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President Trump signed a bill Friday to reauthorize a controversial government surveillance program, extending the ability of law enforcement officials to collect and keep — but not always see — the private communications of American citizens.

Trump first suggested a year ago — with no supporting evidence — that Obama authorized eavesdropping on Trump Tower during the election. He made a similar suggestion last week when he tweeted that the law had been used "to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump campaign by the previous administration."

The bill was set to expire Friday unless Trump signed the renewal into law. It has now been approved by Congress three times under three different presidents.

Trump signs bill extending surveillance law — the same law he says was used to spy on him

From The Guardian:

Intriguingly, the Ancient Greeks had a word for what’s missing: isegoria, which they thought must accompany freedom of speech, and which means equality of speech – people need to hear their own voices reflected in political discourse.

Well, we have Farcebook and Witter.

Wow, this Christmas season was crazy. They always are for me, but this one was particularly stressful.

My parents are divorced, so any event (Christmas, birthdays, Easter, etc) has to be done twice. Typically, for Christmas, that means having Christmas Eve at my Mom's, then Christmas day at my Dad's. This year my brother couldn't make it into town until boxing day so everything was delayed a couple days. It becomes a challenge to choose days that work for everyone and that causes me stress. Anyways, we got things mostly sorted out.

One of the days I headed over to my Dad's for our Christmas dinner, mashed potatoes in hand. Just as we are arriving, my dad is leaving. He tells us that he just got a call from 'The Home' and that they said that Gramps was on his last legs. It was time for the family to say our final goodbyes. We all head down to The Home and say goodbye. He was in a coma or something. Not conscious, but seemed to be quite peaceful. I said my goodbye, conscious of the rest of the family watching me.

I'm not really good with death. The rest of my family was pretty upset (Gramps was the patriarch of the family), but I never really feel anything. It's kind of uncomfortable because I feel like I should feel sad or something, but I felt nothing. Gramps was an old man. He was almost 100 years old and lived a good life. So, I'm there with the rest of my family who are crying and hugging and all that, feeling like I should be feeling something.

Gramps died the next day. That turned an already stressful time into an extra stressful time for me. Now, in addition to multiple Christmas dinners, I had a family pub night, prayer ceremony, funeral, reception, burial, and family skating party. Oh, and also my daughter's first birthday. Being that busy really stresses me out, as do changes to plans.

The day after Gramps dies, my wife and daughter got a stomach bug and were puking. The first night, my daughter puked in the bed 5 times. I was mentally exhausted, and now physically exhausted too. My poor wife felt horrid, so I did what I could. Mostly changing sheets and getting drinks. Just as they start feeling better, it was my turn to get the bug. It's been a while since I have puked and I had forgotten how unpleasant it was.

We had planned to have a party for my daughter's first birthday. The poor girl was sick on the day we had planned, so we rescheduled it. The day we rescheduled it to was the day I was sick, so we just ended up cancelling her birthday. (We did get her a cupcake from Crave and put a sparker in it for a mini family ceremony).

After that we did the funeral circuit, then back to work. My wife is also back at work part time now. We have each Grandma take our little girl for one day per week and I have her alone on Sundays. So far it's been going pretty well.

We've also made a change to the sleeping arrangement. My daughter has been waking up like 5 times per night to nurse. As mentioned previously, we all sleep together in one bed. We think that a big reason why she wakes up is because my wife's boob is right there. We decided to have my wife sleep in the other bedroom for a while and I sleep in the bed alone with my daughter. That way someone will be there to comfort her when she wakes, but there is no boob for her to actually feed on. Eventually, she will realize there is no reason to wake up, and we'll all have a wonderful sleep. That's the plan anyways.

I've done 3 nights alone so far. The first 2 went really well. She would wake up as normal (about 5 times), but I could just rub her back or squeeze her foot and she would go back to sleep in a couple minutes. Last night also went pretty well, but around 6:00am she wouldn't stop crying and my wife came in from the other room to take over and nurse.

I'm feeling a little tired from the night duty, but it's not too bad. It seems like a pretty good plan to me, so I hope it works out for us. Between the night duty and daddy-daughter Sundays, I can definitely feel a stronger bond between my daughter and I. It feels really good.

On the dating front, I mentioned in my last entry that I had placed that on hold for a bit. It is still on hold. I just don't have the energy for it right now. I don't think I have the time for it either, although maybe I could make things work. I need to get used to our new schedule now that my wife is back at work and reassess. My wife and I are both pretty tired from the day-to-day and because of that, our sex life is not that great. It's not quite dead bedroom levels, but it would be within spitting distance. It's not my wife's fault. I'm tired too. Most nights I just don't have the energy and I would prefer to spend an hour just sitting on the couch.

Because of the missing intimacy, I really want to start dating again. I would love to have someone that I can spend a few hours with here and there and just be an adult. No baby talk. No baby monitor. No toys strewn all over the floor. I crave the excitement that comes with someone new. That being said, I think I need to improve things between my wife and I first. She's still my best friend, and we are very much in love but since the birth of the baby, the romance part of the relationship has taken a big hit. It feels like my daughter takes everything out of me and at the end of the day, there is nothing left for my wife. I think my wife feels the same. We are just tired. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to keep the romance in a relationship with a baby?

All in all, the Snow family is doing pretty good. I'm really happy that Christmas is over and we are back on a normal schedule. My daughter is growing up and I'm finally feeling a strong connection with her, and aside from the sex/romance life, my wife and I are great.

-- Snow

Bella Emberg, aka Blunder Woman (Cooperman's faithful sidekick), has died at the age of 80.

As part of his ongoing effort to prove he’s “a very stable genius” and “like, really smart” following the release of a book that portrays him as the exact opposite, on Tuesday afternoon President Trump held a televised meeting with members of Congress on the topic of immigration.

This did not go as planned. The most notable moment was when Trump responded with enthusiasm to Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein’s suggestion that they pass a “clean” bill making the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program permanent. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy quickly jumped in to remind Trump that Republicans don’t want to protect DACA recipients without getting some border-security measures (or maybe even a big, beautiful wall) in return.

But that’s not what one might take away from the exchange if, for some reason, they opted to read the transcript released by the White House. The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker noticed that the line where Trump agrees with Feinstein’s proposal — saying, “Yeah, I would like to do it” — is “curiously missing” from the document.

Guess Which Line Was Missing From the Transcript of Trump’s Immigration Meeting

Apparently this isn't the first time.

Donald Trump has spent 81 days on the golf course in his first year as President, racing past his predecessors.

Mr Trump, after a weekend at his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, has spent more time on the green than George W Bush did during eight years in office.

The President has also been on the golf course almost three times as much as Barack Obama did during his first year.

The American public spent at least $43 million in order to support President Donald Trump‘s considerable golf habit in 2017.

The American Public Reportedly Spent $43 Million Last Year So Trump Could Play Golf

Donald Trump plays golf almost three times as much as Barack Obama after one year in office

Ethics for Soylentils

The Short Version, 0.0.2

        As the resident philosopher, et cetera, et cetera, here is a short primer on ethics. No promises of completeness, comprehensiveness, or persuasiveness, but just some things.

        ONE: Some things are good, some things are bad.
        TWO: Some things are right, some things are wrong.

        We will start here. No first we might consider the contrary position, moral nihilism. As cited in the movie The Big Lebowski, “these men are nihilists, they believe in nothing.” Now there are several things that are attractive about moral nihilism:
  1. you are not the boss of me.
And
  2. you are not the boss of me.
These two explain the attraction the position has for libertarians of all stripes. But we have to keep this anti-position in mind, as kind of a null hypothesis to the moral endeavor. (Oh noes, did I just write that? Homminy crap, this will attract those anti-null hypothesis ACs, and then the Electric Universe types, and the Flat-earthers, and jmorris. But, can’t be helped, we plow on.)

        Moral nihilism may be a bit to strong from some, so they opt instead for something like constructivism. Now this is a sociological school of thought of quite some age, so it is good to pay attention. One of the consequences of Marxism is the standing of Hegel on his head. This requires some explanation. Hegel was a German philosopher that put forth a systematic idealism. Without going into it too deeply, idealism is the idea that ideas are more real than things. Yes, to practical minded people, this is insane. But there is a long tradition of this in philosophy, going back to Plato, who held that the concepts of things, the part of them that could be comprehended by the mind, was what was true and real, whereas the phenomenal part was partial and fleeting. So, Marx, going with the popularity of materialism as against Platonic and Hegelian Idealism, tended to explain reality based on the realities rather than the ideas. This led him to suppose that it was the material conditions of humanity that lead to ideas, rather than that ideas revealed or defined the reality that humans lived in. Practically, this meant that for Marx, philosophy, religion, law, and perhaps even the arts, are all forms of thought conditioned and created by the economic relations of the society in which they occurred. Ideas, for Marxists, are ideology.

              Now this leads into a long European tradition of “ideology critique”, especially in French philosophy, coming from the structuralist ideas of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and leading to the Post-modernist tradition, and, yes, to social constructivism. But we only mention all this here to point out that the idea that morality, ethics, ideas of right and wrong, have been in contention for quite some time, and a long-standing approach has been to analyse the position you oppose, to reduce their position to self-interest. We see this all the time, right here on SoylentNews, where climate change deniers accuse the opposition of being in the pay of “green energy”. But seriously, ideology goes deeper than that.

      And, this raises our question here. If the idea of good and evil depends upon a particular “mode of production” in Marx’s terminology, then of course the standards of good and evil could be changed, by effecting a change in the mode of production. Now some may react in horror at the idea that political violence may change what is right or wrong, but the larger question is whether there is any objective morality at all. Marxist ideology may critique Capitalist morality as the mere superimpostion of ideas in defense of a historically determined reality, but it suggests that all morality is in fact not based on anything else. So the question is, what would post-Capitalist morality be based on? Or if there no longer was any structural basis for ideology, would morality exist at all?

        Interesting questions, all.

  So here we go. If there is such a thing as right and wrong, or alternatively good and bad, it must needs have a basis somewhere. This is one of the really smart things that Jeremy Bentham, the father of Utilitarianism, had to say. All morality must be founded on some principle. If not, it is nothing but the subjective expression of a personal preference.

1. Let him settle with himself, whether he would wish to discard this principle altogether; if so, let him consider what it is that all his reasonings (in matters of politics especially) can amount to?
2. If he would, let him settle with himself, whether he would judge and act without any principle, or whether there is any other he would judge an act by?
3. If there be, let him examine and satisfy himself whether the principle he thinks he has found is really any separate intelligible principle; or whether it be not a mere principle in words, a kind of phrase, which at bottom expresses neither more nor less than the mere averment of his own unfounded sentiments; that is, what in another person he might be apt to call caprice?
4. If he is inclined to think that his own approbation or disapprobation, annexed to the idea of an act, without any regard to its consequences, is a sufficient foundation for him to judge and act upon, let him ask himself whether his sentiment is to be a standard of right and wrong, with respect to every other man, or whether every man's sentiment has the same privilege of being a standard to itself?
5. In the first case, let him ask himself whether his principle is not despotical, and hostile to all the rest of human race?

Introduction to the Principles of Morality and Legislation, chapter one.

Now there have been attempts to describe morality along these lines, again for some reason by Englishmen. The name of the theory is “Emotivism”, sometimes mocked as the “Boo-Hooray” ethical theory. Under this, the only meaning to an ethical judgment is personal preference. Which by its very nature is unprincipled. Bentham wins. (And holey crapolla, BBC has an “ethics guide”?)

        Next, we might take the subjective idea and try to run with it. Problems, though. We might say that it is right for any individual to do what is in their own self interest. See the problem? What people want, and what they need (interest) are quite often not the same thing. So we end up modifying a theory into what is called “Egoism”. Yes, named after a Planet in the “Guardians of the Galaxy, vol. 2” movie! No, “ego” is just Latin for “I”, or me. Of course, to define what someone should find in their own self-interest, as opposed to what they actually say they want, takes of bit of doing. So we end up with “Enlightened Egoism”. This is what any suitably educated and scientifically aware individual would want, so you must want it, too. No matter what you say.

          We may even be able to extend such a theory to the range of principle that Bentham demands. “Everyone should do what is in their own (enlightened) self-interest. And Devil take the hindmost. Sound familiar? On this view, whenever anyone starts spouting any other ethical theory other than one based on selfishness, they either are jockeying for advantage, or seriously deluded. The may quite possibly be a SJW. But this does leave us with a real problem. Often times it is in our interest to cooperate with others, but of course it is also just as in their interest to betray us when we cooperate. What are we to do?

        Another Brit, earlier than Bentham, gives us a shot at this. Thomas Hobbes lived during the time of the Glorious Revolution in Britain. He sided with the Monarchy. Others, like John Locke, sided with the Parliment. But it is interesting to understand that they started from rather similar amoral assumptions. Imagine primitive humanity, before there was society, laws, authority, or anything. This is a rather novel idea, foreign to political thought previous. For earlier political thinkers, the state was based on a natural order, kings were put in power by Divine Right, and so obedience was required by natural and divine law. Hobbes, and Locke, and interestingly, Jean Jacques Rousseau, came up with a new basis for legitimate authority, an idea called the “Social Contract". Prior to the establishment of such a contract, human lived in a “state of nature”.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time or war where every man is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Leviathan

But this does share something with our Emotivists and Marxists, in that it holds that morality is a human invention, not a fact of nature.

  To this war of every man against every man this also is consequent, that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body nor mind.

op. cit.

Now Hobbes's way out of the state of nature is to agree to a truce in the war of each against all. But more importantly, he maintains that it is in each individual’s own self interest to do so. Part of the reason for this is Hobbes’ rather pessimistic ground for human equality.

NATURE hath made men so equal in the faculties of the body and mind, as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. For, as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself.

You may think you can prevail by superior strength, but if we really put our minds to it, each of us is equally lethal to any other of us. Ya gotta sleep sometime! So this means that for everyone, the social contract is mandated by an enlightened self-interest. And of course, breaking the social contract is equally in everyone’s enlightened self-interest, if they can get away with it! Thus Hobbes insists on the creation of an absolute power, a Leviathan, the Monarch, to enforce the agreement. Problem being, the Leviathan is not actually a party to the agreement? Oh, now we move on to Locke, the American Declaration of Indendence, and a whole bunch of liberal bourgeious revolutionary stuff. Skipping ahead.

      Back to Bentham. Self-interest as a principle only gets us so far. Bentham proposed something more universal, a true principle, the principle of “Utility”. Now he here is delving into one of the major points I want to make in this short “Ethics for Soylentils”, the distinction between theories of good, and theories of right. Bentham is competely on the “good” side, and in this he agrees with the ancient Greek school of Epicurus. Utilitarianism is a variant of “hedonism”, from the Greek word ἥδυς, “pleasure”. If it feels good, it is good. Hedonism has been controversial from the beginning, with many saying that pleasure is bad, or suited more for animals or children than for humans. But Epicurus and Bentham both respond along the lines of “what else you got?” The significant thing about moral theory based on a “good”, however, is how much of it there is, and who gets what. If some is good is good, more good is better. Ethics of Good are all about maximization.

            This may be what gets Bentham out of the egoist trap. If more good is, in principle, better, it is immaterial whose good it is, as long as there is more of it. Thus the principle of utility, in order to be a principle, is larger than what I want, or what gives me pleasure. It is this:

"By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose that happiness."

Of course, what is important is the total happiness, not the particular happiness of an particular individual.

if that party be the community the happiness of the community, if a particular individual, the happiness of that individual.

Principles, chap. 1

  But on the upside, the happiness of each individual counts for as much as any other, so when the tally is calculated, at least you had a fair chance.

Bentham’s theory leads us to a couple of conundrums, at least. One is the notion of right actually has no place. In fact, this may be one of the most progressive aspects of Utilitarianism, the pleasure of one counts equally to the pleasure of any other, a radical egalitarianism. This can lead us to some conclusions we do not particularly like. For example, if a large number of people, particularly teenage girls, get pleasure from the performances of Justin Beiber, who are we, or The Mightly Buzzard, to say they are in error? The other, and the one most often posed, is that given the equality, there is no bar to sacrificing the pleasure/happiness of some, if it results in the greater happiness for even more persons. This has been played out in fiction multiple times, but the two I would mention are Stephen King’s Storm of the Century, [Born in sin? Come on in!] and Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”.

          We may have gotten away from moral nihilism, and from an equally nihilistic egoism, but there are still more issues in an ethical system. One is the Hobbesian question that if you could take over the entire apparatus of society, why not be an egoistic tyrant? This is the lingering appeal of Realpolitik, as expressed by Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic. This is really the question of normative force: why should anyone be moral, particularly if they really do not need to be so?
        Secondly, we have the question of right, which brings with it the idea of absolute value. In King’s TV series, the islanders are offered a choice, the life of an innocent child, or the death of all of them. For an accountant, there is no issue. But some might say that the sacrifice of an innocent, no matter what the consequences, is always wrong. Are there any things that are always wrong?

Stay tuned for the next installment of Ethics for Soylentils, where we will consider just that.

Every Vote Counts!

RICHMOND, Va. -- Among the holiday hustle and bustle of Carytown, Virginia voters react to what some might call a "Christmas Miracle" for Democrats in the Commonwealth.

"That's sort of amazing," voter Scott Williams said.

"That's pretty amazing," voter Ariel Furler said.

In a stunning turn of events, Democrat Shelly Simonds gained eleven votes in a recount to beat the Republican incumbent in the 94th District by just one vote.

The final tally: 11608 votes to 11607 votes.

UPDATE: Apparently it's a tie now. By state law, the winner of the tie will be determined "by lot."

The USA just decided apparently to abolish "Net Neutrality" making the public Internet beholden to large, established corporations. This is bad news for individuals and small businesses.

What we need is a new internet, a grass-roots one, ad-hoc, created by volunteers.

Many years ago when WiFi was new, there was one such attempt I seem to remember called "Consume the Net." I never had the money to buy the hardware at the time, but it sounded like a great idea. The problem in those days was getting any sort of broadband connection was difficult and expensive. You could get a 56kbps POTS modem, sometimes ISDN (64k * 2) or cable (500-600kbps) if you were very lucky and ADSL was just coming out. WiFi was already running at megabits.

Now we have a different set of problems to work around, but the technology is ubiquitous, cheap and mature.

It would we cool to have the equivalent of open access points on this new co-operative internet that you could scan for and join if you promised to behave.

Any ideas?

The Guardian has a story about some Harry Potter stories written by Botnki's predictive text keyboard (complete with link to github).

        “He saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione’s family. Ron’s Ron shirt was just as bad as Ron himself.

        ‘If you two can’t clump happily, I’m going to get aggressive,’ confessed the reasonable Hermione.”

So not much worse that the original.