- How America Lost Its Mind (Atlantic) "When did America become untethered from reality? The great unbalancing and descent into full Fantasyland was the product of two momentous changes. The first was a profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the ’60s... The second change was the onset of the new era of information. Just before the Clintons arrived in Washington, the right had managed to do away with the federal Fairness Doctrine, which had been enacted to keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided. With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it. ...absent a Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh’s national right-wing radio show, launched in 1988, was free to thrive, and others promptly appeared. Limbaugh’s virtuosic three hours of daily talk started bringing a sociopolitical alternate reality to a huge national audience. Four years later, when NBC hired someone else to launch a cable news channel, Ailes, who had been working at NBC, quit and created one with Rupert Murdoch. Now TV and radio were enabling a reversion to the narrower, factional, partisan discourse that had been normal in America’s earlier centuries. Before the web, institutionalizing any one alternate reality required the long, hard work of hundreds of full-time militants. In the digital age, however, every tribe and fiefdom and principality and region of Fantasyland—every screwball with a computer and an internet connection—suddenly had an unprecedented way to instruct and rile up and mobilize believers, and to recruit more. False beliefs were rendered both more real-seeming and more contagious, creating a kind of fantasy cascade in which millions of bedoozled Americans surfed and swam. Starting in the 1990s, America’s unhinged right became much larger and more influential than its unhinged left. There is no real left-wing equivalent of Sean Hannity, let alone Alex Jones. Moreover, the far right now has unprecedented political power; it controls much of the U.S. government. Why did the grown-ups and designated drivers on the political left manage to remain basically in charge of their followers, while the reality-based right lost out to fantasy-prone true believers? Religion aside, America simply has many more fervid conspiracists on the right, as research about belief in particular conspiracies confirms again and again. Only the American right has had a large and organized faction based on paranoid conspiracism for the past six decades."
an aside... - Fox News' Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson programs violated Britain's broadcast standards, watchdog says (LA Times) "Britain’s Office of Communications said Monday that it found a January episode of Fox News’ 'Hannity' and a May episode of 'Tucker Carlson Tonight' in breach of Britain’s broadcast standards. The programs were part of the lineup of the Fox News Channel, which was carried by European pay-TV giant Sky until late August. British media laws, unlike those in the U.S., require television presenters to provide fair and balanced reports."
- America is facing an epistemic crisis (Vox) "Epistemology is the branch of philosophy having to do with how we know things and what it means for something to be true or false, accurate or inaccurate. The U.S. is experiencing a deep epistemic breach, a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening. The pretense for the conservative revolution was that mainstream institutions had failed in their role as neutral arbiters — that they had been taken over by the left, become agents of the left in referee’s clothing, as it were. As the massive post-election study of online media from Harvard showed, media is not symmetrical any more than broader polarization is. 'Prominent media on the left are well distributed across the center, center-left, and left,' the researchers found. 'On the right, prominent media are highly partisan.' That insular partisan far-right media is also full of nonsense like Pizzagate that leaves the base continuously pumped up — outraged, infuriated, terrified, and misled. At this point, as the stories above show, the conservative base will believe anything. And they are pissed about all of it. ...to this day, no one knows how to stop or counter it. Mainstream institutions seem as unable as ever to resist its warping effects. It’s all playing out like some morbid script that we can only watch, stupefied. As long as Republican politicians are frightened by the base, the base is frightened by scary conspiracies in right-wing media, and right-wing media makes more money the more frightened everyone is, Trump appears to be safe."
- Mass Shootings, Climate, Discrimination: Why Government's Fear of Data Threatens Us All (Wired) "It’s hard to imagine a good argument for knowing less—about anything, really, but especially about difficult problems with profound policy implications. The government is supposed to base policy on the best data possible, along with political concerns, budget concerns, social priorities ... the usual warp and weft of running a country. Yet the Trump administration is running in the other direction. Any data that has even the faintest whiff of potential contradiction goes right out the window. Dataphobia chills them to the bone, I suspect because they hope to undermine not only some truths but all truth. Now, though, even more stands at risk. This isn't just about undermining data anymore. It's about abandoning its collection."
- The Gerasimov Doctrine (Politico) "General Valery Gerasimov—Russia’s chief of the General Staff...took tactics developed by the Soviets, blended them with strategic military thinking about total war, and laid out a new theory of modern warfare—one that looks more like hacking an enemy’s society than attacking it head-on. ...Russia’s modern strategy, a vision of total warfare that places politics and war within the same spectrum of activities... The approach is guerrilla, and waged on all fronts with a range of actors and tools—for example, hackers, media, businessmen, leaks and, yes, fake news, as well as conventional and asymmetric military means. Thanks to the internet and social media, the kinds of operations Soviet psy-ops teams once could only fantasize about—upending the domestic affairs of nations with information alone—are now plausible. The Gerasimov Doctrine builds a framework for these new tools, and declares that non-military tactics are not auxiliary to the use of force but the preferred way to win. That they are, in fact, the actual war. Chaos is the strategy the Kremlin pursues: Gerasimov specifies that the objective is to achieve an environment of permanent unrest and conflict within an enemy state. Does it work? Former captive nations Georgia, Estonia and Lithuania all sounded the alarm in recent years about Russian attempts to influence their domestic politics and security... In Ukraine, Russia has been deploying the Gerasimov Doctrine for the past several years. The United States is the latest target. They are not aiming to become stronger than us, but to weaken us until we are equivalent. It’s hard to muster resistance to an enemy you can’t see, or aren’t even sure is there. But it’s not an all-powerful approach; the shadowy puppeteering at the heart of the Gerasimov Doctrine also makes it inherently fragile. Its tactics begin to fail when light is thrown onto how they work and what they aim to achieve. For now, though, America is still in the dark—not even on defense, let alone offense."
BUSINESS:
- Saudi Money Fuels the Tech Industry. It’s Time to Ask Why (NYT) "...we need to talk about this money because, boy, is there a whole lot of it — and as the world’s moneyed dictators, oligarchs and other characters look for more places to park their billions, mountains more will be coming to Silicon Valley. Tech companies are fond of pseudo-revolutionary mission statements that extol the virtues of diversity, tolerance, freedom of expression and other progressive ideals. The money from regimes that have been criticized for their human rights records — from Saudi Arabia’s government in particular, which has plans to funnel potentially hundreds of billions of dollars into tech companies through its state-controlled Public Investment Fund — stands in stark contrast to those aims. ...many of today’s tech companies have lost a moral compass."
CLIMATE CHANGE:
- As Syria embraces Paris climate deal, it’s the United States against the world (WaPo) "The move comes after the only other holdout, Nicaragua, announced plans to join the Paris agreement in September. Nicaragua initially had refused to join the agreement in 2015 because its leaders felt the accord did not go far enough in compelling nations to reduce their carbon emissions. But in joining the deal this fall, the country’s president noted that it is the 'only instrument we have' to unite the world around the goal of staving off the most catastrophic effects of global warming."
- EPA's Pruitt vows to continue rolling back rules despite alarming climate report (USA Today) "...Pruitt said a newly released government report that lays most of the blame for the rise of global temperatures to human activity won't deter him from continuing to roll back the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, a major rule aimed at combating climate change."
NEWS:
- Democrat Ralph Northam Elected Governor of Virginia and Democrat Phil Murphy Is Elected New Jersey Governor (WSJ - Paywall) "In off-year elections, Democrats won comfortably in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday. Ralph Northam captured the Virginia governorship, beating Republican Ed Gillespie in the first major test of how the Trump presidency has affected swing-state politics. With 99% of the precincts counted, Mr. Northam had 53.9% of the vote and Mr. Gillespie had 45%. Mr. Northam, a physician who is Virginia’s lieutenant governor, will succeed Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, giving their party another four years in the governor’s mansion. In New Jersey, voters elected Democrat Phil Murphy governor over Republican Kim Guadagno, ending two terms of GOP control by Gov. Chris Christie. The results are an abrupt change in fortune for Democrats, who have been frustrated this year in House special elections in Republican districts. Party officials are hoping the twin victories prove a harbinger of success in the 2018 midterms."
SOCIALIZED MEDECINE:
- Maine Voters Approve Medicaid Expansion, a Rebuke of Gov. LePage (NYT) "Mr. LePage and other opponents, including several Republicans in the state Legislature, said Medicaid expansion would burden the taxpayers and the state budget, and described it as a form of welfare. Senator Susan Collins of Maine, one of the few Republicans who firmly opposed the [Affordable Care Act] repeal efforts, has been an outspoken defender of Medicaid, although she did not take a position on the ballot question. Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government picked up the cost of new enrollees under Medicaid expansion for the first three years and will continue to pay at least 90 percent. States cover a significantly larger portion of the expenses for the rest of their Medicaid population."
TECHNOLOGY:
- To Save the Most Lives, Deploy (Imperfect) Self-Driving Cars ASAP (Wired) "Cars crash a lot: Nearly 37,500 Americans died on the roads last year. If humans cause 37,462 car deaths a year, and driverless cars cause 37,461, let ‘em roll.
TRUMPTEL:
- Another Trump campaign aide acknowledges meeting senior Russian officials in mid-2016 (LA Times) "Former Trump campaign foreign policy advisor Carter Page is the latest to belatedly acknowledge direct contact with senior officials in President Vladimir Putin’s government during the campaign or after the election. Page had repeatedly denied to reporters that he met with Russian government officials in Moscow on a campaign-approved trip in July 2016. But according to a House Intelligence Committee transcript of his testimony, he acknowledged doing so and had even emailed other campaign officials about the 'incredible insights and outreach' he got from Russia’s deputy prime minister and several legislators."
- The Case of Wilbur Ross' Phantom $2 Billion (Forbes) "A year earlier, Forbes had listed his net worth at $2.9 billion on The Forbes 400, a number Ross claimed was far too low... Now, after examining the financial-disclosure forms he filed after his nomination to President Donald Trump's Cabinet, which showed less than $700 million in assets, Forbes was intent on removing him [from the Forbes 400 list] entirely. It seems clear that Ross lied to us... And based on our interviews with ten former employees at Ross' private equity firm, WL Ross & Co., who all confirmed parts of the same story line, his penchant for misleading extended to colleagues and investors, resulting in millions of dollars in fines, tens of millions refunded to backers and numerous lawsuits."
BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:
- Girlfriend To Stay Underneath Blanket For Next 5 Months (Onion) "'I am cozy right now, this is my ideal state of warmth and comfortability, and I shall remain underneath this blanket for the next 150 days or until such time as the cold weather season has fully transpired.'"
TODAY'S SONG:
- America is facing an epistemic crisis (Vox) "Epistemology is the branch of philosophy having to do with how we know things and what it means for something to be true or false, accurate or inaccurate. The U.S. is experiencing a deep epistemic breach, a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening. The pretense for the conservative revolution was that mainstream institutions had failed in their role as neutral arbiters — that they had been taken over by the left, become agents of the left in referee’s clothing, as it were. As the massive post-election study of online media from Harvard showed, media is not symmetrical any more than broader polarization is. 'Prominent media on the left are well distributed across the center, center-left, and left,' the researchers found. 'On the right, prominent media are highly partisan.' That insular partisan far-right media is also full of nonsense like Pizzagate that leaves the base continuously pumped up — outraged, infuriated, terrified, and misled. At this point, as the stories above show, the conservative base will believe anything. And they are pissed about all of it. ...to this day, no one knows how to stop or counter it. Mainstream institutions seem as unable as ever to resist its warping effects. It’s all playing out like some morbid script that we can only watch, stupefied. As long as Republican politicians are frightened by the base, the base is frightened by scary conspiracies in right-wing media, and right-wing media makes more money the more frightened everyone is, Trump appears to be safe."
- Mass Shootings, Climate, Discrimination: Why Government's Fear of Data Threatens Us All (Wired) "It’s hard to imagine a good argument for knowing less—about anything, really, but especially about difficult problems with profound policy implications. The government is supposed to base policy on the best data possible, along with political concerns, budget concerns, social priorities ... the usual warp and weft of running a country. Yet the Trump administration is running in the other direction. Any data that has even the faintest whiff of potential contradiction goes right out the window. Dataphobia chills them to the bone, I suspect because they hope to undermine not only some truths but all truth. Now, though, even more stands at risk. This isn't just about undermining data anymore. It's about abandoning its collection."
- The Gerasimov Doctrine (Politico) "General Valery Gerasimov—Russia’s chief of the General Staff...took tactics developed by the Soviets, blended them with strategic military thinking about total war, and laid out a new theory of modern warfare—one that looks more like hacking an enemy’s society than attacking it head-on. ...Russia’s modern strategy, a vision of total warfare that places politics and war within the same spectrum of activities... The approach is guerrilla, and waged on all fronts with a range of actors and tools—for example, hackers, media, businessmen, leaks and, yes, fake news, as well as conventional and asymmetric military means. Thanks to the internet and social media, the kinds of operations Soviet psy-ops teams once could only fantasize about—upending the domestic affairs of nations with information alone—are now plausible. The Gerasimov Doctrine builds a framework for these new tools, and declares that non-military tactics are not auxiliary to the use of force but the preferred way to win. That they are, in fact, the actual war. Chaos is the strategy the Kremlin pursues: Gerasimov specifies that the objective is to achieve an environment of permanent unrest and conflict within an enemy state. Does it work? Former captive nations Georgia, Estonia and Lithuania all sounded the alarm in recent years about Russian attempts to influence their domestic politics and security... In Ukraine, Russia has been deploying the Gerasimov Doctrine for the past several years. The United States is the latest target. They are not aiming to become stronger than us, but to weaken us until we are equivalent. It’s hard to muster resistance to an enemy you can’t see, or aren’t even sure is there. But it’s not an all-powerful approach; the shadowy puppeteering at the heart of the Gerasimov Doctrine also makes it inherently fragile. Its tactics begin to fail when light is thrown onto how they work and what they aim to achieve. For now, though, America is still in the dark—not even on defense, let alone offense."
BUSINESS:
- Saudi Money Fuels the Tech Industry. It’s Time to Ask Why (NYT) "...we need to talk about this money because, boy, is there a whole lot of it — and as the world’s moneyed dictators, oligarchs and other characters look for more places to park their billions, mountains more will be coming to Silicon Valley. Tech companies are fond of pseudo-revolutionary mission statements that extol the virtues of diversity, tolerance, freedom of expression and other progressive ideals. The money from regimes that have been criticized for their human rights records — from Saudi Arabia’s government in particular, which has plans to funnel potentially hundreds of billions of dollars into tech companies through its state-controlled Public Investment Fund — stands in stark contrast to those aims. ...many of today’s tech companies have lost a moral compass."
CLIMATE CHANGE:
- As Syria embraces Paris climate deal, it’s the United States against the world (WaPo) "The move comes after the only other holdout, Nicaragua, announced plans to join the Paris agreement in September. Nicaragua initially had refused to join the agreement in 2015 because its leaders felt the accord did not go far enough in compelling nations to reduce their carbon emissions. But in joining the deal this fall, the country’s president noted that it is the 'only instrument we have' to unite the world around the goal of staving off the most catastrophic effects of global warming."
- EPA's Pruitt vows to continue rolling back rules despite alarming climate report (USA Today) "...Pruitt said a newly released government report that lays most of the blame for the rise of global temperatures to human activity won't deter him from continuing to roll back the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, a major rule aimed at combating climate change."
NEWS:
- Democrat Ralph Northam Elected Governor of Virginia and Democrat Phil Murphy Is Elected New Jersey Governor (WSJ - Paywall) "In off-year elections, Democrats won comfortably in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday. Ralph Northam captured the Virginia governorship, beating Republican Ed Gillespie in the first major test of how the Trump presidency has affected swing-state politics. With 99% of the precincts counted, Mr. Northam had 53.9% of the vote and Mr. Gillespie had 45%. Mr. Northam, a physician who is Virginia’s lieutenant governor, will succeed Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, giving their party another four years in the governor’s mansion. In New Jersey, voters elected Democrat Phil Murphy governor over Republican Kim Guadagno, ending two terms of GOP control by Gov. Chris Christie. The results are an abrupt change in fortune for Democrats, who have been frustrated this year in House special elections in Republican districts. Party officials are hoping the twin victories prove a harbinger of success in the 2018 midterms."
SOCIALIZED MEDECINE:
- Maine Voters Approve Medicaid Expansion, a Rebuke of Gov. LePage (NYT) "Mr. LePage and other opponents, including several Republicans in the state Legislature, said Medicaid expansion would burden the taxpayers and the state budget, and described it as a form of welfare. Senator Susan Collins of Maine, one of the few Republicans who firmly opposed the [Affordable Care Act] repeal efforts, has been an outspoken defender of Medicaid, although she did not take a position on the ballot question. Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government picked up the cost of new enrollees under Medicaid expansion for the first three years and will continue to pay at least 90 percent. States cover a significantly larger portion of the expenses for the rest of their Medicaid population."
TECHNOLOGY:
- To Save the Most Lives, Deploy (Imperfect) Self-Driving Cars ASAP (Wired) "Cars crash a lot: Nearly 37,500 Americans died on the roads last year. If humans cause 37,462 car deaths a year, and driverless cars cause 37,461, let ‘em roll.
TRUMPTEL:
- Another Trump campaign aide acknowledges meeting senior Russian officials in mid-2016 (LA Times) "Former Trump campaign foreign policy advisor Carter Page is the latest to belatedly acknowledge direct contact with senior officials in President Vladimir Putin’s government during the campaign or after the election. Page had repeatedly denied to reporters that he met with Russian government officials in Moscow on a campaign-approved trip in July 2016. But according to a House Intelligence Committee transcript of his testimony, he acknowledged doing so and had even emailed other campaign officials about the 'incredible insights and outreach' he got from Russia’s deputy prime minister and several legislators."
- The Case of Wilbur Ross' Phantom $2 Billion (Forbes) "A year earlier, Forbes had listed his net worth at $2.9 billion on The Forbes 400, a number Ross claimed was far too low... Now, after examining the financial-disclosure forms he filed after his nomination to President Donald Trump's Cabinet, which showed less than $700 million in assets, Forbes was intent on removing him [from the Forbes 400 list] entirely. It seems clear that Ross lied to us... And based on our interviews with ten former employees at Ross' private equity firm, WL Ross & Co., who all confirmed parts of the same story line, his penchant for misleading extended to colleagues and investors, resulting in millions of dollars in fines, tens of millions refunded to backers and numerous lawsuits."
BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:
- Girlfriend To Stay Underneath Blanket For Next 5 Months (Onion) "'I am cozy right now, this is my ideal state of warmth and comfortability, and I shall remain underneath this blanket for the next 150 days or until such time as the cold weather season has fully transpired.'"
TODAY'S SONG:
- She Blinded Me With Science (Thomas Dolby)
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