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Gallup Poll Shows 78% Of Democrats Mistakenly Believe Russia Changed Election Results
Democrats have often claimed to be the reality based community, citing many false beliefs held by Republicans. For example, a poll as recent as 2015 showed that half of Republicans still believed that WMD had been found in Iraq. Gallup shows that Democrats are doing even worse regarding false claims being used to promote neocon goals. A Gallup poll released August 20 shows 78% of Democrats believe not only that Russia interfered in 2016 election but that it changed the result, despite a lack of evidence for this view.
As with false views about WMD in Iraq, false views by Democrats about the 2016 election have negative consequences. Democrats are using the belief that Clinton lost because of Russian actions to avoid necessary reform in the party. Democrats must face reality, accept responsibility for their losses, and reform their party, as opposed to dwelling on conspiracy theories blaming others. Rigging the nomination for a candidate as terrible as Clinton cost the Democrats about 10% of the vote and is the main reason they lost in 2016–not any foreign interference.
Even worse, this has led to a more hostile view on foreign relations by Democrats. The same poll found that, "Americans believe it is more important to try to continue efforts to improve relations between the countries (58%), rather than taking strong diplomatic and economic steps against Russia (36%)." In contrast a majority of Democrats (51%) favor taking steps against Russia while 45% believe it is more important to continue efforts to improve relations. Hysteria over Russian bots and "fake news" has also led to an increase in censorship of Americans on social media, as I most recently discussed yesterday.
A majority agree that Russia did interfere in the election. This is hardly surprising considering that Russia has meddled in our politics for decades, just as the United States has meddled in elections in Russia and around the world. I find that many Democrats have difficulty separating the different aspects of this. They see legitimate criticism of Trump's policies as somehow being proof that Russia changed the result of the election, or fail to distinguish between low level meddling and actually altering the result.
Some of this comes from misinformation deliberately spread by Clinton and the DNC to distract from the reasons for her loss. As was revealed in Shattered, Hillary Clinton decided upon the strategy of blaming others such as Russia for her loss within twenty-four hours of losing. The Washington Post exposed the fact that the Clinton campaign and DNC had paid for the Steele dossier, after they had denied their involvement for months.
We also have often seen false information being repeated, even after retracted. Today we saw one of many false claims being retracted, this time a claim from Democrats about a hacking attempt turning out to be a false alarm. I've repeatedly found that Democrats will continue to cite the original incorrect stories without realizing they have been retracted. This includes the repeated incorrect claims about seventeen intelligence agencies, and incorrect reporting regarding hacking of voter databases. I listed additional examples here, and The Nation has also debunked the irresponsible media coverage of claims about Russia.
Just as many Democrats are quick to accept any excuse for Clinton's loss, many reporters who had predicted Clinton would win easily prefer to blame her loss on Russia, rather than admitting they had totally misread the election. In reality, signs of Clinton's weakness in the battleground states, among independents, among liberals, and among young voters was apparent even before she was nominated, as I had warned in multiple posts.
Evidence from the Congressional investigations showed that the Trump Tower meeting, while possibly a violation of election laws, was of little consequence. No evidence came up showing any evidence that any votes were changed during the Congressional investigations. The hearings revealed that Russian ads and propaganda accounted for a minuscule portion of overall Facebook content, representing "less than 0.004 percent of all content — or about 1 in 23,000 news feed items" on Facebook. Over half of the ads were not seen until after the election, most had nothing to do with promoting Trump over Clinton, and the ads were more concentrated in safe blue or red states as opposed to the battleground states.
The various guilty pleas and indictments from Robert Mueller have dealt far more with crimes such as money laundering and tax evasion as opposed to anything which involved the election. Some indictments were for violations of campaign law, and others were for allegedly hacking the DNC, with neither claimed to have altered the election results.
With the DNC having refused to allow the FBI to investigate their computers, there remains question as to whether the release of email was really a hack or a leak. Even if a hack, there has been no question as to the validity of the email released by Wikileaks. Blaming the loss of the election based upon the release of factual information which exposed dishonesty by Clinton and the DNC is hardly a meaningful excuse, and the blame for the loss still falls on Clinton and the DNC.
Democrats must face reality as to why they lost the 2016 election and make necessary reforms in the party–including reforming the nomination process at their meeting this week where super delegates are under consideration. Rigging the nomination for a candidate who could not win the nomination fairly on her own both alienated many potential voters, and left the Democrats with a candidate too unpopular to beat even a candidate as dreadful as Donald Trump.
Posted in Congress, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, News Media. Tags: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, Robert Mueller, Russia, Shattered, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Wikileaks. 4 Comments »
ACLU Joins Other Civil Libertarians In Warning About Dangers Of Censorship On Social Media
Censorship on social media has been an ongoing problem involving people on both the left and the right, but the recent banning of Alex Jones has increased attention to the issue. While many civil libertarians have seen the dangers, others have allowed their views of Alex Jones to distract from the urgent civil liberties issues at stake. Attacks on civil liberties have often started with unpopular targets, and then extending to others. The American Civil Liberties Union has warned about the worrisome implications:
Several companies, including Facebook and YouTube, have removed Jones and his radio show for violating their hate speech policies. But doing so may set a dangerous precedent, according to Ben Wizner, director of ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.
As private institutions, these sites have the constitutional right to decide whether to host Jones. But a hate speech policy defining when an individual warrants being banned could be "misused and abused," Wizner told HuffPost on Monday.
"If [Attorney General] Jeff Sessions, for example, were deciding what's hate speech, he would be less likely to think KKK and more likely to think [Black Lives Matter]," Wizner said. "It turns out to be an extremely subjective term."
"I have some of the same concerns about platforms making those decisions," he added. "Governments at least purport to be acting solely in the public interest, but platforms are making these decisions based on what's in their financial interest. So their interest might be in avoiding controversy, but do we want the most important speech platforms in the world to avoid controversy?"
"Who should decide what's fake? … It's not so easy to do in a way that is objective," he said. "If these platforms get in the business of trying to be the arbiters of truth or falsity, pretty soon everyone is going to have something to complain about."
"Do we really want corporations that are answerable to their shareholders and their bottom lines being the ones who decide which political speech Americans should see or not see?" he added. "Because that's what we're asking for here."
Some have questioned whether this is a civil liberties issue as on the surface it involves private companies as opposed to the government. The point is not that whether this is a First Amendment issue, but that our concept of censorship and the First Amendment must be updated due to how social media is being used by government to restrict speech. Social media has become the equivalent of the old fashioned town square. When we have a near monopoly controlling social media on the internet (which happened to be developed with taxpayer's money), and government then instructs these companies to restrict the speech of people, it can be more dangerous than our conventional concept of censorship. Making matters worse, there is no due process when done with supposedly private companies in this manner.
The purpose of the First Amendment was to protect free speech–not to give excuses to support censorship when it does not strictly fall under the wording of the First Amendment. Wired had warnings about allowing Facebook to censor free speech, and responded to the argument that this is not a First Amendment issue:
The lamest of counterarguments to Zuckerberg's absolutist position is the drearily predictable one of "the First Amendment doesn't apply to companies." It's the nitpicky point of the eighth-grade know-it-all. How about I quarter troops from my private army in your house, and when you cite the Third Amendment, I'll reply with "well, they're not government troops," and see how you feel about it?
Concepts like "trespassing" and "privacy" are not mentioned in the Constitution and did not then exist in the form we know today. We have extended the animating spirit of the Third and Fourth Amendments—respecting a person's property and privacy—more broadly, because it's a foundational value we want to see respected everywhere. Ditto the First Amendment: We want companies to embrace it too.
Internet censorship greatly increased as a result of pressure from Democrats who blame Russian ads and "fake news" for the defeat of Hillary Clinton, as opposed to being willing to acknowledge the serious problems in nominating Clinton, and the terrible campaign she ran, which caused her defeat. Clinton herself called on Congress to regulate what she considered to be fake news after her defeat–a rather serious attack on First Amendment rights.
It is easy to look the other way when someone as vile as Alex Jones is the target, but internet censorship has extended to many others on both the left and the right. If censorship is justified based upon expressing hatred, promoting violence, and spreading false information, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are far more dangerous. If kooky right wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones should be banned, the same could just as easily be said about kooky left wing conspiracy theorist Rachel Maddow, whose conspiracy theories risk starting a war with a nuclear power.
Before the government pushed internet companies to act as their censors, they preferred to be regarded as common carriers who are not responsible for regulating content. Either we go with that concept, or we have a handful of executives in Silicon Valley deciding what any of us can say. There is no middle ground. As Matt Taibbi pointed out, "as was obvious during the Senate hearing with Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year, politicians are more interested in using than curtailing the power of these companies. The platforms, for their part, will cave rather than be regulated. The endgame here couldn't be clearer. This is how authoritarian marriages begin, and people should be very worried."
After Alex Jones was removed by multiple social media companies, Senator Chris Murphy tweeted: "Infowars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart. These companies must do more than take down one website. The survival of our democracy depends on it."
Instead of falling into the trap of saying this is not a First Amendment issue as it is not the government doing the censorship (at least directly), we should be exerting pressure on both members of Congress and the social media companies to consider social media companies as common carriers rather than taking on the job of censoring speech. The alternative would be as if AT&T, when they had a monopoly, was also entrusted with determining what types of speech could be allowed over its telephone lines.
In a follow up article to the one I quoted from above, Taibbi wrote on this topic in greater detail:
Two weeks ago, we learned about a new campaign against "inauthentic" content, conducted by Facebook in consultation with Congress and the secretive think tank Atlantic Council — whose board includes an array of ex-CIA and Homeland Security officials — in the name of cracking down on alleged Russian disinformation efforts. As part of the bizarre alliance of Internet news distributors and quasi-government censors, the social network zapped 32 accounts and pages, including an ad for a real "No Unite the Right 2" anti-racist counter-rally in D.C. this past weekend.
Last week, we saw another flurry of censorship news. Facebook apparently suspended VenezuelaAnalysis.com, a site critical of U.S. policy toward Venezuela. (It was reinstated Thursday.) Twitter suspended a pair of libertarians, including @DanielLMcAdams of the Ron Paul Institute and @ScottHortonShow of Antiwar.com, for using the word "bitch" (directed toward a man) in a silly political argument. They, too, were later re-instated.
More significantly: Google's former head of free expression issues in Asia, Lokman Tsui, blasted the tech giant's plan to develop a search engine that would help the Chinese government censor content…
Both the Jones situation and the Facebook-Atlantic Council deletions seem an effort to fulfill a request made last year by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Last October, Facebook, Google and Twitter were asked by Hawaii Senator Mazie Hizono to draw up a "mission statement" to "prevent the foment of discord."
Companies like Facebook might have balked before. They have long taken a position that's very Star Trek, very Prime-Directive: We do not interfere. Mark Zuckerberg, as late as 2016, was saying, "editing content… that's not us."
…After Trump's shocking win in 2016, everyone turned to Facebook and Google to fix "fake news." But nobody had a coherent definition of what constitutes it.
Many on the left lamented the Wikileaks releases of Democratic Party emails, but those documents were real news, and the complaint there was more about the motives of sources, and editorial emphasis, rather than accuracy…
Within a year, Google bragged that it had deleted 8 million videos from YouTube. A full 6.7 million videos were caught by machines, 1.1 million by YouTube's own "trusted flaggers" (we're pre-writing the lexicon of the next dystopian novels), and 400,000 by "normal users."
Subsequently, we heard that Facebook was partnering with the Atlantic Council — which, incidentally, accepts donations from at least 25 different foreign countries, including United Arab Emirates and the king of Bahrain, in addition to firms like weapons manufacturer Raytheon and my old pals at HSBC — to identify "potential abuse."
…For more than half a century, we had an effective, if slow, litigation-based remedy for speech violations. The standards laid out in cases like New York Times v. Sullivan were designed to protect legitimate reporting while directly remunerating people harmed by bad speech. Sooner or later, people like Alex Jones would always crash under crippling settlements. Meanwhile, young reporters learned to steer clear of libel and defamation. Knowing exactly what we could and could not get away with empowered us to do our jobs, confident that the law had our backs.
If the line of defense had not been a judge and jury but a giant transnational corporation working with the state, journalists taking on banks or tech companies or the wrong politicians would have been playing intellectual Russian roulette. In my own career, I'd have thought twice before taking on a company like Goldman Sachs. Any reporter would.
Now the line is gone. Depending on the platform, one can be banned for "glorifying violence," "sowing division," "hateful conduct" or even "low quality," with those terms defined by nameless, unaccountable executives, working with God Knows Whom…
Google and Facebook have long wrestled with the question of how to operate in politically repressive markets — Google launched a censored Chinese search engine in 2006, before changing its mind in 2010 — but it seems we're seeing a kind of mass surrender on that front.
The apparent efforts to comply with government requests to help "prevent the foment of discord" suggest the platforms are moving toward a similar surrender even in the United States. The duopolistic firms seem anxious to stay out of headlines, protect share prices and placate people like Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who just said deleting Jones was only a "good first step."
Americans are not freaking out about this because most of us have lost the ability to distinguish between general principles and political outcomes. So long as the "right" people are being zapped, no one cares.
But we should care. Censorship is one of modern man's great temptations. Giving in to it hasn't provided many happy stories.
Slate warned that, "placing the distribution of information in the hands of a few tech companies will remain a very big problem."
Did anyone vote to make Google and Facebook monopolies. Did anyone vote to say we are going to make private actors make these decisions? There hasn't been such a vote. People are just waking up to the fact that these guys are monopolies. People are just waking up to the fact that these guys have built these machines and amplified these kinds of voices. We only had our first major hearing in Congress last summer. This is pretty fresh, pretty new. I think if you put it to a vote, you sure as hell wouldn't have anybody say, "We will choose these people to be our censors, we will choose these people to be our regulators." And remember that this is a two-edged story. Any time you say that you are going to allow for this type of private action or private censorship, it is something that can be used against your friends next year, tomorrow.
Caitlin Johnstone, who herself was the target of internet censorship this month, further discussed how In A Corporatist System Of Government, Corporate Censorship Is State Censorship:
In a corporatist system of government, wherein there is no meaningful separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship isstate censorship. Because legalized bribery in the form of corporate lobbying and campaign donations has given wealthy Americans the ability to control the US government's policy and behavior while ordinary Americans have no effective influence whatsoever, the US unquestionably has a corporatist system of government. Large, influential corporations are inseparable from the state, so their use of censorship is inseparable from state censorship.
This is especially true of the vast megacorporations of Silicon Valley, whose extensive ties to US intelligence agencies are well-documented. Once you're assisting with the construction of the US military's drone program, receiving grants from the CIA and NSA for mass surveillance, or having your site's content regulated by NATO's propaganda arm, you don't get to pretend you're a private, independent corporation that is separate from government power. It is possible in the current system to have a normal business worth a few million dollars, but if you want to get to billions of dollars in wealth control in a system where money translates directly to political power, you need to work with existing power structures like the CIA and the Pentagon, or else they'll work with your competitors instead of you.
For more on this topic, I would also recommend the following video discussion with Glenn Greenwald (who has written extensively on civil liberties and social media), Sam Biddle, and Briahna Joy:
Posted in Blogs & Social Media, Civil Liberties, Congress, Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Libertarianism. Tags: American Civil Liberties Union, Civil Liberties, Donald Trump, Facebook, Glenn Greenwald, Hillary Clinton, Rachel Maddow, Star Trek, Twitter, Wikileaks. No Comments »
Ecuador Might Be Preparing To Turn Julian Assange Over To Authorities–Will This Lead To Prosecution By The US?
Glenn Greenwald reports at The Intercept that Ecuador is preparing to turn Julian Assange over to UK authorities. He writes:
A source close to the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry and the President's office, unauthorized to speak publicly, has confirmed to the Intercept that Moreno is close to finalizing, if he has not already finalized, an agreement to hand over Assange to the UK within the next several weeks. The withdrawal of asylum and physical ejection of Assange could come as early as this week. On Friday, RT reported that Ecuador was preparing to enter into such an agreement…
The central oddity of Assange's case – that he has been effectively imprisoned for eight years despite never having been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime – is virtually certain to be prolonged once Ecuador hands him over to the U.K. Even under the best-case scenario, it appears highly likely that Assange will continue to be imprisoned by British authorities.
The only known criminal proceeding Assange currently faces is a pending 2012 arrest warrant for "failure to surrender" – basically a minor bail violation charge that arose when he obtained asylum from Ecuador rather than complying with bail conditions by returning to court for a hearing on his attempt to resist extradition to Sweden.
That charge carries a prison term of three months and a fine, though it is possible that the time Assange has already spent in prison in the UK could be counted against that sentence. In 2010, Assange was imprisoned in Wandsworth Prison, kept in isolation, for 10 days until he was released on bail; he was then under house arrest for 550 days at the home of a supporter…
THE FAR MORE IMPORTANT question that will determine Assange's future is what the U.S. Government intends to do. The Obama administration was eager to prosecute Assange and WikiLeaks for publishing hundreds of thousands of classified documents, but ultimately concluded that there was no way to do so without either also prosecuting newspapers such as the New York Times and the Guardian which published the same documents, or create precedents that would enable the criminal prosecution of media outlets in the future.
Indeed, it is technically a crime under U.S. law for anyone – including a media outlet – to publish certain types of classified information. Under U.S. law, for instance, it was a felony for the Washington Post's David Ignatius to report on the contents of telephone calls, intercepted by the NSA, between then National Security Adviser nominee Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, even though such reporting was clearly in the public interest since it proved Flynn lied when he denied such contacts…
But the U.S. Justice Department has never wanted to indict and prosecute anyone for the crime of publishing such material, contenting themselves instead to prosecuting the government sources who leak it. Their reluctance has been due to two reasons: first, media outlets would argue that any attempts to criminalize the mere publication of classified or stolen documents is barred by the press freedom guarantee of the First Amendment, a proposition the DOJ has never wanted to test; second, no DOJ has wanted as part of its legacy the creation of a precedent that allows the U.S. Government to criminally prosecute journalists and media outlets for reporting classified documents.
But the Trump administration has made clear that they have no such concerns. Quite the contrary: last April, Trump's then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, now his Secretary of State, delivered a deranged, rambling, highly threatening broadside against WikiLeaks. Without citing any evidence, Pompeo decreed that WikiLeaks is "a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia," and thus declared: "we have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us."..
But there seems little question that, as Sessions surely knows, large numbers of U.S. journalists – along with many, perhaps most, Democrats – would actually support the Trump DOJ in prosecuting Assange for publishing documents. After all, the DNC sued WikiLeaks in April for publishing documents – a serious, obvious threat to press freedom – and few objected.
And it was Democratic Senators such as Dianne Feinstein who, during the Obama years, were urging the prosecution of WikiLeaks, with the support of numerous GOP Senators. There is no doubt that, after 2016, support among both journalists and Democrats for imprisoning Assange for publishing documents would be higher than ever.
Greenwald added on Twitter: "It should take only the tiniest amount of rationality to understand the dangers to journalists from having the DOJ prosecute Assange for publishing classified or stolen documents. From the Pentagon Papers to the Snowden reporting to daily leaks, media outlets do that every day."
Kevin Drum does not think there would be much support for prosecution among journalists or Democrats:
I don't have any independent knowledge of what will happen to Assange next, or whether he will indeed eventually be extradited to the United States. But I will say this. If the case brought against him is a fairly ordinary one of publishing classified material, I expect, contra Greenwald, that virtually no Democrats and absolutely no journalists will support the government's case.¹ There would, unfortunately, probably be a few Democratic politicians who would cheer his prosecution, but even there I think (or hope, anyway) that their numbers would be small. If this case goes forward, I suppose it will be a good test of whose level of cynicism is currently best calibrated to the current mood of the American public.
¹The exceptions are likely to be nutballs like Breitbart or folks like that. Even Fox News would probably defend him against a straight-up publishing charge.
I agree that serious journalists will not support prosecution, but am not so sure about the Democrats. Again, as Greenwald pointed out, the DNC has already sued WikiLeaks for publishing documents obtained by others. Again, as Greenwald points out, this is a serious, obvious treat to press freedom.
Posted in Civil Liberties, Democrats, News Media. Tags: Barack Obama, Civil Liberties, Democrats, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Fox, Glenn Greenwald, Jeff Sessions, Michael Flynn, Russia, Wikileaks. No Comments »
Establishment Democrats Taking Wrong Lessons From Indictments Of Russian Agents
The announcement of the indictment of twelve Russian agents by Robert Mueller yesterday changes little with regards to what was already known, but establishment Democrats are taking all the wrong lessons, and making claims which they never would have made if not for the perceived political benefits. Finding ways to justify the fact that Hillary Clinton was unable to beat a candidate as dreadful as Donald Trump has become top priority.
Establishment Democrats seem oblivious to the fact that an indictment is not proof. No evidence accompanied the indictments and, as it is unlikely that the Russians will ever appear in court, it is possible that no evidence of these accusations will ever be presented. This provides no further proof than the retracted (but still repeated) claim of seventeen intelligence agencies agreeing that Russia hacked the DNC.
I have remained an agnostic as to whether the email was released by a hack or by a leak, and question if we will ever know for certain considering how the DNC refused to allow the FBI to investigate their servers. My personal opinion has been that a hack was the more likely explanation, but this is not definite. While I personally have never taken the Seth Rich theory seriously, there is nothing new here to disprove the view of those who do believe this.
For the sake of further discussion here, I will assume that the claims in Mueller's indictment are true, again noting that this is not proven. Assuming that the accusations are true, establishment Democrats are still naively living in a pre-Gary Powers world, ignoring the realities of the situation.
Francis Gary Powers was an American spy who was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960 while engaging in espionage. The United States claimed that he was studying weather patterns for NASA, but it was ultimately made clear that he was a spy. The United States was forced to admit that it had been conducting such spy missions over the Soviet Union for several years, ending any pretense that the United States did not engage in such actions. It was no longer possible to see the United States as purely the victim of Russian espionage, but Democrats have suddenly returned to this mindset.
Such espionage is commonplace, and is rather benign compared to the practice of influencing elections in other countries–along with the outright overthrowing of foreign governments. Despite a long history of the United States meddling in the elections in other countries, establishment Democrats act as if the hack of email from the DNC and Hillary Clinton is somehow a unique attack on the United States, with many even comparing it to an act of war. Russia has meddled in American politics for decades, just as the United States has meddled in Russia, and both have meddled in many other countries. Russia did not suddenly attack the United States for the first time to attempt to stop Hillary Clinton–although that might be understandable considering Clinton's history of belligerence towards Russia, and her propensity to support war.
While establishment Democrats have increasingly been following the neocon line on Russia, believing claims from the same people who sold the country on going to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, avoiding unnecessary war should be a high priority. Instead many Democrats opposed the recent talks with North Korea, and are now using this as an argument to cancel the talks between Trump and Putin.
There are valid reasons to question these talks, but in a time of escalating tensions with a nuclear power, there is far more compelling reason to continue with summits, including potential talks on nuclear weapons. Trump's plan to meet with Putin alone is of concern, I think it is far more likely that if Trump has any secretive goals it is more to promote a future Trump Tower Moscow than to engage in any electoral conspiracies. To date there is no evidence of any real collusion occurring, even if the Trump Tower meeting did show a willingness to obtain information from Russia if it existed. While Mueller may or may not present evidence of this in the future, there certainly has been no evidence while establishment Democrats have been trying to pass this off as fact.
While I do not condone the hacking of any Americans by the Russian government, if this was foreign meddling in an election, it was probably the most benign meddling in the history of election meddling. The released email provided the American people with truthful and accurate information which exposed corruption and dishonesty by top politicians in this country.
It certainly makes no sense for Clinton apologists to use the hacked email as an excuse for Clinton losing. If Clinton and the Democratic Party lost because of the American people finding out the truth about their corruption, the blame for the loss falls on the politicians exposed, not those who exposed them. To argue that the email posted by Wikileaks caused Clinton to lose only means that I was right (and Clinton supporters wrong) during all those months I was writing that Clinton should not be the Democratic nominee.
The fact remains that, while Mueller has shown evidence of money laundering and other financial crimes, along with crimes by some Russians, there has been no evidence of any actions which altered the election results. There is no evidence that the voting systems were hacked or that a single vote was changed, despite erroneous reports from Clinton supporters on MSNBC. The evidence obtained in the Congressional hearings showed that Russian ads and other activities on social media were a minuscule amount of traffic, unlikely to affect the vote.
The actual threat to American democracy comes from the Democratic and Republican Parties. This includes attempt at disenfranchisement of voters by Republicans, and the efforts exposed by the Democratic Party to rig the 2016 nomination and keep out progressive viewpoints. I find the actions by the Democrats especially offensive when the Democratic establishment simultaneously works to restrict the ability of third parties to run, and for those with different viewpoints to effectively run within the Democratic Party. Instead of supporting democratic values and allowing for different viewpoints, many Democrats totally reject opposing views, holding a false belief that differences in opinion with them are based upon falling for Russian propaganda.
To the degree that Russia might be engaging in activities to meddle in our elections, the proper responses are clear. We need to enhance election security, including maintaining a paper trail. If the DNC and other Democrats fell for the hacking attempts described in the indictment, further education is needed to limit this risk in the future.
There are also wrong ways to react. This includes arguing against diplomacy and increasing the risk of war, along with the McCarthyism and support for censorship of opposing viewpoints coming from some Democrats.
Posted in Civil Liberties, Democrats, Donald Trump, Election Reform, Foreign Policy & National Security, Hillary Clinton. Tags: Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, North Korea, Robert Mueller, Russia, Vladimir Putin, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Wikileaks. No Comments »
Former Ambassador To Soviet Union Warns Of The Dangers Of Russiagate Hysteria
June 5, 2018 — Ron Chusid
Jack F. Matlock Jr., ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, writes in The Nation that, "We must end this Russophobic insanity." Many Democrats continue to spread hysteria about Russia as opposed to accepting the reality that they lost the 2016 election by running a terrible candidate who should never have been a major party candidate for president. Matlock countered the false narrative we are often hearing by reviewing the facts. Matlock had the following seven points:
It is a fact that some Russians paid people to act as online trolls and bought advertisements on Facebook during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. Most of these were taken from elsewhere, and they comprised a tiny fraction of all the advertisements purchased on Facebook during this period. This continued after the election and included organizing a demonstration against President-elect Trump.
It is a fact that e-mails in the memory of the Democratic National Committee's computer were furnished to Wikileaks. The US intelligence agencies that issued the January 2017 report were confident that Russians hacked the e-mails and supplied them to Wikileaks, but offered no evidence to substantiate their claim. Even if one accepts that Russians were the perpetrators, however, the e-mails were genuine, as the US intelligence report certified. I have always thought that the truth was supposed to make us free, not degrade our democracy.
It is a fact that the Russian government established a sophisticated television service (RT) that purveyed entertainment, news, and—yes—propaganda to foreign audiences, including those in the United States. Its audience is several magnitudes smaller than that of Fox News. Basically, its task is to picture Russia in a more favorable light than has been available in Western media. There has been no analysis of its effect, if any, on voting in the United States. The January 2017 US intelligence report states at the outset, "We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election." Nevertheless, that report has been cited repeatedly by politicians and the media as having done so.
It is a fact that many senior Russian officials (though not all, by any means) expressed a preference for Trump's candidacy. After all, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had compared President Putin to Hitler and had urged more active US military intervention abroad, while Trump had said it would be better to cooperate with Russia than to treat it as an enemy. It should not require the judgment of professional analysts to understand why many Russians would find Trump's statements more congenial than Clinton's. On a personal level, most of my Russian friends and contacts were dubious of Trump, but all resented Clinton's Russophobic tone, as well as statements made by Obama from 2014 onward. They considered Obama's public comment that "Russia doesn't make anything" a gratuitous insult (which it was), and were alarmed by Clinton's expressed desire to provide additional military support to the "moderates" in Syria. But the average Russian, and certainly the typical Putin administration official, understood Trump's comments as favoring improved relations, which they definitely favored.
There is no evidence that Russian leaders thought Trump would win or that they could have a direct influence on the outcome. This is an allegation that has not been substantiated. The January 2017 report from the intelligence community actually states that Russian leaders, like most others, thought Clinton would be elected.
There is no evidence that Russian activities had any tangible impact on the outcome of the election. Nobody seems to have done even a superficial study of the effect Russian actions actually had on the vote. The intelligence-community report, however, states explicitly that "the types of systems we observed Russian actors targeting or compromising are not involved in vote tallying." Also both former FBI director James Comey and NSA director Mike Rogers have testified that there is no proof Russian activities had an effect on the vote count.
There is also no evidence that there was direct coordination between the Trump campaign (hardly a well-organized effort) and Russian officials. The indictments brought by the special prosecutor so far are either for lying to the FBI or for offenses unrelated to the campaign such as money laundering or not registering as a foreign agent.
Matlock agrees that the election of Trump was a disaster, but also criticizes the false narrative as to why he was elected. He discussed both the problems with blaming Russia, and noted that the Democrats most likely would have won if they had nominated anyone other than Hillary Clinton:
I did not personally vote for Trump, but I consider the charges that Russian actions interfered in the election, or—for that matter—damaged the quality of our democracy ludicrous, pathetic, and shameful.
"Ludicrous" because there is no logical reason to think that anything that the Russians did affected how people voted. In the past, when Soviet leaders tried to influence American elections, it backfired—as foreign interference usually does everywhere. In 1984, Yuri Andropov, the Soviet leader then, made preventing Ronald Reagan's reelection the second-most-important task of the KGB. (The first was to detect US plans for a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.) Everything the Soviets did—in painting Reagan out to be a warmonger while Andropov refused to negotiate on nuclear weapons—helped Reagan win 49 out of 50 states.
"Pathetic" because it is clear that the Democratic Party lost the election. Yes, it won the popular vote, but presidents are not elected by popular vote. To blame someone else for one's own mistakes is a pathetic case of self-deception.
"Shameful" because it is an evasion of responsibility. It prevents the Democrats, and those Republicans who want responsible, fact-based government in Washington, from concentrating on practical ways to reduce the threat the Trump presidency poses to our political values and even to our future existence. After all, Trump would not be president if the Republican Party had not nominated him. He also is most unlikely to have won the Electoral College if the Democrats had nominated someone—almost anyone—other than the candidate they chose, or if that candidate had run a more competent campaign. I don't argue that any of this was fair, or rational, but then who is so naive as to assume that American politics are either fair or rational?
Matlock added that falsely blaming the election on Russia is also dangerous:
I should add "dangerous" to those three adjectives. "Dangerous" because making an enemy of Russia, the other nuclear superpower—yes, there are still two—comes as close to political insanity as anything I can think of. Denying global warming may rank up there too in the long run, but only nuclear weapons pose, by their very existence in the quantities that are on station in Russia and the United States, an immediate threat to mankind—not just to the United States and Russia and not just to "civilization." The sad, frequently forgotten fact is that, since the creation of nuclear weapons, mankind has the capacity to destroy itself and join other extinct species…
We must desist from our current Russophobic insanity and encourage Presidents Trump and Putin to restore cooperation in issues of nuclear safety, non-proliferation, control of nuclear materials, and nuclear-arms reduction. This is in the vital interest of both the United States and Russia. That is the central issue on which sane governments, and sane publics, would focus their attention.
The Nation Debunks Russiagate Conspiracy "Fantasyland" And Irresponsible Media Coverage
Posted in Democrats, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy & National Security, Hillary Clinton, Ronald Reagan. Tags: Democrats, Donald Trump, Facebook, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Ronald Reagan, Russia, Vladimir Putin, Wikileaks. No Comments »
DNC Suit Against Wikileaks Is A Dangerous Attack On Freedom Of The Press
In 2016 the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton were exposed for undermining democratic principles by rigging the Democratic nomination and other acts of gross dishonesty. While there were many sources of information regarding this, email released by Wikileaks was instrumental in both verifying what was already suspected and providing new information. Rather than showing any remorse and instituting real reform, the Democratic Party has now initiated the absurd act of suing Wikileaks, Russia, and the Trump campaign based upon their unproven conspiracy theories that the 2016 election was stolen by these groups. In other words, the DNC is filing a lawsuit alleging damages because the truth about them was released by Wikileaks. The most alarming aspect is their attack on freedom of the press by including Wikileaks for publishing leaked or stolen emails provided to them.
This foolish action made the DNC the target of civil libertarians on a weekend in which Donald Trump was also attacking the press. The DNC is including Wikileaks in the suit not because of any claims that they had hacked the DNC, but purely because they posted email they received. Media organizations often publish stolen material and the DNC's attempt to sue Wikileaks for doing is an attempt to intimidate the media for doing so. This includes The Pentagon Papers, The Panama Papers, and the revelations from Edward Snowden about NSA surveillance. The right of the media to publish stolen documents has been upheld by the Supreme Court.
As Glenn Greenwald and Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation wrote, "investigative journalism frequently entails media outlets receiving documents and other private information from people who have stolen them or otherwise broke the law to obtain and release them. To convert that into a legal transgression or part of an unlawful racketeering plot – as the DNC lawsuit seeks to do – is to turn a core part of journalism into something illegal." They also noted:
Even WikiLeaks' most devoted critics and enemies are constrained to acknowledge that WikiLeaks' publications in general – and their disclosure of at least some of the DNC and Podesta emails in particular – informed the public about matters legitimately in the public interest. That's why literally every major media outlet reported on their contents, why those documents forced the resignation of five top DNC officials and the firing of a CNN commentator, and why the DNC itself believes, as evidenced by this lawsuit, that it changed perceptions of Hillary Clinton.
For an entertaining history on this history in which the Supreme Court upheld the right of newspapers to publish stolen documents watch the recent movie The Post. To use an analogy to The Pentagon Papers, the DNC is not only suing what might be the equivalent of Daniel Ellsberg for stealing the papers, but also suing those in the position of The New York Times and The Washington Post (in the pre-Bezos era).
Is this really the position the DNC desires to be in if they want to have any hope of rebuilding bridges with the left? The Democrats have been the villains of this story. Their attempts to portray themselves as the victims, as opposed to cleaning up the party and embracing reform, is counterproductive if they hope to ever regain the trust of many on the left.
Democratic opposition to the publication of email which exposes the unethical actions of the DNC is also rather hypocritical considering that most of them have probably cheered on Rachel Maddow for airing information on leaked tax returns from Donald Trump.
Wikileaks has been victorious in previous cases in which claims that they were involved in the theft of documents they posted. They have also been the target of Democrats in the past, including several false claims about them from Hillary Clinton.
Wikileaks has responded to this suit stating in a Tweet stating, "As an accurate publisher of newsworthy information @WikiLeaks is constitutionally protected from such suits." They are also requesting contributions for a counter-suit: "Help us counter-sue. We've never lost a publishing case and discovery is going to be amazing fun."
There are also questions regarding the validity of other aspects of the suit. The generally pro-Democratic blog Vox writes:
…there were many hacks and claims of hacks during 2016, and it hasn't yet been shown whether any of these Trumpworld and Russia contacts involved coordination on the DNC email leak itself, or even whether any cooperation effort between Trump's team and Russia involving hacked material did materialize.
The DNC may well be hoping to use this new suit to surface more evidence of this, should it proceed to the discovery stage — but as of now, they don't have the goods on any Trumpworld involvement with the hack and leak that damaged Democrats specifically.
Slate points out that, "Russia and WikiLeaks are unlikely to cooperate with a U.S. civil proceeding." They also note that, "The DNC's evidence of Trump participation in the scheme is limited to suggestive but not conclusive information that has already appeared in media reports." They questioned the point of this suit, which appears to be primarily a stunt, when these matters are already under investigation by Robert Mueller (and we have yet to see evidence to support many of the claims coming from the DNC). They also noted that some Democrats questioned spending money on this during a conference call reviewing the suit. Slate was not impressed with the response from the DNC:
"We're not getting into costs regarding this litigation" is not the kind of thing you say, in my opinion, when you are really confident that you are spending your donors' money wisely during a crucial election year!
Posted in Civil Liberties, Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, News Media. Tags: Civil Liberties, Donald Trump, Donna Brazile, Edward Snowden, Hillary Clinton, NSA Surveillance, Paul Manafort, Rachel Maddow, Robert Mueller, Russia, Wikileaks. No Comments »
Rational Voices In Response To Recent Charges Of Russian Assassination By Poisoning And Infiltration Of The Power Grid
March 16, 2018 — Ron Chusid
Before the 2016 election I feared that a Clinton presidency would turn Democrats into a pack of neocon warmongers and we would see attempts to limit free speech in protest. What I didn't anticipate was that her loss would do the same thing. Democrats are spreading hysteria about Russia which is comparable to the misinformation spread about Iraq in the run up to that war. Many Democrats are spreading claims which are not supported by either the Congressional investigations or the information in Robert Mueller's indictments. Many are adopting McCarthyist tactics to attack those who attempt to question their misinformation, failing to understand that debunking false claims about Russia no more makes one pro-Putin than debunking false claims about Iraq and WMD made one pro-Saddam. Fortunately there are still some sane voices in the world. Today I will look at responses to the Russian assassinations in London and to the reports of Russian infiltration of the power grid.
For the sake of discussion I am assuming that the accusations made regarding these two events are true, but we must keep in mind that repeatedly there have been examples of accusations being made, the claims later being retracted, yet many people continued to spread the false claims. This includes the retracted claims of agreement by seventeen intelligence agencies agreeing when in reality all that existed was a fact-free assessment by a small number of anti-Russian individuals in the intelligence community. NBC has repeatedly raised the debunked claims of Russian hacking of our voting systems. Previous claims that the Russians infiltrated the electrical grid in Vermont were later retracted. Many Democrats act as if collusion between Trump and Russia has been established, and that Russia altered the election results, when there is no evidence of either, and no charges that this was done in any of Robert Mueller's indictments to date.
While leaders of the Democratic Party in the United States are spreading anti-Russian hysteria, primarily to avoid responsibility for nominating a candidate so terrible that she could not even beat Donald Trump, the leader of the Labour Party in the UK sounds far more rational. Jeremy Corbyn has this op-ed in The Guardian in response to the recent poisonings in London:
As I said in parliament, the Russian authorities must be held to account on the basis of the evidence, and our response must be both decisive and proportionate. But let us not manufacture a division over Russia where none exists. Labour is of course no supporter of the Putin regime, its conservative authoritarianism, abuse of human rights or political and economic corruption. And we pay tribute to Russia's many campaigners for social justice and human rights, including for LGBT rights.
However, that does not mean we should resign ourselves to a "new cold war" of escalating arms spending, proxy conflicts across the globe and a McCarthyite intolerance of dissent. Instead, Britain needs to uphold its laws and its values without reservation. And those should be allied to a foreign policy that uses every opportunity to reduce tensions and conflict wherever possible…
There can and should be the basis for a common political response to this crime. But in my years in parliament I have seen clear thinking in an international crisis overwhelmed by emotion and hasty judgments too many times. Flawed intelligence and dodgy dossiers led to the calamity of the Iraq invasion. There was overwhelming bipartisan support for attacking Libya, but it proved to be wrong. A universal repugnance at the 9/11 attacks led to a war on Afghanistan that continues to this day, while terrorism has spread across the globe.
The continuing fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the virtual collapse of the Russian state in the 1990s must be addressed through international law and diplomacy if we are to reverse the drift to conflict.
Right now, the perpetrators of the Salisbury attack must be identified and held to account. Only through firm multilateral action can we ensure such a shocking crime never happens again.
Just as we should work to ensure that such a crime never happens again, we should work to increase cyber-security, including security for the electrical grid. Philip Bump, who previously added some sanity to the claims that Russian altered the election by using social media, now is looking at the facts regarding the electrical grid. He wrote a column entitled Why Russian hackers aren't poised to plunge the United States into darkness:
The natural question that emerges is: How serious is this hacking? The idea of Russian hackers having access to the control switches of America's power infrastructure is particularly unnerving, raising the idea of waking up one morning to learn that the United States has simply been switched off.
Several experts who spoke with The Washington Post, though, explained that this is not only oversimplistic but also that it is almost certainly impossible. The effects of infiltration of America's power grid would be much more geographically limited thanks to the distributed, redundant nature of the system.
In fact, it's more than a little like another alert issued by the government about Russian infiltration efforts: the one on Oct. 7, 2016, warning about Russian efforts to tamper with state voting systems.
That announcement came from the director of national intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security and indicated that Russian hackers were "scanning and probing" election-related systems. The message, one of the few public responses to Russian interference from the Obama administration, didn't get as much play as it might have, given that it came out the same day as The Post published the "Access Hollywood" tape.
Meaning that the caveats in the announcement — that our voting mechanisms were protected by being disconnected from the Internet during the election, by being distributed throughout thousands of counties and by having after-the-fact statistical checks on accuracy — weren't really absorbed. The idea that Russian hackers might have significantly altered election results in 2016 persists out of a misunderstanding of how remarkably hard it would be to subvert the process, particularly without being noticed…
…this damage would be localized. Perhaps, Bauch said, a hacker who'd gained access to a regional power provider or generation system might be able to knock out power to tens or hundreds of thousands of people at a time. That would be significant, but it's not taking out the whole grid. Attacking multiple providers across the country at specific times of vulnerability — like on a hot day in the west when power supplies are strained — could multiply those effects. But it would require a significant amount of planning, coordination and access to have an impact on a massive scale…
Thanks to the distributed nature of our elections and the barriers to changing votes, hacking our elections is trickier than most people realize. Thanks to the distributed and often disconnected nature of our electrical system and the barriers to accessing it, the same can be said of hacking the grid…
It's a serious situation, warranting the sort of dramatic response we saw from the government on Thursday. But do not expect to wake up some day soon and learn that Russian President Vladimir Putin now controls the flow of electricity to your house. Real life, as always, is less dramatic than the movies.
Bump has a lot more detail in his full article, including the belief that Russian hackers gained access through spear-phishing. While there is controversy over whether the DNC's email was released to Wikileaks due to hacking or a leak from the inside, the possibility has also been raised that access to the DNC's email was through spear-phishing. We would be much safer if the media and politicians spent half the time they spend on misleading stories about Russia to better educate the public about how to respond to such attempts to gain access to our computer systems.
Posted in Blogs & Social Media, Democrats, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy & National Security, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, News Media. Tags: 9/11, Donald Trump, Facebook, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, Libya, Robert Mueller, Russia, Vladimir Putin, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Wikileaks. 1 Comment »
Facebook "Techno-Fascism" Is Killing Everything From Independent News To Comedy On The Internet
February 7, 2018 — Ron Chusid
Facebook is bringing communities together–and deciding what we might say and read. This includes both outright Facebook censorship in which posts are taken down and people are placed in "Facebook Jail," to new algorithms which limit what we see on our timeline. The new algorithms have greatly reduced traffic to many outside sources harming blogs, the independent media, and even internet comedy.
Antimedia writes that Facebook Begins Killing the Independent News Industry. While Facebook has had considerable impact on internet traffic for years, the problem became more severe with the spread of anti-Russia hysteria based on highly exaggerated claims regarding the role of social media on the results of the 2016 election. The response from Facebook has to fight "fake news," which, as Glenn Greenwald has warned, is often used as an excuse for censorship. Presumably the writings of those of us who warned about the dubious arguments for the Iraq war, along with the revelations of the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam war, would have been classified as "fake news" by the mainstream in the past. Today alternative views on both the left and right are being restricted. Anti-Media saw the turning point as when Barack Obama spoke with Mark Zuckerberg about battling "fake news."
…Zuckerberg has slowly been chipping away at "fake news" sites even when he previously believed that they were not even a particular issue. Following the infamous PropOrNot report barely a week later, which effectively labelled every single site that criticizes U.S. foreign policy as a Russian agent, alternative media has faced a slow and inevitable decline.
In September last year, acclaimed writer Chris Hedges of Truthdig wrote:
"In the name of combating Russia-inspired 'fake news,' Google, Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Agence France-Presse and CNN in April imposed algorithms or filters, overseen by 'evaluators,' that hunt for key words such as 'U.S. military,' 'inequality' and 'socialism,' along with personal names such as Julian Assange and Laura Poitras, the filmmaker. Ben Gomes, Google's vice president for search engineering, says Google has amassed some 10,000 'evaluators' to determine the 'quality' and veracity of websites. Internet users doing searches on Google, since the algorithms were put in place, are diverted from sites such as Truthdig and directed to mainstream publications such as The New York Times. The news organizations and corporations that are imposing this censorship have strong links to the Democratic Party. They are cheerleaders for American imperial projects and global capitalism. Because they are struggling in the new media environment for profitability, they have an economic incentive to be part of the witch hunt."
At first, it was corporate gate-keepers like the Guardian who were begging for donations in the age of Trump, as they had lost all credibility in keeping up with the needs and interests of the people. Now, we are all asking for donations, as Facebook's algorithms are cutting off close to 100 percent of our Facebook audiences…
This has nothing to do with combating "fake news." I have written over 400 articles online, and close to 100 percent of my sources are from mainstream outlets like Reuters, the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, the Washington Post, and others. Why should we be censored for referencing the very news outlets that people like Obama want us to trust in the first place?
We are being censored because we look for the paragraphs in those reports which need highlighting, or the hidden reports that go overlooked, and we broadcast it to millions of people on a daily basis.
Many other sites on both the left and right are reporting similar difficulties. As Hedges pointed out, this has often been pushed by the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. Supporters of Hillary Clinton have been especially aggressive in filing bogus complaints with Facebook regarding those who disagree with them, and Clinton has outright attacked sources such as Wikileaks, while using what she claims is "fake news" critical of her (even when it is often true) as justification for censorship. Donald Trump has taken a position similar to Clinton's in backing censorship.
While not true of all, many of us in the blogosphere and alternative press also frequently use mainstream news outlets as a major source of information, even if we do highlight key facts which are often ignored by the talking heads who try to tell us what to think on cable and broadcast news. Articles coming from a small site such as this typically are backed up with multiple references from major media sources, but Facebook algorithms now hide what we write.
The alternative press is probably suffering the most, but Funny or Die also complains about How Facebook Is Killing Comedy:
The whole story is basically that Facebook gets so much traffic that they started convincing publishers to post things on Facebook. For a long time, that was fine. People posted things on Facebook, then you would click those links and go to their websites. But then, gradually, Facebook started exerting more and more control of what was being seen, to the point that they, not our website, essentially became the main publishers of everyone's content. Today, there's no reason to go to a comedy website that has a video if that video is just right on Facebook. And that would be fine if Facebook compensated those companies for the ad revenue that was generated from those videos, but because Facebook does not pay publishers, there quickly became no money in making high-quality content for the internet…
Facebook is essentially running a payola scam where you have to pay them if you want your own fans to see your content. If you run a large publishing company and you make a big piece of content that you feel proud of, you put it up on Facebook. From there, their algorithm takes over, with no transparency. So, not only is the website not getting ad revenue they used to get, they have to pay Facebook to push it out to their own subscribers. So, Facebook gets the ad revenue from the eyeballs on the thing they are seeing, and they get revenue from the publisher. It's like if TheNew York Times had their own subscriber base, but you had to pay the paperboy for every article you wanted to see.
The worst part is that as an artist, it feels like your own fault. We're used to a world where if you put something out there that's good, people see it and share it. But that's just not true in this world. Someone can make something really good, and just because of some weird algorithmic reasons, or if it's not designed specifically for Facebook, it doesn't do well. And then it becomes impossible to know what a good thing to make is anymore…
Facebook says that they are building communities, but really they're fracturing us. We are all on our own little news bubbles and on our own little islands. It's also fracturing our own creative projects. The internet has turned into a place where you can't have many different people speaking as one entity and expect those people to make a living. And to me, those are the most exciting, rewarding projects, and I can't make those now. I am looking at the past with rose-colored glasses, but you can say categorically that the internet was a better place 3-4 years ago. It used to be fruitful, but it's like a desert now.
It looks like we have been warned about this. Back in 2015, Mark Carrigan warned about Mark Zuckerberg's philosophy of techno-fascism.
Posted in Barack Obama, Blogs & Social Media, Civil Liberties, Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, News Media. Tags: Barack Obama, Democrats, Donald Trump, Facebook, Glenn Greenwald, Hillary Clinton, Russia, Wikileaks. 2 Comments »
With The Outcry Over Trump's Racist Comment On Shithole Countries Don't Forget Hillary Clinton's Role In Creating Shitholes Around The World
January 13, 2018 — Ron Chusid
Donald Trump verified what we already knew about him with his comment about immigration shithole countries. He showed once again that he is racist, xenophobic, and has a shithole for a brain. Having Hillary Clinton speak out against this remark also served as a reminder of how often the United States is responsible for turning other countries into shitholes.
The long history of destruction in other countries by the United States is obviously too broad a topic for a single blog post, so for today I will just look at a couple of countries which Hillary Clinton helped turn into shitholes–Haiti (as it was mentioned by Trump), and Libya.
Current Affairs had one look at what the Clintons did to Haiti in a 2016 article. This includes suppressing the minimum wage in Haiti, as Wikileaks first revealed, with more at the Columbia Journalism Review.
When Haiti had problems recovering from a 2010 earthquake, the Clinton Foundation was happy to provide assistance, especially if "Friends of Bill" could get a piece of "the lucrative recovery effort." ABC News reported:
In a series of candid email exchanges with top Clinton Foundation officials during the hours after the massive 2010 Haiti earthquake, a senior aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly gave special attention to those identified by the abbreviations "FOB" (friends of Bill Clinton) or "WJC VIPs" (William Jefferson Clinton VIPs).
"Need you to flag when people are friends of WJC," wrote Caitlin Klevorick, then a senior State Department official who was juggling incoming offers of assistance being funneled to the State Department by the Clinton Foundation. "Most I can probably ID but not all."
The Washington Post notes that, "the Clintons' image in Haiti has slipped in recent months as Haitians increasingly complain that Clinton-backed projects have often helped the country's elite and international business investors more than they have helped poor Haitians." Among those helped was Hillary's brother, Tony Rodham, thanks to connections he made at a meeting of at a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. The Washington Post describes the Clinton Global Initiative as "an offshoot of the Clinton Foundation that critics have long alleged invites a blurring of its charitable mission with the business interests of Bill and Hillary Clinton and their corporate donors."
The country which was probably harmed the most by Hillary Clinton was Libya. Years after she voted for the war in Iraq, turning that country into a shithole, Clinton showed that the lesson she learned was how easy it is to lie the country into further wars. Clinton turned Libya into such a shithole that CNN found that Africans are being sold into slavery. Barack Obama has called the regime change in Libya, orchestrated by Hillary Clinton, the biggest mistake of his administration, and has called it a "shit show." Last year Huffington Post had a story about how Hillary Clinton Turned a Stable, Developed Nation Into an ISIS Safe Haven:
As a brave crusader for all women – especially for women living in countries that she desperately wants to bomb – then-Secretary Clinton argued that the United States had a moral duty to intervene in Libya, stating that she was "deeply concerned" that Muammar Gaddafi's troops were using rape as a weapon. (She was parroting a rumor started by Al-Jazeera which claimed that Gaddafi was handing out free Viagra to his soldiers so that they could rape 24/7.)
After Libya was flattened by NATO's "no fly zone", Amnesty International published a report which thoroughly debunked Hillary's passionate plea for war:
Not only have we not met any [rape] victims, but we have not even met any persons who have met victims. As for the boxes of Viagra that Gaddafi is supposed to have had distributed, they were found intact near tanks that were completely burnt out.
The boxes of pristine Viagra found next to burnt-out tanks weren't the only things planted in Libya. According to its report, Amnesty "failed to find evidence for these human rights violations [used to justify intervention] and in many cases has discredited or cast doubt on them. It also found indications that on several occasions the rebels in Benghazi appeared to have knowingly made false claims or manufactured evidence."
The icing on the illegal war cake is that before Hillary started spreading rape rumors, Libya was considered a "high human development" country by the United Nations:
In 2010, Libya ranked 53rd in the UN's Human Development Index among 163 countries. With life expectancy at birth at 74.5 years, an 88.4% adult literacy rate and a gross enrolment ratio of 94.1%, Libya was classified as a high human development country among the Middle East and North Africa region.
Libyans once enjoyed a higher standard of living than two-thirds of the planet. Now their country is terrorist stronghold ruled by competing warlords.
And as ISIS continues to lose territory in Syria and Iraq, Libya is increasingly seen as a fertile ground for jihadists. According to The Atlantic:
American intelligence officials estimate that the group's ranks in Libya have grown to 6,500 fighters, more than doubling since the fall. ISIS first declared its intentions to establish a presence in Libya in 2014 and has been launching attacks ever since. The group is now thought to control 150 miles of Libyan coastline.
Hillary Clinton turned a stable, developed nation into an ISIS safe haven using tactics that would have made even William Randolph Hearst a bit queasy. To whip up support for the Spanish-American War (you're probably too young to remember it), America's favorite yellow journalist only managed to invent tame, PG -13 fairytales about Spanish soldiers fondling young Cuban damsels. If Hearst had reported that the Spaniards were having Havana Viagra parties, we could have marched all the way to Madrid. Hopefully President Clinton will remedy this missed opportunity. Pack your bags, ISIS. Next stop: Spain.
Forget Benghazi. Clinton is culpable in a far greater crime.
Besides turning Libya into a shithole country, Clinton's decision to overthrow Qaddafi after he got rid of his nuclear weapons has been cited as a major reason for the current nuclear standoff with North Korea. If things go bad there, the entire planet could be turned into a shithole, with both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to blame.
Posted in Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy & National Security, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, Scandals. Tags: Barack Obama, Benghazi, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, ISIS, Libya, North Korea, Racism, Scandals, Wikileaks. No Comments »
December 23, 2017 — Ron Chusid
As was the case in the run up to the Iraq war when a small number of us were disputing the claims used to justify war, there also continues to be articles disputing the Russiagate conspiracy theory that Donald Trump and Russia successfully colluded to alter the 2016 election result. This is most often spread by establishment Democrats who cannot face the fact that Hillary Clinton was such a terrible choice for the nomination that she could not beat someone as awful as Donald Trump. While Robert Mueller's investigation is uncovering evidence of financial crimes, and obstruction of justice, no evidence has been presented to support the claims of Russia altering the election results which has not been quickly retracted or debunked. Yesterday I quoted from an article by Jackson Lears, Professor of History at Rutgers University. Another article on this subject by Aaron Maté in The Nation is less extensive but has the benefit of being more likely to be read by Democrats who are being duped this conspiracy theory.
There have been so many debunked claims regarding Russiagate that no single article can deal with them all. Maté concentrated on the numerous reports which have been circulated by the mainstream media, only to be quickly shown to be false–a subject I previously discussed here. He also touched on the false claims of Russian hackers hacking the voting systems of 21 states and the claim that there was a consensus from all the intelligence agencies that Russia was responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee. This later claim continues to be repeated by many Clinton apologists despite having been retracted by The New York Times last June. It is also worth noting that, while no evidence has been presented so far showing that Russia hacked the DNC, if future evidence should happen to show this, it would be a negative regarding Russia but would still not support Clinton's argument that Russia is responsible for her loss. The hacked email which was released by Wikileaks provided factual information regarding unethical behavior by Clinton and the DNC, and Clinton would still be responsible for any votes lost because of this.
There are at least five reasons why the Russiagate conspiracy theory is so dangerous. It allows the Democratic establishment to deny responsibility for their mistakes, making reform less likely. It promotes McCarthyism and promotion of restrictions on freedom of expression in the United States. It unnecessarily increases conflict with a nuclear power (playing into the hands of Clinton's neocon allies who desire to attempt regime change in Russia). It strengthens Putin by showing him to be a far greater master strategist than he is, to the frustration of anti-Putin forces in Russia. Maté began his article with a fifth reason. Concentrating on such false charges distracts from forming a true resistance to the many terrible things Donald Trump has been doing.
After this introduction, Maté more directly addressed the unsupported claims regarding the 2016 election:
The basis for the "virtually uncontested truths" of the year's "biggest story" remains the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's January 2017 report, which accused Russia of hacking Democratic e-mails and using social media to influence the 2016 election. Yet the report openly acknowledges that its conclusions are "not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact." Nearly one year later, we have yet to see a shred of proof.
What we have in its stead is a stream of Russiagate stories that make bombastic entrances only to quietly slink away. The pattern persists thanks to a media and political culture that embraces credulity and shuns accountability.
Virtually every major outlet reported claims in September that Russian-government-backed hackers targeted the voting systems of 21 states. But last month Christopher Krebs, a senior cyber-security official at the Department of Homeland Security, quietly informed Congress that no such hacking had occurred. "The majority of the activity was simple scanning," Krebs told a House panel. "Scanning is a regular activity across the Web. I would not characterize that as an attack.… If that context was not provided, I apologize." He added: "When we talk about that scanning, it was not also necessarily an election system that was scanned."
Krebs's contrition did not ring out among the media that had fervently reported the scanning as a hacking attack, and continue to do so as part of Russiagate's "virtually uncontested truths." The falsity of the "21 states" claim went largely unreported, outside C-SPAN and the marginal Russian website that took notice.
Meanwhile, accountability has been resisted even when the mistakes are seismically embarrassing. The most recent case was CNN's erroneous report that the Trump campaign was offered access to Wikileaks' trove of stolen Democratic Party e-mails before their public release. In a story line worthy of Better Call Saul, it turned out that CNN got the date wrong—someone had in fact e-mailed the Trump campaign a link to the Wikileaks e-mails, only after they were already all over the Internet. As Glenn Greenwald noted, the mistake was egregious not just for the story's ultimate uselessness, but also for the fact CNN and other outlets all reported they had confirmed it with multiple sources. Yet none of the networks have explained how their "multiple sources" all "confirmed" the same incorrect date.
Maté discussed CNN's error in greater detail. He next discussed the claims that Russia affected the Brexit vote. As was the case with Russia's actions on Facebook and Twitter in the United States, he showed that the claims regarding Brexit were highly exaggerated, and then discussed Russia Today and the investigation of Jill Stein:
Just weeks ago, The New York Times warned that reports of Russian-linked social-media activity around the Brexit vote "could raise questions about the legitimacy of the referendum" itself. "I have a very simple message for Russia," declared British Prime Minister Theresa May on November 13. "We know what you are doing. And you will not succeed."
We now have a full accounting of what Russia was doing: According to Twitter, the Kremlin-backed network Russia Today spent just over $1,000 to promote its Brexit coverage to UK-based viewers. Facebook reported a grand total of 97 cents spent on three ads, "all centered on immigration and aimed at American users," reaching no more than 200 of them over four days. Whatever Russia was doing, May's confidence that they would not succeed was doubtless well-founded.
The unquestioning faith in evidence-free or overblown claims coincides with the targeting of those who dare challenge them. The forced registration of RT America as a "foreign agent" was followed by the revoking of the outlet's congressional press pass, with the usual silence from press-freedom groups and media outlets, even progressive ones. Without explanation, The Huffington Post removed an article by veteran reporter Joe Lauria that methodically challenged Russiagate's precepts. On Tuesday, Green Party candidate Jill Stein confirmed that she is complying with a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation looking into, in the words of panel chair Senator Richard Burr, "collusion with the Russians."
Despite multiple interviews explaining the nature of a 2015 trip to Moscow, Stein remains the target of a smear campaign, cheered on by liberal groups, painting her as a Kremlin stooge. "Here's hoping this lying sack of piety-spewing shit goes to jail with the rest of the bastards Mueller is investigating," commented liberal sex-advice columnist Dan Savage. Zac Petkanas, a Democratic Party senior adviser and Clinton campaign staffer, was so enthused by the Senate probe that he repeated the phrase "Jill Stein is a Russian agent" to his Twitter followers eight times.
Stein calls the investigation part of a "resurgence of McCarthyism, to suppress opposition voices, to suppress independent politics." But for its proponents to recognize that would mean acknowledging that it derives from the same kind of behavior that is recognized in Trump. "Any genuine interest in objective reality left the building a while ago, replaced by a self-sustaining fantasyland," the New York Times editors write of Trump's right-wing defenders. The tragedy of Russiagate is that its enthusiasts have constructed a "self-sustaining fantasyland" of their own. A fantasyland is no place from which to confront Trump's reality.
Posted in Blogs & Social Media, Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, Jill Stein, News Media. Tags: Better Call Saul, Democrats, Donald Trump, Facebook, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, Jill Stein, Robert Mueller, Russia, Twitter, Vladimir Putin, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Wikileaks. 3 Comments »
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Dr. John Russell sits down with Dr. Sanjiv Chopra to talk about five simple actions that can offer many proven health benefits for patients.
Dr. John Russell talks with Dr. Sanjiv Chopra, author of The Big Five: Five Simple Things You Can Do to Live a Longer, Healthier Life. They discuss 5 easy changes that anyone can implement to improve their overall health.
The book delves into how the underlying promise of every exciting medical discovery, diet, and exercise program is the same: do this, buy this, or eat this and you will look better, live longer, and be healthier. But few books can make the promise of this one: if you adapt these five simple, virtually-free suggestions you will live a longer and healthier life, guaranteed.
This is no fad study. Each of the recommendations outlined in this book has been proven by an overwhelming number of tests, trials, and studies to increase health and lifespan. There are no gimmicks, no catches, no ifs, ands, or buts.


Public infrastructure build-outs are in the works around the state. Los Angeles currently has a total of 1,800 EV charging stations, and hopes that this number will reach 25,000 by 2018,* according to Lauren Faber O'Connor, the city's chief sustainability officer.
California's work has been influential beyond its borders. Its Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) program has been successful in introducing EVs to the market by requiring automakers within the state to sell a certain percentage of electric cars and trucks. The same goes for the nine others that have adopted it: Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Oregon, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Those states represent about a third of the U.S. auto market, which should pressure automakers to expand their affordable EV offerings. "Collectively, they have a lot of purchasing power, and a lot of political power," said Max Baumhefner, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
In 2016, Columbus, Ohio won the U.S. Department of Transportation's Smart City Challenge. Fueled partly by $50 million in grant winnings, the city's Smart Columbus public-private partnership aims to reinvent local mobility systems. According to Brendan Kelley of Drive Electric Ohio, an initiative of the statewide nonprofit Clean Fuels Ohio dedicated to improving air quality, Smart Columbus has a goal of increasing EV market penetration in the city by 500 percent by early 2020. To help the city meet this goal, Drive Electric Ohio offers a program where residents and local businesses can meet up to learn about and test drive EVs. "We've found that the most effective tactic for overcoming people's misconceptions about EVs and opening them up to the possibility of buying one is to get them behind the wheel of an EV," said Kelley.
"People feel more comfortable to buy or lease a car knowing they can charge it," said Mary Lunetta, a representative for the Sierra Club's Clean Transport for All campaign.
The new United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement, reached between President Trump, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto last month, won't help either. The update to the North Atlantic Trade Agreement calls for 75 percent of the content of a car or truck to be made from parts made in North America. Right now, the average conventional vehicle manufactured in the U.S. uses about 50 to 60 percent U.S.-Canadian content, but many electric vehicles are down in the 20 to 30 percent content range. Tariffs on that imported content will cause the average vehicle price to go up further, which may put downward pressure on adoption. Combined with the additional steel and aluminum tariffs, the new USMCA may mean widespread EV adoption is a pipe dream for the immediate future.
Tesla's sleek and pricey vehicles may have helped make the company a poster child for the clean vehicle future, but it only makes up a tiny slice of the market share for all vehicles sold in the U.S., and its first mass-market offering, the $50,000-and-up Tesla Model 3, has been dogged by production and delivery delays. To make a significant dent in the internal-combustion vehicle market, major automakers would need to offer more affordable EVs in many different models to suit different lifestyles and needs. And many are working on it: Toyota, which helped popularize electric hybrid tech with the Prius, still has no battery-only EVs, but it's aiming for 10 electrified models by 2020. Volkswagen plans to produce 50 fully electric models by 2025, and Hyundai/Kia is offering PHEV, EV, and hybrid models of their new cars.
*CORRECTION: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Los Angeles hopes to build 250,000 EV charging stations by 2025. The correct number is 25,000.


Playing dress-up: The recent Mystery Dinner Theater at the Briggs District Library brought out some interesting characters. For more see the album on the Features page.
Maralyn's Pet Corner – Cat Hairball Problems?


text:
Q: Manage nested list of entities within entities in Google Cloud Datastore I am new to Datastore and I am trying to create a simple app that tracks books borrowing.
I would like the DB schema to be as follows:
books:
 book_id
  name:
  borrowing:
   timestamp:
    user_id
    firstname
    email

users:
 name:
 borrowed:
  timestamp:
   book_id

I am using the console to configure the DB.
I have defined two Kinds: Books and User
Business logic:

*

*1 book can be borrowed by n users.

*1 user can borrow n books

Basically, when a user borrows a book I want the two following inserts to occur:

*

*a new borrowing entry is appended to the book entity of type Book, with the current timestamp as key and user_id, firstname and email as properties

*a new borrowed entry is appended to the user entity of ty User, with the current timestamp as key and the book_id as property

How can I achieve this (managing nested lists children) with Datastore? Through embedded entities? Parent ref?
Here is an example of what I expect:
{
  "books": {
      "book1": {
          "name": "book number 1",
          "borrowing": {
              "1234567890": {
                  "user_id": "user1",
                  "firstname": "john",
                  "email": "john@example.com"
              },
              "2234567890": {
                  "user_id": "user2",
                  "firstname": "robin",
                  "email": "robin@example.com"
              }
          }
      }
      ...
  },
    "users": {
        "user1": {
            "firstname": "robin",
            "email": "robin@example.com",
            "borrowed": {
                "1234567890": {
                    "book_id": "book1"
                },
                "3247829398": {
                    "book_id": "book99"
                }
            }
        },
        ...
    }
}

A: In general this is not a scalable approach: every time a user borrows a book you'd have to re-write both the user and book entities, which will get progressively slower as both entities will keep growing.
I'd suggest a different approach: add a new type to your schema, let's call it borrowed_book, representing a book boorowed by a user:
borrowed_book:
  book_id
  user_id
  timestamp

Now every time a user borrows a book you'd simply create one such borrowed_book entity, pointing to both the book and the user. No changes to the user or the book entities. And no nesting required.
Side note: I'd place the firstname and email properties under the user entity type, they don't really belong to the borrowing event where they would be duplicated every time such event occurs for the same user.
Also try to not get confused by the ancestry - it is not required for establishing relationships, see E-commerce Product Categories in Google App Engine (Python)

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text:
Home » Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (Picador Modern Classics) (Hardcover)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (Picador Modern Classics) (Hardcover)
By Joan Didion
This is an absolutely captivating collection of essays on all things 60s by the cultural icon Joan Didion. So many subjects are covered, from short bios on John Wayne and Joan Baez, to true crime, to the hippie movement in San Fransisco, all with a psychologically penetrating eye. Fascinating.
— ben
Beautifully repackaged as part of the Picador Modern Classics Series, this special edition is small enough to fit in your pocket and bold enough to stand out on your bookshelf.
Celebrated, iconic, and indispensable, Joan Didion's first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is considered a watershed moment in American writing. First published in 1968, the collection was critically praised as one of the "best prose written in this country."
More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion's focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture. As Joyce Carol Oates remarked: "[Didion] has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control."
Joan Didion is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, as well as several screenplays written with her late husband, John Gregory Dunne. Her books include The White Album, Play It As It Lays, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem. She lives in New York City.
"In her portraits of people, Didion is not out to expose but to understand, and she shows us actors and millionaires, doomed brides and naive acid-trippers, left wing ideologues and snobs of the Hawaiian aristocracy in a way that makes them neither villainous nor glamorous, but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful.... A rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country." —Dan Wakefield, The New York Times Book Review
"These literary gems are the perfect stocking-stuffer size for the serious reader on your list; you'll look smart wrapping up one or all of them." --USA Today
"A slant vision that is arresting and unique...Didion might be an observer from another planet--one so edgy and alert that she ends up knowing more about our own world than we know ourselves." —Anne Tyler
"The story between the lines of Slouching Towards Bethlehem is surely not so much 'California' as it is [Didion's] ability to make us share her passionate sense of it." —Alfred Kazin
"Give one of these adorable mini-editions of classic nonfiction books by women—only slightly larger than a mobile phone—to a bookish friend, and they'll get lit, literally."—BUST
"Gorgeous . . . among the season's sexiest little literary gifts . . . Close-up portraits of the grand dames by illustrator Celia Carlstedt grace the textured, curve-cornered jackets of these pocket-sized volumes (it's as if they've already been gift wrapped)." —Passport Magazine
Publisher: Picador Modern Classics
Publication Date: November 7th, 2017
Series: Picador Modern Classics
Literary Collections / Essays
Paperback (October 28th, 2008): $16.00
Paperback (October 1st, 1990): $14.00
MP3 CD (July 22nd, 2014): $14.99
Compact Disc (October 28th, 2014): $54.97
Paperback (April 1st, 1979): $4.95
Hardcover$7.95

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