to agree with the need to ease restrictions for the sake of public health, but the extent to which the platforms will accommodate these concerns remains unclear.
We are about to find out how this trade-off will be managed in the United States. The surveillance and speech-control responses to COVID-19, and the private sector’s collaboration with the government in these efforts, are a historic and very public experiment about how our constitutional culture will adjust to our digital future.
What's bizarre about the article is that the authors come up with numerous examples of censorship gone wrong and government abuse of power (the massive Chinese censorship apparatus, Snowden revelations, ubiquitous digital monitoring, and Russian government propaganda concerning US elections), and then speak vaguely of the harm of digital speech. Somehow from that, they argue that growing censorship of free speech is better than the alternative. Are they listening to themselves?
While one can argue that a private platform has a legal right to censor any way that it feels like (ignoring that for years, most of these platforms presented themselves as free speech communities and are now bait-and-switching hard), this article above illustrates one of the big ways that fall afoul of free speech law. The authors advocate for government getting involved in the censorship, both regulating it and helping the censors find the right targets to censor. They're basically calling for a Fascist-style government-lead effort to censor. That falls in First Amendment territory in the US.
And they don't seem to get that they'll probably be first against the wall when the coming tyranny needs to get rid of its formerly useful idiots.
The Dongle
I have an old HP laptop that’s too big for a lap, but that doesn’t matter because the battery’s dead and won’t take a charge. I use it to record KSHE on Sundays, and to play the thousands of songs on my network drive in Winamp.
However, there are two problems with it: one is that it’s still running Windows 7. The biggest problem, though, is the headphone jack has worn to the point that you have to fiddle with it to make it stop humming from a bad ground, and it keeps getting worse. I used to build desktops, but my attempts to disassemble a laptop a few years ago were futile, so I took it to a repair shop. They couldn’t find a replacement jack.
A few weeks ago it was really nice weather, so I sat outside on the porch with the door open and the stereo cranked. It wasn’t loud enough. I missed the old Kenwood 200 watt stereo I used to have that could wake up folks in the next block. It died, but I’m still using the three way JBL speakers.
It wasn’t nearly loud enough, so I went inside, unplugged the little Dell I bought last year (I have a bluetooth mouse and keyboard and use the TV as a monitor, only not when I’m doing commerce) and went to Amazon for a new two hundred watt amplifier.
I had been at war with Sony since they vandalized my computer with XCP when my then teenaged daughter played a CD she had bought from the record store she worked at, until I bought a Sony TV by accident. Then bought a PS4 on purpose, and when I saw that the TV remote worked the Playstation, I was happy to find a Sony receiver advertised at 100 watts per channel RMS, like the old Kenwood.
It came a week or two ago. I’ll write a review of it later, but for now the important part was that it had Bluetooth, and I found that it played both my phone and my tablet with no problem. It occurred to me that if that old HP had Bluetooth it would solve the problem of its worn jack.
My ancient Acer that I replaced with the Dell had a marked key combination to turn Bluetooth on or off, but not the HP, so I did a little internet research, which indicated that it didn’t have Bluetooth. Okay, I’ll just buy a dongle. I thought I’d just run up to Walgreens and get a dongle and a couple of phone memory chips. I bought the chips, but they didn’t have the dongle.
I knew Walmart had them, because I’d seen them there. But not today, I searched for twenty minutes, found someone who worked there, who looked where they usually were: they were out.
So I ordered one from Amazon. It came yesterday, as did a charity Covid-19 KSHE t-shirt I had ordered at the beginning of April. The dongle came with a driver CD, and a URL for where you could get the drivers from the internet, and actually had a small sheet of paper with printed instructions written by someone who was obviously a foreigner who didn’t know English very well, but it was still readable and unnecessary.
I followed the directions, installing the drivers, and was informed there would now be a Bluetooth icon by the clock icon. It was there. Clicking it gave a menu, one item was to add a device.
Leave it to Microsoft to not follow standards, even if it means doing some things ass backwards. Anything else calls it “Pairing”, which I turned on on the receiver. The computer then started loading drivers and other Bluetooth tools, and the stereo timed out before it finished. I never could get it to pair. I struggled with it for hours before discovering that it already had Bluetooth when I was digging around in Control Panel. It had been disabled; I had no idea why, I bought the computer second hand and hadn’t needed Bluetooth until then.
So I unplugged the dongle, did a system restore to get rid of what I had just installed, went back in the control panel to enable the built-in Bluetooth, waited for its drivers and stuff to install, and tried again to pair it with the receiver. And failed again.
I gave up last night. I’m pretty sure it’s a Windows problem, so I’ll just solve both of that computer’s problems by installing Linux.
I hope.
Broken business models
Someone mentioned Circus City and Divx. I was going to reply, but I thought I'd write a journal entry instead.
Ah Divx. Cloudy. Broken business models.
Remember Circuit City's Netpliance iOpener ?
This was about the year 2000. The iOpener was a Linux computer with monitor and dial up modem, for $99. (A steal of a price, at that time, except . . .) it was tied to a dial up internet service subscription. The idea was that you would buy the iOpener at an insanely cheap price, and they would make their profits on the required service subscription to get online. The "i" in iOpener probably meant intarwebs.
Of course, what happened was hilarious. Evil hackers intent on destroying the very fabric of society published online information about how one could:
1. buy an iOpener at Circut City for $99, without signing anything, and walk out of the store
2. hack, modify or reflash (sorry don't remember which) Linux on the device
3. have a useful computer that was worth at least four times what you paid for it
4. without paying Netpliance a single cent more
5. Profit!
Netpliance was upset. Circus City was upset. Something must be done! Some law must have been broken! It is a violation of the agreement!
Runner up: Radio Shack's Cue Cat free bar code scanner with serial port connector. The R/S sales droids would run up to you shoving these free Cue Cat scanner packages in your face! It's FREE!!! The package had the scanner and a disk of software. The scanner would be used to scan bar codes on ads or something to get grate fantastical dealz! Of course, to most of us here it was a free barcode scanner worth about $35 at the time, IIRC.
Any other great broken business models you can think of?
Where has all the ECC RAM gone?
It's about time I built a new PC. The old Phenom II X6 1045T is getting a bit long in the tooth.
I was looking at some sort of AMD X570 chip set motherboard from ASUS and a Ryzen CPU and I was looking for RAM to go with it. I have ECC RAM in my Phenom II and it has detected and fixed the odd error here and there over the 10 years I've had it so I want to put ECC RAM in my new machine.
It seems that it's as rare as hen's teeth these days. In days of yore you just went to www.crucial.com and put in how much you want and it would spout a list of all the options. Now there's none. I believe I would need two sticks of unbuffered DDR4 with ECC.
Some re-sellers have it listed but you have to go looking for it under "Server Memory" and it's mixed up with all kinds of weird stuff. Most of the stuff for sale seems to be very high clock rate, unbuffered and with no error checking to make the games run 2% faster.
What is the world coming to?
Boostrapping Rudimentary AI 2: Discovering the Obvious
Well, I've procrastinated quite a bit from my previous journal, yet despite that, I've managed to come across a couple of interesting, though rather obvious things. While looking for inspiration, I ran across a paper with the lengthy title, Leveraging asynchronous parallel computing to produce simple genetic programming computational models. The idea was to run a genetic algorithm (GA) on a parallel computation system completely asynchronously, by generating new programs from a pool of existing programs, and putting the more successful ones back into the pool as they are generated.
The key property is that successful programs that complete faster can return to the pool quicker (presuming of course, that you have a lot of processors/threads generating these programs rather than just one) and have the potential to evolve faster than longer running programs. So in theory, one doesn't need to include explicit time constraints in their criteria for successful programs because there's this built-in bias towards faster running programs (as long as they are successful enough to stay in the pool). The gist of the paper is that this is indeed the case in practice as theory (tested on eight different problems IIRC).
Among other things, this is in large part how real world evolution works, particularly at the microbe level. At the macroscopic level, you get some survival filters, particularly seasonal stuff, that shapes things like when organisms breed and how long they live.
From my provincial point of view, it was eye-opening because I hadn't given a great deal of thought as to how to structure the genetic algorithms that I'll attempt to start my bootstrapping scheme. The old approach that I did many years ago, the "Generational GA", was to generate a large pool of "genes", pick the best 5-10% of them, put that group in a new pool, generate from them a new pool (next generation), and start over. Now, though I'm not doing any parallelism, I can still greatly reduce the memory load by just dealing strictly with the "best" pool from the start. Generating a new gene from two in the pool, the "Incremental GA", and if the new one is better than the worst gene, replace the worst. In addition, it appears to be a little faster in converging to a useful solution (though I haven't quantified it).
The Lattice Coloring Problem
Finally, let me briefly describe what I'm presently working on. I start with a 60 by 60 grid (the number 60 is chosen because it allows for patterns with periods up to 6) of "colorings", every vertex is numbered between 0 and N-1 (I presently use N=4). A small patch of the grid looks something like:
0 3 2 3 1
1 3 3 1 1
2 0 0 3 1
3 0 2 2 1
The energy of this lattice is based on a randomized function that takes four adjacent vertices of a 2 by 2 box and assigns a real number to them.
w x
y z
Then sum over all such boxes of the grid, wrapping around both top and bottom, left and right. For the 60 by 60 grid, you end up doing 3600 such sums.
The problem then is to find a color pattern that minimizes this total energy. One gets genuine random colorings as the lowest energy state only for rare cases (such as when all possible colorings have the same energy). Instead interesting patterns appear.
Some common examples (just providing the pattern, not the energy function that these patterns happen to be minimum energy for):
1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1
Solid color is the most common.
1 2 1 2
1 2 1 2
1 2 1 2
1 2 1 2
Alternating solid rows or solid columns is next.
0 3 0 3
3 0 3 0
0 3 0 3
3 0 3 0
Checkerboard.
2 3 2 2 2 2
2 2 2 3 2 3
2 3 2 2 2 2
2 2 2 3 2 3
A pattern with a bit of randomness thrown in.
On the last one, the building block is a 2 by 2 block of 2s with one 3. You can shift either the rows or the columns (but not both), randomly offset by 1 (here, it's columns), and still have a minimum energy. I've looked a little bit for a genuine nonperiodic pattern (which would be a quasicrystal), but haven't found it yet.
Here's an example of a four color coloring that can be a lowest energy state:
0 0 0 0
1 1 1 1
2 2 2 2
3 3 3 3
The nice thing about this particular problem is that it's very easy to turn into a genetic algorithm. I basically just copy/paste random rectangles from one grid to another. I can also mutate by copy/pasting from a randomly generated grid to a good grid. It's one of the simpler problems one can apply the GA approach to.
So how fast does it converge? Not very. But starting with a pool of ten randomly generated grids, I usually can come up with a reasonable try after a few hundred to few thousand iterations. What I've discovered is that convergence is fastest when the lowest energy pattern isn't near other patterns in terms of energy. For example, if all 2s is almost as low an energy as all 1s, we would see the 0 and 3 colors rapidly disappear, but then it'd take longer for the 2s to vanish. Sometimes the program would halt on all 2s or even not get to a state of all 1s or all 2s.
I've also had difficulty reaching complex pattern lowest energy states. They tend to converge slower than for the simpler color patterns mentioned above. And if the pattern has a period that doesn't divide evenly into 60 (such as 7 or 9), the pattern will always be truncated. That can introduce higher energy defects which take a while to settle down.
As a final remark, I could look at different numbers of colors or different sizes of grid, as well as figuring out how fast these things converge under different circumstances. I haven't bothered at this time to do so.
What's Next?
Presently, I'm still avoiding actual genetic programs and am instead looking at fitting a table of data (each column corresponding to a parameter) to a polynomial function of the parameters. It's still a pretty easy problem for GA to attack, but involves generation of arbitrary monomials which involves similar tree-building to what generating programs would involve. I presently am thinking of using it to generate a differential equation for a vector differential equation I messed with for a while. Mathematica doesn't seem effective at dealing with it in its present form. Maybe, if I convert the problem to a bunch of separate ODEs, it'll work better.
I'm also thinking about making a default mutation algorithm of breeding a gene with a randomly generated gene since I need both subalgorithms anyway for my basic GA system.
Opinion: the meaning of TDS
In my opinion, the term TDS has exactly one meaning: "I have no actual rebuttal to what was said."
It is (IMO falsely) claimed that TDS is used when someone trivially overreacts to any tiny thing that Trump says or does. However in my experience, I've never seen it used this way.
The way TDS is typically used, at least on SN, is when someone makes a point, in many cases supported at least minimally with facts and/or references, critical of the president, and the TDS-dropper has no actual rebuttal.
The correct reaction to seeing a TDS-bomb? Stop. You've lost me right there. I'm done reading. If you had an actual point to make you would have already made it.
Labeling valid criticism as deranged is itself, IMO, deranged.
Edit, additional thought:
Furthermore, throwing out TDS is not intended to contribute or rebut in any meaningful way, it is intended to be hurtful. It serves NO OTHER purpose. Like throwing a grenade, it has no cost to the thrower.
Science v. Politics
Jim Al-Khalili has written in the Guardian an article entitled Doubt is essential for science - but for politicians, it's a sign of weakness.
In the article he addresses the phenomenon of social media echo chambers, politics, news reporting, cognitive dissonance and the way scientific progress is made. Doubt is essential to science and the Scientific Method. Scientists ask questions, form theories, perform experiments and refine the theories in the light of new evidence.
When the public hears that new scientific evidence has informed a sudden change in government policy, the tendency is to conclude that the scientists don’t know what they’re doing, and therefore can’t be trusted. It doesn’t help that politicians are remarkably bad at communicating scientific information clearly and transparently, while journalists are often more adept at asking questions of politicians than they are of scientists.
And of conspiracy theorists:
Often, in the case of such ideological beliefs, we hear the term “cognitive dissonance”, whereby someone feels genuine mental discomfort when confronted with evidence that contradicts a view they hold. This can work to reinforce pre-existing beliefs. Ask a conspiracy theorist this: what would it take for them to change their minds? Their answer, because they are so utterly committed to their view, is likely to be that nothing would. In science, however, we learn to admit our mistakes and to change our minds to account for new evidence about the world.
In another Guardian article BBC's Covid-19 reporters: 'I wanted to show the reality but was deeply troubled by what I saw’, BBC reporters Fergus Walsh and Hugh Pym were interviewed about their reporting on the COVID-19 crisis from the NHS front line hospitals treating critically ill patients.
They are trying to report the facts so that good questions can be asked of the government. Walsh says, "I feel a huge sense of responsibility to get the tone right, the messaging right, and to show people the reality of what’s going on in our hospitals.”
“Given the technology [thanks to social distancing, journalists now attend remotely] the press conferences have been tricky,” says Pym. “People say: why didn’t you follow up? But until they started allowing follow-up questions, that was difficult. The government side has offered us the chance to do filming on testing or drug trials, but it’s so fast-moving: the communications team, civil servants and ministers are under huge pressure.”
Trump, Disinfectants, and the Media Spin [Viva Frei]
<teaser>
We are either living in a post-truth world or a truthless world and either way it is fricking depressing.
<intro music>
Viva Frei Montreal litigator turned Youtuber it is yet another car vlawg it is going to be yet another toned down car vlawg because I yet again have a kid sleeping in the backseat.
So it's Friday, there's news, which means that there is fake news and I think I'm gonna go with the term Fake News Friday.
<intro music>
In todays episode of Fake News Friday, it seems the Media would have us believe that Donald Trump actually seriously suggested injecting bleach or disinfectant in order to kill the MySharonCyrus,™ and in case you don't believe me let me just read you a few headlines:
</teaser>
<link>
https://youtu.be/TbqGop2cfVc?t=37
</link>
<me>
Any mistakes in my transcription are my own, if there's a non skynet url please post it I'll mod it right up. I'm really not going to sit here and transcribe the entire thing.
But I love that he doesn't waste our time, he speaks expeditiously and gets to the point without too many meandering digressions.
Trump is a gigantic douchebag. But I have no trouble empathizing with people that call him "God Emperor." It's all in what he's running /against./
Anti-Trump people, listen to me. When you make shit up, or uncritically repeat someone who makes shit up, and it turns out to be bullshit, you don't make us look good, you make him look less bad by comparison. You make us look like lunatics.
CUT THIS SHIT OUT!
And pro-Trump people, assuming he had good intentions at all, clearly he's been stymied. The next four years are going to be particularly dangerous, in terms of whatever benefits he bought being reversed harshly. Do NOT give him unconditional support, well, too late for that to matter now I suspect but it's still true. Beyond that though, look at congressional districts. Don't vote based on party, vote based on policy. If he truly is against the forever war, then the only explanation is he doesn't have enough support in Congress - and you don't give him more support by blindly voting (R). You give him more support on this issue by voting for the policy, not the party. There are a few (R)s a few (D)s a few (L)s a few (G)s and I'm sure a few more I forgot to mention, but look for people that advocate sensible policy whenever there is anyone that comes reasonably close to that.
And when no one does, just vote against the incumbent.
Ok, that's enough of </me.>
