Monthly Archives: March 2018

Saturday, March 24, 2018

Friday, March 23, 2018

Yes, I’m Still On Facebook

I still have a page on Facebook.  I use it on a pretty regular basis to keep up with friends and family, some of whom I haven’t seen in years.  I also use it to keep up with playwriting and production opportunities.  Without it I wouldn’t have had one of my plays being produced in Sydney, Australia this week, and I’m also a part of a vibrant and interesting community of playwrights who share, teach, and commiserate.

I’m not going to link the profile here because, well, if you’re really interested in seeing it, you can make the effort to find it.  It shouldn’t be too hard, and if you do, well, okay… I might even return your “Friend” request.  (Oh, come on; you know I will.)  But I’m also not going to delete my profile.

Whether or not the social networking platform was a willing or unwitting participant in the Russian manipulation of the 2016 election is still a valid question, but one thing that some people, including good friends, have forgotten is that Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and whatever else is being used out there to share pictures of cats riding vacuum cleaners and sell condos in Aruba and perhaps mine personal data, in the end they’re just tools, and not a whole lot different than a hammer or a screwdriver.  In the right hands and with discernment, they can be useful.  In the wrong ones or misapplied, they can be dangerous.  (I hear the same argument about guns.  Yeah, but a hammer wasn’t designed for the sole purpose of killing someone or something.)  Like anything, it matters how you use it and your common sense along with it.

By now — some thirty years into it being a part of our lives — most people have learned to discriminate between spam and real stuff in their e-mails (although obviously not enough because I still get it e-mails offering V1agr@, and they wouldn’t keep doing it if they didn’t get a bite every day) and just yesterday I amused my co-workers with a short play I staged with a guy on the phone trying to get me to send money to the Criminal Division of the IRS.  It’s been that way as long as there’s been mass communication — what, you don’t think Moses didn’t have a sales pitch when he came back from Mount Sinai? — and there always will be.  The trick is knowing when to turn it off, hang up the phone, and go read a book.

Facebook didn’t elect Trump.  We did.

Thursday, March 22, 2018

That Would Explain It

Andrew McCabe, newly-fired deputy director at the FBI, had opened an investigation into Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and his less-than-truthful testimony before Congress about his contacts with Russians.

Democratic lawmakers have repeatedly accused Sessions of misleading them in congressional testimony and called on federal authorities to investigate, but McCabe’s previously-unreported decision to actually put the attorney general in the crosshairs of an FBI probe was an exceptional move.

One source told ABC News that Sessions was not aware of the investigation when he decided to fire McCabe last Friday less than 48 hours before McCabe, a former FBI deputy director, was due to retire from government and obtain a full pension, but an attorney representing Sessions declined to confirm that.

Of course he knew and of course he fired him.

Random Thought

There are at least 20,000 people in the state of Illinois who are not only okay with a Nazi running for Congress, they actually made the effort to vote for him.

I seriously think we need to make an effort to encourage people like Arthur Jones to run for office.  That way we’ll eliminate the dog whistles and the wink-wink nudge-nudge that racists and anti-Semites used to sneak into office.  Let’s have them heil their way out onto the stage of American politics so we at least know they’re out there.

Spellchek

The White House has a problem with getting its message out.

Trump boasted during the campaign that he has the “best words.” If the past 14 months in the White House are an indication, he and his team also have the worst spelling.

Among the many casualties of Washington’s protocols in the Trump era has been a lack of rigor to the accuracy of the printed word — whether it’s the president’s typo-filled tweets or the White House’s error-prone news releases.

“Special Council is told to find crimes, wether crimes exist or not,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Wednesday morning to start off a posting in which he misspelled “counsel” three times and had five errors in the span of 280 characters.

As journalists and others poked fun at the mistakes, the president quickly deleted the tweet and posted an edited version. He successfully changed “wether” to “whether” and eliminated an inadvertent repeat of the word “the” — but he failed to correct the three inaccurate references to the title of his nemesis, Robert S. Mueller III.

“If Trump directs Rosenstein to fire the special ‘council,’ I think we might be ok folks,” cracked former U.S. attorney Preet Bharara of New York, whom Trump fired last summer, referring to Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.

Amid all the chaos in the White House — including West Wing personnel drama, the Stormy Daniels scandal and Mueller’s Russia investigation — some wayward spellings and inaccurate honorifics might seem minor. But the constant small mistakes — which have dogged the Trump White House since the president’s official Inauguration Day poster boasted that “no challenge is to great” — have become, critics say, symbolic of the larger problems with Trump’s management style, in particular his lack of attention to detail and the carelessness with which he makes policy decisions.

[…]

Liz Allen, who served as White House deputy communications director under former president Barack Obama, said in an interview that the press office under the 44th president sought to be as rigorous as possible. Releases typically were proofread for accuracy and content by at least four or five people. Announcements that dealt with domestic policy issues and foreign affairs were vetted by experts at federal agencies and the National Security Council, she said.

That voice was a bit garbled last month when, according to the White House daily guidance, Trump was planning to address the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in “Oxen Hill.”

The proper spelling of the suburban Maryland jurisdiction is Oxon Hill, a mistake made more pronounced by the fact that the Gaylord resort is the home of the National Spelling Bee.

I actually think this is deliberate on the part of the Trumpistas; they got into office by appealing to the base of the the GOP, and if you’ve ever spent any time on a comment thread on the internet where they support Trump and his world view, you know that these folks were not paying attention in English class.  They seem to think spelling and grammar is an elitist left-wing conspiracy.  They’d much rather make America grate again.

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Just A Reminder

In case you’ve been missing George W. Bush, just remember that it was fifteen years ago yesterday — March 20, 2003 — that he led us into a war with Iraq based on lies, deception, misinformation, propaganda, and with the complicity of Democrats who were too afraid of their own conscience and losing their election to resist him.

Some estimates place the total war dead at over a million.

So no, as horrible and dangerous as Trump is, he hasn’t done that. Yet.

Reaching Their Limits

Ted Olson, the conservative lawyer who helped lead the fight for same-sex marriage in America, was asked to join the Trump legal team.  He turned them down.

Meanwhile, Ralph Peters, an analyst for Fox News, has quit the network, saying he can’t work for a “propaganda machine” that, in his words, “is now wittingly harming our system of government for profit.”  (Not to be picky, but that has been Fox’s business model since they went on the air.  BTYFO.)

So apparently there are some people on the right who do have their limits.

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Spring

Today at 12:15 p.m. EDT is the vernal equinox when spring arrives in the Northern Hemisphere and autumn arrives in the Southern Hemisphere.

Here’s where the sun and the moon will be at the time.

How To Rig An Election

Via Melissa McEwan at Shakesville, here’s a backgrounder from Britain’s Channel 4 on Cambridge Analytica, the company that turned dirty tricks in an election campaign into a profit-making venture.

Senior executives at Cambridge Analytica – the data company that credits itself with Donald Trump’s presidential victory – have been secretly filmed saying they could entrap politicians in compromising situations with bribes and Ukrainian sex workers.

In an undercover investigation by Channel 4 News, the company’s chief executive Alexander Nix said the British firm secretly campaigns in elections across the world. This includes operating through a web of shadowy front companies, or by using sub-contractors.

In one exchange, when asked about digging up material on political opponents, Mr Nix said they could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”.

In another he said: “We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land for instance, we’ll have the whole thing recorded, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the Internet.”

Offering bribes to public officials is an offence under both the UK Bribery Act and the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Cambridge Analytica operates in the UK and is registered in the United States.

The admissions were filmed at a series of meetings at London hotels over four months, between November 2017 and January 2018. An undercover reporter for Channel 4 News posed as a fixer for a wealthy client hoping to get candidates elected in Sri Lanka.

Mr Nix told our reporter: “…we’re used to operating through different vehicles, in the shadows, and I look forward to building a very long-term and secretive relationship with you.”

Along with Mr Nix, the meetings also included Mark Turnbull, the managing director of CA Political Global, and the company’s chief data officer, Dr Alex Tayler.

Video link.

Those of us of a certain age will recall that G. Gordon Liddy, the wild-eyed undercover operator of the Nixon re-election campaign in 1972, proposed the same kind of shenanigans against the Democrats and was dismissed by former Attorney General and then campaign chair John Mitchell as being too much cray-cray for him.  (Both Liddy and Mitchell did time for their parts in Watergate.)  Now it looks like you can buy it off the shelf.